Je Suis Wedding Dress Dave

THIS IS AN admission of a crime in most states, but: A few months ago, I got drunk and got on my bike. I never drink and bike; I never, ever—have not ever—driven a car drunk, or even under the influence at all that I can remember, though I’ve gotten in the car many times with another driver who was hammered (Dad). When I was six, my aunt and uncle were killed by a drunk driver, and we adopted my orphaned cousins. When I was in college, I worked at my dad’s moving company with a guy who’d been to prison for either seriously maiming or killing someone (I can’t remember which) while driving drunk.

I considered fucking him, the guy. Partly, he was objectively hot, but mostly, I’m what therapists call counterphobic—people who move toward rather than away from their fears, often over and over. “Almost to try to confirm with themselves that they were not impacted,” a mental-health professional put it to me once. Like, “‘Look, I did it again. It’s fine. I’m fine.’”

Anyway.

I didn’t have sex with Planet (the aforementioned guy’s actual nickname), but I did get on my bike drunk earlier this year in the state of Washington, which was stupid. It was a Sunday night, when there’s very little traffic in the town where I live, and I felt confident that if I hurt anyone it would only be myself, which incidentally was not the goal. The goal was to get Indian takeout.

I later learned that Washington doesn’t consider electric bikes motor vehicles, so it was not against the law. But I didn’t know that then, so I assumed I was engaged in an arrestable offense when, a few minutes into my ride, I pulled up to a stop sign, and a police officer pulled up to the one directly across from me.

Like many trans people I know, I am terrified of spending any amount of time incarcerated. The gender that a county jail or state prison houses you with depends on the jurisdiction you’re in, and I’m not trying to see what happens if I end up with cis men, no matter how counterphobic I have always been. In random anxious moments, I find myself rehearsing what I would say to police if they picked me up for any reason. Yesterday, I was doing it in my head even while on a completely sober bike ride; almost every time I’m completely legally driving, I do it. I practice explaining what I’m doing and why in a way that will make the police not take me.

I’ve spent less time rehearsing what I’d say if they did bring me in—but not none. All of my documents say I’m male. But I have a vagina, I picture myself pleading at the booking desk. I sit down to pee. I imagine arguing that I had periods for 25 years (true); saying that I’m nonbinary (not true); even claiming that I’m female, as in transfeminine, which people mistake me for with some frequency. (“You’re here about getting breast augmentation?” an intake nurse asked me when I walked into my most recent doctor’s appointment. A little alarmed by this misunderstanding at my own doctor’s office, I responded, “…NO.”) The booking desk at a jail is the one place in this country I might, for safety, disavow myself, turn on everything I’ve fought so hard for like Gender Judas.

But one of my favorite things about alcohol is famously many people’s favorite thing about alcohol: It makes me less afraid. Even when I’m having a drink in the privacy of my own house, it turns down the anxieties and burdens of my marginalizations. It makes me feel like I belong in this world when nearly every implicit and explicit message I’ve gotten since birth (including *cough* elections) has said that I don’t. So when I pulled up to an intersection across from a police car on my bike, hammered, though I thought I was breaking the law: I waved.

IT WASN’T A cool wave—a hand barely, disinterestedly raised, like when cis men on motorcycles pass each other.

It was full-palm up, eager. A hearty back-and-forth wave. Like passing toddlers.

This was such an absurd thing to be doing to a police officer that I also burst out laughing right after I did it.

It’s hard for me to imagine what the cop on the other side of this interaction thought when he saw me, an adult man in women’s clothing waving at him and laughing on a bike. He pulled away uneventfully. I did, too. But as I continued my ride, I shook my head, thinking that this was either very stupid or totally genius.

Years ago, when I first started integrating the material that started coming up in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, I had a therapist named Monty, who was an old activist from the anti-nukes movement. He and all his hippie buddies used to get arrested together all the time, he told me—except for Wedding Dress Dave. Wedding Dress Dave was a straight guy named Dave who showed up to all of their protests wearing a wedding dress, for reasons unclear. But the result was that the cops wouldn’t bring him in, because they just couldn’t deal with booking or holding a dude in a wedding dress.

Drunk on my bike, I felt big Wedding Dress Dave energy. I felt confident that the cop wasn’t going to fuck with me because of my marginalizations, for once a headache for him instead of for me. I felt a sort of dare in my wave, a defiance. A challenge I knew he wouldn’t rise to.

It was a risky bet. In a 2018 survey, 58 percent of trans people “who interacted with law enforcement that knew they were transgender in the last year reported experiences of harassment, abuse or other mistreatment by the police.” And I did know that at the time. But I’d started becoming afraid of the police long before I knew it. Before I even acknowledged to myself that I was trans.

In 2017, just months before I could finally come out to myself, I was pulled over for speeding in California. Prior to that moment, police had treated me, White-Female-Looking person, routinely at worst and outstandingly at best. One had changed a flat tire for me on the side of the freeway. My freshman year of college, another pulled me over in the middle of the night when a friend was drinking alcohol in my back seat without my knowledge, and instead of arresting my whole car full of teenagers, he asked me to come talk to him in his car so he could determine whether there was alcohol on my breath. Because there wasn’t, he let us all go.

Walking around lookin’ like a nice white gal, I was not afraid of cops. But when I got pulled over in 2017, I had already started the series of increasingly drastic haircuts that begin so many transmasculine journeys—and suddenly, I was terrified.

I didn’t know why. It was the middle of the day; I was definitely sober; my license and insurance were clean. But I feared the worst. I didn’t even have a sense of what that was, just that I had abruptly become eligible for it. I had just left an accordion festival (weird but true detail), where there had been a henna artist, so one of my hands looked tattooed. It was years before they were tattooed for real. But somehow I knew: My days of being friendly to the cop gaze had passed.

“WHERE DO YOU live?” people ask me all the time. I live in Washington; it’s other people in Washington who ask me this. Before I left the Bay Area two years ago, because I lived in ritzy Marin County, people there asked me the question all the time, too.

“I live here,” I used to tell those people.

“I live here,” I tell people now. Sometimes, I’ll say, “Technically, I live right here right now,” pointing directly at the ground of whatever property on which we stand—a community center, a grocery store—because my whole house, and the entirety of my material belongings, go with me wherever I drive. My cat, my computer, my dishes, my clothes; my furniture and my bed and any adorable archival assignments I’ve managed to save from grade school—they’re all with me unless I’ve taken a little bike ride away from my RV. Even then, I live within easy biking distance, then, of wherever I am.

Where do you live? Like: Do you—HOW do you—belong here?

The cop who pulled me over in California in 2017 was perfectly nice, however his presence had activated some fear of authority both ancient and impending. I sweated and panicked while he simply wrote me a ticket I totally deserved. Now, I am the one who evokes constant strong feelings in others. I still listen for approaching cop cars whenever I’m parked/living on city streets—which is illegal—but I’m not too scared to do it anymore, and at this point I’m generally less scared of other people than people are of me.

People in men’s rooms. People in doctor’s offices. Dave Chappelle. Wedding Dress Dave was a white guy, and I am, too, which gives us some liberties when it comes to the cops—in the town where I waved, one shot and killed a drunk Indigenous man just a few years ago. I don’t know what the one in the patrol car I waved at was thinking when he saw me. Maybe nothing. I do know that I hope to get bold enough, whatever the consequences, to increasingly embody the alcohol-fueled spirit of my happy, wholesome, untroubled flutter of fingers at the arbiters of oppression, however completely I oppose it.

I live here.

I belong here.

Just like this.