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Brave new world
Trannies. Crossdressers. Andros. Pomos. By any name, transgenders are just beginning to find their voice The blue El Camino bullies its way down the street then suddenly stops in front of Keonti, its angry engine hot and roaring. Her slim, shapely body poured into blue jeans and a frilly white sleeveless top, her face makeup-free, Keonti feels pretty despite the withering afternoon heat. But as she turns around to face the driver, she knows she's not about to hear a compliment. ''Ho!'' yells the driver, a man in his 20s who hangs out in Keonti's Miami Beach neighborhood. It's not exactly a well-aimed insult to hurl at a transsexual, but the barrage continues as Keonti walks down the street. The driver follows, then stops in the middle of the road and gets out of the car, grabs his crotch, yells some more as his arms flail. He gets back in the car, and as Keonti reaches a street corner he floors the gas and drives menacingly toward her before swerving and peeling away. Keonti, no wallflower, yells back until the car is out of sight. ''He can't take me,'' Keonti says. ``A few weeks ago, he was trying to kick it to me. He gave me his phone number, but I wasn't interested. Somehow, he found out what I am, and now it eats him. It eats him, honey.'' Keonti laughs defiantly and flips her shoulder-length hair dismissively. But later, as she's sitting in her studio apartment recalling the confrontation, a weary look creeps into her face. Keonti's tough exterior cracks a little. ''That's just a day in the life,'' she says. ``People either love me or hate me. My life is always either real high or real low.'' • • • The middle way, balance between the lows and highs, has eluded Keonti and many other transgender people. The umbrella term refers to those -- whether or not they are gay -- who strongly identify with the opposite sex and may cross-dress on occasion; or, like Keonti, dress and live as members of the opposite sex around the clock as transsexuals, often with the help of hormones. Some opt for sex-change surgery, but contrary to common perception, not all transsexuals change -- or want to change -- their sex, an expensive and virtually irreversible step that requires deep psychological evaluation and counseling. In short, transgenderism ''is when what's between your legs doesn't match what's between your ears,'' says Marylin Volker, a Miami therapist whose practice is one-third transgender patients. ``Sex is between your legs. Gender is between your ears. It's who you identify with. ''For transgender people,'' she adds, ``when the inside and the outside don't match, you can only change the outside.'' Today the transgender community is more visible than ever. Given the many levels and varieties of transgenderism and the stigma associated with it, numbers are hard to come by. But Lynn Conway, a research engineer and professor emerita of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor estimates that 1 in 2,500 individuals have undergone male-to-female sexual reassignment surgery in the U.S. today (which would put the number at about 100,000). Myriad websites offer everything from makeup tips and counseling to personal stories and links. Transgender speakers like Leslie Feinberg, a female-to-male transsexual, lecture at universities and diversity training workshops. Tragedies like that of Brandon Teena, who was murdered at 21 in Nebraska for living as a man (and whose story inspired the movie Boys Don't Cry), have helped put transgender people in the spotlight. Students who have insisted on being placed in dorms according to their preferred gender have spurred policy changes on college campuses. There are even signs that the gay/lesbian/bisexual community (into which transgenders have historically been lumped) is seeing transgender people less as embarrassing political liabilities, ''the freaks within the freaks,'' says Denise Hueso, executive director at Pridelines Youth Services, which provides services for gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth ages 13 through 22 near downtown Miami. ''I feel like this is really our time,'' says Raj Narinesingh, a male-to-female transsexual who leads a weekly transgender support group at Pridelines. ``I'm the epitome of what America is: Freedom, the right to be who you are.'' Still, says Hueso: ``The construct of gender in people's minds is so rigid that they don't see the fluidity of it. If people could let go of that rigidity, more people would feel comfortable being who they are.'' As it is, day to day, person to person, in school, at home, at work and on the streets, living as or even wanting to live as a member of the opposite sex is a precarious mix of risk-taking and careful treading, of revealing and concealing. It's a complex life of stepping out of two boxes -- male, female -- and stepping into a vast gray area, a brave new world of adjectives and pronouns: Transgender. Trannie. Transy. Transsexual. Trannie-dyke. Tranny-fag. Cross-dresser. Trans-identified. Trans-variant. Gender-variant. Gender-dysphoric. Pansexual. Two-spirit. Third gender. No gender. Gender nonconforming. Andro. Pomo. Faerie. Boi. Grrl. Special girls. M2F. F2M. Transitioning. Pre-op. Post-op. Non-op. He? She. Ze. Him? Her. Myself. ''It's right on the line of what is conventional and mainstream,'' says