May, 2011

Tom came out to me around 6 p.m. 

By 10 p.m. I was very drunk.

I am, I confess, a bit of a wine snob and I spent an inordinate amount of time puzzling over what would be the ideal wine to pair with transgender — surprisingly, even the world's foremost sommeliers were silent on the subject — and ultimately decided on a Central Coast Pinot Noir, because it was a little fruity.

And that, friends and neighbors, is some damn fine viticultural wordplay.

As shaken as I had been after Tom blindsided me with his stunning news, I still savored the opportunity to do the exact same thing to Samantha. I am not a gossip, but I understand the appeal. The delicious anticipation, the sense of control.

During our family dinner I listened to my daughters talk about their day, Hannah going on and on in tremendous emotional detail about the Machiavellian social maneuvering of her teenage peers, Jana getting in a sentence or two — a terse observation or a pithy quip whenever her sister paused for a bite of meat loaf or a sip of juice — and I smiled to myself, imagining what Samantha's reaction would be to the bombshell I was patiently preparing to drop.

The girls cleared the dishes and went off to their rooms to do their homework. I asked Samantha about her day and listened attentively as she told me about it. Coffee with her friends, working at the student store at our kids' school, the frustrations of unreturned phone calls. And then it was my turn.

"Well, let's see," I began coyly. "I had an animatic review which went pretty well. Did a rewrite on the hedge maze script. And there was one other thing..." I took a slow, deliberate sip of my Pinot. "Oh! Right! Tom is going to be a woman."

Samantha did not disappoint. Her head snapped back like she had taken a tree branch to the face, then she let out a long, incredulous laugh, as she struggled to form a word, which she eventually did.

"WHAT?!"

I brought her up to speed. Tom's gender dysphoria, the anti-depressants, the years of hiding. The years of lies. Samantha listened with open-mouthed amazement, occasionally gesturing incoherently with her hands, while her eyebrows leapt balletically around her forehead.

"More, please," she said, when I finished, holding up her wine glass. I poured out the rest of the bottle and then went over to the kitchen counter to crack open another. I tore the foil off as Samantha collected herself. And when she did, she had a lot of questions.

"How long has Tom known he was a woman?"

"I don't know," I replied. I pierced the cork and twisted the corkscrew, the sharp steel sinking into the soft material.

"When is Tom planning to come out publicly?"

"No idea." I gripped the bottle and pulled on the corkscrew.

"Is he going to have surgery?"

"I didn't ask."

"What is he going to tell his kids?"

"We didn't discuss it." The cork gave way with a soft pop and I rejoined her at the kitchen table.

"Is he taking hormones?"

I shrugged apologetically. These were all things that I should have asked Tom, but I had been too gobsmacked by the headline to delve into the details.

"I told you," she said with a grin, "there was something weird about your relationship." I had always bristled at the suggestion, but there was no arguing with it now.

"Well," I replied, "you could have been more specific."

"And spoiled the surprise? What fun would that have been?" She laughed and I forced a smile as I topped off my own glass.

I had thought about this on the drive home, how our friendship would now look to other people. All the times Tom had stayed over in my room when we were teenagers, all the years we had lived together in an apartment. All the girlfriends who had viewed Tom as a rival for my affections. It would all seem different now. Odd, deviant, maybe sexual. Over the years, there had been a lot of jokes about us being a gay couple, which never bothered me because it was so preposterous. Would people start to see us as a heterosexual couple? That would be, I believed for no definable reason, exponentially worse.

"I can't believe we're dealing with this." I dragged my palms down my face.

"So did you you see this coming, even a little bit?" I sighed. It was the second time in four hours I had been asked that question and in the years to come I would be hearing it a lot more.

Had I been looking for clues, I would have found them in abundance. The lustrous long hair, obviously. He was also wearing earrings, but I thought nothing of it, particularly since I had worn them myself in my twenties, three of them on my left ear — my father-in-law hated them — a practice which eventually I stopped back when baby Hannah thought it was fun to pull on them.

Tom had also taken to wearing blousy, silky shirts with flamboyant patterns. I had, in fact, teased him about their feminine nature. "Is there something you're trying to tell me?" I never dreamed that the answer was yes.

