I_Am_My_Father's_Son
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Trinidad is sometimes called the 'Victorian Jewel of Southeastern Colorado.' It has a population of ten thousand people, nine thousand of whom are cowboys. The rest are transsexuals.
I know this for one simple reason: because this is the town where my brother and I tended to our father, after the four-hour surgery that finally made her a woman, at the age of fifty-three.
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By the time she was twelve, my father was winning tri-county mechanical drawing championships and building fiberglass motorboats in the garage. In her twenties she went to university for aviation management and art, going on to work as an air traffic controller for thirty years. She drove to work on a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle with leather pants and an urban camo tee, and came home to read books on string theory and Rembrandt and to paint intricate airbrushes of the back tailfins of ’59 Cadillacs. She built spiral staircases and secret passages to relax.
She, in short, has the brain of a neutron star and the emotional stability of a cut diamond. This is the father who raised my brothers and I, who nurtured me along with my beautiful mother from mere homo sapien larva to the smartass geek writing before you today.
I, in part, have her transgenderism to thank for that. And to be proud of.
Let’s look at it from the very beginning: a quiet, bookish boy in New Jersey realizes before she’s even verbal that she was born in the wrong body, and if she says a word about it to anybody she’ll be a deemed a pint-sized basketcase. So how do you tackle a revelation like that? In my father’s case, she did it with logic, with self-control, and with prime-time episodes of Mr. Spock. My father adopted Leonard Nimoy as a sort of emotional hero, and a pointy-eared Vulcan as her role model.
Obviously, my father soon became the most socially awkward boy this side of the Mason-Dixon line, and as extroverted as a black hole. But, fact is, she stayed alive - which is better than the alternative. And given the choice between a Star Trek geek for a father, or a McCarthy-era teenage suicide, I'll take the nerd.
Fast forward thirty years. My father worked eight-hour days as an air traffic controller, a profession that would drive mere mortals to a spontaneous arsenic binge. You couldn't do it - I couldn't either. Because one hour in a tower would turn our guts to quicksand, our confidence to jelly, and our head so inside out we'd think that hammer pants were hip again.
My father did it every day, on nothing but a handful of Ritz crackers and a tuna sandwich. She did it by using the same mind that she developed for her survival: the discipline, the focus that in lesser mortals appears superhuman, otherworldly. My father played 3-D chess with several hundred pieces, each flying four hundred miles an hour and carrying more people in a single day than the population of Memphis.
Even by air traffic controller standards - and seriously, most of them are as average as a Rorschach blot, from survivalist nuts to concert cellists to outright friggin’ loons- she was stellar, a king among men (so to speak). And it was her skills - her unalloyed genius - that put food on the table, books in our hands, and college in our future. Mr. Nimoy would be proud.
And he should be proud. Because my transgender father also taught me how to be a man.
Men open doors for strangers and spend quiet alone time with a good book. Men come to bat for the people they love, dive into a new challenge brain first, and do the dishes without being told. Men know how to wear a fine suit, preferably one with pinstripes. Men...don't leave the seat up.
So let’s review.
My father was in the closet for over fifty years, but it didn’t matter. Being transgender is part of who she is - on top of being a race car driver, a sci-fi fan, a bookworm, a tinkerer, and a calm and fundamentally gentle human being on all fronts. I was raised by every portion of her, whether it took center stage or not.
My father lives in New Jersey now with her mother, but thank God no one has ever called her a ‘Jersey Girl.’ She rides her bike in the morning, eats the same bowl of Raisin Bran she’s eaten her whole life, and schleps sheetrock into the back of a pickup truck like she used to - although now random men suddenly offer to help by the dozen. She spends a lot of time painting, and remodeling. When she goes to the city, she gets cat calls, and she’s still not quite sure what to do about them. I once took her out dancing, to an 80s night downtown. And I don’t think there’s a word, in any language, for the feeling you get when you see your transgender father getting hit on by an Alaskan fisherman named Dirk.
‘Dirk.’ Seriously, his first name might as well have been ‘Punchline.’
My friends still tell me that my father is hot. And that, of all things, will always be creepy.
Me? I survive like I always have. I do my best to read too many books, stay up too late, and eat like crap. I turn to both my mother and father for well-meant advice, and then ignore it to my own detriment. I am filled with verve and gusto and uncertainty about what I’ll be doing tomorrow or a year from now. But I’ll do my damnedest to do a fine job of whatever comes around the bend, even if it means screwing up ever now and again. There’s always tomorrow, and I look forward to it. And there’s a very simple reason for that.
