Pronoun Problems: A Novel About Friendship, Transgender and (eventually) Ninjas

54 - A Hankering For Man Meat

Sooner or later, every meeting we had turned to the subject of transgender. If we were meeting with someone we already knew, they would bring it up, gushing about how amazing Tammy looked. And I would hold my hands out, palm up in a faux wounded What about me? gesture and they'd laugh and assure me that I looked amazing, too. Which I obviously did not.

If it was someone we didn't know, Tammy would inevitably find a way to work transgender into the conversation. Sometimes, she just wanted to be the center of attention; other times it was strategic, like when, for instance we were meeting on a project that had LGBT overtones. Or a project that involved superheroes or aliens or parenting or thrift stores or animated rabbits or, in one particularly impressive display of conversational contortionism, the undead.

I guess what I'm saying is that Tammy really, really liked the spotlight.

In fairness to my writing partner, people were legitimately fascinated by the subject, some of them luridly so. A surprising number wanted to know if, now that Tom was Tammy, we had thought about banging each other. (That would be no.) Others, even more brazenly, would ask questions about how one goes about designing one's own vagina. Because, you see, when you decide to have gender confirmation surgery, it's up to you do decide what it looks like. And I could not help wonder if there were standard models to choose from.

Welcome to Vaginas 4 Less! Is there any particular vagina that I can help you find today?

Do you have any Susy Galas in stock?

What size?

Medium.

I'll check.

Gay men loved to compare coming-out stories with Tammy. The takeaway for me was that the emotions are very similar — the confusion, the fear — and both require a good deal of body waxing, but only transgender necessitates a whole new wardrobe. (Clearly, transgender was the most expensive item on the LGBT+ menu. The least expensive, by the way: Asexual, because there is really no reason to dress up when you're not interested in getting laid.)

A few executives, all of them women, found our unconventional friendship very touching. One executive was so moved by our personal story that not only did she tear up, but insisted on hugging us both which she did for an uncomfortably long time.

She didn't actually hire us, though. But then again, nobody else did, either.

Tammy and I had hit a massive slump, by far the worst in our career. If you watch baseball — which as you know, I emphatically don't, but I've picked up some insight from the babbling of sports-loving private school fathers — you've seen this happen to even the best hitters. They were knocking it out of the park for months, or even years, and suddenly they just... weren't hitting. And the truly maddening thing was that, as far as they could tell, they were doing everything the same as they always had. So they changed their swing, which made it even worse, in part because it felt unnatural and in part because they didn't know exactly what they were trying to fix.

That's where we were. After the Emmys we took a few weeks off and then came roaring back to work, turning out a film spec which we loved. The working title was Fat Fuck From The Future. It was about a loser a million years in the future who steals a time machine and travels to the past (our present) because he believes he'll be worshipped like a god, but because he knows nothing about history or science, and also was a big fat idiot, he winds up being a loser in our time, too. As we did with our previous film specs, we laughed our asses off writing it. It had all the hard-hitting hilarity and absurdity that had always worked so well for us, but the collective reaction from the film community was basically a shrug. Honestly, we would have rather had everyone hate it than to simply dismiss it.