Horse Barbie, page 11
“That’s why your knees are so big,” he said as I swung the door shut.
After that, I never went into a guy’s bedroom unless he knew I was trans. But I also realized I didn’t have to share something so intimate with men who were incapable of reciprocating that level of honesty. I disclosed to keep myself safe, not because I felt they had a right to know. In this new country, I deserved to use all the power I could get.
9
BABAYLAN KISS
WALKING INTO A TANNING SALON for the first time felt like a forbidden act.
The entry to Tropical Kiss was on Geary Street in Japantown, an anonymous, purple-lit door between all the boba shops and Asian gift stores. Two girls sitting behind the front desk greeted me when I entered.
“Um, hi,” I stammered. “How does this work? I’ve never gotten tanned before.”
“Well, it’s simple,” one said. “You choose how dark you want your skin to be. Since it’s your first time, maybe try ten minutes, then you can do more on the next go-round.”
I stood there, dumbfounded, stunned by how casually she had told me that I could choose “how dark” I wanted to look. For a new arrival from the Philippines, that was a radical notion—and one that needed quite a bit of unpacking. I had grown up getting teased mercilessly for having dark skin—and I had developed my Horse Barbie persona as a reaction to that colorism—but here, getting darker was the point.
As I imagined walking out of Tropical Kiss with a tan, I could practically hear my parents yelling in my ear and feel them thwacking me on the ass as I came home sweaty from playing street games while the sun was out. “Ang itim itim mo na!” they would chastise me. Look how dark you are!
“We also have packages,” the girl at the front desk was telling me, but I was still back in my childhood living room, a chubby-cheeked sunburned kid watching TV shows where only light-skinned actors got to be the stars.
In the Philippines, light-skinned actors were the object of desire in every romance, the only ones who could slap people on soap operas without being portrayed as villains. The rare dark-skinned actors I saw were relegated to service roles or sidelined as pitiable, dirt-poor tertiary characters.
From a young age, I got the message loud and clear: Having dark skin meant you were ugly, undesirable, and dirty. And now I was about to intentionally make my skin darker. It had been one thing to give up on the bleaching powder and adopt my role as the dark horse of the pageant scene. It was another to choose it.
Going to a tanning salon might not seem like the most monumental life event, but for me it was the first step toward deconstructing and dismantling some of the harmful beliefs I had unknowingly inherited from our colonizers.
You choose how dark you want your skin to be was a sentence that flew in the face of everything I had been raised to believe.
* * *
—
Back when I used Etta’s prepackaged bleaching powder, I would apply it to my whole body. The noxious stuff came in a red box with a white hourglass figure of a woman emblazoned on the side—a figure who seemed to promise that I could be beautiful, too, once I was as light as her.
Every day for a week, Tigerlily and I would mix the powder and liquid chemical solution until it had a thick, pastelike texture. She helped me apply it evenly as I stood, limbs extended, in her living room.
Thirty minutes in, the paste would start solidifying. Then, as the chemical seeped deeper into my skin, an acrid smell would fill the room. My body would itch, first in patches, then everywhere, but I couldn’t scratch it off. No, I had to let it sink in. It felt like the whitening powder was burning away the top layer of my skin.
At the hour mark, the pastelike texture became more like a hardened mold. By then the itching became full-on burning, and I would run to the shower, leaving little trails of bleaching powder behind me on the floor.
In a way, you could trace those tracks back centuries to the Spanish colonizers who first taught us to hate our own dark skin. They had forced the people of the Philippines to adopt Catholicism, then brainwashed us into adoring and worshipping white saints. They stole our land and then mocked our dark-skinned indigenous ancestors. We were a Spanish colony for 333 years, only to be bought by the United States for $20 million after the Spanish-American War in 1898. Our new colonizers saw us as savages and tried to erase the rich diversity of our languages, imposing American English on our education system, a tongue that felt bereft of variation and devoid of beauty. The Spanish, the Americans—they all wanted us to value whiteness.
