ninaherenorthere.com

1. I can’t grow a full beard, nor proper sandpaper stubble, but when my laziness reaches the week mark, I do rock a full face of pubescent fuzz. A few weeks ago, before I went to the doctor, I made it a point to shave. I was going to the gynecologist; it just seemed like a respectful thing to do.




2. For the past month, between travel documents and medical records, labs, and doctors I had to use my old name a lot, which meant I was constantly alternating between “Nina” and “Nick.” (I’m physically fine, though I did have an anal probe to determine, again, that I have a chronic and mild case of JewBowel, or GI conditions common to those of Eastern European descent.) I got the to the point where I couldn’t remember what name, boy or girl, to use.




3. Although there are VIP locker-rooms at 24hr Fitness, none have a stick figure sign for “boy band member”–my gender identity of the week. In these VIP locker-rooms, just like the regular ones, the men’s side has open gang showers and the women’s side has doors on at least some showers. Despite being recognized as a guy all the time, I STILL use the women’s locker-room (to shower before returning to work) AND nobody has commented yet, even when I don’t shave. I know, I know, but what am I to do? I don’t take hormones to acquire “male privilege” any more than I take hormones to spend my lunch break naked in gang showers with large, smelly, hairy men.




4. I am addicted to gay dude porn. I watch it regularly, obsessively, without any forethought. I can be checking my bank statement and find myself on Xtube before I’ve even noticed. I had to upgrade my Macbook several months ago because it was too old for good streaming video software and I couldn’t handle watching one more glitchy blowjob. Now I have a small collection of DVDs, made up entirely of gifts from exes, women. Because here’s the thing, I only date and pursue sex with women. I love women. But I cannot stand watching women in porn, so instead I fill my head with dick and balls.




5. Sometimes, I think I’ve broken down sex into poles, holes, erogenous zones and positions, and that I can see through sexual orientation entirely. Sometimes, I think I’ve deconstructed gender, isolating the pieces–names, body parts, hormones, locker-room used–all of which may have something gendered associated with them, but from which there is no sum, no gendered whole. Sometimes I think I’ve transcended it all, and then I realize I’m only one paradox away from a full-on identity crisis.

*NOTE: I’ve shared certain things above that I may not be willing acknowledge again and wouldn’t want others to bring up about me. Also some of those topics are not comfortable for all trans folk. Being a paradox is funny until a doctor won’t provide you with service, someone purposely ignores your preferred name, or security is called while you’re in the “wrong” bathroom.

I FINALLY, as in eight months later, told my adult learner that I’m going by “Nick.” The conversation took place after tonight’s tutoring session and went like this:

Me: I have to tell you something. (Dramatic pause.) I’m using a new name. I’m not going by “Nina” anymore. I’m going by “Nick.”

Him: So, you want me to call you Nick?

Me: Yes.

Him: I have a friend Sharon and she wants me to call her Sherman. And I know a Kathy who goes by Kevin. When she owes me money, I call Kevin up and say, “Kathy, when are you going to pay me.”

Me: (Nodding and laughing awkwardly)

Him: But I can get with that. I can get with it. I’ll see you next week.

THE END

It’s been over six months since I took the training wheels off of “Nick” and brought him out of my trans group into my everyday life. There is only one place where I keep him a secret. Every Thursday, I go to the Project Read office in the main library and meet my adult learner. He (we’ll call him S.) is gregarious, charismatic, and greets everyone with a “Hello” followed by their name. When I hear my old name come out of his mouth, I feel empty, weak, and like a liar. The staff in the office uses my old name, too. When I send the volunteer coordinator my hours for the month, I change the name on my email account from Nick to my old one. Then I change it back.

I have come up with every explanation/excuse available: Sometimes I just don’t want to deal with being trans; gender is insignificant to our tutor-learner connection; our cultural and generational experiences (S. is sixty-plus years old and African-American) are so different that telling him I’m “Nick” or transgender won’t mean anything; he sees me as I am and understands my “character” as he calls it, even though when I’m a hardass, he says, “yes, ma’aam”; class, race, privilege guilt that I have the luxury to be trans while he fought drugs, prison, and the same system that made my life so easy; he doesn’t need to know about “Nick” unless I take T; I don’t know how much longer I’ll tutor him, anyways. (I’ve been saying that for the almost year and a half we’ve been together).

Sometimes I have this fantasy where I tell him about “Nick,” and he goes, of course, duh, thank god, that whole “yes, ma’am” business was such a struggle. I picture him shaking his head disappointedly and saying, “It’s about time you told me. I knew.”

