Who we always were: the girl next door
Part one of a monthly series on transgender lives in rural America
At first blush, a cisgender person writing about their perspective on *transgenderism comes across as ‘splainin’. You know, like mansplainin’, whitesplainin, and now cissplainin’.
“Splainin’” (for those who need an explanation) is ignorant, self-righteous, condescending, and usually unsolicited. It’s offered by someone wallowing in the majority/ power/privilege (or think they are) about how those who are different from the ‘splainer feel about themselves, how/why they are different, and what they should do to gain acceptance or if acceptance is even possible.
That’s not what this is.
This writing is an attempt to figure out why we in the majority/power/privilege can’t accept those who are different, those who sometimes make us uncomfortable (mostly about ourselves), why they make us uncomfortable, and how we can ease our discomfort.
Some of the more militant progressives who rail on about how we should just “accept” these differences that quite frankly are quite jarring to many cisgender folks regardless of their politics or worldview might have a problem with what I’m doing. My counter is that aversion to the unfamiliar and unimaginable is unsurprising and unremarkable. I’m of the opinion that we can overcome this aversion through knowledge.
So this writing puts the onus on us who are “normal,” as some of my more supercilious acquaintances refer to everyone not found somewhere along the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. It’s a call to seek out why we have our problems with the natural fluidity and variety of gender and even sexuality as well as confronting the rigidity of gender roles. Which really aren’t as rigid as we think and have changed tremendously during my lifetime.
I don’t know how many installments about transgender folks growing up and living in rural communities I’ll run here, but likely several. This is a journey to understanding. I’m also currently conducting interviews with Airen (the girl next door) and another transgender friend. I plan to incorporate those conversations into this series of essays or perhaps a more direct question-and-answer format depending upon whichever way the spirit moves me.
I'd lived nearly half of my years in Atkins but this might have been a first. I could not see Crow Mountain. A thick January fog swallowed the mesa that stands like a guardian over my little hometown. Down in the valley, the fog thinned to light mist as a line of thousands spilled out of the newest high school building. We were there to pay our final respects to Charlie Sorrels.
Charlie was one of my alma mater’s most celebrated football players. He had led a scrappy pack of Red Devils to a state football title back in 1971 as an all-state quarterback on a team coached by his father Carl Sorrels. After graduating from a local university, Charlie came back to Atkins and became a legendary head coach. Across our region, Charlie was known for three things: kicking ass on the football field, inspiring his young gladiators from the sideline, and being a good person everywhere. All of these qualities are why it seemed that half the county was in attendance to bid him farewell.
It took two hours for my place in line to reach Atkins High School’s new gymnasium, but those hours were a journey back through 30-plus years. Though I’d never set foot on the new campus prior to that day, it felt familiar. That sense of intimacy was because of the faces in line with me. All of us weathered by the years, yet somehow ageless. Like swatches in a quilt that is sometimes a familiar comfort and sometimes a stifling hindrance, we’re stitched together in the small-town relationship. It’s a kinship that endures in one form or another from cradle to grave. I couldn’t forget them if I wanted to.
I finally reached the gymnasium where faded banners of past glories sagged beside the taut flags of newer conquests. A gleaming red casket surrounded by flowers and a grieving family was stationed in the middle of the gym floor like it had always been there.
I filed through names and attached them to faces of the family effortlessly. I’ve known these people all of my life, after all. One remained nameless, though, she looked so familiar. I knew that I knew this person standing at the end of the family line. But I could not remember how.
Handshakes, hugs, and condolences moved me along faster than expected until I stood in front of her still clueless. She smiled with warm recognition. I racked my brain.
“It’s so good to see you, Johnny.”
“You, too…”
She hugged me.
We released and I smiled in awkward silence, still scrambling for a name as she extended a moment of grace allowing me to sort through memories and save myself. But the sliver of time when my faux pas could be blamed on a hazy middle-aged mind evaporated as I stood like a fencepost, unmoving and painfully mute. Finally, I offered a weak and generic “I’m so sorry about Coach” and moved out of the line.
Two steps away and it hit me. That was Airen Sorrels. The reasons for my lack of recognition crystallized.
It was the first time I’d seen Airen in more than three decades. In some ways, she hadn’t changed at all, I thought, as I watched her embrace another lifelong Atkins resident. But in other ways, less subtle ways, she has wholly transformed. Metamorphosed would be a better way to say it, which I’m sure is why she gave me a pass on remembering her name. You see, back in the 80s, I knew **him as ***Casey.
I was not surprised.
“Huh… that makes perfect sense.”
I was not especially close to Airen growing up, but I was friends with her older brother Chris. The Sorrels lived three houses down from me. My memories of Chris feature ferocious one-on-one battles under a basketball hoop erected by a neighborhood dad on the cul-de-sac just in front of the Sorrel’s home. Those games were a regular occurrence until our later junior high years when Chris’ athleticism made the contests too lop-sided for my liking. As we grew older, our interests and skills caused us to drift apart. Chris assumed the family mantle (Charlie had two daughters) as starting quarterback for the Red Devil football team while I spent all of my free time catching fish and making music.
