“Will my mom be mad at me if I show up at a wedding in this?” I asked the sales guy.

“No,” he said. “It’s your standard, plain, affordable suit.”

That was exactly what I was looking for at H&M on my lunch break from work. I took a black jacket in the smallest size and a pair of black pants in my size, as well as a white shirt and purple tie I had no intention of buying to the dressing rooms. Accessories weren’t allowed inside, which meant that I’d have to put on the tie in the common area, a problem because I can’t really tie a tie.

I was once able to do so, for about a week, several years ago, after an incident on the train platform. A performance artist on the way to a show had asked me to help with her tie, and  embarrassed by my butch ineptitude, I later watched how-to videos on the Internet. But without a reason to practice, I promptly forgot what I learned.

Then whenever I needed my tie tied, I simply asked my roommates to help. There’s something so perfectly submissive that I love about standing completely still while another is focused intently on the task of dressing me. Now having to do it myself in the store, I hoped that like driving a car with a stick shift, I could get the job done in a pinch. But when I wrapped the purple silk around my neck, it was clear I needed a refresher course.

I was annoyed, and although I was unable to determine the main root of my frustrations, quite a few cropped up: I hate traditional weddings for numerous reasons, including but not limited to my feeling that publicly declaring your love for another does not warrant a juicer or a tea set; a tie can be a great accessory for a person of any gender, but I’ll take jeans and a t-shirt over a costly noose and the mandate to look respectable any day; I’m bitter that in certain settings my failure to tie a tie and perform man could out me as trans and put my safety at risk; I’m ashamed that I am unable to do something our society and culture believes I “should” be able to do based on my gender presentation.

A lot of trans guys I know are thrilled to dress up now that it’s on the “right” side of the man/woman divide. Not me. I spent too many years futzing with pantyhose, and now I’m too old and disinterested to be futzing around with cuff links. In the end, perhaps, my challenge is my resistance to learning something new, to change, or my fear of throwing change into the faces of my family and my father, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in over two years.

When I was a kid, I attended a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs with my family. Whether it was because I was deeply uncomfortable in a dress or cold in short-sleeves, my dad often lent me his suit jacket. A half-dozen sizes too big, it covered me, protected me, kept me warm. To me a suit jacket has always signified the generosity of my father. Now it is part of a uniform signifying the cause of our rift.

I waver and shift and change the main explanations for this thing people like to call my “gender transition,” but my reasons always surround instinct and comfort in my physical body, especially when it comes to sex. My reasons never surround the roles and expectations for men–I could do without them. I could do without the institution of separation that is Gender in our society. And yet, I will be socialized as a man, for safety, for obligations (like weddings), and maybe even for my own simple pleasure of one day offering my jacket to my cousin’s kid, a niece, and you never know, a daughter.

I ended up buying the jacket and pants, and along with a shirt I owned, I carried my outfit from my studio over to my old roommate’s house. From his closet, he pulled out a sharp tie with black and gray stripes and tied it for me. He tucked the extra length on the short end in between two shirt buttons and recommended a tie clip to hold it in place, showing me a new trick. “You look handsome,” he said, offering me another lesson I resist learning.

I felt guilty going to my trans group on election night. I could be refreshing my computer screen as the returns come in, or tapping my knee surrounded by people biting their nails, I thought. The fate of the country is at stake and all I can think of is me. When the big one hits, I’ll probably climb over the rubble, hand my apple to a trapped kid, and still make it to therapy on time for the full 50 minutes.

When I arrived at group, the huge TV was on and a few people were sitting on the couches, everyone nervously chatting about the early results. We started late, and as part of check in, we discussed our feelings about news TV breaks or stopping early to watch TV, allowing us to bond over shared election concerns. We never did turn on the TV. Instead we talked about the things we always talk about: our families, our bodies, our friends and co-workers, our trans-identities, and yes, I’m being intentionally vague about our private meeting. The thing that struck me most yesterday was the diversity of our group: pre-transition and post-transition; barely old enough to drink and old enough to qualify for senior citizen discounts; black and white and brown. All of us last in a long line for equal rights, ones that include using a public bathroom without fear. But nobody said that. When we left, we were all way to pumped by Obama’s growing electoral lead.

By the time I arrived at the election party, the wall map had been covered in blue with spots of red, and McCain had already delivered his concession speech. The great thing about watching Obama’s victory speech with gay guys is that they cried, and squealed, “Oh My God, who dressed Michelle? What was she thinking?” I think even a few of the straight men cried; this is San Francisco after all.

I imagine few of us in the room had voted for Obama because of his skin color, what with those issues of wars, the economy, the environment, education, health insurance, evolution, and women’s reproductive rights to consider, or character traits like eloquence, intelligence and leadership skills. But I know we all thought about race now. It was impossible not to listening to the words in his speech. It was impossible not to see it, looking at his face. I had been wholly unprepared for the impact of his win, to see a black man on stage, to envision him in the White House with his family, to transform the words “change” and “hope” from campaign slogans into a presidential symbol of all that is possible, a touchstone for the dream of progress.

