COATS, IDOLS, AND OTHER STOLEN THINGS 

I’m twenty-five years old, but only for a couple more days. I’m also six thousand miles from anyone who knows that, running out of what the Argentine government will let me pull from an ATM in a single week, and shopping for a birthday present for myself in a corner drug store in Recoleta that I ducked into on a whim, mostly to get out of the bone-chilling damp of a wintry June. What I need is a real jacket to stop my teeth rattling because I came from a desert and never imagined fifty degrees could be this cold. Instead, I’m laying down a ten-peso note on an eye pencil that I’ve never dared to buy before. I know how to use it—or at least I think I do—because I’ve watched a thousand tutorials, but I’m six thousand miles from all the people who don’t know that yet. 

It’s one a.m., and all the lovely, long-necked porteñas in the building are just putting on their makeup to go out. They all know I’m a foreigner because I’m taking mine off to go to bed, but their eye rolls and whispers don’t matter, because for just a few hours I’ve walked on the edge of the sea, my hair tasting in the salt the barest savor of what it might be like to be beautiful like them. 

Now I’m standing at the edge of the sink, gently teasing the kohl away with the edge of a fingernail. I didn’t have the good sense to look for any actual remover back in the shop, and I wouldn’t have had the pesos on me to buy it anyway. I keep my touch light, trying not to scratch myself, but still it feels like I’m tearing my own face off and watching it swirl down the drain. I’ve come so far for this freedom—come so close to telling myself something I’ve always known—that the promises to put it on again tomorrow feel empty even though I know I’ll keep them. I’m afraid of losing everything, because I’m afraid of looking back one day and feeling it would have been easier never to have anything at all. 

My face is gone; there’s only a familiar kind of void looking back at me in the mirror, so I look down at my nails. Two remain just a little black under their leading edges, no matter how I wash. I’m thinking of my great-grandfather’s face, because I can remember how it looked. I can’t picture his hands that dug ditches for the railroad in Pennsylvania, only hear my father going on about how proud he was to have come from a long line of men who weren’t afraid to get dirt under their nails. This will have to do. I don’t think he’ll be as proud.  

It’s four in the morning in the early middle ages at the opposite corner of the Atlantic. This is where my mother’s family is from, every bit as cold and damp as Argentina on the cusp of July, so that it takes me a moment to realize that I’m gone. But the shore is too rocky, the horizon too dark, and I haven’t seen any seals here before. 

This harbor has several bobbing in the water, all watching a human figure on the beach. At least from this distance, she looks just like me except that she’s beautiful, which is to say I don’t look anything like her. She lays out as though sunbathing under a slate sky, and I can’t imagine how she can bear the chill. 

It takes me just a half-second too long to understand. 

There’s a man on the beach, no more paces off than I am, but he knew what he was looking for. He’s already lifted his foot by the time I’ve made out the soft mound of the sealskin slipped off by the waterline. It’s too early for English, I sense—too early even for Scots. I’m trying to join two words of Gaelic but my head is too full of Spanish; there is only a warble and the lullaby-like patter of my feet striking new life into long-dormant volcanic sand. I have to get to her coat first—give it back to her so she can escape into the tide—but that slow-witted half-second was all he needed. His fingers are closing on the skin, and her cry is as incoherent as mine as he takes off up the beach toward, I presume, the village. She’ll be after him, but not before losing another half-second locking eyes with me, unsure if I was trying to help or just trying to bind her to land for myself by being the one to hide the selkie’s coat. It’s a half-second she can’t spare. She’ll never return to the sea. 

I wake up, and the sun is just beginning to stretch itself along the Avenida 9 de Julio.

The good news is that I’ll still be born. The good news is that I’ll still be a little strange.

Two years will pass before I buy another eye pencil from a Walgreens in Minnesota. The first time I try to use it, my wife will pluck it out of my hand, afraid of what people will say—afraid of what I’ll remember of the Rio de la Plata. 

