Redefining Realness (23 page)

Though my family in Hawaii grew to accept my gender over the years, the same can’t be said for my father, whom I hadn’t seen in the nearly five years we’d been with Mom. Despite his absence, he was very much present to me, especially when he called the apartment, here and there, to speak with Chad and me. I usually sat next to Chad, sharing the receiver as he asked about school, the family, and sports. When he asked for me, Chad knew to say I wasn’t there; it was the only time he ever referred to me as “he” or Charles. I hadn’t told my father that I was a girl. I was afraid to do so. He still had an intimidating presence in my life. After a year of this charade, when I was in my junior year, Dad asked for pictures. I finally sent him my yearbook photo and this letter:

Dear Dad
,

I hope you’re well. I want to say that I’m sorry I haven’t spoken to you in a while. I’ve been going through a lot of stuff, things you probably will not approve of and probably will not understand.

Growing up, I’ve always felt different, like I was born in a body that didn’t match who I was. With the help of Mom, Chad, and our family and my friends, I’ve realized that the reason I felt different was because I have always been a girl, just in a boy’s body.

I’m sure you’ll be angry about this and won’t approve of it. I remember when I was growing up you scolded me for liking girl things, for not playing football and basketball like Chad. I’m sorry that I’ve disappointed you in the past and maybe now, but I’m trying to make myself happy.

I go by Janet now. I don’t expect you to approve of this and I know
it’s a lot but I just wanted to be honest and stop hiding and avoiding you. I hope we can talk again, but I do understand if this is too much for you to handle.

I love you but if you can’t accept who I am, then I can’t talk to you.

Love
,

Janet

After I wrote the letter, sealed the envelope, and dropped it in the mail, I wanted to take it back. I’d been too defiant because I had been avoiding all contact and conversation with my father for over a year. I had a lot to tell him, yet stubbornly told myself I didn’t need his approval or love. A piece of me had something to prove to him: that despite his years of frustration over who I was, I was a happy and healthy teenage girl and there was nothing he could do about it. I knew that the physical distance between us kept me safe. The odds of him having the money to fly to Hawaii to reprimand me and cuss me out were slim.

A week later, I got a letter in the mail from Dad, which surprised me. In it, he complimented me and said that I “looked nice.” He said it would take him a while to get used to calling me Janet and seeing me as a girl, but “I will try my best.” He used the latter part of his letter to address my “ultimatum”:

Your disrespect for me is apparent. You never respected me when I think about it and you never liked me. But I’m the parent and you’re the child and it is not your job to love me the way I love you. My love for you is unconditional and no matter what you decide in your life I will love you. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, but I will always love you.

Love
,

Dad

When I look back on this exchange, I realize that I didn’t give Dad the chance I gave my mother, who had time and experience, seeing me take all the baby steps I took to reveal myself, from Lip Smackers and tight jeans to name changes and hormone treatments. My mother and I didn’t consult him when I started hormone therapy, I avoided him when he called, and Chad kept him in the dark. I realize now that I shocked my father into submission by giving him an ultimatum that proclaimed:
Accept me as your daughter or pretend that I do not exist.
When a person transitions, it doesn’t affect only the person undergoing the change but all those who love that person. I didn’t take into account the mourning that my father, my mother, my siblings, and my family would undergo as I evolved, and in my father’s case especially, I didn’t take into account his love for me as his child, a love that has given me a solid core, knowing that no matter what I go through, even if he has nothing else to give, I have his love.

By the end of our junior year, Wendi considered Farrington a waste of her time. I can’t count the number of times she stood me up on the intersection of Gulick Avenue and King Street, the meeting spot for our morning walks. She overslept with little regard. She spent most of her time with older girls like Shayna, who schooled her in the ways of Merchant Street and got her into the straight clubs in Waikiki. For a seventeen-year-old girl, fast money, parties, and boys were an appealing alternative to algebra and English. I remember her coming to school at lunch with no makeup on, big sunglasses, jeans, and a hoodie. She was just going through the motions, showing her face so the vice principal wouldn’t call her grandmother for truancy.

