Plunge

Last week I had a drink with friends at my local day-to-night, co-work-to-beers place where we passed around clothes from our respective thrift piles. Carly took a pair of Anne Demeulemeester engineer boots I got at a stoop sale 20 years ago. Maybe they won't crush her toes like they did mine. I grabbed her black clogs to add to my already impressive collection of black clogs. Hera claimed a plunge dress with a deep V that I’d bought last summer to wear to a wedding. Her 19 year-old daughter would love it, she said, since she loved any outfit that shows off her impressive cleavage.

Ordering another round, we laughed about Styles of the Youth and at the same time regarded Hera's daughter and her friends with awe: they had so little self consciousness of their bodies. By contrast, we agreed, none of us had felt that way about our own bodies when we were 19. Nerds that we were. 

Then Carly asked what Izzy thought of low necklines. As the parent of a trans daughter, I was so happy to be included in the conversation this way! No one had ever thought to ask me about matters feminine pertaining to Izzy. And I knew quite well: she likes a low cut. 

“Izzy has a nice bustline,” I added. 

Cherries

Our server crossed the room with our refills held high on a tray. As she bent to hand me my mocktail, I noticed that Hera and Carly were no longer participating in the conversation. I tried to make out their stares, to see what they were seeing in me. Something had changed. It felt like one of those metal store shutters had come down between us. Suddenly I was on my barstool, laughing by myself, while my friends sat across the table watching. The moment stretched out into infinity.

Had my friends expected Izzy to disdain revealing necklines because they always see her in a sweatshirt and shorts? Did it make them feel uneasy to learn that Izzy might be drawn to glamour and consider performing her gender in such a way? Had I unwittingly crossed over, in their minds, into presenting my daughter in drag? Izzy has no interest in drag. She’s just a girl, in a mall, considering the clothes marketed to girls in malls. (But what would be the problem if she did like drag?)

While I mentally panicked about my friends’ silence, my mouth continued on its own, describing a dress with a cherry print Izzy had considered for prom. 

Maybe we were in a weird conversational area because my kid, whom they had known for years as a boy, was now a person with boobs. But why was it not odd to chat about a cis girl’s boobs and taste for deep Vs? What would be the difference between my daughter’s boobs and Hera’s cis daughter’s boobs? The same hormones grew all of the breasts that had entered the chat.

When you think about it, it’s odd to have a body at all.

Lumped up

Sometimes I think of fingers. Get five people together, you already have fifty fingers. Give or take. In my city: Three million fingers. Or think of teeth. My small family of three has over one hundred teeth. Sometimes all of our fingers and teeth are in the same room. Wiggling. Gnashing.

My favorite Peanuts comic strip is the one in which Linus becomes aware of his tongue. There’s nothing wrong with him; Linus is just having an ordinary day when it hits him: tongue. Such an alienating feeling, sensing an appendage in your head that you don’t think about. A long, red, bumpy, articulate muscle, right inside your mouth. Right now.

Odd how we go on growing hair, sneezing, exfoliating, shedding our particles, as if it’s not strange. “Fear not the strangeness you feel,” said the writer Rainer Maria Rilke, whose mother dressed and presented him as a girl for many years because she mourned her dead infant daughter.

All kinds of people who want boobs, bigger boobs, smaller or more upturned boobs or no boobs, have gone about making the changes they desired. For a long time. Hundreds of years. 

Boobs are strange.

Let’s Bounce*

For days I mulled the idea that the gulf I perceived between my friends and me in that bar had to do with trans bodies vs cis bodies. I allowed the possibility of Hera and Carly’s unease as cis women listening to their friend talk about their trans teen's body. 

Because they are close friends, I decided to stop speculating and talk to them. Did they notice a silence on their side while I talked about Izzy and plunge necklines, and if so, what was going on for them?

Hera didn't. “I think, not necessarily in this instance, which did not stand out to me—it is hard to know what level of question is OK to ask, but also that is just sort of true about teen children generally,” she said, “like the slide from discussion of poop among toddler parents, to oh, they are real people with probably some boundaries we should observe.”

“I don’t remember any weirdness,” said Carly. “I wish I’d known you were feeling that way at the time.”

No matter what, that moment in the bar reminded me that my friends’ lives are very different from mine. And I am less close to them than I used to be. My friends never need to think about whether they took a risk in saying something about their kid. I think about it all the time.

There are plenty of trans women on social media. Their transitions are proudly public record, their glamour legendary, their work making trans history more visible to bigger audiences, tireless. But no matter how many famous dolls we have, we have few images, or ways to think about, the trans girl next door. 

Where there are no real images, hate festers. Certain Republicans (their own surgeries advertised on their very faces) want you to think trans girls are monsters. We know they aren’t, but it makes ordinary conversational gambits awkward, if not downright dangerous. So parents like me tend not to risk them.

Lab-grown

I’ll be the first to admit that having a trans daughter is an idea you have to get in deep with. And stay with for a long time.

I think of the long road my parents faced when my brother came out to them as gay. Unless they were willing to lose their son, they would have to get used to the fact that he was not going to find a nice girl, he was never going marry a girl. In fact, he was eventually going to sleep with boys. Coming to terms with this was very hard for them for a long time. 

They had to live with the idea, wake up thinking it and go to bed thinking it, have it repeated to them by their other children, my aunts and uncles, TV shows and movies and therapists and parents at PFLAG, until they stopped thinking about it because it was unremarkable as a tongue in your mouth.

I’m glad they didn’t want to lose my brother.

By the way, did you know there are lab-grown vaginas? You can grow a vagina in a lab, attach it to a person missing a vagina, and it works. The next time I meet up with Hera and Carly, I’ll tell them about it.

Drinks will be on me.

—N.R.

*You must check out Rusty Warren’s 1961 hit Bounce Your Boobies.