An Author’s Note for “If I had a ‘real’ penis, I’d name him Sting” by Remi Recchia
This poem was born out of a traumatic experience I had while traveling. I think it’s safe to say that it’s many, if not all, transgender people’s worst airport-related nightmare to be pulled aside during what is ostensibly a routine TSA screening and be harassed, molested, or even raped. My wife and I were on our way home from an out-of-state wedding—the wedding was, in fact, that of the woman who’d been my first girlfriend, and our friendship has been made doubly special in that as adults, we both eventually came out as transgender: I a man, she a woman.
I’d thought that I’d been very clever in booking a nine-hour layover at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport since it made the flight so cheap. Promptly after waking up at three in the morning to catch a puddle-jumper plane in Iowa, though, I got food poisoning from expired yoghurt in the back of the plane and threw up all over my favorite backpack and my wife’s shoes. Still, I remained optimistic, and I set out to purchase a new bag with money I didn’t have.
Due to the length of the layover, I realized that I had time to go to a Sunday service in the airport chapel. I ended up making the absurd mistake of exiting security in search of the chapel. When I finally found a chapel—though not one with the advertised Sunday service—a woman walked in. She thought I was a student at first, likely due to the fact that I was weighed down by books, and we started chatting. She asked me if I wanted to go back through security to see if we could find the service together. What better use of my time than to get to know a stranger and sit in the Lord’s word together? I said yes; we hopped on a shuttle.
After we’d been talking about God, creationism, evangelism (so many -isms!) for some time, I realized I might have a problem. She, a seemingly cis woman, had no qualms about hopping in the security line. I, on the other hand, had already replaced my packer after taking it off to go through security the first time. She stepped confidently up to the scanner, shoes off, carry-on swishing gracefully on the conveyor belt. I did not want to make her late for the service. I followed right behind.
The buzzer went off as soon as I walked through the metal detector. After pulling me over for a pat-down, an agent said he detected something “hard” (my prosthetic) in my jeans instead of the soft thing (a penis) he’d expected.
“Hey, we got something over here,” he said to another agent, signaling for backup. My new friend looked back in confusion.
“Go ahead,” I told her. “You don’t have to wait for me.” I wondered what she was thinking. We never saw each other again.
I left my body and watched from above as I was led off to a cloistered room with two cis men, though I at least had the wherewithal to refuse to undress without my wife present. As the three of us waited for her to traverse the twenty-seven miles of the bustling Dallas Fort Worth Airport (she had not, of course, been foolish enough to leave security), I opted for emasculation in front of my wife instead of rape alone in a TSA security booth.
That story could have ended differently had I not had the privilege—such as it is—as being a white, passing trans man. (In fact, the TSA agents never realized I was transgender. They believed me when I said I needed the prosthetic to “pee and penetrate,” when, in actuality, this particular prosthetic did nothing but make me feel marginally closer to God’s creative design.) But still there was damage done: the damage of being othered, the damage of the risk of sexual violence, the damage of the reminder that despite my whiteness, citizenship status, and PhD, I am never really safe. I did not come back into my body until days after we landed back home.
In a way, writing “If I had a ‘real’ penis, I’d name him Sting” was healing. It wasn’t healing in the traditional sense of the word—nothing was “fixed,” nothing “made whole”—but it did help restore at least a semblance of control, of autonomy. Of a way to explain in my own words what had happened to my own body. I would be remiss not to add, too, that the quotation marks around “real” in the title are of paramount importance to the meaning of the text. The body is only as real as we make it. The first phalloplasty was created for cisgender men who’d been injured in war. Is a cis man suddenly not a man if his penis has been blasted to shreds by a bomb? I don’t think anyone could reasonably say that, and certainly not empathetically, which, in my opinion, is vastly more important than reason. And empathy begins with contact. I offer this poem as a moment of brief, fleeting contact, and I’m asking you, reader, to know me.