And when I finally do come out, I’ll use the expression “come out”, like I’ve been inside something, and yet I’ll feel the breeze on my palm where the pencil’s missing and be cold as though I have, once again, failed to pack a coat. It will seem ironic for someone who has supposedly spent decades inside a closet. 

Someone will share with me a cartoon of a young woman sitting beside the figure of a man lying face down on the floor, his back unzipped where she has just stepped out. She is thanking him for working so long to protect her and telling him he can rest now, because she is strong enough to go on on her own. It will be one of the better presentations I see of a common trope—the assigned gender as something put on, something worn for camouflage or protection, something shed at last to reveal a beauty underneath that the world outside had not seen before.

I will learn to dislike this trope intensely. 

***

I’m standing on the shore of a Minnesota lake, watching my seven-year-old son gleefully toss away his shirt as he plunges into the waves with some friends he just met. My own chest is covered, as I had insisted even at his age that it should be, with a fervency that adults around me found near pathological and refused to respect. The marshes around Buenos Aires and the cliffs at Montevideo are distant memories, but that’s okay. 

I’ve just bought a lovely new sun hat with a great black ribbon tied around it, and I fit it more snugly to my head as the breeze picks up and muffles the voices of the screaming, delighted children just a little bit. I’m glad of the approach toward silence. The last few months have been so much talking. 

What has surprised me is how unsurprised everyone has been—not just my queer friends or my writing circles, but my devoutly Catholic colleagues at work, the elders at my synagogue, my spouse. Almost without exception, they’ve nodded without so much as a blink clean through the apparently quotidian fact of my transness, as though still awaiting on the other side of it the bombshell news I’ve set them up to expect. I’m starting to get the impression that I was the last person to know. 

My phone buzzes. It’s a reply from a friend. “Oh, thank God!” she exclaims. “This will make things much easier. I didn’t want to misgender you, but I’ve been referring to you in my head as ‘she/her’ for months.” 

I lower the phone for a moment and stare out to the water, making sure my kid’s head is still above it. Then I text back a laughing emoji. “Did I really do that bad a job of being a man?”

“Oh, honey…” she replies. “Just terrible.” 

I look out at the water again, where my beautiful, carefree son stands in the midst of a group of boys around his age. He seems to have become the leader of whatever little game they’re playing, as he often does at the park. I’m thinking of a tweet from Erin Reed that I’ve read a few days before: “Trans femmes were never ‘socialized male’ . . . My socialization was bullying and mass societal abuse of the core of my being. I was socialized ‘terrified,’ and my privilege was to ‘hide myself until I die.’” 

My free hand comes up to the strap of my top. It’s still on. They can’t take it from me. Not anymore. 

The first of my ancestors I know to have worn a man’s name and women’s clothing at the same time was born in the Scottish Highlands around 1754. His Jacobite family—my family—lost everything when the Bonnie Prince fled to France, and Alexander Cameron ended up taking land in the Mohawk Valley in New York two years before the Revolution. With precisely the same acumen for picking winners, he enlisted in the King’s Royal Regiment of New York when the fighting broke out. 

The first time he was captured by the Continental Army, he escaped by dressing as a milkmaid. The second, he was due to be shot for espionage until his mother rode down to Valley Forge to plead for his life with General Washington, who commuted the sentence on the condition that he and his entire family leave the Thirteen Colonies never to return. According to the father of our country, both the gender marker and the nationality on my passport are wrong. 

Of course, this is precisely the kind of tricksterism the world expects from trans people. To many of my compatriots, there is scarcely any difference between my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather and I—both just men in a dress engaged in un-American activities. In the popular imagination, the transsexual has long been a cunningly nefarious deceiver, dangerously concealing their monstrosity from God-fearing folk. If the contemporary transgender person escapes that casting, it is too often only by playing the canny survivor, who tragically concealed their true self until their “coming out”. This second version is certainly more sympathetic, but ultimately it is still a tale in which a cleverly disguised trans person is at last made to divulge “the truth” they have kept from their fellow human beings. The stories differ in deciding which identity is the lie, but they agree that trans people are liars. 

