Permanent
“Don’t do anything permanent,” he had said to Wyatt and the other young gentlemen in the circle. The men’s eyes fell to look at their shoes on the floor. They exchanged quick, furtive glances as the group facilitator continued speaking. “You may want to be out now, but you may not want to be out later.” He ended his advice with a look that said, Take-It-From-Me, indicating his wisdom acquired by the newly gray hairs added to his beard.
That was over ten years ago at the city’s monthly transmasculine support group. Wyatt looked down at his arm. He remembered what it felt like to do something permanent. How eager he had been at that time to stamp his forearm with a large transgender symbol tattoo, proof of his queerness. His body had changed quicker than he could have ever imagined on testosterone, and any physical representation of his identity was no longer apparent. He wanted to be visibly out, visually trans. What did the old man know? Being trans was different now, easier, somehow. You could be out now. The idea of going stealth seemed unnecessary to him then, antiquated. Besides, who were these men to tell him not to do anything permanent when they had all embarked on a path of injectable androgens, creating the most permanent changes of all? He was grateful for his younger, progressively minded friends around him congratulating him on the artwork, pushing the older transgender man’s outdated ideas further down into his mind.
Little by little, though, that same voice came pushing its way forward from the back of his head – “Don’t do anything permanent.” It started a few months later, when he realized that someone had begun to follow him around town after grocery shopping. When he called the police, they shrugged off the stalking saying, “he could just be an odd duck”, and left it at that. Was it connected? That was hard to prove, after all. People had a right to be weird, the cop had said.
Wyatt nodded; people did have a right to be weird. It was weird when he entered a church that he had previously frequented and had multiple eyeballs glued not to the officiating priest but to his left forearm during the entire service. He felt himself instinctively move his arm behind his back, sitting on it. Even with his tattoo hidden, he could still feel the heat of their glances on him. He heard the voice again. “Don’t do anything permanent.” He didn’t return to that church where he had felt the heat of those glares. Sometimes being transgender felt almost like being a celebrity, where everyone was always staring at you.
Because you were, in fact, a celebrity. “We must be really important now,” one of his friends had quipped as they watched the news across the screen. “We are always on the TV; people are always talking about us,” she said. As the political climate became more, not less, hostile over the years to the now infamous people like him, Wyatt started to look into local cover-up tattoo artists.
Wyatt sat in the chair across from one of these designers, feeling the pain in his left arm for the second time. The ink needle drilled deeper into his skin, expressing the greens, blues, yellows, and violets required to craftily devise a desert scene of succulents, saguaros, and agave overlying the transgender symbol. The tattooist peered closely at his skin, then sat back and grabbed her ice water as a necessary break in the hot Sonoran sun. “Are you good, you need to take a breather?” she had asked him about halfway through the session. Wyatt relented, agreeing to a pause. They talked about her life as they rested, and she began to spill her daily worries about her children and ex-husband.
“That’s what I always tell people,” she said, as she planned to deal with the lengthy text messages from the man of her prior divorce after they finished. “Don’t do anything permanent.”
J. Drew, who writes under a pen name, is a transgender man from the American Southwest. https://jdrewbooks.wordpress.com/