Body trouble
by Tessa Stevens, March 2014
The other day a fourth grade boy asked me if I was a boy or a girl— "I mean, a man or a woman-- I mean... 'cause sometimes... you dress like...?" I smiled as I thought to myself my female masculinity works for my girlfriends. His innocent question reminded me of when I taught English Composition to freshmen—our classes, my beleaguered colleagues and I joked, were about writing, yes, but we were often put in situations where twenty or more teenagers of enormous class, gender, race and sexuality privilege were given first-time invitation to speak publicly about controversial (aka real) topics in diverse spaces. We read freshmen papers with proposals for thesis statements like, “We should just kill off all the prisoners to save money rather than keep those criminals locked up,” and, “The clear solution to the immigration problem is to build a wall along the border with Mexico,” and “Marriage is between Man and Woman alone,” and “if you don’t have money you shouldn’t have a baby.” As we met to discuss anti-racist classroom strategies and how to educate folks about privilege, my fellow teachers and friends and I had an inside joke that helped us survive the onslaught of ignorance-- that we were really working together to develop a class and a curriculum called Preventing Hate Crimes 101.
So this fourth-grade boy, then, who asked me this question was curious. I was a substitute teacher, and we were just getting to know each other. He was asking me for more language around gender; I did not want to silence him. His question also made me think about the dark days before I found queer family when I looked my parents, my brother in the eye and asked them to see me— So, I laughed, and said, "Thank you. Have you heard of the gender spectrum?" Though he shook his head and stared off into space when I opened the door to further conversation, this boy was still able to approach what many adults do not: livable space for transgender lives. My hope is that he again questions that line he could not cut through my body that does not always go gently into the good night, the boy and girl.
Sometimes I sleep with women for the suggestion that I am not alone, the resistance when her hand is on my shoulder and squeezes and does not release, my flesh inside the shirt naked by her touch. I need women to heal. How many times have I heard that line, and rolled my eyes to hide that I share that truth.
*
Going through security at the airport, coming home from spending time with my beloved queer family, I was, I believe the word in psycho-speak is “triggered” -– I am a writer, so the definition of trauma I carry with me is an erasure of language. We folks who’ve been through trauma convulse and rage at the silences the world allows. History takes our tongues; we take back our bodies; we speak our stories to survive.
When it was my turn to step up inside the body scanner I caught the security guards nodding at me, then to one another. Shit. I shouldn’t have worn baggy jeans to the airport. I fit some target criteria, guidelines—I thought in that moment I was being targeted—and let me be clear, my thoughts were not from a lived experience I can comprehend, only acknowledge and respect and insist is human though not my own—I thought about what black folks must deal with every day, for example, on the streets of New York where Stop and Frisk abounds, or folks of Arabic descent have had to suffer every day since 9/11. For me what was an aberration, I am guessing must be for some folks a daily terror. The security guards raked their eyes over me—my white female body in baggy jeans, no belt, pants not too low, but low enough. I saw the last TSA security official take in a breath, let it out, as if she too was made tired by this dance we were about to do. She spoke fast, called me “m’am”, and when she told me to turn around, the skin and hair on my neck tingled as it rose as if to repel where she stood behind me, and I cursed in my head again to push away my fear. I do not let people stand behind me if I can help it, and when I enter a room the first thing I do is locate the door. At least the TSA security official is a woman.
I bent over.
I can only hypothesize why. Maybe I thought I was at the doctor’s office, another place I remember leaving my body when the doctor checked me for scoliosis as a kid. Or maybe I was trying to find my blood by making it rush to my head.
She laughed.
Laughter softens this harsh world, so I did too. I wanted also to feel what she felt. She continued to chuckle, “You don’t have to—“
She cut herself off, perhaps realizing the degree of my discomfort by the awkward sharpness with which I jerked myself upright again. I blinked as I tried to register the lines of people, the beeping machines, the tangible annoyance rising from all these bodies aligned and ritualized by “security” because they wanted the same assurance that children do at night before they close their eyes: hush child, parents promise the stubborn tired children loosening their grip over their bodies, over the adult finger inside their fist, and out of this wakeful world, you are safe.
Now, she was stretching apart, then slipping on two gloves somebody had brought her-- she began saying she was going to pat her gloved hands on my—what did she say? Rear region? Buttocks? I grimaced; I was not, as I had suspected momentarily, in the doctor’s office. There were people moving all around me, the lights above white and bright, uniforms—as if uniforms are synonymous with trust. I was sweating underneath my sweater and turtleneck. Maybe I was in an alien spaceship. Where was I? Shame. She brushed the pockets on the back of my men’s jeans with her hands, the way a mother might her own child who sat in dust, but fast like the kid had an infectious disease.