As before, I had chalked it all up to a mid-life crisis. I had joked with Samantha that it was only a matter of time before Tom bought a convertible. (He — she — eventually did get a convertible, by the way. So I was right about that, at least.)

"More? I asked, holding up the bottle.

Samantha tapped her nose with her forefinger a few times. This was her test to determine how drunk she was. If her nose had gone numb, it was time to stop. "I better not."

"Are you suuuuure?" I am a shameless wine pusher. It is one of my best qualities.

She wavered. "Fuck it." She handed me her glass and I filled it a quarter of the way before she made the blackjack hold signal and I stopped.

We sat in silence for a little while. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, feeling the rise and fall of my chest, the gentle breeze from the ceiling fan, the slight sway of my body. It was the perfect amount of drunk. If I could, I'd live there forever.

"OK," Samantha said abruptly and I opened my eyes. "You know what I don't get?" There was a new intensity to her tone, the product of an interior monologue to which I had not been privy.

"What don't you get?"

"What kind of lunatic," she demanded in a scandalized voice, "would choose to become a middle-aged woman?" She punctuated her sentence by banging her fist on the table.

I laughed at that. But I also understood the painful truth behind those words. Samantha had recently turned forty-six and was feeling not just old, but invisible. This was a complaint of women everywhere, but was amplified tenfold in a place like Los Angeles, which was built on youth and beauty. Frequently overlooked by salespeople and dismissed by repairmen, she felt she had to become increasingly assertive to get noticed and was worried that she was coming off as a harpy.

Which she was.

Not from my perspective, of course, but I saw the way a lot of men reacted to her, heard the condescension in their voices, caught the glances they shot my way, either sympathizing with me for having to live with this bitch or wondering why I wasn't doing a better job controlling her. There was an assumption, it seemed, that an assertive woman was necessarily the byproduct of a weak man.

This was one of the many things that I had not considered, and as I would eventually find out, Tom had not fully considered himself: Becoming a woman was about a lot more than laser hair removal, a genital overhaul and a shiny new pair of breasts; it was about one's place in society. Tom may have always felt like a woman but he still enjoyed the power and prerogative of maleness. He was seen, he was heard, he was taken seriously by car salespeople. And as a man, he always would be.

Tamara was born, so to speak, in her forties; from Samantha's perspective at pretty much the exact wrong time. Tamara had not only signed away her valuable male privilege, but had done so at the very moment that her femininity was becoming increasingly worthless in the eyes of society.

And to me, this pointed to an unspoken tragedy. Because Tamara would never get to experience life as a young woman. She would never feel the power of being young and pretty and desirable. To be yearned for. To inspire that bodily want that masqueraded as need. To have someone cross the room to meet her, because they had to.

Instead, she would begin her feminine journey with joint pain and high blood pressure, slackening skin and an expanding waistline, strangled by foundation garments, drowning in moisturizers. Tamara had missed so much. Because of her shame. Because of her fear. Half of her life, gone.

"So," Samantha said with a wry smile, "you're not planning to leave me for Tammy, are you?"

"First of all," I said with mock indignity, "it's Tamara."

She held up her hands in faux apology. "Oh. Excuse me."

"And I promise you, when I leave you for another woman, it's going to be someone much younger. And with all-original parts."

"That's all I can ask." She held up her glass and we clinked.

The next afternoon, when my hangover had mostly receded, I called my parents to bring them up to speed as well. This was not a breach of trust. Tom had long understood that anything he told me in confidence would stay confidential, with the caveat that I would definitely tell Samantha and, probably, my parents as well. But that would be as far as it went.

My parents were shocked, of course. But not so shocked that within minutes of hearing the news, my father said, "As long as we're on the subject, we have something to tell you, too." I suspected that he was about to do a bit and I was right. "I'm not really your father. I'm actually your mother. Your mother is your real father. Also, your dog was really a cactus and your grandparents were sea otters."

"I suspected as much," I said, playing along. "It certainly explains why their breath always smelled like fish."

We all had a nice laugh and then my mother, as she was wont to do, zeroed in on my greatest fear. "How will this affect your career?"

