When Trans Doesn’t Mean Transgender
By: James Finn
Tags: LGBTQ, This Happened To Me, Equality, Transgender, Racism

When Trans Doesn’t Mean Transgender

Mistress Carla and Mae West

Alaska as Mae West, RuPaul’s Drag Race

My friend Carla was a 70-year-old, cross-dressing dominatrix prostitute.

She called herself a transvestite.

He was David by day, a mild-mannered, retired accountant from Connecticut who favored understated Brooks Brothers, fine art, and visiting with his grandchildren.

By night, she was fierce in black fishnet, leather, and 6-inch stilettos. She had a devoted clientele, so I suppose she must have been very good at what she did.

I sat quietly in the garden at the Manhattan LGBTQ Community Center with David many an afternoon. He shared a good bit of his story with me. How he’d always been attracted to cross dressing, how he was shamed for it in his childhood after being caught. How he (mostly) gave it up to raise his family, which was more important to him.

When he retired, he moved to Manhattan and lived the life he’d dreamed of. David was very happy when I knew him. He told me he was more content than he ever had been.

David was not transgender —

He didn’t feel like he was a woman. He wasn’t a woman. He got tremendous pleasure and satisfaction by transforming himself into Carla, however. I don’t pretend to personally understand that. All I know is that David was a good man and a good friend.

Isn’t that all I need to know?

He helped me understand once —

He transformed a much-younger me into a voluptuous, whip-toting Mae West. Imagine Halloween, sometime mid 1990s in Greenwich Village. Lord, could we DO Halloween.

I think it was Carla who talked me into it. It might originally have been my husband Lenny’s idea.

Whoever thought of it first, I spent all Halloween day with Carla (as David) dressing, applying makeup, watching Mae West movies, and learning how to walk in spiked heels.

Now, I’m a very traditionally masculine-acting, former military officer. I prefer my hair in a tight buzz and I’m pretty gruff.

That night I wore an amazing blond wig. I rolled my hips. I exaggerated femininity into a caricature.

Carla was delighted for me —

She’d been my friend for a long time and I knew her well enough to know that she needed to cross dress. It was incredibly important to her.

Pronouns are troubling me here. I always think of Carla as she. I always think of David as he. The same person. Two gender identities.

Yet she was a man, not a woman.

In any case, I didn’t need anything. I just wanted to have fun on Halloween. I wanted to wear a tight, sequined, slinky red dress and and have a ball touring all my usual haunts.

And I did. With Carla’s evil little cat-o’-nine-tails in hand.

Mostly I got what I wanted. Lenny dressed as Cary Grant in a brilliant suit he borrowed from a theatre company. We strolled arm in arm down Bleecker Street and Christopher Street, stopping in at all the gay bars. Our friends usually didn’t recognize us at first.

So that was fun.

We drank, sang, danced — or tottered in my case.

But as the night progressed and people got drunker, as suburbanites flooded the Village to take in the show, as the streets became packed …

Things turned a little ugly —

As a man, I’ve never been accustomed to having my physical space violated. I don’t put up with it. I can’t tell you how many times that night that my ass was pinched or my stuffed chest was palmed. I can’t tell you how many guys felt free to maul me or just to take liberties with how close they got to me.

I used Carla’s whip once. Just the once.

Don’t get me wrong. We had a great time. We stayed out until almost four.

But I learned a lot more that night than just how to party. I learned how people who mess with gender roles are sexually suspect. I directly experienced how being suspect can lead to dark disrespect, and even to physical confrontation.

This puzzles me.

I don’t know why my wearing a fabulous Halloween costume should lead people to believe that I am low enough to be prey.

I don’t know why a crossdresser ought to be fair game for bullies.

And I can’t even imagine the bullshit transgender people have to put up with on a daily basis.

I suppose it’s all about scapegoats.

I suppose it’s all about being Other.

There’s a dark place in human nature, an instinctual place that echoes far back into the mist of our ancient origins as bands of roaming primates.

Protect our territory. Watch out for strangers. Kill the Other.

These impulses are burnt indelibly into our neural circuits, although culture damps them and subdues them as we strive to transcend our origins and our biology.

They still manifest, however —

Racism

Homophobia

Transphobia

Misogyny/sexism

xenophobia

I learned something about all that the night I went out the town as Mae West.

Something I’ll never forget.