I really wanted Chaz Bono to be a transgender hero. By sharing his transition in his film, “Becoming Chaz,” and in his memoir, “Transition: The Story of How I became a Man,” he is offering gender-questioning people an intimate entry into his personal experience. With his fame, he is raising much-needed awareness about a marginalized population. But as I, a writer releasing my own transmasculine memoir on the same day as Bono, follow the coverage of his story, I feel like I’m watching a slow-motion media train wreck.

The New York Times article, “The Reluctant Transgender Role Model,” by Cintra Wilson, is the latest troubling piece. Wilson, in what must be an attempt at humor, investigates Bono’s motivations with questions about celebrity damage, gender-bent Oedipal revenge, and reclaiming childhood attention. I imagine Wilson aims to connect with skeptical mainstream readers, but those types of questions push well past curious and cynical to downright ridiculous.

In a cultural climate that forces transgender people to explain themselves at every turn, I cannot be too surprised that Bono plays into another story of overcoming pain and suffering, of transition as the last resort of the suicidal. As a transgender person, I find this narrative exhausting and self-victimizing. Why do we, as trans people, need to keep proving how awful our lives are in order for people to accept us? What if we modified our bodies, not “amputated” parts of them as Wilson so crudely states, because we thought our lives were so beautiful that we wanted to experience them in a vehicle that allowed us our deepest comfort and truest self-expression?

Bono reiterates the standard transgender narrative of identifying as a male since childhood, using as evidence gender stereotypes like “playing sports” to reinforce his case. Once again, it’s hard to blame Bono. The criteria for Gender Identity Disorder (GID) in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders refers to gender stereotypes in its diagnosis. Although the article claims GID was only classified as a mental disorder until 1999, this is incorrect. A diagnosis of GID is still required for many trans people seeking gender reassignment surgery, and reinforcing gender stereotypes is the necessary proof. While I cannot question Bono’s experience, I can challenge his facts and make it absolutely clear that his experience isn’t shared by all of us.

Bono says, “There’s a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they’re mismatched. That’s all it is. It’s not complicated, it’s not a neurosis. It’s a mix-up. It’s a birth defect, like a cleft palate.”

First I’d like to know where Bono confirmed the gender in your brain and gender in your body theory. Sure, researchers are looking for hard proof of transsexualism, but they are having about as much success as they are in finding a definitive “gay gene” or “gay brain” structure in homosexuals. The nature vs. nurture debate will continue in gay and lesbian research circles just like the essentialist vs. cultural construction debate will continue in gender research circles. To fall completely to one pole as Bono does with essentialism is to ignore the very complicated topic of gender presentations, expressions, embodiments, roles, and identities as lived in our culture. To Bono’s claim of mismatched alignment for transgender people, this is a gross misrepresentation of all of us.

“Transgender,” in its most common usage, is as an all-encompassing term and self-defined identity available to anyone who doesn’t fit into the man or woman boxes. Transsexuals (female-to-male/FTM like Bono; or male-to female/MTF) are the most well-known group under the transgender umbrella. But there are many trans people who live and identify outside of the stifling constraints of the gender binary. Some pursue hormones without surgery; some pursue surgery without hormones; some choose only to adopt a new name; some use the gender-neutral pronouns “ze” and “hir”; some use self-identifying words that encompass both man and woman, like genderqueer or gender fluid.

Therefore, the conclusion of Wilson’s article relating to diversity is correct, except that Bono actually reiterates the black and white of gender identification by wedding himself completely to the notion of a woman becoming a man. He may offer an alternative understanding of black and white, but as for ushering in a complete wheel of gender (not sexuality as Wilson mistakenly writes) into the mainstream, Technicolor Bono is not.

It’s time for an understanding of transgender experiences and identities to reach mainstream audiences. Bono is, with his celebrity bullhorn, an ideal candidate to be a transgender role model, but after I read that he once had a tolerance for women that he no longer has, he cannot be my hero. I do hope that his story is the starting point, an impetus to expand the conversation beyond sensationalism, gender stereotypes, and the Fashion & Style pages. But this poorly fact-checked article by Cinta Wilson makes me nervous that many will now claim to know about transgender people, and about me, because they read or saw something about Cher’s kid.

***

For another perspective that I think is excellent, check out Oliver Bendorf’s commentary on Autostraddle.

It’s pretty funny. At least I think so. You should probably check it out. Plus, there’s a picture of me.

“A Higher Education,” By Nick Krieger

Linking to the personal essay in this week’s NY Times Sunday Styles Modern Love column saves me the struggle of coming up with something original to post. It’s written by a woman about her transgender twin brother’s desire to have biological children and the fertility challenges he faces from testosterone that has been accumulating in his body for a few years.

I had a lot of responses to this essay, none of them particularly original or insightful, and all of them rather self-absorbed. So, I deleted them and decided to just recommend that you read the essay.

I was inspired by last week’s New Yorker, the one with “Red Death on Wall Street” on the cover, no schadenfraude intended. Despite the nightmares in which I’m greeted by the Grim Reaper in Dennis Rodman hip-hop garb and I cry tears of blood, the Malcolm Gladwell article, “Late Bloomers,” gave me a bit of artistic hope.

It opens with an anecdote (warning: article spoiler) about this guy who quits his job as a lawyer with the dream we all know too well of being A Writer. He has little literary training, but is disciplined. He sells a few stories, and is obviously intelligent, having passed the bar and all. At this point in my reading, I start shaking my head and muttering obscenities. I’m having flashbacks to the Murakami article several months ago (culled from his new running memoir) in which he describes quitting his bar-owning lifestyle to become a best-selling prolific novelist because it “suited” him. I’m not sure if I’m revising Murakami here, but I basically understood his career path as an I-decided-to-be-a-writer-and-so-it-happened tale.

