With the current hysteria over nonexistent creeps faking an entire lifestyle just to spend a few illicit moments in “the other” bathroom, I can’t help thinking about my daughter.
She’s not transgender. She was born a biological woman and remains a biological woman. Two years ago, she married her high school boyfriend, who had just completed four years in the Marines and come home. She’s much more conservative than me, a fair amount more religious than me, and much more straight-laced than me. She is not, however, narrow-minded. She also does not dress like her mother always wanted. She does not have long hair and wear dresses and jewelry and use “just the right amount of makeup.” In the past five years, she’s probably worn a dress three or four times. I know she wore one for the Marine Ball, for her wedding, and for my (second) wedding. She might have worn makeup all three of those times, but I’m not actually sure about all of them.
She has short hair, dresses a little boyish, and likes building things, camping, hiking, etc. She’s never had a spa day, and when my second wife asked if she wanted to go have a Mani-Pedi with her, the look of polite disinterest on her face was cute and sweet. It was also undeniable.
Why do I say all this? Because she, my decidedly hetero, decidedly female daughter, often gets mistaken for a boy in public. Even now at the age of 26. You might say it’s her fault for dressing herself as she does, for not looking more like a girl. You would be flatly and completely wrong. No, she has no fault or blame. She dresses like she is, not like someone she’s “supposed to” pretend to be. It’s not her job to meet someone else’s definition of what a man or woman or boy or girl should look or walk or dress or talk or act like.
Sometimes I’ve worried for her – sometimes I still do, especially these days where rightists and religious fanatics are frantically trying to save us from a nonexistent risk. I worry not because I think she’s troubled or confused about her gender and sexuality, but because frightened, small-minded people might confuse themselves and trouble themselves about her gender and sexuality, and in troubling themselves, go out of their way to trouble my entirely innocent, albeit non-typical, daughter. She neither needs nor deserves to be assailed by small-minded, frightened people who think it’s their job to protect their sense of decency, which really more often boils down to their sense of a dull, binary, whitebread status quo.
Their problem is not my daughter’s problem – or at least shouldn’t be. Their problem, also, should not be a transgendered, gay, lesbian, bisexual or queer person’s problem. This should be between themselves and their pastors and/therapists. It’s not a matter for sexual vigilantes working through their paranoid sexual psychoses.
I have no doubt there will be a day – and because we live in Texas, it’s going to come – when she’s out in public and some “well-intentioned” vigilante confronts her about using “the wrong restroom.” Don’t say it won’t happen because it has already happened to numerous people, all over the news. They'll jump right to “Hey! What do you think you’re doing!” because that’s what happening not just to transgender people, but to regular old people who just don’t fit someone’s stereotype. Maybe they'll stop at a verbal assault. Maybe they'll get physical.
If you’re one of those self-righteous vigilantes, I’ll advise you now to approach her calmly and respectfully. She may be small, calm, and reserved, but if you assault her, you’ll need at least legal representation, and probably some level of medical care. And you really don’t want to exercise your self-righteous right to interfere if her 6’2” Marine husband is within earshot to assist in neutralizing the situation.
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