A stranger in my pants
A man near you is having his own vagina monologue. Is trannie chic far behind?
by Scott Henry @ScottTheHenry
- Jim Stawniak
- MOTORCYCLE MAMA: Jessica Eberle lived out the frat-house joke of being a lesbian trapped in a man's body.
Yet it's here that the platypus lays an egg, literally. By failing the litmus test for membership into mammaldom -- bearing live young -- the creature threatens to wreak zoological chaos. It certainly wouldn't fly as a bird, but is it truly a mammal? Moreover, why should we care about any of this when the platypus itself is utterly unconcerned?
Setting aside our metaphor-rich mascot for the time being, let's meet Jessica Eberle, a software programmer who rides a motorcycle, plays drums and just began learning the bass guitar. She wears little makeup, doesn't like frilly dresses and walks around barefoot in the modest northwest Atlanta bungalow she recently bought and shares with her girlfriend of two years. Bisexual, but leaning toward lesbian, she confides that the two have gotten involved in the local S&M community.
Fact is, there's really only one personal detail that the amiable Jessica seems reluctant to discuss. It's like pulling teeth to get her -- as she covers her face in embarrassment -- to divulge the name her parents gave her 33 years ago. That would be Jeff. Not a bad name, but, obviously, not one that most women find themselves saddled with at birth.
Jessica, however, isn't most women. By Texas State Supreme Court standards, she's not really a woman at all, but more about that in a moment. Then again, she certainly isn't a man -- and hasn't been one for some time now.
Her "transition," as it's called in the transgender community, took place a decade ago and involved two years of hormone treatments and full sex-reassignment surgery. For a long time afterward, Jessica would become infuriated when people still would call her "sir." Were these clods so dense they couldn't tell someone so determinedly feminine was a "she," not a "he?"
Then came her epiphany.
"Once I realized I didn't have to be one or the other, but could be somewhere in between, my life got a lot better," she explains.
It's safe to say that there now are more such in-betweeners than at any time in human history. Certainly more than in 1952, when an obscure ex-G.I. left for Denmark as George Jorgensen and returned an overnight celebrity as Christine. More than in 1977, when tennis player Renee Richards won in the courts of New York the right to return as a woman to the courts of the U.S. Open, where she once had competed as a man.
And, although there are no such well-known female-to-male role models, the ranks of what had long been a stealth group are growing and becoming more vocal.
The role the Internet has played in informing, connecting and sometimes mobilizing the transgender community cannot be overstated. Only a generation ago, people routinely grew up feeling completely isolated and alone in their doubts; now they can choose from a collection of online trannie diaries to see how others have coped with their problems.
Today, transgender advocates are working to overturn not only rigid gender stereotypes, but the fundamental assumption -- understood and accepted intuitively by any child -- that there are only two sexes, and if you're not one, then you've got to be the other. Instead of just chocolate or vanilla, there's an entire rainbow of flavors, they argue. Political correctness aside, they may be winning this battle.
It's something of a cliche, Jessica concedes, but her pre-platypussian childhood in south Florida was overshadowed by the horrific certainty that she was the victim of some terrible genetic accident, a chromosomal gender-bender.
"I always wanted to do what the girls were doing -- playing with Barbie instead of G.I. Joe -- but I was doing boy stuff and I didn't know why," she says. "It was like I was living the first 21 years of my life as someone else."
Specifically, she was going through the motions of growing up as the boy she knew deep inside that she wasn't, despite the way everyone treated her and the evidence offered by her own male anatomy. Needless to say, this was knowledge she could barely admit to herself, much less share with others.
As the unhappy, adopted son of a middle-class couple, Jessica reacted to cruel puberty by embracing the expectations placed upon teenage boys, hoping to shake something loose in her psyche. Tall, trim and athletic, Jessica played football and became captain of the high school wrestling team. Privately, she loathed both sports.
"I cried once after a wrestling match and everyone assumed it was because I lost, but it's because I couldn't understand why I should want to hurt people," she recalls.
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