Why can't you be more like your brother?

I hopped on the Metro at Tenleytown with my new external hard drive*, and sat down to that common Metro sight: The Out-Of-Town Family Being Shown Around Town By Their Citified Child. I took my seat just as the local laid this bit of wisdom on her teenage brother:

There are actually lots of transvestites that are straight.

The brother wasn't having any of it. How could you want to dress like a woman but also still want to have sex with women, too? I could understand his confusion. After all, he looked to still be at that age where it makes sense that straight guys listen to bands that only other guys listen to and to listen to the music that the girls like makes you a "fag". Oh, if only I could have seen the ridiculousness of that one earlier. There's nothing hot about asking a girl to go to the Rush show with you, but Duran Duran? Maybe I would have had sex at some point in my teens.

But now I'm completely off topic. The topic at hand is evesdropping as the enlightened city girl in her twenties edumacated her family about sexual politics, including these bits of wisdom:

• People switch their sexual preference even after years of either hetero or homosexuality
• The concepts of what clothes men or women dress are cultural
• If the little brother was living in another time or another culture, he would comfortably wear tights and skirts and love every minute of it

If it all sounds a little condescending, it's not the way it sounded at all. The local was calm, casually handing out these facts that seemed to both bewilder and embarrass her family. Her father in particular was stone silent, obviously wishing in that Dad way that everyone would just shut up.

I was enjoying it. As basic as the concept that transvestites are actual human beings with individual personal preferences seems to me and most of the people I know, I forget that it's pretty revelatory to a lot of folks. They probably don't even personally know any gay people, let alone transvestites and transexuals. Hell, they probably haven't even seen an Eddie Izzard show.

And mostly, I just love these moments that you can see all over town, especially in the summer. Family goes off to visit their wacky liberal kid in the crazy big city where they don't drive everywhere and eat all sorts of weird food, and why doesn't {big city kid} just be normal and live in the suburbs and get married and vote Republican? You can especially see this at the end of a long day, when both parties are through censoring themselves and just have conversations like the ones I heard yesterday.

The end. Or is it? Yes. It is.

* If anyone knows how the hell you map a drive on Macs, give me a hand here, huh? I love my Mac and all, but I swear: for every thing they make easier, they make another harder.