Stan Has Issues™ — One Time Lucy Thought She Was Dating a Tranny

One Time Lucy Thought She Was Dating a Tranny

About a year and a half ago, Lucy dumped her longtime boyfriend and decided it would be a good idea to fail at some relationships before getting back together with him. She went on a few dates with random guys before settling on some guy. Let’s call him Rufus, for a nice Bill & Ted reference.

Here’s the thing: she met Rufus online. She didn’t want to tell me that, because when she first broached the subject of “messing around” on match.com during a free trial, I warned her against the pure, unmitigated evil that lurks on the Internet. Trust me, I know all about [not work-safe — or, for that matter, human-eye-safe, you wusses] that. Lucy’s ordinarily a lot smarter than me, but sometimes she can be pretty naïve.

So, she told me she met this guy through a friend. I knew the friend in question; he worked as a server at Bennigans, where we spent the overwhelming majority of our time, so I saw him quite a bit. And that’s when her tangled web unraveled. She was worried about this new guy being a bit too needy, and she expressed as much to both myself and our server friend.

He called during dinner, while the server happened to be at the table. “Oh, is that that guy?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah,” she said.

“Where’d you meet him again?” he asked.

Lucy looked at him, then looked at me, then looked back at him. “Oh shit,” she was thinking.

“Um,” she said, “online.”

At this, the server laughed uproariously. I would have laughed uproariously, too, except I was too busy being enraged. Honestly, meeting a guy online — it’s stupid, yes, but it’s not a big deal to me. I would have made fun of her nonstop, but she was really worried that I’d get pissed off, overreact, and then say hostile things. So she lied to me. And then when I found out, I got pissed off, overreacted, and then said hostile things.

Two weeks later, when we resumed speaking with one another, we met again at Bennigans. Lucy was concerned about Rufus. They’d been spending a great deal of time together, and Lucy was starting to believe that Rufus not entirely male. She believed, actually, that he used to be a she and was in the process of changing genders.

“Why would you say that?” I wondered.

She had a number of reasons. The first, and most obvious, was that Rufus sounded like a woman. She played me some VoiceMails, and I can confirm the femininity in the voice. I don’t like to brag, or even really to compliment anyone in any way, but I know quite a bit about how the human voice works in both males and females, and I can pretty much tell insantly whether somebody is a male or female, even if they’re doing some sort of hilarious voice. It’s eerie but true, and I can say I was 95% sure Rufus was a woman based solely on his voice.

Another reason, which for some would have been a dead give-away, is that his friends referred to him with feminine pronouns. Not exactly subtle, right? When Lucy asked Rufus about this bizarre thing, he told her some story about how, when he was a kid he did something that made them all believe he was a woman, so now, more than a decade later, they still use feminine pronouns when referring to him. Or her.

Furthermore, Rufus looked androgynous. One could not tell by looking at him what specific gender he might have belonged to. Granted, the same could be said for quite a few people, but when you combine the many other reasons and then say, “Oh, and he looks genderless,” it sort of solidifies things.

Also, Rufus had a wide variety of medical problems. I had no idea what the specifics were, but I am aware that when people undergo sex-change operations, there are often a lot of complications, and even when there aren’t complications in the process itself, there are serious health risks. It’s just not really an awesome idea to change genders, to be frank.

…not that I’ve researched it at all.

And the final, most disturbing (if not most damning) hunk of evidence was Rufus’s overly stiff, somewhat unrealistic manhood. Now, the farthest Lucy had gone with Rufus at this point was a lot of kissing and rubbing, which generally makes the male of the species aroused (in my experience, the woman is usually bored). But Lucy liked to point out that it seemed like Rufus was aroused all the time. Which, ordinarily, is a good quality in a man, especially if he is in the porn industry.

Not when it feels like a wooden stick, though. Lucy described the unrealistic feel, the bizarre angle at which the prop-penis was positioned, and the fact that it was essentially immobile. It just hung there like a coat-rack, defying gravity.

I decided it would be a good idea for Lucy to set up a sting operation that in some way involved actual physical access with the unit. It was the only way to be sure, once and for all, what gender this person was.

Lucy decided, rightfully, that I am an idiot. She took a better course of action and broke it off (fake-penis-related pun intended). She consciously avoided him, and he called her constantly. That was another thing: he was (and this is her claim, not mine) needy like a woman. Men, she postulated, don’t obsess over women. They simply accept it and move on to their next conquest.

Random aside: Now, with her having formed an opinion like that about men, can you see why I almost always hate the guys she dates?

Anyway, eventually he stopped calling. I assume. She never talks about him anymore, so if he does, I don’t know about it.

In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a cautionary tale. Online dating services are very, very, very, very bad. The only tried and true method for meeting your perfect spouse is to hang around in bars and hope somebody will get drunk enough to sleep with you.

Tags: classic