Casey, three years younger than me, rarely joined us for basketball or football games with all of the other neighborhood boys. If memory serves, Casey preferred Star Wars figurines, which I thought were plenty cool, too, but not to the level he did. Casey was different in other ways as well, subtle and not-so-subtle distinctions that contradicted the black-and-white worldview we were taught at home, at school, and in Sunday school. Clearly, Casey was a horse of a different color, though, no one seemed to know exactly what shade. And curiously, this was something every kid in the neighborhood — adults, too, for that matter — never, ever, talked about.
To be honest, I didn’t think about Airen after our awkward (for me) meeting except in the sense that she was as she should be and that was that. I wasn’t even aware that she still lived in our old hometown until she friended me on Facebook sometime after her uncle’s funeral. Caught up in my own day-to-day of family and work, I never considered what her life must be like now or what she must have endured all those decades ago as a girl born into a boy’s body. Not to mention being born into a culture and even a specific family widely recognized for the enduring and imposing masculinity of its menfolk.
It wasn’t until spring of 2021 as the Arkansas General Assembly worked to pass cruel legislation aimed at the transgender community (legislation that even our Republican governor called out as a “step too far” and “a product of the cultural war in America”) that I thought of her again.
As a straight, white, middle-aged man, I’m embarrassed to say that my empathy must often be jarred loose. Privileges inherent to my identity too often crust over any sensitivity to the plight of others. Like everyone else on the planet, the only perspective I truly understand is that of my own. And I’ve never questioned my own sexuality or gender, which, to my benefit falls right in line with what nearly everyone in my culture thinks it should be.
But those draconian measures aiming to inflict pain and fueled by the arrogance and ignorance holding power in our state brought Airen to mind. I had originally called on her while planning to work up a quick reaction piece to the Arkansas legislation with Airen’s take alongside a couple of other transgender folks. But only minutes into a phone call with Airen, I realized she could offer more than commentary on bad laws.
I realized that Airen’s story is one of living life on your own terms. It’s the story of a transgender woman embracing her small-town heritage along with some foundations of the culture even as she embraces her raw feminine power only recently fully realized. It’s a story of uncommon grace and unimaginable courage. And my relationship with her presented an opportunity for me to gain an understanding of something that seemed impossible for me to grasp.
Given my age, region of residence, and station in life, it's probably not surprising that I’m in a perpetual state of confusion about how to address someone who is transgender and even more often just who is transgender. Though many are offended by the pronoun regime, I find it a helpful map through the veritable minefield of social and professional interactions. And why wouldn’t I want to address someone in the manner they prefer to be addressed? The manufactured outrage brought on by this simple act of courtesy certainly demolishes that tired old myth of genteel Southern hospitality and the innate politeness of rural residents.
Airen and I plan to meet over drinks for a preliminary interview, which is really more of a reacquaintance, and I’ve got to psyche myself up for it. Not because the Casey I knew is now a woman, but because this will be one of the most sensitive and intimate conversations I’ve ever had with anyone except my wife. Airen knows I want to tell her story, that we’re here to talk about what it’s like to grow up and live as a transgender woman in a place that fairly seethes with a hatred for all but the most stringent of binaries when it comes to sex and gender in the public view. But this is unfamiliar and acutely uncomfortable territory for me. I’ve never asked anyone — ever — about when and how they knew they were a certain gender.
I was raised to not ask about such profoundly personal topics (not to mention that this specific question is one I never imagined asking anyone) and even in my professional capacity as a sometimes-journalist, I struggle with the responsibility of probing into personal lives. Asking about relationships (beyond the surface, anyway), religion, and money were off the table in my culture. They were considered impolite conversation. But that ponderous question is the one I’ve got to ask in order to gain a better understanding of just what it means when someone says they’re transgender. Because, honestly, I can’t wrap my head around the concept. I just can’t. And, obviously, I’m far from the only one.
I say it aloud for practice.
When did you know you were a girl?
Shit…
How do I ask that?
Hell, when did I know I was a boy?
The answer for me? Always. It wasn’t only because of the penis and testicles between my legs, though, that certainly was one component. No, even as a sensitive boy and now a sensitive man growing up in an age when sensitivity was viewed as a feminine trait, I’ve never questioned my gender. It was always something more than skin deep and more than my personality. I never wondered if my family was wrong for referring to me as a boy or if I was wrong for thinking of myself as a boy. I never decided to be male. There was simply an undeniable masculinity coursing through my body, mind, and soul from earliest memory. No literature or television or Sunday school lesson or anything else had influenced my ultimate gender, though, all of those did influence what was expected of my gender. I had no more say in being born male in every way than I did in being born into my family.
So I’ve never confronted such a conundrum about myself, knowing my entire life that he/him is who I was/am and will always be. Trying to comprehend this level of profound uncertainty about one of the most basic components of identity was an impossibility. Growing up with genitals matching my gender was yet another example of my privilege. There’s no other way to define it.