Gabriel Hermelin, who calls herself a trannie-dyke. ``It goes to that line and jumps right off. It's as if today, in 2002, there's a wild, wild West. It's the frontier and we're all pioneers.'' Living on that frontier can be exhausting and even dangerous, in which something as banal as going to a public restroom can turn into a perilous trip. It can be the most public of private lives. And already for Keonti, who is only 21, ``it's been a long journey.'' • • • Keonti remembers the day clearly. She was 16 and wearing a green turtleneck, stretch leggings and high boots. ''I was looking over that day,'' she brags with a smile. The occasion: A National Coming Out Day event at her Boston high school. Keonti remembers telling the auditorium packed with 1,000 students: ``Hi. My name is Keonti and I'm transgender.'' ''I was nervous, but I was excited,'' Keonti recalls. After her speech, her classmates asked questions until time ran out. It was a rare moment when Keonti felt liberation and even a measure of respect in the midst of her difficult teen years. She grew up as Keon, a boy, one of three kids in a broken family with a drug-addicted mother and an absent father. Keonti says she always felt ''different.'' Boy on the outside, girl on the inside. For Keonti, it matters little what differing researchers believe about when, where and why feelings like those begin, whether at conception or later on, whether the reason is chemical, chromosomal or psychological. ''I just felt my male identity wasn't me,'' Keonti says. ``I've been feeling this way ever since I can remember.'' At 14, Keon told his mom that he wanted to become a girl. She told Keon that he couldn't do it under her roof. ''It was very disturbing for her,'' Keonti says. She threw Keonti, who had started braiding her hair and begun wearing makeup and girls' clothes, out -- but later told Keonti she could come back if she'd tone down her look. The difficult compromise lasted a short time before Keonti's mom's addiction led to the family losing its home. Keonti's mother went to rehab and the family was scattered. Keonti's father, who had remarried, offered no help for Keonti: 'He said, `Don't ever come around here again,' '' Keonti recalls. ``To this day, I still don't talk to him.'' For the next few years Keonti stayed with relatives, crashed on friends' couches, or lived in foster care and three state group homes where the rules were often more strict than at home. ''I was just waiting to be myself,'' Keonti says. Partially as an act of rebellion at what she says was the oppression of her true nature, Keonti kicked her dream of becoming a woman into overdrive. In a raw, sometimes grueling process, Keonti learned how to tweak her male body to match her female soul. Learned how to tuck her penis in, use condoms filled with water for breasts. Bought hair weaves, dresses, makeup. She learned how to deal with stares and scoffs, and blows both verbal and physical. Something so unnatural in the eyes of others felt right to Keonti -- a sort of homecoming. At 17, after a year of counseling, a therapist prescribed female hormone pills. Keonti's body was already lean and lithe, her mannerisms already feminine. But the pills, which she still takes every day, rounded her hips, made her develop breasts, softened her skin and lessened her body hair -- and gave her violent mood swings until she got used to the change. ''It was an evolving change, a progression,'' Keonti says. ``I'm not playing dress-up here.'' Snapshots in Keonti's apartment tell the story of her transformation: Keonti and childhood transgender friends trying on makeup and clothes in a bedroom, trying out sexy and goofy poses, out on the town. Keonti with boyfriends -- straight guys and a female-to-male transgender. To support herself and her dreams during those nomadic years, Keonti says, she turned to turning tricks. She nearly paid with her life. ''There was a situation where this guy picked me up and I thought he knew,'' she says. ''He was all of 6'4 and 220 pounds.'' When he tried to have intercourse, 'he was like, `Wait a second, you're not a girl,' '' she says. The john was furious and began to choke her. ''I'm a good talker, so I convinced him to get the hell off me,'' Keonti says. Keonti hasn't tricked in a year. But her life has not gotten any less complex: In December she moved to Miami with a boyfriend (a former client) and tried to forge a relationship with him. It hasn't worked, she says, and now she's looking to be truly independent for the first time in her life. She attends college with hopes of becoming a pharmacist -- a career that she became interested in when she started taking hormones. ''I don't feel right doing drag shows or trying to turn dates,'' Keonti said. ``I feel right trying to learn, trying to strive. Having a degree, that's something that can't be taken away. That can't be stripped. I'm young, gorgeous, intelligent and I have street smarts. I may have setbacks, but dammit, I'm gonna do it. ''The other day,'' she adds, 'a guy on the street looked at me and asked, `How much?' And I said, 'Priceless, honey. Priceless.' '' • • • Keonti and Raj have to pee. They are on their way to the Florida Gender Equality Project's first statewide transgender summit in Orlando. They pull into a rest stop. Keonti walks straight into the women's bathroom, but Raj hesitates. Standing at