"Honestly," I said dishonestly, "I haven't even thought about it." It was, in fact, the very first thing that leapt into my mind when Tom told me his news. I know it doesn't speak well of me, worrying about myself while my best friend was baring his girly soul to me. But then again, with our fiscal fortunes intertwined, Tom's decision could have real, tangible impact on me and my family. And unlike Tom, I did not make a choice.

"Remember what happened," my mother reminded me, "with Barry Teller?"

She was actually referring to Larry Keller, the actor we had cast as the voice of Twig. Larry was a former Brat-Packer and DuckGoose considered him something of a "get." Not because he meant anything to children, but because he meant something to the parents who determined what their children were allowed to watch. He was also the source of a scandal that almost destroyed our show.

It was Gia who brought it to our attention. "Um. Do you guys follow Larry on Twitter?"

"I'm not on Twitter," Tom said, perhaps more disdainfully than necessary.

"Me, either," I said. "I was on Twitter for maybe a week, then I deleted my account." Gia nodded, indifferent to this information. "It's like standing under a gravel waterfall," I added.

"Great," Gia said dismissively. "Anyway, you should probably know that Larry has been tweeting about how much he'd like to stick his big toe all the way up Michelle Obama's bleached asshole."

Holy hell.

"See for yourselves." She handed Tom her iPhone and I peered over his shoulder. We stared at the screen, dumbfounded. All Tom could think to say in the face of this naked obscenity was, "That's not good."

"No, it isn't," I agreed. Then I turned to Gia. "I don't suppose he explained why."

"Why Michelle Obama bleaches her asshole?"

"She doesn't bleach her asshole!" I snapped.

Gia bristled at my tone. "How the fuck do you know?"

"I meant," I said, struggling to contain my anger, "did Larry explain why he felt the need to make this particular comment?"

"He didn't walk us through his reasoning process, no."

"Is that it?" Tom asked, hopefully.

Gia grimaced and shook her head vigorously. "It gets worse."

As Tom scrolled, we discovered that Larry had quite a fondness for the C-word.

C-beast. C-whore. C-face. C-licker. Ass-C (which made no anatomical sense). C-tastic (which at least seemed kind of complimentary). Dumb-C. Wonder-C (which he rhymed with Thunder-C in an adorable little poem he wrote). Lying-C. C-tard. It just kept going.

If there was a silver lining — and let's be clear, there fucking wasn't — it was that most of his vitriol wasn't targeted at the First Lady. And some of it wasn't targeted at women at all. So it was maybe less of a misogyny thing and more of a limited vocabulary Tourette's syndrome kind of thing.

"Well... I mean..." Tom said, grasping at straws. "It's his private account."

"The thing is," Gia explained, "DuckGoose links the show's page to his Twitter account. So if a kid wants to learn more about the show..."

"Jesus Christ," Tom muttered.

I turned to Brie, who we had hired as a writers assistant — her latest food allergy, in case you're wondering, was pine nuts — and saw that she was biting her knuckles to keep herself from laughing. "Get me whoever the fuck I should be yelling at."

That person, it turned out, was Cameron. "He's really sweet," Brie said protectively as she connected us. I nodded. I would be nice to Cameron.

"Hey, Cameron," I began in a friendly tone. Brie smiled approvingly. "Aaron Rubicon over at Suit & Tie."

"Hi," he said, his voice mild. "What can I help you with?"

"Have you, perchance, seen Larry Keller's Twitter page?"

"I haven't," he admitted.

"Why don't you give it a look-see?" I said. "I'll wait."

I heard the clicking of a keyboard as he summoned the page. And then there was an audible gasp.

"Oh, dear," Cameron said when he picked up the receiver, which I have to admit I found kind of adorable. "That's a bit of a problem."

"Agreed. So maybe you want to talk to him about his language? Or at least stop sending children his way?"

"Yes," he said. "That would probably be for the best. I'll get right on that."

Unfortunately, by the time Cameron had sprung into action, TMZ had already broken the story and numerous other outlets picked it up, too. There were denunciations from parent organizations and religious groups. Larry offered one of those passive-aggressive non-apology apologies.

I'm sorry if any of you C-words were offended...

