Shaawan Francis Keahna

Stealth

On the phone with a trans elder. Maybe she’d hate being called that. She is, though, old and monied and cynical. They’d call her a “battle-axe” back home. Tough broad. California accent. She works in Hollywood, kind of, but primarily in trans healthcare, demystifying it for medical researchers at universities I’d never set foot in. She tells me the rich transsexuals haven’t been posting about the election because they’re either “closet MAGA freaks” or in hiding, like she is.
            “I don’t wanna be shot,” she says, “literally shot.”
            I keep calling the rich people I’m tangentially related to and hoping they have good news. Once you reach a certain tax bracket, the American Dream promises me, everything’s sugar and roses. Not so.
            “You’re rare,” the old lady keeps saying. “You know, I can always clock a trans man by their voice. Every single trans man. Not you, though. And do you know why that is?”
            She launches into a fascinating rundown on the maturation of vocal cords over male and female puberty. My mind is a bloated corpse. The flies set upon it as I think of my aunt, who, mere days before that video of Trump calling trans people “spiritually mutilated” went viral, said transness is a manifestation of “bad medicine.” That abusers like to change their victims’ genders so they can be subservient to them. She means her “son,” who is her daughter, and isn’t that always the underlying meaning? That women are weaker? It’s just misogyny all the way down.
            “Anyways, that’s why trans healthcare is so important, you know. Catch it early and you’ll be harder to clock. Speaking of, when did you transition?”
            I was nineteen. It was perfect timing. The “transgender tipping point” hadn’t been reached yet. I could still walk into any Planned Parenthood in New York State and leave with a shot of testosterone in my thigh meat, administered by a nurse practitioner who didn’t give a fuck.
            “That’s why,” the old lady says. “You were just on the outer edge of female puberty. Still malleable.”
            Actually, I realize after we hang up, that’s not why my voice is a deep, resonant bass. If the key difference between a cis man and a trans man is that the cis man’s vocal cords are longer, mine would have been bio-identical to begin with. When my eight-octave range was being trained, my teachers had me bend my neck all the way back until my crown rested between my shoulder blades. They’d have me hum. The idea was to stretch my vocal cords, warm them and keep them long. When I turned up the testosterone, all the equipment was already plugged in.
            Not for the first time, I imagine being stealth. Without trying, I already am, six-foot-one and conventionally handsome. I think about stealth as OPSEC, stealth as silence, stealth as a hidden knife held to a billionaire’s jugular.
            I am not spiritually mutilated, nor am I bad medicine.
            I might be a dangerous man.