If I’d had a mask to wear, though, I wouldn’t have been “socialized terrified”. If I’d been a master (or mistress, depending on the version of the story) of disguise, someone I told would have been surprised. Among all the little incidents of my life that kept me “in the closet”, not one felt like putting on a layer to protect myself. Each was of a kind with the handbag I once came away with at a white elephant gift exchange that was regifted out from under me by a girlfriend before I’d ever used it. Each was like that second eye pencil, pulled from my hand by my wife. Every one came from the same rack as the shirts I had tried to wear swimming as a child only to have them peeled off me as I bawled, because I was a “boy” and needed to “stop being ridiculous.” The moments that kept me from being “out” weren’t the moments that hid me, but the ones that left me naked. 

That’s not a closet; I know what a closet is. It’s a place I have something to wear. It’s a place no one has stolen my coat. 

***

It’s Saturday morning. I’m doing more family history. Rabbi wants to know why Rachel took her father’s idols. 

The others have read the same books I have: she wanted for something to remind her of home, she wanted to end her father’s idolatry, she feared the power of the idols would allow Laban to track them . . . No. This won’t do at all. 

This is a Reform congregation. Every time the patriarchs are invoked, we add v’imoteinu—“and our mothers”. But if there is one to whom I feel closest—one who is most especially my mother—it is Rachel. Who but she can understand this—to be the one who was waited for for so long and who, on coming into the life that was always meant to be hers, is taken for the usurper of another’s precedence? Oh, do not tell me there was another child of my parents who deserved those years, and do not call my mother a thief. 

I raise my hand, imagining the weight of small figures. “Why are we assuming she picked them up?” I ask. “Why don’t we ask instead why she didn’t put them down?”

It’s a rhetorical question. I know the answer already, because I did the homework and read the midrash to Jeremiah 31. My affinity for Rachel is widely shared, and rabbinic teaching often presents her as the archetypal mother of the Jewish people, who weeps for our exile and guarantees our return. The idols offend our sense of what it means to be Jewish, and so we have to believe that they can be separated from her—that there was once a Rachel whose hands and panniers were empty. 

For his service to the crown, Alexander Cameron—who had now twice lost everything—received lot 6, concession 4 in Cornwall township, Ontario, as well as the right for himself and all his descendents to carry the postnominals U. E. (for “United Empire Loyalist”). His granddaughter, however, conveniently left these off her name when she slipped back into the States via Chicago some decades later. 

Growing up with her granddaughter’s granddaughter, I heard as little about loyalists as I did about transgender people—which is to say, nothing. I was told only that our family had “been here since before the Revolution”. We were Americans through and through. The sojourn in Canada, like the sojourn in the wilderness, had to have been a mere providential detour from the promised land. Alexander had come intending to settle in New York, just as Abraham had come to Canaan, and everything else was footnote to our still being here. 

It is, I think, with the best of intentions that people want so badly for pronouns to be like pronominals. They want to believe me when I tell them that the woman they’re talking to is who I have always been. But they also want to believe that the person they had known before was a whole and functioning human being, because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. 

Nobody wants to believe that they’ve seen suffering and just walked by it. Nobody wants to think they are participants in a system of torture. 

Everybody wants to remember how Alexander Cameron made himself an American by taking up land in the Mohawk Valley. Nobody wants to ask why the valley was called that.

At the time Alexander was banished to Ontario, the pillory was still in common use throughout the Empire as a punishment for a wide range of crimes, including both sedition and crossdressing. In many ways, it was the perfect exemplar of what is now known as “visibility without protection”, as its brutality depended in part—and sometimes in whole—on the participation of passers-by. All the law had to do was fix the victim publicly and ensure there was no way for them to slip out of their appointed place. 

Put up a sign on the locker room and leave the children to deal with the “boy” who doesn’t want to take off “his” shirt for the pool. 