The results for Prop 8 were close, but it was no good from the beginning. My friend who had spent the past week in Colorodo campaigning for Obama, occasionally ending up on the phone with a bigot who used the N-word, roamed the party, repeating both prayer and mandate, “We cannot write discrimination into our constitution.” His words moved me more than “unfair and wrong,” more than the commerical images of Japense internment camps that aimed to link all of our mistreatments. Maybe it was my friend’s soft-spoken voice or the word “constitution,” an official state document, but also the foundation, the matter of which we are made, our core, that resonated with me.

At the block party in the Castro, we celebrated one victory, and drank to forget the impending defeat of our other battle. There is no question in my mind that we won the more important of the two, although I tell you, I’m having a hard time looking people in the eye today. As buoyed as I was yesterday by Barack, I’m equally disheartened today, not that people still call me “dyke” as a slur, or that I could be denied employment as a visible trans person, but that in an organized manner, and through a legitimate voting process (or so I think), my fellow people, over 5 million of them, others like me who desire happiness and health and love and connection, wrote discrimination into our shared constitutional body.

I went to trans group last night because I needed to talk about my family. I’m in the process of coming out to them as transgender, which is like coming out to them as gay, with some aspects worse (the situation) and some better (my maturity to deal with the situation). Ten years ago, both of my parents were concerned that life would be harder for me as a lesbian. I recently asked my father what he’d done in the past decade to make the world a better place for gay people, to make my life easier. He got defensive and responded that he doesn’t discriminate. What does it say that to help these days is to not make something worse? Recently, my mother told me that she read her mother’s old yearbook and was shocked that someone had called my grandmother, “a dirty Jew.” I launched into an ineffectual spiel about the current state of gay discrimination. My mother failed or didn’t care to see the connection.

It turned out that going to my group last night was the least self-absorbed thing I could do. In sharing my latest challenges in living in a society that is not set up to accept me, I’m following in the path of thousands before me; I’m walking by the sides of thousands with me; I’m leading the path for thousands to follow. When will we see that there is no line for equal rights and basic human decency? When will we realize we’ve all been fucked in the ass one too many times without the common courtesy of lube?

Will four years change us? I’d like to believe so.

I saw my parents every day for the past seven days. I’ve only been relieved of their West Coast presence for a few hours and here I am, in a cafe, blogging about them. I’m hoping break out of my shell shocked state, do what I do best after an intense and disturbing experience: write about it.

But sometimes numbers are worth a 1,000 words. So let’s start there. I spent a total of 32 hours with my parents. Think about that. When was the last time you spent 32 hours with your parents? And I’m talking hours of direct contact. Like sitting across a breakfast, lunch, or dinner table or being crammed in a car. I don’t mean the hours we all spent asleep in the same hotel room. I think 32 hours is a lot of time, a challenge, a test of humility and compassion, and I believe I deserve the Purple Heart for being such a damn good kid.

We only had one major fight, which happened around day six, after three days in Napa and two hours in a Lexus hardtop convertible. We borrowed the car from a relative, because how could we refuse the offer of such a fancy schmancy car. And I sat in the backseat meant for luggage, not people, because how could I ask a 61 year old, a woman who squeezed me, a grapefruit of a baby, through her pea-sized hole to sit in a seat so flawed in its ergonomics as to cause permanent deformity.

My mother is an ant-like woman with the mouth of a gorilla. When she is angry, unlike my father who whistles and steams like a teapot left on the stove too long, my mom turns into bullet-riddled grizzly bear. Beastly howls mingle with flailing arms as she claws and scrapes in her terror fueled frenzy. But that was how the fight ended, with her swipes and raging non sequiturs. It began with her asking me if I had any normal friends, normal as defined as white, heterosexual, and with no visible tattoos or piercings. But in truth, it began the second I greeted the both of them.

It should be no surprise that the subtext of my life for the past year became the subtext of my parents’ visit. Yet it was a surprise because I didn’t think I looked much different since the last time I saw them. My hair is no shorter and my clothing is not new and my legs don’t have any more hair. My breasts are perhaps more noticeably flattened, partially because of lost weight, and I can only hope that my gestures and mannerisms evoke manly connotations (studly with a hint of fag), but I doubt even this would be new. Something has changed though. I am getting older, but I am carded for alcohol more often than ever, almost 100% of the time (including private parties). It seems that the more I embrace feeling like a boy, the brighter my boyish aura glows. Or maybe binding my breasts just makes that much of a difference.