I swiftly judged Wendi. She was becoming a night creature, like the older women we knew who came out only at night, when they knew getting clocked would not be an option. The night shielded
them from obligations, from what I saw as the “real world.” I wanted Wendi to be better than they were, to rise above them. I was also bitter because she was a deciding factor in my decision to transfer to Farrington. I had wanted us to eat lunch together, to go to prom together, to strut down the aisle in our white graduation gowns together. But school was never Wendi’s thing, and I never told her I was angry with her for what felt like abandonment. We were best friends who became young women together, pooched rides together, learned the tricks of the streets together, and dreamed together. Her leaving school created a wedge between us, one that in hindsight was a gift.

Throughout my adolescence, I was compared to Wendi, the louder, more flamboyant half of our relationship. I was envious of the attention that she commanded, of her long and silky hair and equally lengthy legs—fitting so perfectly into Hawaii’s standard of mixed-Asian beauty—and, most striking, her unapologetic air. Wendi always seemed light and free, operating without obligation, without a filter, without the sense of impending judgment that I admittedly had. She didn’t care what people thought or said about her, and I respected her for that. I had hoped, ever since we met in the seventh grade, that some of her would rub off on me. Ultimately, she decided to drop out on her eighteenth birthday, at the end of our junior year. She fast-tracked her GED and went to cosmetology school as I continued on alone in my senior year, a time that allowed me to step out of the shadow of our friendship and find myself. I made new friends, like the cool-girl clique Allure Ladies, who embraced me, welcomed me to their table at lunch, and invited me to parties on the weekends. I also joined peer mediation at the Teen Center under the guidance of Alison, who became one of my first allies. She took me to conferences where I trained middle school students on conflict resolution and the benefits of creating LGBTQ student alliances.
I talked to her about the complex issues in my life, including my gallivanting on Merchant Street.

“But I don’t do what they do,” I lied, not wanting Alison to know that I had an arrangement with Max and a handful of loyal regulars. I knew she was acquainted with Merchant’s because our Chrysalis co-facilitator April did outreach there. “A lot of young girls go to just hang out. It’s like Chrysalis, a place where we can be with our own.”

“It’s important to be around people who understand who you are,” she said, looking at me as I picked at the bowl of Chex Mix in front of me. “Do you ever worry about money?”

“Only when I think about the cost of surgery and stuff,” I said, feeling a bit defeated. It was the first time I had told anyone besides Wendi about my desire to have bottom surgery.

“That doesn’t make you a girl, Janet. You are complete just as you are,” she said, trying her best to lighten the burden I felt as a seventeen-year-old with no money to reach such a goal.

I first became aware of the fact that genital reconstruction surgery (GRS) was a possibility when I was thirteen, lying in Wendi’s bed, hearing stories of older girls who had undergone the procedure. Now they were in front of me on Merchant’s, living possibility. In my gut, I knew that I was a woman regardless of what lay between my legs. Most of the women I knew hadn’t undergone GRS; some had been saving for years but life got in the way, while the majority chose not to have it. I knew that their genitals didn’t dictate their womanhood, and I knew there were many paths to womanhood. My path and my internal sense of womanhood included a vagina, and that does not negate anyone else’s experiences. I was determined to have GRS. It was never a question of
if 
but
when
.
When
depended on how fast I could attain those resources.

“I want other things, too, like I want to go to college as a girl, and I want to move to the mainland and just live my life,” I said. “But I
can’t do all of that without first getting over this. It’s like the first big step I have to make.”

Alison nodded in the assuring way she always did, telling me that she was confident I would do everything I wanted and more. Years later, when I replayed this conversation to her and told her that I had crossed the threshold into sex work while at Farrington, she was surprised. She told me that she’d had an unwavering faith that I had dodged that fate. “You were always so smart,” she said. “So I just knew you would find a way. I just hate that it had to be that way.”