So, this lawyer sells some stories, then there’s a dark period, an unpublished novel, then something in Harper’s, a short story collection, then lots of awards. I’m envious and bitter and pretty sure I’m on the local bus to nowheresville, when Gladwell tells us the catch: the timeline. This lawyer guy’s rise took 18 years. Immediately, I felt buoyant.

The article explores our natural inclination to associate genuis with precocity, using examples like Ben Fountain (the lawyer and late bloomer) and Jonathon Saffron Foer (the precocious genius), as well as Picasso and Cezanne. It debunks some myths and introduces the concept of the “patron,” the person or people who fund the artist on the long walk to glory. I began to find that it helps me deal with my job if I consider my company my patron rather than my employer.

This is one of my favorite quotes: ”On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.”

I like the quote and the article because they give me the illusion of hope, offering a nod to the blind faith that is the antithesis to my logical constitution. It is one of last lines in the article that left me the most encouraged, “sometimes genuis is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.”

I have more rejections coming my way. More setbacks. More thoughts of failure. More crappy patrons. More ass sores from sitting in that damn desk chair. But someday, I tell you, some day…

I am horrified. Sorta rageful. Cringing fitfully. But I get it. I understand why Curve Magazine had to refer to me as a “woman,” at least once. The use of “girl” seems excessive and sloppy. (Is it a “woman’s journey” or a “girl’s bike trip”? Consistency copyeditors.) However, there is one phrase, the title of my article as listed in the table of contents, that makes my gender identity flare his nostrils in anger:

Cycling Sista

I always swore that I would never be one of those trans people to nitpick about pronouns, make a stink about bathrooms, be militant, bother every friend and lover with constant talk of my body “dysphoria,” or use “dysphoria” or “gender identity” without laughing. But that’s before I actually accepted that I am a trans person, an invisible guy, one who at least is still laughing at the title of his blog post.

Curve is a lesbian magazine. It says the word three times on the cover, including, “Best-Selling Lesbian Magazine.” The audience is Women and Womyn. In flyover states. If I had a quarter for every time a writing teacher told me you don’t have to be the audience of a magazine to write for the magazine; just know your audience…

Five months ago, during my unemployed stint, Curve posted a Craigslist ad seeking freelance writers. Since it’s hard to pitch travel magazines unsolicited, I pitched two travel stories to Curve, one about a permaculture farm in Costa Rica, the other about bicycle touring. I was fully aware that I was trying to sneak destination and adventure travel stories into the mag, so hidden in over 2,000 total words, I included less than 50 words about dyke soccer and a gay bar. (It was really a gay men’s bar.) I also used the following phrases in my pitch, “For the adventurous lesbian,” and “After reading my article, lesbians will know.” In my daily life, I NEVER use the word lesbian, because even my lesbian friends think the word sounds like a disease, but I looked at the cover of the magazine and tried to know my audience. I was complicit in this whole debacle.

But… Is there something about being a woman, or a girl, or a sista that is intrinsic to my story? NO! Is it necessary that a woman reading the story assumes that the first-person guide is a woman in order to identify with her? Yes and no. The exact same story (minus the 50 words with the two “dyke” mentions) could’ve been in a men’s magazine, but perhaps it would’ve been less inspiring to the readers of Curve. We seek connections with others like ourselves.

Which is why, even though I don’t think there is an appropriate angle for me to write a letter to Curve expressing my frustration, I am frustrated. I do not feel connected to women. At all. I might as well come out with it: I am NOT a woman.

My boy name is “Nick.” I don’t use it very often, and for now, at least, I don’t mind having two names. If you are one of my friends pulling for “Nino,” I suggest you start calling me that ASAP, because although I like how close it is to my name, it could take a while to get used to. So, I wonder, if I had submitted my article with the name “Nick” or “Nino,” would the editor have asked if I was a woman, would she have just as easily called me out as a woman in the table of contents and title, would she have assumed that in pitching Curve, I was one of the many dykes with a masculine name? Would it have been inappropriate for a man to write the article, a transman? What about a genderqueer boi?

When I walk down the streets, I access my superhuman power to jump into bodies of the dudes. I see myself in time-lapse metamorphosis, my breasts vanishing into pecks, my dick pressing out of my pelvic area. Then, I look in the mirror and see the flatness of my chest, feel the binder ripping into my armpits. I run my hands across my checks, soft as a pre-pubescent boy.

The word “woman” is nails on a chalkboard, a rude interruption of my reality. I am done with my silence, done passing. But even as I write this, I pass. “How’s it going, sister?” asks the plant guy in my office. I have known him for almost ten years. I see him only once a year, usually a run-in at one of my various office jobs. He is twenty feet away watering; I am at my cube; I want to shout, “Hey! Don’t call me sister.” I stay quiet.

If I end up transitioning, or partially transitioning, or changing my name, and someone asks me how I could be so sure, I will say that Curve Magazine helped. That I saw the words “woman” and “girl” and “sista” in print, applied to me, and that I simultaneously wanted to cry, die, disappear and breath fire.

I like my reality better than your reality. And I will chose mine over yours. But fuck you for making me choose.

If you find the June issue of Town and Country magazine in your local bookstore and open it, you will find many diamond and perfume advertisements. You will also find, on p. 134, what isn’t quite an article, but an item, written by me. It’s a brief, concise, succinct piece on an organization that leads bicycling and walking tours (luxury vacation style). The participants also raise money for AIDS and breast cancer charities. Check out the link, and see what it looks like when an editor edits my writing. Or better yet, buy the magazine. I did.