My Transvestite

Sometimes Annie, my second daughter, insists upon making me over. Most fathers of girls know the drill: Garish tattoos, composed with multi-colored ballpoints, covering both of my arms; enough mousse to give my hair the tensile strength of a bungee cord, and, on those occasions she simply saps my will with her indomitable resolve, make-up. When she is finished, everyone must laugh at me, pitilessly, for, as anyone who knows me will testify, I would make a very unattractive woman.

My daughters, especially the teenager, intuit that gender identity is at least partially a construction, as much nurture as nature, though it is intuition tutored by experience, specifically the years we lived between New Orleans and Prague, as now we live between Kalamazoo, Michigan and Prague, with forays down to the Big Nasty as often as we can manage. My girls have grown up assuming drag queens as natural a feature of the urban landscape, at least in New Orleans, as stumbling tourists tangled up in gaudy plastic beads and sloshing Hurricanes from go-cups. Both will speculate matter-of-factly as to whether this or that fellow is gay, and both notice the cultural difference between New Orleans and everywhere else, though particularly Prague, regarding gender identity as street theater. We've never seen a transvestite in Prague, at least that we've been aware of, never passed a rollicking gay bar. The gay life in Prague is discrete to a fault. The transvestite community is either non-existent or so discrete as to be meaningless: What transvestite can feel fulfilled living discretely, at least up to a certain age?

I wonder if the flaunting of contrary gender isn't a celebration of one's power to choose from the midst of that most fundamental aspect of identity that cannot be chosen, except in terms of evasive surgery. I mean, those transvestites who believe themselves women trapped in men's bodies choose to be what they ostensibly are not, and what more radical gesture of freedom can there be than that? It isn't a lie, but a paradox: I am a male, but I am a female.

Such radical freedom requires a haven; New Orleans, before Katrina, served as such for several decades, and one can only hope that it will remain a charmed urban space where men and woman who have been marginalized to the point of endangerment across the American south come to form a center, a play space where one of the most powerful transformations imaginable may be afforded its existential due. I have had the privilege to know the embodiment of such freedom, its corporeal and spiritual essence, though I was too distracted at the time to appreciate her.

She was a grim parody of femininity, a humorless, white, petite biological male with big 80s hair and olive skin. She was large-featured, exotic but not very pretty. She hardly ever wore dresses, usually entered the classroom in tight slacks and pastel blouses unbuttoned and knotted at the ribs. Her make-up was tasteful, usually.

It should surprise no one that in New Orleans the range of students I encountered at the public university where I worked for twenty years reflected, in every significant respect, the demographics of the city. I taught scores of "Y'ats" (white, upper Ninth Ward natives named for the salutation, "Where y'at!"); Chalmette natives, always white, called "Chalmatians" (about whom a young knucklehead from Jefferson Parish might joke: How do you compliment a Chalmatian on the first date? You tell her, "Nice tooth!"); black kids from all over predominately black Orleans Parish who chose to attend my white-flight public university rather than the city's mainly black public university for complex, often noble reasons; white students from Metairie, the Irish Channel, Algiers, even Slidell, in all the ethnic flavors, though mostly Italian and Irish, mostly Catholic. Of course I worked with numerous "ESL," English As Second Language, students, from Vietnamese to Salvadorian. I even taught some rich, white, uptown Empty Nesters returning to school to improve themselves, slumming at the local public institution. But this diversity extended...