June 2, 2012

Gender perceptions and sexual preferences have been on my mind lately. A friend of mine was griping the other day that people see him as a straight man because the love of his life has changed her gender. She was a guy when they fell in love and in the intervening years she decided to transgender (can that be used as a verb that way? Nope, I just found this blog/post). My friend still loves her but is a loud and proud gay so it kind of bothers him (on an intellectual level at least) that when people see them together, they see a heterosexual couple. A different friend had been married to his wife for 15 years when she decided that she was a man and started hormone therapy. They are still together; they both have beards and now when people see them walking down the street they think they are a gay couple. Oddly enough both of the 'husbands' are over 6 ft 6 in tall and weigh over 300 pounds, one can use a concrete cutter overhead and the other slams 350 pounds in the squat machine; one of the partners is trainer in a gym and the other is a network geek. The couples do not know each other - they are from different decades.

My first experience with a transsexual man was back in the 1970s. I played D&D with a pretty diverse crowd; we smoked a lot of dope, did some acid, and played D&D 2 times a week for hours on end. One of players was a woman who was a stripper down on First Avenue (across the street from the Pike Place Market). She called herself The Grey Mouser (we just called her Mouser). We assumed that she was a lesbian but when she and her partner came back from a cross-country trip in an huge old van they named Leviathan she started on her hormones and then he grew a beard. It took me a while to get the pronouns right. One friend kept kicking me under the table; I got fed up and yelled "Mouser has been a friend for 8 years, he understands that mistakes will be made". Pissed me off a bit - but I did eventually stop using feminine pronouns. He went in to get his driver's license renewed and the clerk looked at him and said "looks like someone made a mistake and checked female on your license; let me fix that for you" and he got his gender changed. Later he got married and move off into the country way south of town. When Mrs. Grumpy and I went off on her post-doc hot-time tour, spending about 7 years split between Tuscon and Raleigh (in a car with no a/c!). By the time we got back the 'tribe' had pretty much gone their separate ways. I did run into Mouser's ex-wife who complained about community property and how Mouser got half of everything without yadda, yadda, yadda.

You haven't played Dungeons And Dragons until you've played it high on acid.