Liking people like me (instead of liking me)

I remember in early 2004 going to the SRO bar on Fifth and Elm, one of the maybe half-a-dozen times in my life. I remember hearing the line from a cis man (a non-trans man) in male attire saying to me, “I like people like you.” I remember thinking it was the oddest line I’d ever heard in my entire life – he didn’t like me, he just liked people like me. I wasn’t interested, so I said nothing in return to him.

When I woke the next day it dawned on me what I found unsettling about this patron’s comment to me. That patron in a sense saw trans women as flesh-and-blood versions of blow-up, female-faced fetish dolls with penises instead of vaginas; the patron didn’t see me as fully human, but instead as a sex object.

I’d gone to the SRO with my then friend Poly (she moved out of state quite a few years ago) that night, so discussed the line and the guy with her, and told her how weird and dehumanizing it felt. Poly then took the occasion to explain “admirers,” also called “chasers,” to me.

There were, are, men who like to have sex with trans women who haven’t had genital surgery. Just as it’s shown in pornographic films with tag lines of “chicks with dicks” and “shemales,” there are men who like to be penetrated by trans women. The phalluses of trans women, according to a theory of Poly’s, functioned as symbols of power, and these men who “liked people like me” were often turned on by being humiliated sexually by a woman with male genitalia.

Poly also told me about trans dominatrices, and explained that this was that power dynamic “on steroids.”

Poly also told me some of these men who “liked people like me” wanted gay sex, but were uncomfortable having sex with men; she said I should think of sex with those kinds of men as a sort of “gay light.”

She also explained to me that quite a number of the trans women at the SRO were sex workers, and some of those men who “liked people like me” frequently hooked up with them. Sometimes those men “got lucky” with wide-eyed newbies like me and didn’t have to pay.

I’m white and from a middle class, fundamentalist Christian family; in 2004 I had a job at the VA and was going to school for a degree in Information Systems. And, even though I also had a 20-year Navy career under the belt where I thought I’d seen and heard just about everything, I found I was completely naïve to just about everything Poly had explained to me. I was definitely surprised at just how objectified and dehumanized I could be just by being a trans woman going to an LGBT community bar on a trans night.

Why am I thinking about all of that? Gay San Diego recently ran a story by Jeremy Ogul entitled One of the girls. “A six-foot-tall drag queen in a sequined cocktail dress and five-inch stiletto heels flicks a smartphone screen on a quiet Bankers Hill street corner,” is how Ogul opened his review of the SRO for his column Raising The Bar. “To the oblivious passerby, she sticks out like an untucked testicle. But to the crowd gathered inside the nearby SRO Lounge, she’s just one of the girls.”

There’s just so much wrong with that first paragraph it’s difficult to know where to begin; or really, maybe it’s not that difficult. He began his piece by looking at trans women through the lens of sexuality; he began by limiting trans experience within terms of clothing and genitalia; he defined crossdressing men and 24/7 trans women as female children.

Hey, on one hand I get it. One goes to a bar and sees drinking crossdressers, drag queens and 24/7 trans women “dressed to the nines,” and it’s difficult not to just see that world through the rose-colored glasses of happy partying. It’s seeing all that fun, colorful gender expression without seeing that some are exploring their gender identity in a place focused perhaps too much on gender expression and sexuality – and that focus on gender expression and sexuality can be degrading.

Oh, the dehumanity.