Trans? I Hope So

I knew I had to get it to the dumpster. It had been laying there far too long.

My broken lounge chair, that is. It had been sitting in the hallway inside my front door--which I rarely use--for weeks. I had bought a new one, too. But the deliverers weren't required to get rid of the old one, and so it had sat there, unbothered, unused, dysfunctional.

The weather turned unexpectedly warm the other day, and finally, there would be several days without rain or snow, a potential problem still in Wisconsin's April. I had to make it happen.

The upper portion, which I had managed to lift off, wasn't too heavy. In fact, it had a bar across it that allowed me to carry it not unlike a sack of groceries. Part I was a cruise.

Not Part II. The bottom half had the footrest mechanism, the primary infrastructure, and springs. Lifting it proved both awkward and too challenging. Now what?

I decided to turn the thing side-over-side, thus gaining ground toward the outside dumpster a couple of feet at a time. There was no one around to ask for help, but I wasn't in a hurry.

I managed to commandeer it down the short flight of steps that led to the back parking lot with the dumpster at the far end. It didn't look real far to get the top part there. It looked like the bottom part would have to traverse the Sahara Desert, though. 

My back began to complain. By the time I had gotten halfway across the parking lot, with some forty or fifty yards left, I had had to stop twice already.

I had no idea that someone was watching. The rear part of some of the apartments in my complex have back porches. Apparently, as I struggled, two young women must have seen me and taken pity. They came down to assist me.

One was a blond and another a brunette. One was fairly tall, the other very tall and thin. "We can handle this," the blond said, and she and her accomplice grabbed the skirt of the lower half. Within maybe a minute, they had dragged it to a reasonably noticeable place near the dumpster, next to the upper half.

I felt less than manly, but enormously grateful. I walked over and told them my name. It was the least I could do.

They told me theirs: April and Petra (they have been changed). I shook their hands and thanked them profusely.

I couldn't help but notice, though, that the very tall, brunette young woman had a far huskier voice and long, bony fingers. Of course I didn't ask, since it was really none of my business, but--was this a transwoman who had helped me with my difficult task?

I have not met one for some years now. My experience with NEA committees inevitably brought me into contact. I tried to disguise my initial surprise back then.

Once you come into contact, though, the notoriety falls off. It's just another human being, and this one was very compassionate, in fact. Fear fades. As far as I was concerned, it just led to another question: So what?

It makes you wonder what all the fuss is about, the ersatz threats, the presumed blasphemy of religious tenets. It's almost as if people are trying to frighten others into believing that as a few people go, so will the majority of humanity, that there is more to dread in coming into contact with gender transition than there is in Covid. I have no numbers to tell you how ridiculous this is, but I'd be surprised if the distribution of transgender individuals within our population is more than one-half of one percent.

But I was driving through southeast Missouri late last month--remember, this is the state that's voted to defund its public libraries in paranoia about gay and trans- literature--and I decided to turn on talk radio, which in that area is decidedly hyperreactionary. The commentator was prattling on about the recent murder in the school in Nashville, ostensibly committed by a trans-woman.

That, apparently, had led to rumors which, of course, he felt duty-bound to repeat: Namely, that on April 1, about four days away then, trans- people would be loading up their weapons and descending upon the rest of us 'normal' people in a surreptitious attack. What had caused him to factually conclude such ballyhoo was, of course, lacking from his spewing, as was the source of the rumors--which would spoil things for him and everyone. It wasn't unlike Fox News' assertions that the investigations of the so-called rigging of the Election of 2020 had genuinely solid ground--for which it is now being sued because of its assertions that Dominion Voting Systems had somehow diverted some Republican votes and turned them Democratic.

First Amendment, right? Preying on people's prejudices? Why not? Already embarrassed, Fox News is about to be outed as a primarily entertainment entity, not that it'll make much difference to its adherents.

But I doubt if the southeast Missouri radio station will be brought up for violations of propriety. It'll stand as another silly effort at fear-mongering. I wonder if any of those announcers have ever met a trans-person. I wonder how they would react if they ever did. Nevertheless, you'll note that there were no spate of domestic terror attacks on April 1. Maybe it was all done to gin-up the purchase of yet more guns, as if we would finally be convinced of their necessity.

I have no idea. I listened for about twenty minutes because I can't stomach any more than that. All I know is that a person taller than six feet, and friendly with a female name, lent me a hand that saved my back from being even sorer than it became in the aftermath. He/she did so without promise of recompense--a genuine act of kindness. I have no surety that he/she is a trans-person. In a way, though, I hope so.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark