by Angie D. Gordon
We do what we can with what meager means we have available to us; some do better than others. Everywhere it seems, there are efforts to suppress what in its fundamental essence is a state of being, an internal reality exposed in spite of biological mishap; never have we been honestly able to deny the impossible hostilities that our present environment has turned in face of us, the embattled front of dehumanizing confinement, an existence where, despite our metaphysical truths, our ability to pass as feminine, or even the breath of our convincing social demeanor, what we are to the system that binds us is a cursed enigma, a puzzle from which its answer leads only to further questions and greater liability; we are a number in spite of a name, the perpetual villain in a play impossible to quit, but above 
all else, we are condemned to serve a dual imprisonment: trapped in a body alien to that of our true gender identity, and in mirrored irony, housed in a prison classified exclusively for men, where to be here is to be a man. We live and breathe each day through a realm ruled over by ambiguously written policy, prejudice upon discretion, deeds which are grown in the dark and only permitted to rise up in the light of a corrupted authority, that power which substantiates, reinforces, and revels those who carry it, like ritualized serpents, circling around the idea that we are nothing in principal, male by practice, and female only in the oblivious expenditure of their strangely misplaced misogyny. We are wading through a void, a great and vast absence of permissible gender, denied the ability to prove our worth, and segregated from the essential freedoms being bestowed in the most casual regard, acknowledged as, if nothing less, ourselves.
They call me “him,” “he,” “mister”; they say, “What does he want?”
They say, “He wants us to call him ‘she.’”
They say, “Fuck no, I ain’t doing that.”
But I can hear them …
Pronoun neutrality only seems to exist as an afterthought—if a thought at all—when custody staff address a trans-woman directly. It is all too often that the conversation is about, in front of, and without the participation of those whom the pronouns target, we are parcels in handcuffs, hens in cages, taken before committees who, like all the others, talk about us the way surgeons do over an unconscious patient. They see gender validation as if it were something of a favor, as if they were being called upon to free us from our binary delineation at the risk of their own lives; but when you are real polite, when you explain just how every utterance of male subjugation is like a puncture wound, the piercing effect of each grammatical pronouncement, the reminder that the man—when it is a man—behind the words sees you by the terms of your greatest failure; breasts as dog-eared skin flaps, nailed to broad shoulders as if they were a cross; he is joking about “titty shots,” “five-o’clock shadow,” and “shriveled balls”; he is the man, every man, who will never buy you a drink, never ask you to dance, never teeter on the edge of exploratory disaster while grinning discourteously over the concealment of a dirty bar top; it is the reinforcement of shame and insecurity, being judged under the lens of subjective abomination; but if you tell them, force them to hear you, then eventually they will respond:
“I don’t mean any disrespect. It’s nothing personal. If you want me to call you ‘inmate’ or something like that, it’s cool, I mean, but ‘she’ is like out of the question. I just don’t believe in it and, like I said, it’s nothing personal, it’s just the way I talk, man … What dude, really? Now you’re just asking too much.”
It is not just the cops, such treatment comes also from a menagerie of free staff, those non-custody employees who, stammering along to the death knell of their dismal career paths, parade around in tan or brown or patterns of floral idiocy; they are attempting to reach retirement beyond the dregs of a life spanning ascent in slow mediocrity. Capable of little more than the most menial of tasks, they are hitched without compassion to the supervision of various inmate labor crews. This authority is foreign to them, like a rifle in the hands of a savage, an instrument of mystery with which they bluntly strike out, befuddled by an indignant lack of professional capacity.
It is difficult to say on just how many occasions I have sat down with one of these supervisors and watched as they glanced over my employment history, their eyes stumbling across the words, as if in them somewhere was lurking a pit into which they were meant to fall; they, anticipating this, are already convinced that I am trying to trick them, or at the very least make them believe a lie; it is then, with the self-assurance of a lemming off a cliff, that they are sure they have spotted it:
“Really? You were a chef in the Napa Valley? And they let you work there … in all this get up?”
