Genderation X

David has put a couple ads in the personals section of the Bay Times. "Mostly men who identify as heterosexual answered. I said, 'I have female plumbing, but I look like a guy. You may not be attracted to me.' And I wasn't what they expected. They expected a butch woman. I got really tired of that. Though one man ... he said that after being with me he realized sex was not about bodies, that sex is about erotic energy between two people. People need to see gender beyond a certain set of genitals or a body type and look instead at what that person is exuding."

I asked unflappable Shadow if he thought the soul was gendered. He considered the question in his measured way, took a sip of his 7UP, and said, "I don't like the idea of a gender continuum because it's so linear. I see more a sphere, of which you can take cross-sections, slicing them horizontally, diagonally, or whatever. You'd find something different all along the way.

"I think of souls as a multidimensional part of ourselves that are temporarily in linear time. But we still have the capacity to experience all those dimensions. A lot of gender folk are going beyond the physical realm of gender and taking it to a spiritual realm." He shakes his head. "The human race is so caught up in categorizing itself, into putting everyone in little boxes that keep everything separate. But so many people are coming together and blending, whether about gender or race or culture, that those boxes are no longer applying. As we're moving into that evolution, people are freaking out, because there's no longer a nice set order to how things are supposed to be, and that's frightening to a lot of human beings."

I picture Shadow, over coffee, delivering the news to a prospective date. How he must hate it! And I remember when a butch pal of mine -- you might call her a "fuck buddy" -- told me over dinner that she was moving in with her lover, a lover she'd never mentioned during the two years I'd known her. "But why have you never talked about her?" I asked.

"It's not a her, it's a him," she said, her face practically in her plate. I was speechless. And while I sat there paralyzed, I was desperately thinking, I've got to say something, she's drowning, say something, but for far too long I could not. Such are the certainties of the assumptions we live by, and the sick free fall when those assumptions crash into hard reality.

Transsexuals live in the real world of fluidity that almost no one else wants to see. Who cares to remember that who we think we are might not have all that much to do with us, yet it governs almost everything we do? It's like being the one sober person in a roomful of drunks. "Come on, join the party," everyone else sloppily entreats. There's a certain satisfaction in staying sentient, but it must also be damn lonely.