Happy Birthday?!
Our friends kindly gave us a voucher for a v-e-r-y swanky restaurant in London, so we made a day of it. We went to the aquarium, went to the Moulin Rouge musical, we laughed and rolled our way around London, it was so much fun.
I’m not going to name the restaurant because this story kinda offers a gentle criticism of one of the staff there, but I do want to preface this story by saying that the restaurant and all the staff were absolutely wonderful and if we could look at the bill without passing out cold we’d for sure go back soon.
When we arrived I was using my manual wheelchair, the Rocinante, and we’d been rolling around London all day. I’m strong now, capable in the chair, and there’s almost no terrain, no distance, I can’t blast my way down.
We told staff that we had a reservation, they found it, and they clearly had somehow identified that we were here for a birthday. This is true, what the voucher from our friends didn’t cover I’d be paying for today. I was taking my wife out for her birthday.
In the entrance room, a member of staff looked at me pointedly. She was pretty, what do you want from me, and I almost blushed at her direct glance. She got closer and clasped her hands in front of her.
I looked up at her. Inside my mind I heard someone say ‘Uh oh’.
She looked down at me, bent low, and exclaimed in a kind of sing-songy voice ‘Happy Birthday!!!’
I’m bamboozled. I looked at her with total confusion on my face. Her face was implaccable, my disorientation did not surprise her.
We got to our table and several seconds passed before I finally realised that this kind woman had made the confident assumption that I was there for my birthday because I was using a wheelchair. I put the pieces together pretty quickly after that and deduced what this must have meant for how I looked to at least some people. I swallowed my pride for the rest of the evening, promising to write to you to tell you.
We’ve talked before about not feeling attractive in the wheelchair, not really feeling like a sexual being at all, and indeed we’ve talked about the temptation for people to treat me in a kind of childlike manner. It turns out that the sing-songy voice and the clasped hands are the hallmark mannerisms of this kind of interaction that, still, is extremely weird to experience. It’s so odd that it feels like a hallucination or a dream for a moment. It transgresses all the social rules with which I’m familiar so sharply, it honestly takes me a beat to find my words. It feels like saying anything is going to have implications. If I react with confusion, as I did with this woman, it feeds the conclusions they have already made. If I say something like ‘well it was Emerson who said that the years teach us much which the days never knew but on this day the year’s celebration is not in fact mine’ then I assume she’s going to feel really weird and I’m going to look like a bit of a nob.
So the conversation just… stops.
I realise this woman meant no harm and I don’t mean to be critical, but her approach tells us something about how she sees me. This isn’t just about attractiveness, though I’ve no doubt she has not considered that I might in another world be dateable, that I’m actually a great date. I like to think I’m funny and charming and frankly amazing in bed, mostly at sleeping, but still. This isn’t even just about infantilisation, though the sing-songy voice and clasped hands did make me want to ask to do some finger painting before dinner. This is something even stranger. I think this kind woman, naive to her own perception, saw me as fundamentally different to her. In this woman’s imaginings there was no world in which I could be taking my wife out to dinner. She was so certain in her assumption that she publicly wished me a happy birthday.
It became clear to the restaurant staff that I was indeed taking my wife out to dinner, and they treated us with the utmost kindness throughout our meal with them. It was a truly wonderful evening.
But this moment has stayed with me. Recently I’ve had a few challenges to the concept of my selfhood that I work to maintain. I like to think of myself a rogueish corsair, a dragon rider, flying from place to place aboard the Rocinante, thwarting every rule and expectation, dashing and debonair. And when this woman looked at me… all I saw reflected back was… sympathy.
So today I decided to remind myself of who I am. I took the Rocinante out for my 6k workout before heading to my hairdressers for some colour and a sleek blow dry. I did my makeup, got the fit right, wide leg jeans paired with a v-neck. At the hairdressers I took a look in the mirror, tried to remind myself that a woman in her 40s can still be beautiful when I heard a customer behind me approach my hairdresser…
‘Is your client trans?’