The explanation I give falls before them; in it are fraudulent pleasantries attempting to proceed unimpeded by the netted mire of my contemptuous regard for such dialogue; and I relay that my gender transformation had only occurred in the last few years, to which they say, “Oh, well, that makes more sense”; this, as if they had momentarily entertained the idea of me having been hired at a reputable, fine-dining restaurant upon the contingent that I be permitted to attend work in an oversized bear suit; an idea that they appeared to be disturbed by, though, in turn just as quickly saved from, and I having done it, am afforded briefly the only approval they have for me; and such reward, of course, is very short-lived, for quickly they convince themselves that, despite my prior rescue of them, the very peril in which they were momentarily fixed was a ruse of my making; and this effectually become the pit from whence they climb, looking rather angry in the process, having as they did the sense to anticipate such a seemingly clever trap, but falling in anyway, by the consequence of which, they seem to find, or grant themselves rather unceremoniously, a renewal in their ardent disapproval of me; it is from that vantage point that I am permitted, as if by consolation or by act of rare discovery, the pleasure of viewing relief as it washes over their faces, having in that exact moment unearthed their justification for not hiring me; elated and shamelessly unabashed they nod to themselves in latent conformation, for trickery, as I had so generously offered, would serve to make good their reasoning, though they hardly needed a reason at all. Needless to say, very few transgender inmates are willingly hired to the positions for which they apply.
What we lose without obtainable employment is a drastic portion of our ability to prove a genuine persona, someone beyond that on an illegitimized concept; certainly, sentient we exist, but not as ourselves in its reception. It is the meaningful validation of that true, internal identity with which our lives have become obsessed. Work is such a powerful social platform, it is where the individual not only displays themselves under the hue of their cultural archetype, but is the held immensity of standardized role expectations, where one is either validated or refused based upon, to a large degree, their performance. Through the participation in group production, one’s place in a recognized order is inescapable, and perhaps it is this in its most base form, that of comparable compensation, viewed by those who are equally considered, each in the scope of a given pay scale, to be observed by such social recognition, that one’s labor is within a horizon of worth from that of another’s. It was Virginia Woolf who penned in “A Room of One’s Own” that “[m]oney dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.” And though I do wonder what she would say if asked to apply her same reasoning to say, marriage or prostitution; however, such quandary to the side, consider if you will the grand leap that was made by the American woman during the second great war, as they bonded over rutted cultural assumptions concerning their place in the work force, that is, when at the time riveting was a lady’s affair, and their recognition for such became completely unavoidable. Though comparable by a far lesser degree or potential impact, the juncture is clear all the same; that so long as trans-inmates are refused the opportunity to work, and therein prove our comparative worth, then we are unjustifiably severed from our right to be acknowledged as functionally ourselves, removed from the prospect of demonstrating that, in fact, we don’t wear a bear suit—in spite of the fact they these claws and teeth are vengefully real.
Because it is when we are there, and permitted to be so, that the true transformation begins, when the scope of our cultural acceptance is broadened; it is when the straight guy in marketing sees one of us and thinks that we are cute, sharing a flirtatious conversation in front of the coffee maker in the break room, when he lingers there and beyond that moment of incidental collision, entertaining the idea that perhaps the curious creature before him might be of palatable fare; and later, at the water cooler or the gym, or any place where the secrecy of male congregation speaks at ease, they joke and laugh, alacritous in their ambition of sexual conquest; and there, in the intermingling of bartered sentiment, lewdly we are objectified, yet such is the tentative inkling of a long-awaited validation, a time when the cop or free staff or the miscreant from middle management sees us as genuinely fuckable; but until then see this, until culture lets us in, if only to be afforded by trailing on the coattails of chauvinism, than in spite of ourselves we may never emerge from our caste as genderless creatures, feared in spite of a bear suit, and forced to scrape out a life from the dreams of our future selves. We are waiting for our cultural reception, that time when we can walk down the grand staircase as redolent debutantes, bathed in glorious congeniality, to be finally received as what we are and not for what we are yet to become.
Republished from “Perspectives from the Cell Block: An Anthology of Prisoner Writings” – edited by Joan Parkin in collaboration with incarcerated people from Mule Creek State Prison.
