Bornstein - Bornstein A Queer and Pleasant Danger

Other books by Kate Bornstein

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us

Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure (with Caitlin Sullivan)

My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely

Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (ed. with S. Bear Bergman)

A Queer

and

Pleasant DANGER

A MEMOIR

Kate Bornstein

Beacon Press Boston

Dedicated with all my heart

to my daughter, Jessica,

and to my grandchildren,

Christopher and Celaina.

Small as my home may be,

its bigger on the inside and

my door is always open for you.

Contents

Prologue. The Kiss of Death

The last time I looked into a mirror and I saw daddy? It was the last time I tried to phone my daughter. It was the day I got an ankh tattooed onto the back of my hand. Now, hand tattoos skate the fine edge of legality/illegality across the United States. So hand tattoos are hard to get, unless you know the right people. It was 1996. I was living in Seattle, back when the city was still gritty. I was far enough underground to know someone who knew someone, and presto: a hand tattoo was mine for twenty-five dollars. I tipped the guy another five bucks because people say it hurts to get a tat that close to the bonebut it didnt hurt me.

Thousands of years ago, North African priests, priestesses, and holy people of genders neither male nor female used the ankh to mean something along the lines of Eternal Life , The Divine Androgyne, or The Power of Sex . Take your pick. To me, it seemed like just the right mix to mark the place where Deathsweetheart that She iskissed me on the hand.

Earlier that day, the free queer clinic had called to confirm my diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and I didnt yet believe the doctors when they told me that CLL is a slow-moving cancer and probably wouldnt kill me. I was forty-eight years old, Lady Death had just kissed the back of my hand, and I wanted to make peace with my daughter, with whom I hadnt spoken for nearly sixteen years.

It wasnt that I hadnt wanted to speak with her for all these yearsit was that she most likely didnt want to hear me. My best educated guess is that she believeswith all her heart and soulthat I am completely and irredeemably evil. Fact is, there are many reasons that people would agree with her. Permit me to count the ways:

Im sixty-three years old, and for the past quarter of a century Ive been living in queer subcultures out on the margins of America. I write books that have been condemned by Pope Benedictand those are just the books that are taught in universities around the world. I dont think the pope knows about all the porn Ive written, but hed probably condemn that too.

There are a great number of people in the worldI dare say most of emwho would say Im a pervert and a bad person because Im a transsexual woman. I was born male and now Ive got medical and government documents that say Im femalebut I dont call myself a woman, and I know Im not a man. Thats the part that upsets the popehes worried that talk like that not male, not female will shatter the natural order of men and women. I look forward to the day it does.

I call myself trans , or a tranny and the latter angers a small but vocal group of transsexual women who see tranny as the equivalent of kike to a Jew. Right, Im a Jew, and everyone knows someone whos got a thing about Jews. Im also a tattooed ladywhich in most cases means I cant be buried in a Jewish cemetery. But thats OK, because after the doctors harvest whatevers useful, I wanna be lit on fire. My girlfriend knows where to scatter my ashes. Right, Im a dyke on top of all this. Constant through my incarnations as man then woman then neither , its always been women whove made me weak in the knees... well, knee, singular, nowadays. My right knee is titanium and space-age plastic and it never gets weak, and that makes me the bionic tranny. My daughter doesnt know any of this about me, and even if she does, none of what Ive told you so far is why she thinks Im evil.

Andfull disclosuretheres more. Im a sadomasochist. I enjoy mixing up pleasure and pain. Im not a sadiststrictly a masochist. Im the one who gets whipped, paddled, cut open, and pierced. I like it when people cut on meIve been a cutter since I was a teenager. As for piercings, Ive got em in body parts I wasnt born with.

And I live with borderline personality disorder (BPD). This gives me a whole lot to write about as a performance artist, and as an advocate for queer youth, freaks, and other outlawswhich are all more reasons some people think Im a bad person.

In 1970 I ducked out of military service in Vietnam with a psychiatric deferment. It was an act back then, but today? On good days, Im merely depressed, and more than one therapist has considered a diagnosis of bipolar disorderbut theyve finally settled on BPD. Well, I settled on it as soon as I heard that the borderline theyre talking about is the impossible state of mind that exists between neurosis and psychosisnot unlike the impossible state of gender that exists between man and woman. Several doctors have developed theories of borderline archetypes. Im the waif. For some real fun, google Princess Diana AND Borderline AND Waif... thats us. My eating disorder is a lot like hers. I love foodcant get enough of it. And I love to starve myself long enough to see bones poke up just under my skinand thats yet another borderline.

And still... in my daughters eyes, none of this matters much, if at all. Theres a whole other reason Im bad. Im a certified post-traumatic stress survivorno, thats not the reason my daughter Jessica thinks Im a bad person. Surviving my trauma, thoughthats what makes me evil in her eyes.

A few hours after the guy drew the ankh into the back of my hand, it was throbbing. It occurred to me for the first time that because of my leukemia, I no longer have enough mature white blood cells to go after possible infections. I had to call Jessica, let her know that this disease was lurking in her own blood. I wanted to say... I didnt know what I wanted to say. I hadnt thought about it much before that momentId always assumed wed always be out of touch. But I wanted to say, Hello . I wanted to say, Ive always loved you . I wanted to say goodbye . I didnt know how to reach her. Id sent letters and cards and cash to several addresses, but theyd all come back to me with Addressee Unknown scrawled across the envelope. Like me, my daughter has moved around a lot in her life, and I didnt know where she was living at the time. I couldnt afford a private detective and no amount of Internet sleuthing had revealed her whereabouts. This was 1996there were no sophisticated people-finding websites yet.

But the back of my hand was still bleeding from where Death had just kissed me, and I couldnt go another day without trying to reach her. After a few hours, I managed to squeeze a phone number out of the Internet for Jessicas mother, my ex-wife Molly. She answered the phone after three rings. I recognized her voice from the single word:

Hello?

Hey, Molly. Its Kate Bornstein.

I heard the slightest intake of her breath... then the soft click, and a dead connection.

I wasnt surprised. I would have been surprised if shed said something like, Kate! Hi! Its so good to hear from you! Hows life now as a performance artist after all those years you and I spent in uniform? And the woman thing... hows that going for ya?

Molly hung up on me because thats the way Scientologists are supposed to deal with me. In their language, Im a suppressive person, an SP, and simply put that means Im bad to the bonethats the kind of bad my daughter sees when she sees me in her minds eye, because my daughter was born into the Church of Scientology and to this day shes a member in good standing. Me? Im an excommunicated, decertified, and defrocked minister of the Church of Scientology. My eleven plus years as a Scientologist is my lifes trauma, and leaving the Church is what makes me a suppressive person.