“Did you have an operation?” my father asked me only minutes after hello. I said no, mumbling something oblique, not asking what he meant, but wondering if he knew the difference between top surgery and a breast reduction. Always desiring the route of less information, my dad is the kind of guy who considers queer acceptance referring to my girlfriend as my “friend,” and so he didn’t press the subject of my chest.

My mother, on the other hand, expresses a curiosity so entitled in its nosiness that I knew there would be more questions about my gender presentation. I have made it a habit to grant her a few moments of judgmental interrogation as part of my child duties. My mother has made it a habit to ask build-up questions, perhaps an attempt to control herself, only to erupt during what she perceives as the last moment of our “bonding” time. On our trip to Napa, her build-up questions involved the method with which I flatten my chest, and I showed her my three-quarter length tank top.

She followed up her inquiry while the two of us were dangling our feet into the whirlpool, where I sat on the edge in my boy swim trunks and tight sports bra, the same outfit I’ve worn for the past several years when I decide that swimming is worth the discomfort of revealing that I have breasts. Even before my mom asked the question, I was off in my own reverie, wondering, hoping, dreaming it might be my last time in that awful sports bra. Someday soon, I could be topless in just my shorts, and I preemptively immersed myself in the elation and relief.

“How come you don’t wear a bathing suit?” she asked.

“I am wearing a bathing suit. It’s a boy’s bathing suit.”

“Do you want to be a boy?”

I don’t always answer this question the same way. But even if my mother and I had a shared vocabulary that included words like genderqueer, gender fluid, trans-masculine, even if she could see gender as a spectrum, or as Russian nesting dolls, or as a galaxy, as more contemporary theorists theorize, the answer is still complicated. But as someone who recommends skipping the “bisexual” middle ground on the way to “gay” with the option to recant if the mood so strikes, I chose the more honest of the two answers. “Yes,” I said.

I did throw her a few bones of explanation. I said that when I looked in the mirror, I expected to see a man’s body. She said that when she looked in the mirror she expected to see herself, although she wanted to look less wrinkly, with smaller thighs. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I just don’t.” She said all this with the annoyed tone of a diabetic restaurant customer who just received the wrong meal after waiting for over an hour.

I know all too well my explanations, metaphors, and analogies are not explanatory enough for even the most open-minded of people. But my mother has this bad habit of trying to put herself in other people’s shoes, even if they are four sizes too big. Then she’ll be clomping around with her huge clown feet, screaming that the damn shoes don’t fit, as if anyone asked her to try them on. Over a decade ago, when I told her I had a girlfriend, her response was that she liked her friend, Margaret, but she couldn’t, just couldn’t understand wanting to kiss Margaret. (I couldn’t understand wanting to kiss Margaret either.)

“Are you the boy in a gay relationship?” my mother asked.

“I’m a boy, but not the boy,” I said, choosing not to elaborate on the fact that this sometimes makes the relationship not very gay at all.

I told her there are other people like me out there. I thought about the word transgender. Then I closed the door on the conversation.

******

Aside from a few awkward and difficult moments, including the one big fight about whether I had normal friends, my parents’ trip had all the outward signs of success. But even when the going is good with parents, I still find it challenging. It is only in the past few years that I’ve become continuously aware of my parents’ mortality, either because they are visually aging, or because the my mom’s fears force her to constantly remind me that she’s going to die soon (and that I won’t have to take on her debt). Personally, I think my mom could kick the Grim Reaper’s ass; she’ll probably be the only elderly woman I’ll ever get to meet with a six-pack of abs. I may hate my mom’s hard-headedness, but I admire her hard body, and there is something tragically endearing about someone as lovable as granite rock.

My favorite part of the time with my parents was watching them in the pool. My dad was once a swimmer (it’s the only sport he’s better at than my mother), and he can still hold his breath for long periods of time. They play this game in which my mom climbs onto his back underwater so that the two of them resemble mating turtles. Then he propels them through the water for as long and as far as he can. Maybe I like watching because my mom is is ridiculously enthusiastic about what appears to be an unadventurous, mundane ride. Or maybe it’s one of the few images I have that shows my parents are capable of a happiness independent of me and my life.

It’s a pleasant thought, but not entirely true. My mother may be more forthright but my father has quite an impact. He is a lawyer and he reserves his most powerful comments for the end, for his closing argument. I’ve often wondered if he plans it this way, if he is aware of the obviousness of his intentions to sway me.

It was the very last night of their visit, after dinner, after my dad had paid the bill. He leaned over to me and said, “I hope this is just a phase. I want my little girl back.”

Looking into his eyes, I could see his heart splintering, and so I didn’t crack it over my knee. “I’m not so little anymore,” I said.

I hugged them goodbye, went outside, and punched the wall. I wonder when I’ll stop feeling like I owe my parents my life just because they created my life. I wonder when they’ll stop asking me to repay.