S. and I were asked to emcee the tutor-learner recognition event last week. I was shocked because I tend to think I’m an awful, undedicated, slacking tutor. I was doubly surprised when I showed up and the entire place was packed. I don’t know why the staff asked us, but we did a terrific job.

My old name was printed in the program, and for the first time in the last six months, I intentionally wrote it on a name tag (confession: sometimes I accidentally catch myself doodling it), a fate that didn’t anger me since I set it up for myself by keeping a secret.

Most of the event consisted of adult learners sharing their experiences. One learner took the podium to read and was so nervous he sweetly smiled, shaking perceptibly, and said he just couldn’t do it tonight. One woman read from the bible, her face quivering as she held back tears, practicing for her goal of reading in church. Another woman read a story about being blind as an extended metaphor for illiteracy. More adults, including large men, cried in one room than I’d ever seen, not counting this past election night.

Tutors took the stage with their learners, and I was deeply struck by the intimacy in these relationships; in their reflection, I saw S. and myself. I’ve known for awhile now, I guess, that our banter is special, that we were made for each other, and when I admit it, how addicted I am to watching his self-confidence expand, his pride in his dedication and education grow. I have not taught him all that much, but man does he feel good about it, and so do I.

As I watched the event, my name tag glued tightly to me, I understood fully and clearly why I haven’t told him about “Nick.” This is a man whom I have seen at his most vulnerable. I’ve watched and listened to him grope for a few syllables, trying to hear the sounds in words that he cannot spell. For three months, he wrote in a journal; he thought the word was pronounced jonna. Sometimes, he closes his eyes when he is fighting for the letters, struggling, sweating and I sit there silently, because he will figure it out, or at least he will know he tried. I can sit there silently for a long time, thirty seconds at least, just waiting with a kind heart in awe of his unabashed weakness on display, his nakedness.

At the end of the tutor-learner recognition event, S. was floating on our performance, but more than that, he was impressed with mine. “You were so smooth,” he said, shaking my hand and exploding with that huge life-loving grin of his. “It was like you’ve done that before.” What he didn’t know is that I’ve spent a little time in front of the mic. But he doesn’t know a lot of things about me because I do not tell him, because I care about him more than I lead on, because I know that if I show myself to him in the vulnerable way he has revealed himself to me that he could reject me.

I have not told him to call me Nick because I am afraid.

I couldn’t take it anymore, the weekends as Nick, the weekdays as Nina, the world sharing joint custody of my name. So, a few weeks ago, I spoke my boss and to human resources and under my own volition, I started taking field trips to the single stall bathroom on another floor. Then, in the last hour of my workweek, I sent an email to a few dozen co-workers, informing them of my new name and pronoun switch. I offered example sentences: “Nick does an excellent job with the copy. He really knows the [insert my company name] voice.” On the following Monday, I showed up at work and like magic, everyone was calling me Nick. A nameplate soon followed.

It was a relief to change my my name in the workplace, and for the most part the process has been smooth. People mess up occasionally, more so with the pronouns. I prefer it when people don’t notice their mistake, otherwise they blush and apologize and I jump to say, “no, worries” or “it’s okay,” before looking down at my notebook and starting to doodle.

It’s not the most natural thing for me either, having a new name. It’s particularly difficult because I have my old one, too. Recently I eliminated any mention of my name from my cellphone voicemail message so as not to alarm those who know or those who do not. And I have two email address, one that has my former name built into the address and the one where I am myself, Nick. I still have two names because that’s how it goes, I think. Because there are people I’m afraid to tell, bureaucratic paper trails I’m afraid to get lost in, people I don’t want to burden, people who don’t need to know that much about me.

I have not told the adult learner whom I’ve been tutoring for a year about Nick. I have not told the person who cleans my house, nor my dentist. I have not changed my name on any official paperwork, not on my benefits, my passport, my mail, nor my credit card, which has prompted several strangers to comment on the beauty of my former name. I have not changed my name at the gym where I’m sure there is a corporate manual that requires the front desk workers to address us all by name as part of a personalized customer retention plan. I have not been adamant about my mother and my brother calling me Nick, even though they are aware of it. I have not been very clear about Nick with my literary agent, nor anyone involved with my book project, since like my blog, the working title of my book includes my former name, and really that just means more mistakes and more discomfort for everyone.