“I think you don’t like to be vulnerable.” Somebody I paid to listen said to me once, a splinter in my skin. I’m not sure. I think I’d like to be less bothered by my own vulnerability. Why, perhaps, my preference for layers and long sleeves and winter weather, why, perhaps, this performance at times of a female body as more protected and masculine and nodding politely and respectfully toward a hip-hop consciousness I respect and try to take responsibility for is not never was and never will be my own, jeans baggy so that I have more room with each stride to find the rhythm my body needs to feel to move, rhythm tethers me to the world, delight in movement—all this, yes, amounts to a readable queer masculinity a fourth grade white cis-boy in a middle-class white school might find remark-able—I had not done a good enough job, though, here, had I, in this airport security of hiding? Or perhaps I had done too good a job, made some trouble that needed to be set straight. And the gloved hands were still patting my ass. What is the word? Butt. Buttocks? If I say body words more scientifically or more accursedly do they help chase away my fear? What language do I use to tell my story? The one that is neutral or the one I feel?
“Turn around.” I’d heard that just before I was sexually abused as a seven year old, and now, I left my thirty-one year old body as I obeyed and faced her; I left the skin and there was a tearing without sound; dizzy; she wanted eye contact so I broke that intimacy because it was all I had to take from her that was my own as she stood too damn close and sprayed an invisible chemical on my hands, and as she traced my palms with the tips of her gloved fingers, I wondered where my gloves were and my uniform.
“As soon as this test comes back, you’re done.”
She handed something to the other TSA guard, who placed it in a machine someone had designed to keep us safe. I stood and tried to stop my eyes from darting, my tongue from thickening. Where was my breath? What was that trick to ground myself I paid hundreds, fuck that thousands, of dollars to learn once, and what do people do who can’t pay a therapist? I asked myself the temperature of my skin, what the floor underneath my feet felt like, chased sentences in my head that began with I am-- but world moved around me; dizzy.
“You’re done,” She repeated, “You’re done.”
“Thank you.”
I stumbled off; my belongings must be somewhere in the metal detector-- my bag, my jacket. I was still hot but I wanted my jacket on my body. I realized I had chosen the wrong direction as I stared at the conveyer belt and could not find anything familiar. I turned around and floated back across the linoleum floor to the opposite line of people, stepping away from the flashing bodies, a man with white hair and a gut, a woman whose lips were turned down, until there at the end was my bag with my lap-top and books inside, my wallet, my cell phone, my shoes and jacket—I came at them hard: if my grip over these objects were strong enough my body would not dissolve and my breath would be my own, pushing back at you, dear reader, only long enough to take us again back inside our beautiful troubled world.
The other day a fourth grade boy asked me if I was a boy or a girl— "I mean, a man or a woman-- I mean... 'cause sometimes... you dress like...?" I smiled as I thought to myself my female masculinity works for my girlfriends. His innocent question reminded me of when I taught English Composition to freshmen—our classes, my beleaguered colleagues and I joked, were about writing, yes, but we were often put in situations where twenty or more teenagers of enormous class, gender, race and sexuality privilege were given first-time invitation to speak publicly about controversial (aka real) topics in diverse spaces. We read freshmen papers with proposals for thesis statements like, “We should just kill off all the prisoners to save money rather than keep those criminals locked up,” and, “The clear solution to the immigration problem is to build a wall along the border with Mexico,” and “Marriage is between Man and Woman alone,” and “if you don’t have money you shouldn’t have a baby.” As we met to discuss anti-racist classroom strategies and how to educate folks about privilege, my fellow teachers and friends and I had an inside joke that helped us survive the onslaught of ignorance-- that we were really working together to develop a class and a curriculum called Preventing Hate Crimes 101.
So this fourth-grade boy, then, who asked me this question was curious. I was a substitute teacher, and we were just getting to know each other. He was asking me for more language around gender; I did not want to silence him. His question also made me think about the dark days before I found queer family when I looked my parents, my brother in the eye and asked them to see me— So, I laughed, and said, "Thank you. Have you heard of the gender spectrum?" Though he shook his head and stared off into space when I opened the door to further conversation, this boy was still able to approach what many adults do not: livable space for transgender lives. My hope is that he again questions that line he could not cut through my body that does not always go gently into the good night, the boy and girl.
Sometimes I sleep with women for the suggestion that I am not alone, the resistance when her hand is on my shoulder and squeezes and does not release, my flesh inside the shirt naked by her touch. I need women to heal. How many times have I heard that line, and rolled my eyes to hide that I share that truth.
*
Going through security at the airport, coming home from spending time with my beloved queer family, I was, I believe the word in psycho-speak is “triggered” -– I am a writer, so the definition of trauma I carry with me is an erasure of language. We folks who’ve been through trauma convulse and rage at the silences the world allows. History takes our tongues; we take back our bodies; we speak our stories to survive.