six feet with heels, Raj would attract attention even without makeup. What if she gets looks? What if people have a bad reaction? What if someone kicks her ass for wanting to pee? ''There are places that I frequent, where they know me and where I have a little comfort,'' Raj notes, ``but this was an area that I had never been to. I was deciding whether I could hold it or not.'' Raj opted to hold it. It's because of such absurd uncertainties that Raj started the support group through Pridelines in December. It's a place, she says, where kids who are questioning their gender identity can work through confusing feelings and speak freely, something they often can't do at home. ''Anytime you get together with people that you can relate to, it's very empowering,'' says Raj, a poet whose soft-spoken nature is a counterpoint to friend Keonti's grit. ``You don't feel so alone anymore.'' Keonti has attended for a couple of months, and says it's the one time in the week where she doesn't have to decide how much of herself to disclose. ''Youth need support, education about safe sex; they need that love, without being questioned and stripped of who they are,'' Keonti says. At a recent meeting: one 21-year-old man wearing a purse and bronze sandals talks about the first time he sneaked into his mother's room to swipe her Gucci purse and shoes. 'She was blaming my sister, telling her `you took them,' but then one day when she came into my room, she saw them there and found out I was the one that took her stuff,'' says Eric, and the room explodes in laughter. Cleveland, an 18-year-old who works as a cashier at Winn-Dixie, says that as a child, he wanted to dress like his grandmother -- in a fancy hat and pretty dress -- to church. He talks about his boss' positive attitude toward his transgenderism (he doesn't have a problem with Cleveland wearing a mini-skirt, nails and makeup to work), and about his experience getting industrial silicone injected into his thighs to make curvier hips. J.B., dressed in baggy jeans and strappy black sandals, has a different story -- his mother, he believes, may be nearing the point of telling him to leave home. Raj listens without judgment, but warns of the dangers of industrial silicone injections, which last year killed a Ft. Lauderdale woman who wanted a smoother butt. Then Raj, 35, relates her own experiences -- trying on his mom's makeup at age 5, living as a woman for the last eight years, problems getting housing and jobs. She is a mixture of hopefulness and frankness. Keonti walks in near the end of the meeting, as Raj is asking the kids whether they think transgender people will ever be accepted. Keonti speaks up. ''Not in our lifetime,'' she says, and recounts a college class in which homosexual tolerance was the topic and a group of students talked derisively about gays. ''If those people feel that way about gays, how am I supposed to even tell them who I am?'' Keonti asks. ''Don't tell me that,'' Raj replies. ''You really think it won't happen in our lifetime?'' Raj's eyes well up with tears, but adds, ``Well, at least if it doesn't happen in our lifetime, we would have paved a road for young people.'' • • • So far, that road has been paved with pain and courage. Last summer, Raj was getting gas at a station near her home when two men approached her car. She thought she recognized one of them. ''Hi, don't I know you? Hi, don't you work at Wendy's?'' she asked. ''No, that's my twin brother,'' came the terse reply, followed by a blow to the side of Raj's head. The blow was so hard it knocked the keys out of her hands. The hits kept coming from both men. One of the assailants, who had entered the car through the passenger's side, changed his mind and ran away. The other, the one Raj thought she'd recognized, kept pummeling her face and head. Gathering her wits, Raj was able to fight back, find her keys and drive off. Although she her lip was cut and bleeding and her face was black, blue and swollen, Raj didn't consider going to the police an option. She was terrified and skeptical about whether police would believe or help her -- and remembered a male-to-female transgender friend who was taken into custody by police for an unpaid parking ticket, then taunted by officers to take off her wig and acrylic nails and made to share a cell with 20 men. ''I just wanted to go home,'' Raj says. Sometimes Raj has to pump herself up before doing something as simple as getting groceries. She'll sit in the car outside the grocery store and tell herself she can withstand the smirks, the rude comments, the vulgar questions. Does she ever feel like just going home, taking off the makeup and pumps and returning as a man? Raj doesn't hesitate before responding: ``No. That wouldn't be natural. That's how I know that this is what I want. Because despite everything I go through, I still want to do it. It's who I am.'' Returning to the safety of her cramped apartment after the encounter with the El Camino, Keonti shares that firm stance. ``I can't let people get to me. If I do, they've got the upper hand. They win. I have a lot of odds stacked against me, but I'm willing to fight for what I believe in.'' DETAILS: The Transgender Support Group meets at 6 p.m. every Thursday at Pridelines Youth Services, 180 NE 19th St., Miami. Call 305-571-9601.
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