The more we internalized their racism, the more power we gave to the paradox that became part of Filipino culture: We were people of color who came to subconsciously esteem and support white supremacist ideals. We shamed one another for living under the sun. All those centuries of indoctrination are not easily undone.
In the Philippines, every afternoon at three, a national TV channel would broadcast an image of a gleaming white Jesus who spoke in a Johnny Carson–like voice, preaching the “Daily Prayer Habit.” Radiant beams of light would dance around the picture of Christ as the voice encouraged us to repent of our sins and pray for world peace. Looking at and listening to that image every day encouraged us to associate heavenly glory with whiteness, furthering our subjugation.
So imagine how much whiplash I felt when I moved to San Francisco and learned that white Americans liked to go tanning, the darker the better. At the time, being white and tanned signaled that you led a leisurely life full of sun-drenched vacations. Of course, they could undo their tans anytime by simply staying out of the sun.
More promising was the fact that American pop culture seemed to be starting to acknowledge the desirability of people of color. Ashanti was churning out sexy videos, always all bronzed up. I adored Brandy and Kelly Rowland for embracing their dark-skinned beauty. It was the beginning of something that felt bigger—the seeds of a movement that could assert that Black and brown skin are beautiful—and it thrilled me. When I saw these stars proudly showing skin, I felt my heart swell.
Still, whenever I went to Filipino supermarkets and grocery stores, I saw all the imported bleaching soaps, lotions, and beauty products displayed right by the entrance. It was like they had been placed there on purpose to remind me that while I might be in America, I was still Filipino in my mind and culture.
Nowhere was that more apparent than our gatherings to watch the major world pageants. For Miss Universe 2003—which was basically the Super Bowl of pageants—more than twenty of us got together at Kasia’s tiny apartment in the Tenderloin, arriving with trays of pancit, barbecued chicken, white rice, and various desserts. It was our own mini fiesta in San Francisco.
We all listened with rapt attention as we heard the opening voiceover: “It has been called one of the wonders of the modern world, connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, the Panama Canal! Tonight, this wonder is home to seventy-one of the most beautiful and breathtaking women in the world, all here to compete for the title Miss Universe 2003!”
Then, as the seventy-one ladies in white floral-print swimsuits paraded down the cobblestone streets of Panama City’s colonial old town, we let comments fly as freely as bets in a Vegas gambling hall. Whenever it was a white European contestant, we’d talk about how beautiful she was or speculate that she’d probably make the semifinals.
But when a Black contestant came on screen, proudly announcing her name and home country, the casual insults rolled off our tongues.
“Ang ganda nya kahit maitim,” some would say. She’s beautiful even though she’s Black.
“Dirty ah ah,” others might say if her skin tone was even the slightest bit uneven.
When Miss Philippines appeared, the whole room erupted, even more satisfied when we discovered she was light-skinned. If she had been dark, we would have taken the same jabs at her as we did at the Black contestants. We had truly internalized colorism to the point that we would insult our own entrant in the pageant. I myself made these comments, not yet able to think more deeply about what we were doing.
We were judging beauty based on what we had been taught all our lives.
Which only made it more confusing to realize I wanted to go to tanning and showcase my natural skin tone. That day in Tropical Kiss, I was hesitant but eager, a game of tug-of-war playing inside me. It was a mind-fuck of the highest order to unlearn the belief that my brown skin was inherently ugly.
As I laid my body down in the tanning booth, I felt confused but ultimately indignant at the cruel legacy that had made this decision so complicated. Tears swelled in my eyes. I could still hear my family scolding me. “Stop playing outside or you’ll get dark like those Aeta!” they’d shout, referring to our dark-skinned aboriginal ancestors. I could still hear my aunties and our neighbors during a community vacation to Batangas Beach, screaming at us and the other kids, “Hoy pumasok kayo dito, sige mangingitim kayo!” They were mad not because we’d done something wrong but because they wanted us to get inside the house before we got too dark. Our innocent playtime in the sun was always laced with a disgusting threat.
