In the morning, Red and Fate line up now, ready to work, to go together and get the sheep and move them out of the side pasture so we can continue our rotational grazing and postpone the looming day when the animals go on expensive hay. The job will get done with these two, both workers, proud and strong.
Over the weekend, when I was recovering from a bout of food poisoning, I didn’t feel clear enough in my head to read, so I took my Ipad into bed and tapped open my Amazon video app. I was impressed by the hundreds, if not thousands, of choices of free things to watch. We used to be a captive of the few dull and fleeting choices of network television, now we can choose what we like, a liberating blessing of new technology. I chose the new, award winning series Transparent starring Jeffry Tambor as trans parent Maura (formerly Morton) Pfefferman of Los Angeles.
I saw a pilot of the program a few months ago and was drawn to it. I have always been drawn to the pain and isolation of trans people, the sense of hiding, of never being known, even by your own family, even by your spouse. Outsiders are all trans people, in a way. I have always felt as if I know them.
I lived this way for much of my life, I am not a trans person in the literal sense, I have not been torn about my gender identity, although I have experienced much of the shame and confusion of the traumatized child. Somehow, in ways that have confounded me, I could always sense the awful pain – brilliantly captured by Tambor in Transparent – of the stricken, shamed person who lives forever outside of the circle, a secret and invisible life; the person who lives almost in the skin of another, alien being. Who feels as if he or she never belongs anywhere, is never seen or known or understood as they really are, who lives in pain and terror being found out.
I was transfixed by Transparent and watched four or five episodes, one after another.
It was hard for me to watch, and yet irresistible, I saw myself so many times in this unlikely drama. Maura’s pain was so brilliantly portrayed, her fevered, almost desperate desire to be known and accepted by her children, none of whom knew or accepted her true self, before or after. “All of my children are so selfish,” Maura tells a friend, realizing that he doesn’t know them any more than they know her now.
I do not believe I was known by anyone in the world until I met Maria when I was 61 years old, and she does not believe she was known by anyone else either before that. I have thought a thousand times when I talk to the people I have known: nobody knows me, nobody knows who I am.
This stunning connection – I had given up on it, I expected to leave this world without it – was the core of our love and our relationship, this experience of finally, after so many difficult years, being known. Maria can speak for herself, but it changed me, it altered the chemistry of my life and my consciousness, it freed me of so much of the pain and poison and fear that was choking me to death and snuffing out hope and love.
Isn’t this what we all yearn for, to be known and seen? Isn’t it true that without it, we are broken and incomplete? The trans life is not, of course, just about people’s gender, but something so much bigger than that. It is about the human struggle to be accepted and to be known, to be loved for who we are. About how we treat one another in a harsh and divided world.
It was wrenching, hypnotic to see this reflected in Transparent, such a sensitively done relevant work of art, a representation that sadly could never be done on any of the commercial networks that so many Americans watch, a program people truly need to see. Something is very wrong in a system like that.
Tambor is amazing. He plays the role of a loving but somewhat clueless and self-absorbed trans parent, a tortured man who has hidden his true identity all of his life and has come out as a woman. In the opening episodes, Pfefferman, long divorced from his contemptuous ex, is coming out as a woman to his children, one after another. He is also figuring out where to live, how to look, dress, walk, feel, how to be. His children all, in varying degrees, are messed up and unhappy.
He is Daddy to them, someone to quarrel and complain in front of, to never really hear or see.
In every episode, there is a flashback to the life of Morton, taking secret trips in private places to try on his dresses, new wigs, jewelry, hiring trans escorts to talk to. “Daddy,” says one of his daughters, “are you dressing up like a woman now?” He takes a breath, looks into her eyes and says, “my love, my whole life I’ve been dressing up as a man.” Later, with her sister, she shakes her head in disgust. “Why is he doing this now?,” she says, as if he had just intruded on her unhappy life.
There is an especially wrenching scene that magnificently captured the struggle of the trans in our angry and intolerant culture when Maura, dressed now as a woman but still looking very much like a man, goes into a mall ladies room with his daughters to go to the bathroom.
There, she is confronted by an enraged mother with her two obnoxious teen-aged daughters who accuses her of being a man, demands that she leave the restroom and calls her a pervert. She is shattered by the accusation and then, numb with embarrassment, goes home to her new apartment where her gay and trans neighbors are hosting an ear-shattering patio party. She bangs on the wall and the divider to get them to quiet down, but they ignore her or don’t hear her and she sits down in a patio chair in he new clothes and new life and new identity and cries in sorrow.
Here she is, after all this, she is still not known, not seen, not heard. Alone still. She still does not know where she belongs.
I had awful dreams and nightmares all night after this, it brought me back so powerfully to my early life. It is an awful and difficult thing to not be known, even in your own family. To have a secret existence, private fantasies, an entire existence that must be kept hidden from the very people who are supposed to love and protect you and know you best.
I think what we all want is community, to be known, to be understood. I walk in the shoes of the outsider, I will always wonder where I belong, and learn over and over again that I usually don’t belong. I am grateful for the chance to finally experience the joy and connection of being known. First, by one person, then perhaps two or three more.
It seemed arrogant to me to feel as I knew Maura Pfferman, my life has been easier than the life of most trans people for sure, but I wanted to sit down next to Maura and take her hand, and tell her this was a process, and she was in it now, and it would take it’s time and go it’s own way, and she had to believe in it and have faith in herself. Her life was ending, her life was just beginning, a tragedy and a miracle all at once. I know it.
She was living the very idea of authenticity, and that was the path to life. To hide oneself, and never be known, was just another kind of death, I wanted to tell her, I felt like some sweet old lady sniveling over her daily soap opera.
Whatever the cost, she was saving her life. Her children would perhaps never understand who she was was, or had been, she could only do her best and stay strong.
That night, I had a long nightmare about riding in a bus and losing my camera and getting let off to wander in banks of dirty snow. We kept driving but never got anywhere. And I guess I shouted out because Maria woke up and held me and asked me what was wrong. I never talk about my dreams, I’m superstitious about it, but I told her about this one and she listened and teared up.
We talked about our early lives, our childhood, or time before one another.
“I know,” she said. “I understand.” And we both waited for the morning sun to shine through the window and begin our next day together.