It was Alison who urged me to get a work permit so I could nab an after-school job and start saving for my dreams. I soon landed at a popular urban clothing boutique called Demo at Pearlridge Mall in Aiea, known for its crew of fly salesgirls. I felt honored to be one of them, in cropped graffiti tees and embellished low-rise jeans. This distinction made up for my pathetic paychecks, about a hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars for thirty to forty hours of work, an amount that I spent on employee-discounted Baby Phat. The girls on Merchant Street would’ve laughed at my salary. When your self-identity and worth are tied up in how much you can make and how many men want you, it can be hard to see value in doing anything else. Though I knew I earned more with sex work, I wanted to prove I could do something else, to prove that Merchant Street wasn’t my
only
option.

I took pride in the fact that I could get a job, that I could be out in the daytime, that I could spend my humble earnings on Taco Bell Mexican pizzas in the food court, that I could be visible, out of the darkness. Some people in the mall knew I was trans, but most did not. It was a taste of the freedom I would experience as a young woman in New York City. Those paychecks weren’t going to get me to New York, though. That was real. No matter how much
I loved working at the boutique, I knew it couldn’t ease the urgency prompted by the clock that ticked within me, reminding me daily that it would take money for me to get where I needed to be. I couldn’t ignore the fast money available to me. The survival sex trade economy and the women of Merchant Street would lead me to realize those dreams.

It was the sight of Kahlúa’s newly stitched-up vagina during my final year of high school that put me in touch with possibility, just a few thousand dollars away. Kahlúa, who was in her late twenties, came to Merchant Street for one reason that night: to flaunt her new Lexus, boobs, diamond ring, and vagina, fresh from Thailand.

“Honey, I’m getting married next spring,” she said, extending her knotty knuckled hand, which sparkled with an emerald-cut diamond. “Congrats, girl!” was said all around. We wanted to ask how she’d funded this quick transformation and knew it had to be the guy who had proposed. Just a year before, Kahlúa had seemed like all those other butch queens, who’d put on a wig, a dress, and some heels on the weekend to attract cute guys who wanted a girl with something extra. I didn’t even know that Kahlúa was living her life as a girl, and she knew any girl would be envious of her progress, so she came there to make us gag. And gag we did.

“I met this guy at Hulas about nine months ago,” she said, prompting Rebecca to walk away because Kahlúa’s Cinderella story was already too much for her. Rebecca believed you had to earn your womanhood. She was out on Merchant Street nearly every night, and no one gave her anything; she worked for it.

“Girl, never mind her,” Shayna said, consoling Kahlúa, who was obviously hurt by Rebecca’s shade.

“Well, we began dating, and he told me that I looked good in drag,” she said. “I told him I actually wanted to be a woman but didn’t have the money, and he said he would help me because he loved me. Next
thing you know, I was flying to Bangkok to do it with Kalani’s doctor. I went in January.”

“And he paid for everything?” Wendi said as a crowd of girls zeroed in.

“Yes, girl. All twelve thousand dollars of it,” she boasted.

This ignited the fairy tales of all the girls on that block, the urban legend we’d heard our entire lives: Some handsome or at least decent man would swoop in and pay for your pussy without asking for anything in return. And you would live happily ever after as a legal female or, as Octavia St. Laurent said in
Paris Is Burning
, “a full-edged woman of the United States.” Despite my jealousy over Kahlúa’s swift transformation, I knew that having some man pay for your surgery involved sacrifice. Nothing is given to you for free. There’s a level of ownership when a man sponsors you, as the girls called it. I always wanted to say that I did this for me, that this was and is and will always be mine.

“Girl, we like see,” Shayna said, not even feigning propriety. She had seen it all.

As if she’d been practicing this choreography her entire life, Kahlúa crouched down, lifted her skirt, and spread her lips. I had never seen a vagina this close before. I had seen porn only through cable stations we didn’t have access to. It was always behind a haze of black-and-white moving pixels, and the vaginas I saw in
Playboy
were always prettily posed, with soft lighting and retouching. They looked more like illustrations. I naively thought there was one uniform vagina template, and Kahlúa’s looked nothing like that. It looked like a gruesome scene from
Law & Order: SVU
.