When it was my turn to step up inside the body scanner I caught the security guards nodding at me, then to one another. Shit. I shouldn’t have worn baggy jeans to the airport. I fit some target criteria, guidelines—I thought in that moment I was being targeted—and let me be clear, my thoughts were not from a lived experience I can comprehend, only acknowledge and respect and insist is human though not my own—I thought about what black folks must deal with every day, for example, on the streets of New York where Stop and Frisk abounds, or folks of Arabic descent have had to suffer every day since 9/11. For me what was an aberration, I am guessing must be for some folks a daily terror. The security guards raked their eyes over me—my white female body in baggy jeans, no belt, pants not too low, but low enough. I saw the last TSA security official take in a breath, let it out, as if she too was made tired by this dance we were about to do. She spoke fast, called me “m’am”, and when she told me to turn around, the skin and hair on my neck tingled as it rose as if to repel where she stood behind me, and I cursed in my head again to push away my fear. I do not let people stand behind me if I can help it, and when I enter a room the first thing I do is locate the door. At least the TSA security official is a woman.
I bent over.
I can only hypothesize why. Maybe I thought I was at the doctor’s office, another place I remember leaving my body when the doctor checked me for scoliosis as a kid. Or maybe I was trying to find my blood by making it rush to my head.
She laughed.
Laughter softens this harsh world, so I did too. I wanted also to feel what she felt. She continued to chuckle, “You don’t have to—“
She cut herself off, perhaps realizing the degree of my discomfort by the awkward sharpness with which I jerked myself upright again. I blinked as I tried to register the lines of people, the beeping machines, the tangible annoyance rising from all these bodies aligned and ritualized by “security” because they wanted the same assurance that children do at night before they close their eyes: hush child, parents promise the stubborn tired children loosening their grip over their bodies, over the adult finger inside their fist, and out of this wakeful world, you are safe.
Now, she was stretching apart, then slipping on two gloves somebody had brought her-- she began saying she was going to pat her gloved hands on my—what did she say? Rear region? Buttocks? I grimaced; I was not, as I had suspected momentarily, in the doctor’s office. There were people moving all around me, the lights above white and bright, uniforms—as if uniforms are synonymous with trust. I was sweating underneath my sweater and turtleneck. Maybe I was in an alien spaceship. Where was I? Shame. She brushed the pockets on the back of my men’s jeans with her hands, the way a mother might her own child who sat in dust, but fast like the kid had an infectious disease.
“I think you don’t like to be vulnerable.” Somebody I paid to listen said to me once, a splinter in my skin. I’m not sure. I think I’d like to be less bothered by my own vulnerability. Why, perhaps, my preference for layers and long sleeves and winter weather, why, perhaps, this performance at times of a female body as more protected and masculine and nodding politely and respectfully toward a hip-hop consciousness I respect and try to take responsibility for is not never was and never will be my own, jeans baggy so that I have more room with each stride to find the rhythm my body needs to feel to move, rhythm tethers me to the world, delight in movement—all this, yes, amounts to a readable queer masculinity a fourth grade white cis-boy in a middle-class white school might find remark-able—I had not done a good enough job, though, here, had I, in this airport security of hiding? Or perhaps I had done too good a job, made some trouble that needed to be set straight. And the gloved hands were still patting my ass. What is the word? Butt. Buttocks? If I say body words more scientifically or more accursedly do they help chase away my fear? What language do I use to tell my story? The one that is neutral or the one I feel?
“Turn around.” I’d heard that just before I was sexually abused as a seven year old, and now, I left my thirty-one year old body as I obeyed and faced her; I left the skin and there was a tearing without sound; dizzy; she wanted eye contact so I broke that intimacy because it was all I had to take from her that was my own as she stood too damn close and sprayed an invisible chemical on my hands, and as she traced my palms with the tips of her gloved fingers, I wondered where my gloves were and my uniform.
“As soon as this test comes back, you’re done.”
She handed something to the other TSA guard, who placed it in a machine someone had designed to keep us safe. I stood and tried to stop my eyes from darting, my tongue from thickening. Where was my breath? What was that trick to ground myself I paid hundreds, fuck that thousands, of dollars to learn once, and what do people do who can’t pay a therapist? I asked myself the temperature of my skin, what the floor underneath my feet felt like, chased sentences in my head that began with I am-- but world moved around me; dizzy.
“You’re done,” She repeated, “You’re done.”
“Thank you.”
I stumbled off; my belongings must be somewhere in the metal detector-- my bag, my jacket. I was still hot but I wanted my jacket on my body. I realized I had chosen the wrong direction as I stared at the conveyer belt and could not find anything familiar. I turned around and floated back across the linoleum floor to the opposite line of people, stepping away from the flashing bodies, a man with white hair and a gut, a woman whose lips were turned down, until there at the end was my bag with my lap-top and books inside, my wallet, my cell phone, my shoes and jacket—I came at them hard: if my grip over these objects were strong enough my body would not dissolve and my breath would be my own, pushing back at you, dear reader, only long enough to take us again back inside our beautiful troubled world.