My Story Part 156 – Your Papers Please

I was reading an editorial in the New York Times about a black man who was stopped and searched upon leaving a store in New York.

Last month the actor Forest Whitaker was stopped in a Manhattan delicatessen by an employee. Whitaker is one of the pre-eminent actors of his generation, with a diverse and celebrated catalog ranging from “The Great Debaters” to “The Crying Game” to “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” By now it is likely that he has adjusted to random strangers who can’t get his turn as Idi Amin out of their heads. But the man who approached the Oscar winner at the deli last month was in no mood for autographs. The employee stopped Whitaker, accused him of shoplifting and then promptly frisked him. The act of self-deputization was futile. Whitaker had stolen nothing. On the contrary, he’d been robbed.

I never was stopped and searched, but I have been followed around by security and at other times have been asked for my ID.

That never happened to me before I transitioned and at first being followed around by the store detective I thought was funny, but after it happened a couple of times it became insulting. The first time it happened was when I was looking at clothes in a big box store and I noticed a guy shopping in the women’s department. When I move over to another section of the women’s department, there he was again pretending not to be watching me. I then went over to another department in the store and he was followed me. As I was standing in the check-out line I noticed him at the Courtesy Desk and they were all starting at me.

One time I was checking out at a national chain department store, I was in the line with about a dozen other people and when I handed my credit card to the clerk and she looked at me and her eyes got real big. She then asked me for my diver licenses and I was the only one that she asked to see their ID.

Another time I was in a bar/grill for lunch and I was sitting at the bar with a friend and when I ordered a beer the bartender asked me for my ID. Now you have to realize that I’m in my 60s, I was just carded and I was the only one who was carded even thought I was with my classmates who are in their late 20s or early 30s… what would you think?

The editorial went on to say…

Since the Whitaker affair, I’ve read and listened to interviews with the owner of the establishment. He is apologetic to a fault and is sincerely mortified. He says that it was a “sincere mistake” made by a “decent man” who was “just doing his job.” I believe him. And yet for weeks now I have walked up Broadway, glancing through its windows with a mood somewhere between Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover” and Al Green’s “For the Good Times.”

I’m sure that he is a “’decent man’ who was ‘just doing his job.’” and that he never even thought what he was doing was racist, but it was. When the clerked followed me around the store or when the clerk asked me for my identification, I don’t think that what they were doing was based on bias, but it was. They saw someone different and thought that they must be up to something no good.

I have never faced discrimination until I transitioned, I enjoyed my white male privilege that I never knew that I had, but now I don’t have it any more and I see what it really is, discrimination. The second conclusion that I have drawn is that passing has it privilege, if then did read me as being trans none of this would have happened.

My Story is a weekly series of blog posts about my transition and observation of life as a trans-person.