The Faces
It was my sophomore year in high school. The band was doing great things for the second year in a row. We were on an invitational trip to a large city: golf courses, restaurants, and, of course, a huge mall.
The previous summer I had asked if I could get my ears pierced. It was a resounding “No!” and was followed by what amounted to an unannounced grounding. Not like I could do much anyway, but for a couple of weeks I couldn’t even go visit family. In a house with no air conditioning in the middle of a Texas summer, it amounted to hell.
Back to the trip.
My mom was a chaperone. I was in her group in the mall and after I came out of a bookstore she pulled me aside and gave me a surprise: magnetic stud earrings. Little round golden balls that pinched the crap out of my earlobes. I put one in each ear and wore them for the rest of the trip.
She was surprised I put one in both ears. I remember giving her the explanation I would use for years whenever I got a little too close to the truth: “I like symmetry.”
She accepted that. I was a weird kid.
The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. Then we got home. It was dark, sometime after dinner, and I just wanted to go to bed. My dad was home. My mom made me wait on the front porch with the earrings still on. Finally, she told me to come inside.
He went ballistic.
I was told to leave and never come back. To get out of his house. That he had no insert slur for a child. My mom stood between us and told me to go outside. So I did. I stood on the front porch shaking. I don’t know what she said to him, but eventually she came outside, asked for the earrings, and sent me to my room.
It was never brought up again.
As you can imagine, this shook me. By this point there really wasn’t much doubt in my mind: I was meant to be a girl. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what that meant. I definitely didn’t have the word “transgender.” But there had to be a solution. There had to be some way to fix whatever had gone wrong.
So I did what you’re supposed to tell kids to do.
I went to a trusted adult.
Let’s call her Mrs. H. I trusted her more than almost any other adult. She had helped me when I got bullied. I had known her for years. I trusted her. So I went to her and told her what happened with my dad.
Then I told her my secret.
She nodded. She got up. She gave me a hug. Then she told me she could help me.
I remember being so happy. Someone understood! Someone actually knew what I was talking about. Better yet, she knew how to help. She arranged for me to come to her room for an hour every day for the next two weeks.
I went back the next day.
She had a VCR and television waiting. There was one chair pointed at the TV. She had me take a seat, started the video, and went back to her desk.
I don’t remember the words.
I remember darkness. Smeared makeup. Torn clothes. Emaciated bodies. Drugs, alcohol, prostitution, slavery, pornography. Homelessness. Murder. Suicide.
I remember the faces.
Desperate. Hungry. Afraid. Alone.
The next day I went back. Another video. And the next day. There were three or four of them. Sometimes I watched a different one. Sometimes I watched one I had already seen.
One hour a day for two weeks.
Ten days. Ten hours.
I had gone to the adult I trusted most and told her, “I think I am supposed to be a girl.”
This was her answer.
I don’t know what Mrs. H thought she was doing. Maybe she honestly believed she was helping me. Maybe those videos were considered legitimate educational material at the time. Maybe she thought she was saving a confused teenage kid from destroying their life.
I can’t know what was in her head.
I know what ended up in mine.
There was no future down this road.
Whatever this thing inside me was, it needed to stay buried. Because I had seen what happened to people like me.
Again and again and again.
The faces never completely went away. They still haunt my dreams from time to time, usually just when I think they won’t anymore.
Recently was one of those times.
Why?
Because I dared to contradict them.
Not once, but two days in a row.
The first day I’ve already written about. It was a birthday party for a new friend. It was amazing. I was accepted as Amber. I left with a smile on my face and a tear in my eye.
I slept really well that night.
But the next day was something different.
I went out as Amber again, but this time I dared to get gas close to home. Broad daylight. I didn’t have much choice. Cars are annoyingly insistent about the whole gasoline thing.
It went fine.
Then I picked up a friend and we headed into the city for what has become, in my mind, “The Event.”
It was a gathering for transgender and gender-diverse people held at a bar downtown.
If you had told me a year earlier that I would be going to a bar downtown the night before work, I would have denied it wholeheartedly.
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If you said I went as a woman, I would have doubled over laughing.
But there I was.
Bar. Downtown. Wig. Cami. Baggy pants. Three-inch wedges.
Amber.
I could easily make this all about me. I’m sure I’ll write another essay about how affirming the night was. Instead, I want to talk about the event itself.
There were a lot of transgender and gender-diverse people there. All stages. All ages. All styles of dress. There were probably gender identities there I’d never even heard of before.
I talked to a bunch of women.
Students. Professionals. Parents. People working in technology. People working ordinary jobs. People with careers and families. Younger women who had transitioned years earlier. Older women who had lived entire lives before transitioning.
I listened to women talk about things that interest me. Things that matter to me.
Do you know who I didn’t talk to?
A prostitute.
A homeless person.
A porn actor.
And please don’t get me wrong. I see nothing inherently wrong with legal sex work as long as it is consensual, safe, and the worker is paid appropriately. That isn’t my point.
No one talked about drug addiction. No one looked beaten or starving. I heard stories of bravery and defiance, not slavery and despair.
Mostly I met people.
Ordinary people.
Trans people.
Living their lives.
I dropped my friend off afterward and drove home with a smile on my face and the music blaring. I was happy even knowing I had to put the masculine costume back on the next morning.
Shower. Lay out my clothes. Bed.
Then the dreams started.
The faces from the past were back, but now they were mixed with the faces from the present. The fear from my childhood mixed with the hope of adult Amber.
I woke up and grabbed my phone. It was the middle of the night. I still had hours before I needed to get up.
Great.
I tossed and turned for a while, but exhaustion eventually won.
My dreams aren’t usually very vivid. Mostly motion with interspersed images to move the story along. These dreams were different.
They were bright.
Happy.
Filled with the people I had met. Women with jobs. Women with families. Women who had transitioned young. Women who had transitioned old. Women talking about work and families and things that interested them.
No fear. No shame. Only hope.
My alarm woke me in the morning.
Time to put the costume back on.
But the hope came with me.
I don’t think the old faces are gone. Honestly, I don’t know if they ever will be. Ten hours is a long time when you’re a teenager. Ten days of being shown the same lesson over and over leaves marks.
But there was something I didn’t understand back then.
Mrs. H controlled the television.
She chose which faces I got to see.
Thirty-eight years later, I finally got to collect some of my own.
Students. Professionals. Parents. People with careers. People with families. Young women. Old women. Women who transitioned decades ago. Women still figuring things out. Women laughing. Women talking. Women complaining about work. Women making friends. Women going home at the end of the night and getting up the next morning.
Living.
So when those old faces return, and I know they will, I finally have something to put against them.
Other faces.
Real faces.
I have evidence.
I have hope.
Thirty-eight years ago, a terrified kid sat alone in front of a television and was shown what her future supposedly looked like.
This time, she finally got to see it for herself.
They were wrong.
