Eliza Hammond

♫ Panama - The Cat Empire ♫

It was December 22nd, and Will and I were finally heading home for winter break. Thanks to Will forcing me to study (against my will*, I must note), there were no finals during which I felt completely out of my depth. Goodbye, Professor Casella! I’ll see you, and your short answer questions about Iwo Jima, in hell! With tests out of the way, I had a solid four weeks just to chill! To relax! To… go back home to Michigan. And yes, I had to go home. After having been pricked three times with a special kind of vaccine, I no longer had an excuse. I hadn’t gone back the previous year, and I was legitimately worried my dad would jump off of Bridgewater Place if I tried it again.

(*Heh, Will. That’s his name.)

Everyone has their secrets. I know for a fact that Will Robinson secretly collects Yugioh cards. Once, when I visited my dad's apartment, I found a vibrator in one of his kitchen cabinets. Not judging, but damn! Keep that shit away from your spoons! My twisted little secret is that I’ve always really liked airports. There’s something peaceful about liminal spaces that tickles me like the creepiest of uncles. I can just sit at the airport gate, exist outside of time for a while, yet know exactly what I’m going to do with the rest of my day. Of course, once I started growing tits, there had been one mandatory disruption to the delirious kenopsia of the airport: The TSA absolutely loved feeling me up.

So, as Will and I stood in Terminal 1 of Laguardia Airport, preparing to fly back to Grand Rapids, I was having an intense debate in my head. Get through security quickly to better enjoy the hot water and cold seats of our gate, or delay the whole process as much as humanly possible? Will was in no state to help me decide. “Come o-o-o-on!” I whined, pulling him behind me towards the security line.

“Dunwanna,” he grumbled. He looked virtually catatonic. His eyes were glazed over, and even with his mask, I could see him breathing through his mouth. Will had been acting really strange around me the past few days. It was especially annoying during our late-night study sessions. How the hell did he expect me to remember facts about Hirohito when he vacillated between acting super anxious and shockingly bold during our conversations? I couldn’t blame his behavior on anything specific, but there was this general ~strangeness~ that permeated our interactions. I worried I was doing something wrong.

This time, though, I was pretty sure I had nothing to do with his behavior. For whatever reason, getting him to security had been an incredible chore. Did he have a rivalry with the x-ray machine, or something? I decided to ask. “I’m trans, but why are you scared of the TSA?”

His eyes got a little less glassy, and he used them to look at me like I was an idiot. “I’m literally brown,” he remarked.

“Oh. Yeah.” Maybe I really was an idiot.

“Also, I’m… scared of flying.” Will looked down at the linoleum tiles of LaGuardia and shuffled in place a little bit. God, did he always have to be so fucking coquettish?

I fought back the urge to tease him. “Aww, I’m sorry,” I cooed, in a much more condescending tone than I intended. He didn’t say anything, so I awkwardly added, “I’m here for you,” with a pat on the back for good measure.

While I couldn’t have done anything to prevent a plane crash except to act as Will’s meat shield, he smiled at me anyway. “Thanks.” Damn, his smile was kinda cute. It was slight but intense, and it went perfectly with his gentle brown eyes, and… and… I looked away and coughed slightly. Was LaGuardia always this hot?

We made our way to the security line, which was guarded by one of those guys who checks your ID. ID Guys, I think is their official name. I pulled out my passport, which hadn’t been updated in four years, and handed it to the bored ID Guy, a fifty-something man whose hairline was trying to escape down the back of his head. Even before looking at the passport, he gave me a look of such derision that I had to remind myself it (probably) wasn’t personal. I pulled down my mask, and he compared 3D me with 2017 me for what felt like a full minute. “Is this you?” he asked, which actually made me roll my eyes. It’s not like I looked that different back then!

“Yes, of course it’s me,” I replied.

“Hmm…” He gave me another once-over, before handing me back my passport. “Alright, sir. Have a good day.” I could tell he didn’t mean it.

I grit my teeth. “You too.” I hung around the booth while Will went through the same process. In his case, it took all of five seconds before he was handed his license and joined me in line. I wondered what his license photo looked like.

As if reading my mind, he showed me his card, saying, “I got it updated last year. I don’t look that different, so–” he shrugged.

“Neither do I,” I grumbled. After waffling for a few seconds about whether or not to show him my picture, I cracked open my passport. In the photo stood a fifteen-year-old version of me, almost a year before I switched schools and started hormones. I had scruffy, unkempt greasy hair, a loose t-shirt that hid my man-boobs (fat, not tissue), and too much acne. Way too much acne.

