Jane is across the street from me, a bright smile on her face, dressed almost entirely in red. She is folded over a little, in the way very shy, very feminine women always are. Delicate. When I reach her, she doesn’t hug me or shake my hand, but presses her shoulder against my shoulder conspiratorially. She gestures at the shopping bag in my hand. “You’ve been to Sur La Table. It’s a nice store.”
“I love that place,” I say, giddily, guiltily -- my cooking passions are rarely shared by other people. But Jane is not merely being nice.
“What I really love,” she says, slowly, as if savoring her own speech, “is baking bread. I can’t make it in my kitchen now. Section eight housing – the oven doesn’t get above 120. Barely hot enough to cook the bottom crust.” She shakes her head. “I miss really good bread. I love kneading it. I’ve never used a bread machine – it takes all the fun out of the process.”
“I’m not much of a baker,” I admit. “More of a cook. But I love to bake bread. It’s the yeast – because it’s alive –“
“Yes! It’s wild. That’s what makes it intimidating to a lot of people. But it’s easy, once you get the trick to it.” She sighs, laments her kitchen again. “I used to bake a lot of bread.”
I met Jane when Jess – my dearest friend, my roommate, my brother – took me to a transgender support group. Jess had just begun his transition then, had just realized that, despite having been born in a female body, he was not female at all. Those early days of transition were tender for me, raw and chafing, rough and whirlwind, observing Jess as he changed into someone that I did not recognize and had no history with. It was a process that I’d thought I was well prepared for – I’d read all the pertinent books! I knew the language! – but was damnably, demonstrably, not. It was impossible just to be in a room full of transgendered people and not feel a little unbalanced.
In the midst of this, Jane was very easy to overlook.
Jane is shy, soft-spoken, reserved. Health problems have prevented her from starting the hormone therapy that would soften her features and enable her to look more as she would have had her body been female from the beginning. Her face is not feminine; when I first met her, she was homeless. She had no reliable way of shaving, and she wore a full beard. The world is cruel in this way. I stuck by Jess, who didn’t look female but didn’t look male, either, and I stuck by Jess’ friends, who were all very low-key, very easy going and good natured.
And in time, I found it harder and harder to pass Jane by. She is gracious and generous, so quietly so that you have to be watching intently and at the right time to notice it.
“I like Jane,” I told Jess. “I mean, I really like her.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s wonderful.” Pause. “I think I’m going to give her all my old earrings.”
“Did you have anything to do with these?” Jane asks, pulling her hair away from her ears and exposing a chain of dangly silver.
“No – that was all Jess.”
“That was so nice of him. I knew, from the moment I met him, that there was something about him. Something special.” I feel warmth swelling out from my chest; there are few ways to my heart that are more effective than this one, loving my family as much as I do.
We cross the street together, board a bus together. Jane tells me how to check the water temperature before adding in the yeast. “Drop some on your wrist – the way you test a bottle, for a baby. It should be about that temperature.”
The conversation turns to gardening, which is just another way to talk about food. “That bright green color of pesto made from fresh basil,” I say. She sighs, happy.
“And tomatoes – bright and firm and red,” she counters. For a moment I find myself as content as I ever have been, talking about cooking with someone who understands what it is that makes it so lovely, so vibrant, so fulfilling.
Jane’s comment is offhand – “I think I might be getting a cold.” It means nothing. It is small talk. The bus is crowded. Someone is standing over us, a woman, and she says something I don’t hear, something I only see as it washes over Jane’s face. Her voice comes into focus, slowly, as if I were drugged.
“I hope you have pneumonia. I hope you die from it.”
The woman moves away from us quickly, before my mind can formulate a meaning to the words. I cannot breathe. Wait! We were only talking about bread! There is nothing worth hating here. I look over at Jane, who is clearly upset. “People say the worst things to me sometimes. One guy said I ought to blow my head off.” She shakes her head, and then, by all appearances, she has recovered. We talk about bread again. I don’t recover. Not really.
Because if it happened to Jane, it could happen to Jess. And if it happened to Jess – this is unspeakable.
Jess’ transition catapulted me into an uncomfortable awareness of a privilege I didn’t know I had. I am cisgendered. I am a woman and so is my body. My own upturned wrist, my demure smile, my hair tucked behind my ear -- each of these things shoots me now with a haunting ache, each seems affected even as I know they are not. They are not affected, because they are natural. They come naturally to me, because I was lucky. I was lucky.
I will never have to tell a potential employer that I used to have a name that they might find is unusual for a woman. I will never have to explain to a new doctor why I’m on estrogen pills. I will never have to question whether someone spurned my offers of friendship because they disliked me personally, or because of something deeper. I will never, never have someone tell me that they hope I die from pneumonia just because I am wearing a dress.
In light of that privilege, all of my other privileges, the ones I have gotten used to having, seem paltry. It does not, after all, seem all that special to have a kitchen in which I can bake bread.
I roll my crackers out and cut them into shapes. I started to do this because it made for fun photographs for my blog, but now I do it because I have mutiny on my hands if I don't. Square crackers, kicking puppies, what's the difference?