In our small town during the 80s, which I'd reckon was representative of so many others in those years, nearly everyone attended a church at least semi-regularly. We spent our Sundays as part of Baptist, Assembly of God, Church of Christ, Methodist, or Catholic congregations. To say that most, and likely all, of our churches — meaning as denominations, the local leadership, and the congregation as a whole — were anti-LGBTQIA+ would be accurate. But the truth of the matter is that any sexuality or gender other than straight and cis was simply an unknown, or at least an unacknowledged, in our community. Homosexuality and transgenderism were always framed as sins of the big city and the bigger world beyond even our state’s borders. They weren’t here. Not with God’s hand shielding us from such worldly evils.
Of course, we could all peek through God’s fingers. Homosexuality and transgenderism were quite obviously part of our community. But as kids back then, none of us could truly define those differences we saw in some of our friends. I recall one teacher explaining the behavior of a schoolmate who would turn out to be gay as “a girl living in a boy’s body.”
Bless her heart. She tried, but she didn’t know how to explain it either.
That’s probably why we never heard an adult say anything negative about the “different” girls and boys we shared a classroom with and the ambiguous women and men we passed in the grocery store aisles. Another reason for the lack of comments was because bold acknowledgment could lead to awfully uncomfortable conversations, and those conversations could lead to even more uncomfortable actions in the name of principle. It was better to think it couldn’t happen here, ignore it, and keep peace.
The members of our community who were also members of the LGBTQIA+ community before that acronym existed were discussed with an ambiguity that never even skimmed the deep nuance of their lives. Within our small town, where perhaps the only bond stronger than blood was a shared zip code, an odd chimera of acceptance combined with head-in-the-sand denial was the norm. A “love the sinner/hate the sin” dynamic but one in which the sin could not be mentioned. I imagine this only compounded the confusion of any child or teenager struggling with the question of who and what they were.
In 1980s rural Arkansas, sex, sexuality, and gender were cut and dried. Well, they were cut and dried on the surface of social life, anyway. We were taught the “facts” early on and the differences between a boy and a girl were tangible and indubitable — boys had a penis and girls had a vagina. Full stop. Boys liked girls because girls had that vagina and girls liked boys because boys had that penis. Full stop. Those concrete rules of human physiology and biology were (somewhat ironically given that much of the population still believes that evolution, the foundation of biology, is a farce) sacred in Arkansas because those opposing yet compatible genitalia make babies. And there is no Biblical command more dutifully adhered to in much of rural America than to go forth and multiply.
We could talk about the need for rural families from generations ago to rear a large brood to help with homesteading and farm life. We could talk about the wholesome Americana of the nuclear family and how much that means, even if only symbolically, to the identity of rural culture. We could wander deep into the weeds searching for an answer as to the high value placed on making babies and babies themselves (mostly white babies and even more so American babies) in this culture vs. anything else including a woman’s right to body autonomy. But it’s not really a mystery. The entire point of life from an evolutionary perspective is to reproduce. Making babies and the inherent goodness associated with making babies is normal because that’s what most of us are instinctually programmed to do. And at the core of our animal understanding, it’s okay to be confused by romantic relationships that have no chance of leading to kids from a sexual pairing of the partners. That’s how we’re wired. Though, we can rewire ourselves.
Other likely culprits for our uneasiness are codes both spoken and unspoken within the patriarchal order of our culture. A strict binary view of gender is a supporting pillar of patriarchy.
The patriarchy is not some make-believe abstraction concocted by the “woke” bunch on which to cast their ire. A patriarchal society is any society tracing its lineage through the male bloodline. It’s not just an American thing and it seems innocuous on the surface. But the patriarchy is why the firstborn son is iconized in our storytelling and real life. It’s why China now has a bunch of lonely, horny men fueling the sex-slave trade. It’s why until recently women were deemed second-class citizens in our country and still are in many areas around the globe.
To understand our particular flavor of patriarchy, we must first understand that rural culture across the South, the West, and most of the Midwest is derivative of Appalachian culture. Appalachian culture is Scots-Irish, or the academic term Borderlands, at the roots. Some historians and anthropologists say Borderland ways are the foundation of American culture as a whole. Patriarchal clans and the high social currency of unquestionable manhood fuse to compose the backbone of that warrior-minded, testosterone-drenched, and fiercely territorial tradition. Some striking parallels to organized football in America here.
But we can’t point to one or two facets of who we are as humans or as a culture and lay the blame for our suspicions about those people perceived different from us upon them. The skein of reasons loop, wind, and tighten into a Gordian knot. You don’t even need to factor in the heavy influence of modern Evangelical Christianity to see why the worst insult a boy in 1980s rural America could ever endure was to be called a girl.
That was no insult to Casey, though. Because Airen was a girl.
Coming Next Month: Part 2
Can't wait for next month! Johnny, once again, I am in awe of your talent! Thank you for tackling this subject.
Thank you for this, Johnny.