Dressed to Kill

October 11th, 2006 | Sex | E-Mail Article | Print Article

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TYRONE HUNTER was always effeminate. His father died early and his mother, Irene, and two sisters, Kate and Joanne, gave him dolls to play with as a child. Soon he was fixing hair, applying makeup and being the belle of the ball at the slightest opportunity.

He fell in love with Bette Davis early, then Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Diana Ross, but these days he rather favoured the black drag queen Ru Paul. At sixteen, he dropped out of school, started growing his hair, and changed his name to Tyra.

The constant dressing up in women’s clothes came six months later when he landed a job as a hairdresser not too far from home. He’d been working there nearly two years before any of his clients worked-out that he was actually born male, but by then he was already paying for the breast hormone treatments, and it was really just only a matter of time before the all important chop, tuck and fold. And God-forbid should anyone, management, client, or staff ever dream of getting rid of Tyra: everybody loved her for no one ever thought of HER as a HE. She brought the most money into the salon for sure, plus the boys on the block would definitely agree; Tyra was all-woman.

She faced no prejudice, no insults at all, at least not from people she knew. A kinder, more loving, generous and thoughtful, more sensitive human being, you could hardly find. Women adored her. Men admired ‘his’ guts. She brought many people a great deal of joy. Not least of all her gorgeous boyfriend, Daniel, whom no one ever doubted was completely heterosexual, and those who knew the truth loved them both in spite of it.

On the evening in question, she’d been out on a hen-night with her girls from the salon and had gotten a little drunk. She phoned for her boyfriend Daniel to pick her up, and he left his apartment immediately, but had somewhere been stuck in traffic. Dressed to kill and staggering on heels, she had gone out to flag a taxi nearby when she figured she would walk the few blocks home. She didn’t see the runaway car turn the corner or hear the screams of other pedestrians running. The car broke a barrier, swerved across the street, and flung itself into an approaching vehicle, which skidded and piled into Tyra as she crossed the road. The whole street seemed to have seen it happening, for taxi-drivers, homeless drunks, Seven Eleven workers, and all men it seemed for miles around had turned to watch the beautiful woman pass. Not one of them, however, was able to avert the inevitable.

Someone called the emergency services. Many people screamed. A man got out of the wreckage unhurt, another was dead, but Tyra was bleeding and still alive. The Fire Brigade was the first to arrive. They had been out in the area, and were heading station-bound. They fought to clear the wreckage around, asked of her many questions to check her corpus-mentis, and just as she began to slip out of consciousness, they started the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

While his colleagues worked elsewhere, one fireman threw himself into the job with great aplomb. He had recognised her from the salon he used and was intent on saving this pretty girl’s life. He tore at her blouse to stop smouldering smoke consuming her chest, then deciding that he would also have to remove her tight skirt to treat her upper leg and abdomen, he ripped from the waist and had the shock of his life. Tyra, of course, was still very much a man in the genital department, and not a small man at that, which sent the fireman into fits of embarrassed laughter.

“This ain’t no bitch!”

he screamed.

No, but Tyra was all-human. Neither his colleagues nor the people milling around could immediately understand just why the fireman had stopped, or exactly what it was he was laughing at, until they came closer. Minutes went by, or so it seemed, and the whole street was still in uproarious laughter. Just then, Daniel turned up completely distraught, shortly followed by an ambulance crew who pronounced Tyra dead.

This short fictionalised story is written in memory of Tyra Hunter, the transgender hairstylist who died one night in my neighbourhood in Washington DC, when an emergency service worker refused to treat her at the scene of a car accident upon discovering that Hunter was anatomically male.