Cascade

Okay:

I've taught some characters. But none so colorful as our resident Transsexual. Let's call him/her Jamie.

This is not a gay bashing thing. I have nothing against the gays, especially if that gay, per se, is one of my students.

See, on account of Jamie, the entire school had to go to sensitivity training where I learned that teachers are a lot like doctors in the sense that our duties have nothing to do with our personal beliefs about the lifestyle choices of our patients/students. We are there to teach. Period.

They called it LGBTQ Training. While that may sound like a delicious deli sandwich, in actuality it is an acronym for variants of homosexuality. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual and Queer. That's right, Queer. A assumed the Q stood for questioning, but this lady who conducted the training (an obvious lesbian) swore to us that the Q stands for Queer.

Apparently, the Gays like the word Queer. Kind of like how Blacks eventually switched from Negro to Black, which had previously been considered a derogatory word but was embraced for its brevity and concision. The Gays like brevity and concision, too.

I also learned that there is a distinction between Transvestite and Transsexual. A Transvestite is one who simply dresses like a member of the opposite sex and may not be a homosexual at all. Technically, Martin Lawrence, Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams are Transvestites.

A Transsexual lives as a member of the opposite sex. Many of them elect to have gender transformation surgery. Some take hormone pills for a more organic transformation. Some Transsexuals who can't afford surgery or hormone pills simply take birth control pills, which are chock full of estrogen.

That's what our Jamie does.

I discovered a few things at the training. The first thing I discovered is that most white people are not homophobic at all. They couldn't care less. At least in big liberal metropolises like DC. I'm sure you'd see something different in, say, Boise, Idaho. The other thing I noticed is that most black people are incredibly homophobic. The women more so than the men. They were almost angry about it.

Some of them thought the training was to help them learn to un-gay the students. The ended up being pretty disappointed. One lady said she didn't feel as though she should be forced to teach a gay student because it would bother her too much. And a lot of people sounded off in agreement. I was floored.

It was then that I discovered that I'm not really homophobic at all. I think it's because I went to art school. I may make the occasional joke or throw the "F" and "D" words around more than I should, but that's mostly because I think it's funny, not because I'm a bigot. I may call Gill a faggot at happy hour. Not because he's gay, but because he's getting on my nerves. See? It's different.

Anyway. All that liberalism went out the window one fateful morning. Jamie wasn't in the best of moods and had insisted on leaving the classroom without permission.

"Jamie," I told him, "if you walk out that door, you may not be allowed to come back in."

He stormed out anyway. Had he been a smaller Transsexual I may have tried to stop him. But he's about 6 feet tall, 180 pounds, pretty solid actually. I decided to just let him leave.

Sometime later he came back claiming that he left his purse. I stood in the doorway blocking his entrance. "Jamie, I told you not to leave without permission."

"Get out the way Mr. Nadir," he said, "I need to get my purse."

He tried to rush past me, and I foolishly tried to stop him. In the tussle he was able to muscle his way through. But something happened in that tussle that changed me for the rest of my life.

Jamie tweaked my nipple.

It was too fast for anyone else to notice, but it happened, I'm sure of it.

I stepped to the side, speechless, and let him get his purse, after which he left back out.

I went straight to the Principal's office and announced, "Jamie just tweaked my nipple."

Holding back her laughter, she summoned Jamie to her office. "Jamie," she said, "Mr. Nadir said you tweaked his nipple. Did you tweak Mr. Nadir's nipple?"

"Oh my God, why is you lying, Mr. Nadir? I did not tweak your nipple!"

"Well, you did touch it or at least cascade it."

We went back and forth like this for about ten minutes until it wasn't clear to me whether or not it had happened at all. Was I more of a bigot than I thought I was?

Jamie was suspended for a few days, and while he was out on suspension he got into some trouble and ended up missing over a month of school. Had he been in school, that might not have happened.

It's a cruel profession, isn't it? Still sometimes I wonder whether or not it actually or happened. Or was I just so creeped out by this guy that any close contact felt inappropriate.

I'll never know.


Thanks for reading.

GO OBAMA!

Factoid: I'm pretty sure Kwame is gay.

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