By the end of the day, Larry was fired. Cameron, too, since it was apparently his job to make sure stuff like this didn't happen. DuckGoose considered shutting us down, but we convinced them to recast. Ultimately, it was an inconvenience for us — we had to re-record all of Twig's lines with a new actor (whose Twitter page was, I can assure you, gone over with a fine tooth comb before he got the job) — but it also pointed to one of the burdens faced by a children's entertainment channel. Because while the stuff that Larry had written on Twitter was vile, it also wasn't any different than the things he had been tweeting for years. The difference was that he was now associated with DuckGoose, which very much needed to project a wholesome appearance. And certainly, someone who spent his days conjugating the C-word did not fit that image.

The really strange thing, though, was that despite the family-friendly sensibilities of their programming, DuckGoose was far and away the sleaziest place I had ever worked. And I'm not just talking about The Room, although it was much raunchier than anything we had experienced in primetime, but everything.

For instance, the voice actors were legendary for saying the most foul, offensive things... in the voices of the beloved cartoon characters they played. Imagine, for instance, Po from Kung Fu Panda confessing to being a serial killer and describing the sexual satisfaction he gets from ritual torture, dismemberment and necrophilia. Hilarious... but so very, very dark.

The sound engineers liked to keep the recordings for their own amusement and I always imagined the shit-storm that would rain down on DuckGoose if they ever found their way to the public.

But that was only the pretend stuff. The real stuff was far more disturbing. For instance, everyone needed to pass a background check before they were hired. Why? Because a few years earlier, and on more than one occasion, employees of DuckGoose would go to the nearby park on their lunch break and ask a young boy if he would like to come to his office and see how cartoons are made.

(I have no joke for that. Just... yuck.)

One woman in the office was stalked for months by an unknown employee who kept sending her increasingly disturbing and sexually explicit love notes. In some, he would assure her that he would abandon both his wife and his children for her, in others he would tell her all the ways that he would make her come, in others he threatened her life. (It's called romance, people!) Eventually, they found out the culprit and it was the head of security. DuckGoose got some bad press when he was arrested, the cheerful, colorful sign on the front of the building juxtaposed with the shamefaced head of security emerging with his head bowed in front of the local news cameras.

There were a lot of other would-be scandals that were nipped in the bud, before the public got wind of anything. Sexual harassment and assault, obscene art on cubicle walls, endless fucking in the bathroom stalls, a married couple whose mutual accusations of physical abuse and infidelity spilled over into the workplace. It didn't help that DuckGoose served alcohol to their employees at least twice a month, as part of an art exhibit or a morale-building celebration of a holiday or a corporate milestone. Not just because it encouraged bad behavior at work, but also because a few employees got DUI's on the way home.

The fact that DuckGoose's policies were stupidly self-defeating didn't change the fact that they were very nervous about scandal. And this raised the question: How would DuckGoose feel about having a transgender person running one of their flagship children's shows. Or, more to the point, how would they feel about parent groups and religious organizations finding out that a transgender person was running one of their flagship children's shows.

These groups had long had a problem with homosexuality, considering it deviant and immoral. And they accused Hollywood of having a pro-gay agenda — which of course we did (yay, us!) — and it's something these groups are still fighting against today (as I write this, they are freaking out about a "gay moment" in the new, live-action Beauty & The Beast movie).

It was, I believed, fair to assume that these groups would treat transgender people with the same ignorance, bigotry and disdain that they had gay people. There was, of course, no rational reason why any of them should have cared about Tom's gender or sexual orientation, but people were not required to be rational.

DuckGoose, on the other hand, had every reason to be rational, but the rational thing to do, from a corporate perspective, was protect their brand.

"I hate to ask this question," my mother said, and it was clear that she did. "But is it time for you to find another writing partner? Or maybe go out on your own?"

My mother had always been very fond of Tom, but much like DuckGoose's priority was their profits, my parents' priority was me.

"I couldn't possibly do that to him," I said. "I'd rather go down in flames than abandon my friend."

"If the situation was reversed," my father asked, "do you think Tom would stand by you?"

I exhaled a laugh through my nose as I thought about all the times that Tom should have had my back, but didn't.

"Honestly," I said honestly, "I don't know."