Because I am my father’s son.
Trinidad is sometimes called the 'Victorian Jewel of Southeastern Colorado.' It has a population of ten thousand people, nine thousand of whom are cowboys. The rest are transsexuals.
I know this for one simple reason: because this is the town where my brother and I tended to our father, after the four-hour surgery that finally made her a woman, at the age of fifty-three.
-
By the time she was twelve, my father was winning tri-county mechanical drawing championships and building fiberglass motorboats in the garage. In her twenties she went to university for aviation management and art, going on to work as an air traffic controller for thirty years. She drove to work on a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle with leather pants and an urban camo tee, and came home to read books on string theory and Rembrandt and to paint intricate airbrushes of the back tailfins of ’59 Cadillacs. She built spiral staircases and secret passages to relax.
She, in short, has the brain of a neutron star and the emotional stability of a cut diamond. This is the father who raised my brothers and I, who nurtured me along with my beautiful mother from mere homo sapien larva to the smartass geek writing before you today.
I, in part, have her transgenderism to thank for that. And to be proud of.
Let’s look at it from the very beginning: a quiet, bookish boy in New Jersey realizes before she’s even verbal that she was born in the wrong body, and if she says a word about it to anybody she’ll be a deemed a pint-sized basketcase. So how do you tackle a revelation like that? In my father’s case, she did it with logic, with self-control, and with prime-time episodes of Mr. Spock. My father adopted Leonard Nimoy as a sort of emotional hero, and a pointy-eared Vulcan as her role model.
Obviously, my father soon became the most socially awkward boy this side of the Mason-Dixon line, and as extroverted as a black hole. But, fact is, she stayed alive - which is better than the alternative. And given the choice between a Star Trek geek for a father, or a McCarthy-era teenage suicide, I'll take the nerd.
Fast forward thirty years. My father worked eight-hour days as an air traffic controller, a profession that would drive mere mortals to a spontaneous arsenic binge. You couldn't do it - I couldn't either. Because one hour in a tower would turn our guts to quicksand, our confidence to jelly, and our head so inside out we'd think that hammer pants were hip again.
My father did it every day, on nothing but a handful of Ritz crackers and a tuna sandwich. She did it by using the same mind that she developed for her survival: the discipline, the focus that in lesser mortals appears superhuman, otherworldly. My father played 3-D chess with several hundred pieces, each flying four hundred miles an hour and carrying more people in a single day than the population of Memphis.
Even by air traffic controller standards - and seriously, most of them are as average as a Rorschach blot, from survivalist nuts to concert cellists to outright friggin’ loons- she was stellar, a king among men (so to speak). And it was her skills - her unalloyed genius - that put food on the table, books in our hands, and college in our future. Mr. Nimoy would be proud.
And he should be proud. Because my transgender father also taught me how to be a man.
Men open doors for strangers and spend quiet alone time with a good book. Men come to bat for the people they love, dive into a new challenge brain first, and do the dishes without being told. Men know how to wear a fine suit, preferably one with pinstripes. Men...don't leave the seat up.
So let’s review.
My father was in the closet for over fifty years, but it didn’t matter. Being transgender is part of who she is - on top of being a race car driver, a sci-fi fan, a bookworm, a tinkerer, and a calm and fundamentally gentle human being on all fronts. I was raised by every portion of her, whether it took center stage or not.
My father lives in New Jersey now with her mother, but thank God no one has ever called her a ‘Jersey Girl.’ She rides her bike in the morning, eats the same bowl of Raisin Bran she’s eaten her whole life, and schleps sheetrock into the back of a pickup truck like she used to - although now random men suddenly offer to help by the dozen. She spends a lot of time painting, and remodeling. When she goes to the city, she gets cat calls, and she’s still not quite sure what to do about them. I once took her out dancing, to an 80s night downtown. And I don’t think there’s a word, in any language, for the feeling you get when you see your transgender father getting hit on by an Alaskan fisherman named Dirk.
‘Dirk.’ Seriously, his first name might as well have been ‘Punchline.’
My friends still tell me that my father is hot. And that, of all things, will always be creepy.
Me? I survive like I always have. I do my best to read too many books, stay up too late, and eat like crap. I turn to both my mother and father for well-meant advice, and then ignore it to my own detriment. I am filled with verve and gusto and uncertainty about what I’ll be doing tomorrow or a year from now. But I’ll do my damnedest to do a fine job of whatever comes around the bend, even if it means screwing up ever now and again. There’s always tomorrow, and I look forward to it. And there’s a very simple reason for that.
Because I am my father’s son.