“I’m letting my body be darkened,” I whispered to myself, still in disbelief that this was happening. What if someone heard me? “I’m letting my body be darkened.” This time I said it firmly, with an assured tone, as if I were preparing myself for the shame police to pop my tanning bed open. I was shedding generations of toxic beliefs. It was an ultraviolet rebirth.
* * *
—
I started to question more of our colonial beliefs as time went on. Catholicism, with all its detailed systematic doctrine, had been the predominant cultural force in my life for eighteen years.
But once I realized, through books like Dr. J. Neil Garcia’s Philippine Gay Culture, that Catholicism was a religion forced upon our indigenous islands—and that before colonization, there had been a thriving cultured society in the Philippines that honored gender fluidity—I had an awakening.
I learned more about babaylans, gender-fluid healers and shamans who played a crucial role in our societies before the Spaniards came. The Catholics who colonized our land saw babaylans as a threat because they were considered spiritual leaders, so they supplanted them and enforced a rigid gender binary on our people.
Considering the full scope of our history, I could choose to honor my beautiful indigenous culture, just as I had chosen to free myself from hatred of our dark skin. Embracing precolonial Filipino culture complicated my process of adapting to the United States; I felt that I was not so much assimilating as learning to see the insidious impact of history for the first time. Only then could I decide what felt true to me and what didn’t.
In the Philippines, going to church was our utmost social responsibility, each mass a thread in the fabric that held our communities together. But in San Francisco, mass was more of a duty—a thing we were expected to do every Sunday that, to me, didn’t really feel like a pure form of divine worship.
Inside St. Patrick Church on Mission Street, a sea of strangers singing “Ave, Ave, Ave Maria” felt odd to me. I grew up knowing the people I went to church with. They looked like me, they sounded like me. Exchanging “peace be with you” with strangers felt disingenuous. I didn’t see them in school or on the streets or at fiestas; they were just there to sit, stand, kneel, and go home.
But knowing the history of colonization made mass feel not just strange but also alienating. At the same time, I was surrounding myself with a more diverse group of people, outside the confines of Catholicism, who exposed me to new beliefs and new ways of looking at the world that helped me contextualize everything I had experienced back in the Philippines. For better or worse, I had had to leave my motherland for me to truly know it.
I returned to Tropical Kiss until I was exactly as dark as I chose to be. And little by little, I stopped attending mass. Mama still periodically attended, but not me. It must have been painful for her to watch me reject centuries of spiritual teaching that had been passed down to her, but she disguised it well, continuing to love me even as I strayed from her faith. I knew that if I wanted to keep growing, I had no more time for dogmas that taught me to hate my skin and myself.
10
BUTTERFLY
MOST CATHOLIC MOTHERS PROBABLY WOULDN’T fly to Thailand so their daughter could get irreversible gender-affirming bottom surgery. But mine did.
At ten p.m. on July 6, 2003, we arrived in Chonburi, a seaside suburb an hour south of Bangkok, where English wasn’t widely spoken. We were here so I could see Dr. Suporn, who was famous the world over for his handiwork. We girls liked to say that if you went to Suporn, you had “the Maserati of vaginas.” His results were that good.
Nong, a petite Thai woman in her thirties with short hair, had driven us all the way here from the Bangkok airport. The hospital had hired her to be our guide through the whole experience. On the drive, Mama watched out the window as the lights of the capital city receded, sleepy towns emerging out of the darkness every few miles, then fading away into the black. At first, the occasional flickers of light felt familiar, as if we were passing through rural towns in California, but Chonburi was on the other side of the world. I was about to get a life-changing procedure I had wanted for as long as I could remember.