“That’s actually you?” Will asked. He sounded genuinely surprised, which made me chuckle.

“Yes, you idiot!” I playfully slapped his surprisingly-toned chest. “You literally knew me back then!”

He looked at the photo again. “Wow. Honestly, I sometimes forget that you were ever a boy.” He turned his gaze to me and added, completely deadpan, “Eliza suits you much better than that other name ever did.” Like I said, he alternated between acting high-strung and shockingly bold.

I blushed a little. Figuratively, of course, because who the hell actually blushes in real life? Sure, it might happen in the Jerry Seinfeld x Jerry the Mouse erotica I definitely haven’t read, but that’s not real. At least, I hope it’s not. “T-thanks,” I stammered, giving Will my signature nasty, lopsided smile.

We’d already moved up a bit in line, which was surprising given how many people were going home to visit their families. Either the Christmas rush was a few days behind us, or the airport was better organized than I thought. Stand-up comics wrote entire routines about how shitty LaGuardia was; how it was hard to navigate and smelled even worse. But in the entire time I’d lived in New York, I hadn’t had any issues. It was efficient, clean enough, and only had a regular number of rats. Before the November 25th Incident, Zoe told me that it had been recently renovated, and used to be way worse. Thanks, Andrew Cuomo! (Please do not quote that last sentence out of context.)

Anyway, I was just glad that it didn’t take two hours to get through security like it did at JFK. After thirty, forty minutes tops, Will and I were at the front of the line. There, we performed the sacred airport rituals of shoe removal and pocket emptying. I didn’t say anything to Will, but I was getting a little nervous. The last time I went through the TSA, the scanner marked my boobs as anomalies. It was a mistake that almost got me strip-searched. I didn’t want that to happen again.

Remember a few sentences ago, when I said I didn’t say anything to Will about how nervous I was? I lied. “Will,” I whined, pulling on his sleeve like a forlorn child, and doing a voice to match. “I’m vewy scawed.”

He looked away from me and simpered. “Oh my god, please don’t do that with your voice.” I could tell he was hiding a smile.

“Why not? Is this your fetish, Will?” After seeing how flustered he was, I knew immediately that I’d have to use this voice around him as much as I possibly could. He didn’t respond, at least not verbally. Instead, he just gave me one of those ‘my lips are sealed’ gestures and speed-walked into the X-ray machine. It was one of those newfangled metal cylinders with enough radiation to give the Hulk stage 4 cancer. He did the T-pose to assert dominance, and in a few seconds he was on his way to collect his stuff. Based on other stories he’d later regaled me with, him getting off this easy was the exception, not the rule.

I entered the doom cylinder with complicated feelings running through my mind. Should I want to be seen as a girl, or should I just get out of here as quickly as possible? Or what if I got out of the machine, and they stamped my passport with a giant shemale stamp and paraded me around the airport in a petticoat and–oh shit, the scan was finished. I walked out of the machine and prayed they’d just let me go. The TSA agent was a heavyset man who looked like if you took the ID guy and turned the saturation filter down a few notches. Seriously, his skin was almost as gray as his mullet.

“Ma’am, we’re gonna need you to get back in the machine,” he asserted. His voice was awfully nasally for someone with so much unearned authority. Ma’am, huh? That’s nice. Also… fuck. There was a screen next to the X-ray machine that showed detected anomalies, and sure enough, there was one giant red box around my crotch. On the bottom right I noticed two buttons designed to scan male and female bodies (way to push the gender binary, TSA). As I re-entered the X-ray machine, I saw the agent lean in and press the female button.

I wanted to count that as a win, but that only meant my dick was still going to show up on the scanner. Was I really going to have to “correct” someone who properly gendered me? To explain that I’m a guy underneath these comfy pajamas? And if I had to get patted down, would that be validating or a breach of space? It reminded me of the few times I’d been catcalled. Should I have been happy the one time a street weed vendor said his strain was “free for you, mami?” I was pretty sure gratitude wasn’t the proper emotion, but on the off chance that it was, I certainly wasn’t feeling any.

Before I could T-pose again, the TSA agent leaned in and said, “The problem is probably the drawstring of your pants. You wanna tuck that in for me?” I looked down, and sure enough, the drawstring of my fluffy pajama pants was there, just dangling around. I obliged and tucked it into my pants, knowing that it wouldn’t actually fix anything. Unless my drawstring could do Gender Confirmation Surgery, which I was pretty sure it couldn’t.