By the time the last pillory in the United States was taken down in 1905 (it had been abolished in Canada in 1842), the view of queerness as a category of isolated, willful criminal acts was giving way to a view of queerness as an inborn disposition. The leading way of explaining this, however, was through a theory called “sexual inversion”, which proposed that same-sex attraction was the result of a mismatch between a person’s physical anatomy and their internal sense of self. A gay man, in this view, was essentially a woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body. 

You, dear reader of an essay by a trans lesbian, may have already spotted some of the flaws in this theory, but at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, it was immensely popular, in part because it succeeded in explaining same-sex attraction as, in the parlance of the time, “latent heterosexuality”. The test of any theory is not how well it explains the world, but how well it allows us to leave some uncomfortable part of the world unexplained.

I’m standing over a sink in barrio San Telmo with bits of my face under my fingernails like Lady Macbeth. 

The porteñas don’t know what to make of me, and didn’t even before I bought the pencil. When we are alone, the rigid protocols that govern relations between the sexes here seem to thin sometimes, and they almost talk to me as if I were one of them. When they eventually remember themselves, the guards go back up. 

For their part, these macho Argentine men seem quite unconcerned to leave me alone with their beautiful girlfriends, as though the way I walked into the room had been enough to assure them that I am a eunuch. 

I am not, but I can understand why they think so, because the figure before them certainly isn’t a convincing image of a man. The rotten fruit flung at me during years in the pillory hasn’t painted me a passing mask, as my friend will someday remind me. 

This is where that metaphor falls apart—the assigned gender as suit or disguise, like the woman exiting the unzipped man in the cartoon. I’m not traveling South America in a man’s skin; I’m traveling it as a flayed woman, bound in layers of scarring atop tissue that was never meant to be exposed. I may be too disfigured to be seen for what I am, but I never pass for something I am not—not when someone is really paying attention. 

Later, in Minnesota, I’ll learn how the Dakota would fast and incubate on open hilltops for days at a time, exposed to roasting sun and lashing rain, in order to gain a vision that would guide their purpose and reveal their place in the tribe. It’s kind of like that, I’ll think, except that you don’t choose to go and there are no elders and there’s no place for you in the tribe when you come back, which is to say that it’s not like that at all. 

Before bed, I’ll read a story by Nurit Zarchi. 

It’s just before dawn and far from the coast. The camel’s reins are already in her hands as I rush up to her. Our eyes lock, but my breath fails me and I stand there, trying to catch it in time. Her face, hard-set for the journey, softens as she takes me in. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I tried to hide you, but still your brothers turned you out. Still, everyone sees through you.” 

I take one more deep breath. “It’s alright,” I tell her. My fingers are peeling off a skin of many colors, rolling it into a bundle. “You take the coat now,” I urge her. “When you get to Canaan, keep going. Don’t stop in Ephram, but go on to the sea.” 

Her eyes are deep and thoughtful. I feel myself at the bottom of a well. “But then, how will you be born?” 

“Don’t worry about that,” I say. “I’ll give birth to myself if I have to.” 

She smiles and stretches out her hand to touch my cheek. “I always wanted a daughter, you know. Fine, I’ll take the coat, but I’ll need to make some room in the pannier.” There isn’t much time left before their departure, and she rummages quickly through the bag under her leg. Its leather is scarred. “Here, take this,” she says, prising a small figurine into my hand. “It was your grandfather’s.” 

My head is a swirl of faces. “The one who dug ditches for the railroad?” 

“No,” she answers impatiently. “The other one. The Canadian.” 

The coat has disappeared beneath her; no one will find it until it is too late. There’s something else I want to say, but the sun is already over the horizon. The Avenida 9 de Julio is a sea of light, and its little waves roll through the window to lap at my outstretched hand, tumbled over the edge of the chair. The fingers of the other are stiff like the guard hairs of a camel and won’t release. 

I’m twenty-six years old, flat broke, and freezing. But I’m still holding the pencil.