Eighteen Lines
by Catherine Glenn
Two years ago I told my best friends, a hetero married couple I’d known for close to fifty years, that I’m a trans person. They weren’t surprised. They said they’d known for twenty-five years and had just been waiting for me to say something. A year later, the day the husband and I both turned sixty-seven, he told me I really needed to “invest in a training bra, or something, because you kind of look like a seventh grade girl who’s starting to, you know … grow.” I said I’d go put something on under my polo shirt, smiling all the way to my room to rummage through my suitcase. They had been two of the first I’d spoken to in what came to be an eighteen-month-long coming out journey to nearly all of my friends and many in my family. As anyone who has done that knows, it is terrifying, because no matter how confident you are in believing these people you have known most, or all, of your life will still love you and accept you, there is always that nagging doubt you could be wrong, and they’ll leave. It happens; though, fortunately, only twice for me.
Six months after the birthday incident, I was offered a part in a regional theater charity performance of Eve Ensler’s play, “The Vagina Monologues.” I was to be one of three trans women performing the segment titled, “They beat the girl out of my boy … or so they tried.” Coming out to those I knew was difficult, but I still felt a sense of control, as everyone agreed to keep the news among those I told, because I was still only “semi-out;” “semi” because I couldn’t be out at work and had yet to tell my elderly and very conservative parents. But the play, performing in front of 300 people I didn’t know, was going to be something altogether different; the illusion of control would vanish entirely. For the first time ever, I was going to be truly open to the world, just Catherine, not anyone else.
After my first pass through the script, I wondered if I was the best person for this play because I felt it wasn’t my story. It was a story that definitely needed to be told, just not mine. I don’t know why I thought that; maybe I just didn’t want to remember the years of hiding and lying. Or, maybe, I felt guilty because so much of this hadn’t happened to me. I was elated when I was assigned these lines:
Got my first hormone shot
Got permission to be myself (1)
The feminine is in your face
I lift my eyebrows more
I’m curious
I ask questions (2)
Of all the lines in the segment, I felt so comfortable with these, because they were me, even though my “first” wasn’t a shot; it had been a pill, taken on my 64th birthday while sitting in my living room and holding my wife’s hand. Those words spoke to a giant change in the lives of many other trans women, changes they had desperately wanted to make, to stop hiding behind a false masculine image. For me, though, it had just been raising a translucent veil that never really hid who I truly was if you knew me well enough and paid attention. My hiding had been in plain sight and to my friends, those thoughts or just feelings made sense now. And to myself, I made sense now.
Rehearsal was the first time in my life when I participated in an event where I knew no one and they all only knew me as Catherine. There were eighteen of us; a few who had acting experience, most who did not, and a few who were petrified at even the thought of speaking to an audience. But they all thought this play was more important than their fears. They were to be the voice of the voiceless, and they welcomed me as one of those voices, as well. No one looked at me askance or mis-gendered me. I was, in their eyes, fully female. In fact, conversations were no different from what they would be at any party or gathering I’d ever attended had I’d been born female. “You’re a teacher? Tell me about that? How is it teaching young kids these days? That’s a really pretty dress. I love your earrings, where’d you get them?” I was truly myself, nothing hidden, no acting, no affected voice or concern about the length of my hair. I was just me, all of me, and they embraced me immediately. It was, in a word, affirming.
Eve had written this monologue for five voices, but realizing finding five trans women might be difficult, the director was given the latitude to assign lines based on the number of voices available. There were three of us, and at our first rehearsal (we only had two) we took turns reading different lines, so the director could decide which lines to assign to each of us. The first three times through our part of the script, I did not read the final passage, eighteen lines that were not me, lines that frightened me, lines that required so much more than I thought I had within me to give. When the director finally asked me to read them on our last pass, it was all I could do to muster any voice at all.
I live now in the female zone
but you know how people feel about
immigrants.
They don’t like it when you come from someplace else.
They don’t like it when you mix.
They killed my boyfriend
They beat him insanely as he slept
With a baseball bat
They beat this girl
Out of his head.
They didn’t want him
Dating a foreigner
Even though she was pretty
And she listened and was kind.
They didn’t want him falling in love
With ambiguity.
They were scared he’d get lost.
They were that terrified of love. (3)
After rehearsal ended, the director said she would look through the entire segment and work out how she wanted to pare five voices to three, and would send us an email with our parts in a few days. That was Sunday. On Tuesday I was assigned not only the lines I felt spoke about me, but the last eighteen, as well.
Eve interviewed scores of trans women before writing this monologue. Everything she wrote was said by one of those women, even the last eighteen lines. Everything is true. Even the last eighteen lines. True. There are people in this world (in the play those swinging the bat were soldiers) who not only want to kill me because I am trans, because I am an “Immigrant,” but also someone I love, who just might, against all odds, love me, too. I have always known this sort of hatred exists. I hear it nearly every day in the news, in conversations with people who don’t know about me as I move through the world even today in stealth mode. I know I have no legal protections to keep my job if I’m found out. In many states, if I were dating and surprised my companion with my “trans ness,” and he “lost control” because of fear and killed me, the “trans panic” defense would justify the homicide. I have even heard the loathing from the pulpit of my own church, not from my minister, but from a church member who garnered applause and support for his comments.
Eighteen lines brought screaming home to me everything I have to fear. Eighteen lines brought a woman I’ll never know into my arms, wanting to comfort her from thirty years away for the unfathomable pain of her loss. But there was just one line that voiced something I didn’t know until I read it aloud:
They were that terrified of love. (3)
Was that it? Were they terrified of us, all of us who are trans, all of us who dare to admit we have been created this way, only because we have all been taught not to love something defined as “different?” Is this why it has been so hard to learn to love myself?
On the night of the play, I held my script in front of me, (we all had to read from our own copy of the play, even though most of us knew the words) and I became her. To be sure, I shed tears as I read, and there was a break in my voice as I remembered a violent death I’d not known until I’d read the script the week before. And we, the woman from thirty years ago and me, tried to tell them, the audience and my fellow actresses, why it had happened, what she had finally figured out, but that’s so hard to do in just eighteen lines, in just one line. I hope they understood. When I finished there was just silence.
The applause came some moments later, but my time had been suspended. I was standing there with her. She wasn’t saying anything; she was just there. I felt her drawn back to a moment she had never left. There were two of us now, not one. She stepped a bit away, and I was left forever changed. I thought back then to what had been my trauma before, and I cried, embarrassed by the comparison. I warmed, smiled and cried at the miracle of friendship in being told to buy a training bra at 67. The applause faded, not because it had ended, but because there was no room for it, as the entirety of my life crashed in instantly, almost crushing the breath out of me, as I realized how much I owed this woman and all of those like her, unimaginably brave all. Eighteen lines, ninety-four words. I was forever changed. Light beckoned me from shadow.