We went through the whole process again. A minute later, I came back out of the machine, and sure enough: one anomaly. Yep, it was my dick. The agent looked at me and, for whatever reason, still didn’t seem to put two-and-two together. “Ma’am, is it okay if we give you a waist patdown?” he asked. Half his job was literally just to gender the people who walked through his domain, and yet he was still somehow oblivious. Dude, there’s one anomaly and it’s around the crotch! How do you not start to think that the ma’am you’ve been talking to isn’t as ma’am as she seems?

I gulped and nervously answered his request. “Um, sure. Okay.” Not that I really had a choice. I was pretty sure it was illegal to refuse a TSA request, and it would have made things even more awkward if I told him the truth. He ushered me over to a female agent, because I guess it’s not groping if a woman does it? She was probably in her thirties, with smooth skin, curly brown hair and a neutral expression that, when compared to the other agents, seemed positively ecstatic. She patted me around my waistband, pinching the top of my pants for clues. When she found that the cocaine I definitely had on my person wasn’t hidden in my drawstring, she blue skidoo’d down my pants to–oop! Yeah, she found the anomaly. With surprising grip strength, too. Ow.

She pulled her hand away in a flash, and even though I was ostensibly the victim, I couldn’t help but feel like a pervert. “I’m so sorry, sir,” she said, sounding just as frazzled as I felt. “We must have made some mistake.”

“Oh, well, uh…” I thought about just telling her the truth. I’m trans, deal with it. But it was a little too late for that, wasn’t it? She’d just think it was creepy that I didn’t speak out sooner, that I stood still while she felt up a man in a metaphorical dress. I bet she already thought I was trying to get Groped by the Government. I couldn’t admit that I wanted to be a girl and make things even worse. No, I needed to bullshit my way out of this. “I have a hormone imbalance that makes my body produce a lot of estrogen. Sometimes people think I’m a girl.” Perfect.

She nodded as though what I said made any sense at all. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” she pitied. “It must be so sad, to have your body develop in ways antithetical to your preferred gender expression.”

I nodded enough times and with enough speed to pull a neck muscle. Ow, again. “Yeah, totally. Absolutely, bro.”

She gave me a solemn nod in return. “Oh, you’re free to go, now that we know what the anomaly was.”

“Thanks,” I muttered, chastened by our interaction. “Have a good day.”

I walked over to Will, who I’d briefly forgotten about. He saw the whole situation play out and was giving me a really weird look. Even after I grabbed my carry-on and put on my shoes, he was still staring. Guess he was back to being awkward. “What?” I asked, gently nudging him in the shoulder. “What’s up?”

“Why would you say that to her?”

Play dumb, my hindbrain whispered. “To who?” Not that dumb, stupid!

“To the TSA lady,” he reiterated. “Why’d you tell her you have a hormone imbalance?”

Huh, why did I say that? I tried to think of a good reason. “They like you more if they think it’s an accident,” I supposed. “When you take estrogen on purpose it’s weird, but if it’s out of your control then they feel sympathetic.”

His eyebrows crinkled, and he shook his head. “But why does their sympathy even matter?” he volleyed back.

I returned his volley with a spike over the net. “I don’t know, because they’re the fucking TSA? Because they can legally harass me without recourse?” That shut him up, but I think we both knew there was something deeper there than a fear of authority. Something about my transition being out of my hands made it feel more acceptable. Why was the fact that I’d chosen this path the part I was most embarrassed about? Was it because society marked being trans as a blemish, an inherent character flaw? Or was I the one who saw things that way? Maybe it was because accepting my identity would mean admitting, both to society and myself, that I wasn’t the cis woman I so deeply wanted to be. Ow, the third.

All Will said, as if witnessing the argument in my head, was “You’re so freaking weird.” Over the next few minutes, we silently passed all the famous landmarks of LaGuardia: a Hudson News store selling fake magazines featuring celebrities you’d SWEAR were fake (and her 40lb weight loss transformation will shock you!). An Auntie Anne’s with a perpetual twenty-person line, which made me wonder just how many pretzels they actually had hiding under there. By the time we passed the two-hundredth child running on the travelator, we knew we were approaching our gate. In contrast to the chaos of security, the gate was pretty benign. As with every airport gate, there were too many chairs and too few charging stations.

“Here we are,” Will said. “Gate B9.” Like I said: pretty B9.

We plopped down onto some seats and prepared to vibe until the boarding call. “So…” Will said, “you come here often?”