After checking in to our suite at Chon Inter Hotel, Mama flopped down onto the bed while I went out to the balcony, feeling equal parts jet-lagged and buzzed, anxious and excited. The neighborhood was quiet, a welcome escape from the hustle and bustle back in Bangkok. But my thoughts raced to fill the silence.
“I can’t fucking believe I’m actually doing it,” I said to no one, taking a long draught of the ice-cold Singha beer I had brought outside with me. “It’s really happening.”
In truth, I was nervous as hell.
I had been fifteen years old when I met the first trans woman who I knew had received gender confirmation surgery. I was backstage at a neighborhood pageant in Pasig Line, Manila, hanging out with the multigenerational crowd of baklas gathered in the hot and humid dressing room, when suddenly a woman with pale, ghostlike skin sauntered backstage, her shiny black bob bouncing with each step. She looked like a 1990s Versace supermodel in her skintight jeans and red-and-white-check halter top. I was mesmerized.
But after she greeted everyone, she turned around and the whispers began.
“Oh, that’s Gina Pu-keh,” someone said.
Gina was, of course, her name. But puke, as it’s spelled in Tagalog, means “vagina.” People were calling her that because she was one of the only trans girls in the scene who had gotten bottom surgery. In that moment, listening to those whispers, Gina seemed even more like a mythical goddess to me, a mysterious being who represented the fulfillment of my wildest dreams.
But then I heard another whisper: “You know…her vagina made her crazy.”
I didn’t know what it meant. Those words shook me. I absorbed that rumor at an impressionable age. But as I stood on that balcony in Thailand years later, I knew I was making one of the sanest decisions of my life. I wasn’t crazy—maybe a little jittery, but not out of my mind. I truly wanted this. But as every trans woman who’s gone through this knows, wanting it your entire life doesn’t make it any less scary the night before.
After another chug of Singha, I joined Mama in the big hotel bed.
* * *
—
Later the next day, we walked into the sleek Chonburi Hospital for my presurgery checkup.
“Sawadee ka,” Nong greeted us, escorting us directly to the section of the floor reserved exclusively for Dr. Suporn’s clients.
Between the warm welcome and the smooth logistics, we felt like VIPs. So far this experience was living up to the Maserati name. It was downright luxurious. That was because I had worked hard for treatment this good.
Back in San Francisco, when I finally decided to speak into existence my dream of having the surgery, I started going to Divas more often after clocking out at Macy’s. Plenty of the trans-amorous men who hung out there were willing to spend cash in exchange for my valuable erotic time.
Every night at Divas, bathed in the purple light that bounced off the mirrored dance floor, I exuded undeniable sensuality. Guys noticed me. Men in finance, men in suits, men in leather jackets, men in tech—they all contributed to my growing “surg fund.”
But it was Eddie Jackson, the founder of a prominent software company, who paid me the bulk of the money I needed. Eddie had an affinity for trans Filipinas—and I was enticing enough for him that he regularly drove from Silicon Valley to spend the night with me at the W Hotel. I didn’t mind Eddie. He was respectful and funny, and we had a good time together.
During the weeks we spent together, I followed Eddie’s journey from being a fan of fencing to taking up the sport himself. I would lie naked on the silk bedsheets in our room at the W and watch him show off his counterattack stance and his sharp lunges. Once I had the money I needed for my “Maserati,” I stopped seeing him, but I’ll always remember his ridiculous showmanship as he jabbed an imaginary épée at the minibar.
It took two months of long sleepless nights to afford my trip to Thailand with Mama and my surgery with Dr. Suporn. My private hospital room in Chonburi wasn’t quite as nice as the W Hotel, but it was still swank, and Nong showed up at my door with the gift of barbecue chicken.
The night before my surgery, anxiety and anticipation filled the air. Mama was all nerves. When Nong arrived, Mama was restlessly pacing back and forth while in the background the TV on the wall played the news.
“Mama, sit down and eat po,” I said, pointing to the empty bed beside mine.
