A Queer Transgender Woman and Straight White Cis-Man Walk Into a Bar in Florida.
A Road Trip Across America
Part One: The Phone Call Nobody Wanted
My wife told me on a Tuesday. Not my brother. My wife. She delivered the news the way she delivers most of my brother’s requests: with a mixture of amusement and resignation, as if she were announcing that the dog has gotten into the trash again.
“Your brother wants you to drive a trailer full of broken mechanical bulls to Florida.”
I waited for the punchline. There was no punchline. There were, in fact, literal broken mechanical bulls that needed to be hauled from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Port Charlotte, Florida, where the manufacturer, Galaxy Rides, would repair them. My brother runs an entertainment and event company out of Harrisburg, South Dakota. DJs, inflatables, casino party rentals, photo booths, and, yes, mechanical bulls. My wife has been his work wife since 2017, running the day-to-day operations of his business. So when he needed someone to make a 1,700-mile delivery, the request came through her, because that is how everything in my family works. The chain of command runs through the woman who actually keeps things organized.
The reason my brother asked me is simple. I write full-time. I am the author of romance novels under four pen names, and I write opinion and research pieces under my own name. I have an MBA with concentrations in Health Informatics and Artificial Intelligence. My last position before I retired to write was in healthcare informatics, analysis, and systems administration. And yet, because I work from home and my office is wherever my laptop is, my entire family operates under the quiet assumption that I do not have a real job. My brother did not call a trucking company. He did not call a buddy with a CDL. He called the writer because the writer is always available. The whole family is waiting, I think, for the day I snap out of it and get another real job.
I had from Tuesday to Saturday. We were supposed to leave on Saturday, March 7, at 1:00 PM. We did not leave at 1:00 PM. We left at 4:30 PM because my brother was still getting new tires, oil changes, and other last-minute maintenance done on the pickup. The man had all week, but the truck was not ready until 3.5 hours past departure. This surprised no one who has ever met my brother.
Let me describe the rig, because it’s a character in this story. A diesel pickup with a thirty-gallon tank that got nine miles to the gallon. Nine. At diesel prices that reached as high as $5.69 a gallon on this trip, you can do that math yourself, or you can just trust me when I say it was offensive. Hitched to the truck was a sixteen-foot enclosed trailer carrying the mechanical bulls. The trailer had lights that could charitably be described as precarious, and a trailer brake that liked to announce its disconnection with a dashboard warning approximately every 40 miles. Every forty miles, the truck would chime at us, and I would mutter something unprintable, and Michael would check the mirrors, and we would keep going, because what else were we going to do about it on I-44 at midnight?
I need to tell you something about myself before this story goes any further. I am a transgender woman. I am five feet seven inches tall and weigh 140 pounds. I am sixty years old. I live in South Dakota, which is a state so committed to the idea that people like me should not exist in public life that its legislature has spent more time debating which bathroom I can use than it has spent on roads, hospitals, or schools. Our governor has built a national career out of using trans people as political props. This year, South Dakota passed HB 1184, a bill that has made me begin the detailed, exhausting process of changing my legal residency to Minnesota, just to protect my gender identity. This is the state I call home. I love it here. I am also planning to leave it if that would be legally contradictory. Welcome to my life.
So, when I was asked to drive a truck and trailer through Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and deep into Florida, my first thought was not about mileage or diesel prices. It was about survival.
Let me be specific about my fears, because I think specificity is what gets lost when people dismiss trans women’s safety concerns as drama. In several of the states on my route, I could be challenged, detained, or arrested for using a women’s restroom. I could be jailed on the grounds of misrepresenting my sex assigned at birth. I could be harassed or assaulted while walking to or from my truck at a truck stop full of male long-haul drivers, many of whom are killing time during their federally mandated rest hours with nothing but boredom and whatever opinions they have absorbed about people like me. At night, these risks multiply. I am a small woman, alone with a truck and a trailer full of mechanical livestock. These were not hypothetical anxieties. These were logistics I had to plan around.
There was no version of this trip where I was going alone.