I smirked. Dork. “No, not really. I’m, uh...” I struggled to keep the bit going. “...normally flown by private jet. Me and Jeff hang out pretty often.”

“Who?” Jeez, Will clearly didn’t know the golden rule of improv.

“Uh, Bezos?”

He laughed in confusion. “What the hell are you talking about?”

My jovial pretense faltered a little bit. “Man, I don’t fucking know,” I whined. “I got three hours of sleep last night, a TSA agent just grabbed my dick, and I don’t want to see my dad!” Dammit. Way to bring down the mood, me.

“Oh.” Will’s expression went from nervous laughter to equally-nervous sympathy. “For what it’s worth, I don’t really want to see my parents, either.”

“Why not?” I realized that during the months we’d been reunited, I hadn’t really asked Will what his familial situation was like. I knew he had some kind of falling out with his parents, and we’d bonded a little bit over that, but I was never told the specifics.

“Um… geez, okay. When I told my parents I wanted to go to college in New York, we got into a huge fight. They told me I was making a mistake, that I wouldn’t be able to handle life in the big city. I think they just didn’t want me so far away.” Something told me there was more to the story, but I fought back the urge to make him elaborate.

“That’s kind of sweet, though, right?” I was pretty sure Daddy Dearest was overjoyed that I had gone off on my own, and my mom…? Well, the less said about her the better. I would have traded my left ear to have such caring parents. Even if they were a little overbearing.

But Will was incensed by my response. “It’s not, though! It’s really not.” He balled up his fists and bit out an explanation. “They kept me on such a close leash all my life. They made me study for hours every day, made me practice an instrument I didn’t enjoy. But the moment I tried to deviate from the life they had planned for me, they were absolutely furious. They never cared about me as a person. They just wanted a trophy son.”

I could relate to that. Take away the ‘trophy’ in his last sentence and you had my relationship with my mother. “I’m sorry, Will. That sucks.” I tried to think of some advice but couldn’t come up with anything great. “Look, I don’t think you’re obligated to make up with your family. If I had a friend who treated me like your parents treat you, I would drop them in a heartbeat. So, you don’t need to fix things if you don’t want to.” He didn’t look convinced. “And for what it’s worth, I care about you as a person.”

He gave me a sad smile. “I know you do. Thanks.” I knew it wasn’t what he wanted, but it was all I could provide. “Anyway. Why are you scared to see your dad?”

“Um, well–”

We were cut off by an announcement from the PA system. “Bing-bong,” it jingled. “Gate B9, boarding groups one through three are now open for boarding.”

“That’s us!” I proclaimed. I jumped out of my seat and Will followed sluggishly behind, the conversation forgotten for the moment. We got in line, which once again went faster than you’d expect, and soon enough I was showing my boarding pass to the lady at the desk. She gave it a quick scan, not even thinking to glance in my direction, then said, “have a nice day, sir!”

I sighed, then walked into the gangway to slowly make my way to the airplane. Will followed right behind me, and I gave him an expectant look. “See, I told you!”

“Told me what?” he asked.

“That I don’t pass! Remember when I said I didn’t pass, and you said I did? Well, I don’t!” No idea why I was acting so smug, but I was.

Will gave me a weird look. “That was, like, three months ago. Also, what?” He sighed. “That lady calling you sir doesn’t mean you don’t pass, especially when she was looking directly at your boarding pass. Plus, you literally just got pulled over by the TSA for passing too well!”

“Well yeah, but I’m sure they figured it out at some point. Like, maybe they just called me ma’am because they thought it’d be too awkward not to? Or–I don’t know, whatever! That doesn’t prove anything!” I huffed.

“So, when someone calls you miss, you try to say they made a mistake, but when someone calls you sir, you immediately accept it?”

I gave him a look that said ‘I know you’re right, but I refuse to admit it.’ “Yes. One hundred percent,” I declared, refusing to admit it.

He nodded sagely, clearly not wanting to continue the conversation. “Fine. Speak your truth,” he stated sarcastically. We stopped talking about trans issues after that. I didn’t want to burden him anymore with my weird idiosyncrasies, and I’m sure he was getting tired of being my personal therapist.

A few minutes later, we were sitting on the plane in seats next to one another. Will looked increasingly nervous. I needed to do something to make him feel safe, to be less of a human sadness beacon. So, when he started shivering as the plane took off, I held his hand and nuzzled into his shoulder. “This too shall pass,” I murmured in his ear, knowing I never would.