I am aware that I could be more proactive, perhaps even tackle the official paperwork, but I’m not ready. I don’t know if I want to be a female Nick on my passport. I don’t know if I want to be a male Nick who often passes as a female and yet is put in a hostel room with six dudes. I don’t know if I will take testosterone. I don’t know if any of these things matter, if a name change can be just that, a name change.

Sometimes I’m so tired of the name change that I want to give up and revert. I’m tired of leaping to introduce myself before you do. I’m tired of of your slip-ups which may only be one for you but they add up to over a hundred for me, each with its unique brand of awkwardness. I’m tired of telling you about my new name and watching it go in one ear and out the other and feeling that I need to rip off my shirt and show you the gashes across my chest so that you can see how much Nick means to me. I’m tired of having to compose a narrative about it, prove my struggle to you, to well up with tears in the corner of a bar so that you can see that I’m “emotional about it.” I’m tired of your issues with male privilege when you never had any issues with my class privilege. And I’m tired of your total ignorance about your cisgender privilege. But mostly, I am tired of your mourning, of hearing you say that using my new name will “be hard because it’s ingrained.”

A couple months ago, my therapist, in what I imagine was a plea for patience, asked me to try to hold the two names side-by-side, to hold both my feminine and masculine sides. But my names have nothing to do with with masculine and feminine. They are correlated with darkness and light with invisibility and visibility with despair and hope. When you call me by my old name, it translates in my head into, “I like your vagina.” And is that something you really want to say to me? 

I’ve also noticed that it’s really not that hard to to call me Nick. Mistakes do happen, but when you try, they become the exception not the pattern. First, change my name in your phone. Then, actually try calling me Nick. Exaggerate, do it purposefully, overuse it.  And please stop throwing around my former name like you own it. It’s not yours.

I told a friend I was tired the other day, that I was out of patience to deal with those that don’t have some experience with trans people, that I just don’t have the energy to spend time with these people, which included her. ”Well, then that’s my loss,” she said. “And your loss.”

So, I took a deep breath and began to educate one more person.

The office manager didn’t notice me in the room when she read my name in the appointment book and announced, “The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.” When she did see me sitting there, her face flushed and she started to apologize profusely.

I wondered if it was her lack of professionalism that concerned her, or if she knew she should have been particularly sensitive because of the reason for my visit. We were in a place where names mattered. To many who passed into that very room, the gender of a name mattered more than anything.

I told the office manager it was okay. I wanted to put her at ease. People, especially when I was a child, would say, “the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria,” all the time. I almost thanked her. I wanted to thank her. It occurred to me that it might be the last time anyone says that to me.

I was named for my mother’s brother, Norman. He was hit by a car and killed before I was born. I think I was conceived in the wake of his death. He exists in my mind only as a legend. Dark, tall, and handsome. A world-class basketball player. I’ve always been proud to continue the legacy of his three-point shot, to carry his “N” in Nina.

My name is a gift, given to me by parents. There are strings attached to a name, an expectation for a lifetime. I have long felt suffocated by the path set for me by others, but my name is not a burden. It is a gift I treasure.

Every time I hear my name, I linger on the sounds, trace its curves, finger its softness, hold its grace. Sometimes I feel like I’m having break-up sex with my name. I love my name, but we are moving in different directions. We are growing apart.

I treat finding a new name like a game. A friend and I went through baby names the other day. Nate is not quite me. Neil I like. Noah is chosen by everyone. Nimrod made us laugh. Nino doesn’t stick. Nico is the guy I’d like to date. But it’s always been Nick. It came into my head one day, a couple years ago, virginal conception or something. I treat finding a new name like a game because I am barely showing, because I am not ready for Nick.

I don’t need a new name. Nobody is forcing me. But “Nina” sounds like mid-day chimes, pleasant and obligatory, a noise not mine. When my name is spoken, I half expect someone else to step forward. I find introductions uncomfortable. I cringe upon hearing “Nina” in bed. My name is too pretty for me, for my coarse hands, my hairy legs, my boxy jaw, a hardened exterior growing in my imagination.

With all that is changing for me right now, there is nothing I shall grieve for more than the loss of my name. If I do let go of Nina, I will ask you to hold it for me, to place it in an urn on the mantel of your heart.

I hear there is currently a resurgence of the name “Nina.” The office manager who grouped me with the Pinta and Santa Maria told me so at the end of my appointment. She said elementary schools have lots of small Ninas. I picture them with long wavy hair pulled back into barrettes, pierced ears, wearing beige corduroy pants and a red pea coat. I picture them like I was once, a little girl.