“You can ride on my lap.”
Added a Postscript at 8:00 p.m. PDT on April 25, 2018
Five years ago, I spent a week in Fort Lauderdale to attend a trans-related medical symposium. One of the event’s highlights was meeting Jazz Jenning and her mother in person. Jazz is a well-known trans girl who became famous when Barbara Walters interviewed her in 2008 at five. In her late teens, she starred in her own reality TV series, “I am Jazz.”
Those jerks, I thought. They were going to leave me behind.
I’ve often wondered what that man, or the rest of them in the cab, would have said if they knew I was trans. Crap. What was I thinking?
Five years ago, I spent a week in Fort Lauderdale to attend a trans-related medical symposium. One of the event’s highlights was meeting Jazz Jenning and her mother in person. Jazz is a well-known trans girl who became famous when Barbara Walters interviewed her in 2008 at five. In her late teens, she starred in her own reality TV series, “I am Jazz.”
The other highlight was staying with my first cousin, Carlos, and his wife, who live in Ft. Lauderdale. Carlos drove me to the airport on Tuesday for my return trip to Vancouver via Chicago. As he pulled away, my phone vibrated. A text message from United Airlines told me my 4:15 flight to Chicago was delayed until after 7:00 p.m. I panicked.
I rushed into the airport and went to the United Airlines ticket counter. I told them I had a problem. I was scheduled to catch a connecting flight from Chicago to Vancouver at about the same time I would be boarding the plane in Ft. Lauderdale. There were no later flights from Chicago to Vancouver on United or any other airline that night.
I had an urgent appointment at 11:30 a.m. at the Vancouver School of Theology the following day, and it looked like I wasn’t going to make it.
Crap!
The United Airlines representative told me that since the delay was not due to the weather but a mechanical problem, they would put me in a hotel in Chicago and then on to a flight to Vancouver that left at 9:00 a.m., but because of the time difference, I would arrive in Vancouver at 10:15 a.m. It would be tight, but it would give me enough time to get to the meeting, barring any snags along the way. The annoying thing was that I would have to go to the United Airlines (UA) customer service counter upon arrival at O’Hare to get them to put me in a hotel.
O’Hare is not a small airport. By the time I collected my suitcase and made it to the UA counter, there were over 100 people ahead of me. It was 11:150 p.m. when I finally got to speak to an agent. She was visibly overworked that day—it had been a long shift for her. After confirming that my flight’s delay was mechanical and not weather related, she gave me a voucher for a night at a Quality Inn and told me where I would find the shuttle to the hotel.
UA would have been off the hook if the delay had been weather-related. I would have had to find a hotel for the night and pay for them myself.
I made my way to the spot where the shuttle was to pick me up. Before long, there were five more passengers who had vouchers for the same hotel, all men, ranging in age from thirty-five to fifty. We had all been told the same thing: a shuttle came by every thirty minutes.
After 45 minutes, we were still waiting for the shuttle. One of the men had a great idea, to call the 1-800 number on the voucher. He spoke to the front desk at our host hotel and learned that their shuttle service had made its last run at 11:00 p.m. and would return to the airport at 7:00 a.m. The other bad news was the Quality Inn we had been booked into was a thirty-minute drive from O’Hare. The hotel was located next to an executive airport outside of Chicago.
We were screwed. But then I spotted another Quality Inn shuttle stopped about 100 meters away. I told the group I would find out if it could take us to our hotel. We knew every shuttle was from a different hotel, but I reasoned they were the same company, right?
No-go; the van driver told me he could not take us to a different hotel and suggested we take a cab.
I turned around and saw the men loading their bags into a Yellow Cab, a Ford Crown Royal, and then climbing into the cab. I started running, pulling my suitcase on wheels as I watched all four doors close, and then the taxi started to pull away with its rear end loaded low to the ground. I put my right thumb and index finger together to my lips and let out the loudest whistle I could produce. The cab stopped!
The driver managed to find room in the trunk for my suitcase, but there was no seat for me. The man sitting by the back door on the passenger side offered, “You can ride on my lap.”
I figured I would be safe in numbers and accepted his offer. Was it awkward? Hell yes! I put it out of my mind for five years; I’m only telling you about it now.
The ride took over thirty minutes, and the six of us split the $120 fare. It was after 1:45 a.m. before I was handed a room key at the front desk. I needed to catch the hotel’s first shuttle that left at 6:30 a.m. so I could be at the airport by 7:00. The front desk programmed a wake-up call for 5:30. At least I got three hours of sleep and a hot shower.
The good news is I made it to my appointment at VST. The rest is history; I went on to do a Master’s degree. And to think I sat on a stranger’s lap to get there.
I’ve often wondered what that man, or the rest of them in the cab, would have said if they knew I was trans. Crap. What was I thinking?
Postscript
As I was typing the words last night, there was a nagging sense there was something else—something important to say about this somewhat humorous, if not awkward, event. Perhaps there is a hint of this in my questions at the end.
Today at work, it hit me. I failed to acknowledge my privilege as a trans person who society seems to have granted me “passing” status. This is a difficult topic in the trans community because some would argue that the whole notion of passing is odious; it makes second-class citizens of those who don’t get passing status.
Here is where it gets thorny. Who, after all, is the final judge and arbiter for society on who passes and who doesn’t? Where do we draw the line as to who “looks” like a “real woman” or a “real man?” A more challenging question might be: why do we need to make any distinction?
I hope you can see why this is a troublesome conversation, but I had to acknowledge that the story’s outcome could have been very different if I had not looked woman enough for this group of men. I don’t mean hyperbolically, for example: that I could have been viciously attacked, sexually assaulted, killed, and dumped on the outskirts of Chicago. I’m talking more about not being accepted into the group. That is what we became at that moment; our common struggle made us a group.
I could have been shunned and rejected or made to feel unwelcome. But things worked out okay for me that night. The men saw me as a woman who met their unconscious, socially programmed criteria of how a woman should look. I passed the test.
But didn’t I say they started to drive away without me? Yes. But their excuse made sense at the time. They lost sight of me when I half-entered the van’s sliding door to speak to the driver. They thought I’d solved my ride situation and left without them.
