Everyone has their version of the happy pill. Generally, I was born with it. But that is only going to get you so far. Disposition. Oestrogen, on the other hand, wow, that’s a powerful euphoria-inducing joy ride. Plus, it has all kinds of fringe benefits, all the juicy things that a trans girl wants.
Well. With all that is going on in my life, one could wonder why on earth I might feel this way. I guess that when you have lived in a cage your whole life and then you finally break free, everything tastes good. That is certainly what is happening with the change in gender. And every day is a new discovery. It must be boring for my friends who graciously put up with whatever silly new thing I have noticed. But I sure love it.
I am noticing the same thing about people, women, that I am developing feelings for. How differently they treat me and relate to me than my wife did. They all do better, much better. But more fundamentally, I don’t feel put in a box or a cage by them either. My wife, in her disgust for my sexuality, in her shame about my gender expression, was unconsciously keeping me locked up. Putting me down. And it is by stealth. You don’t realise the judgement is just gradually, one little bit at a time, eroding your sense of self.
A big part of me believed that she was right to be disgusted because I felt society would share in her disgust, her shame. How awful is that?
The relief is also about removing an active wound. The joy and freedom of gender expression is augmented by the removal of a significant person in my life whose whole being rejected the essence of me. For what is more profoundly “self” than our gender identity and our sexuality? Okay, you will take the bright and shiny public me no problem, but only on condition that the vast underneath is never seen, never discussed. So that we can pretend it doesn’t exist. How awful.
If that is the backdrop, these are some snippets of life-affirming and slightly odd things that have happened to me.
I rounded a corner at home and a teen girl out with her teen boyfriend looked at me, was startled, and then burst out laughing. There were many ways to interpret or feel about that. I chose to share in her laughter. It’s ridiculous, I know. A ballerina giraffe on the loose.
That was just after I came from my nail salon appointment at the busiest nail salon in town. A Chinese hubbub of activity. Why is it that the Chinese seem to be so good at this, and all over the world? And why can’t you get a decent manicure or pedicure anywhere in Italy? At least, I haven’t found one yet. I have been to a dozen places, and the very best I have had, is not as good as the worst I have had in either the US or the UK. And the worst, also the most expensive, was so bad (bubbles in the nail) that I had to take it off the next day and get it done again.
This one that I was coming from was the best so far, but after asking me if I wanted my nails rounded or square, she proceeded to file down my beautiful, natural, long nails to man-length. Just before painting them mint green. Hello!
“Why did they give me man nails? Look at me, there’s nothing that says ‘man’ here right now. I am wearing a bra to hold my boobs, a blouse, a short skirt, heels, my toe nails are painted, what gives?”
My friend said, “well, they can be quite conservative.” Thank goodness nails grow.
A few days later, with the same friend in London we had a lovely dinner in a Chinese restaurant where I was correctly gendered (miss or ma’am) by men and women, Chinese and non-Chinese alike. So that theory is out. After dinner we wandered over to Edgeware Road in search of dessert, baklava, only to find that many of the old haunts had changed, gone. When we did finally settle on a place, the very Muslim cooking staff regarded me with a range of priceless expressions, mostly disbelief.
The tall skinny one looked at me with a vulnerable and pensive look. Another one looked at me with a kind of confused and wounded look. He was a bit scary. Two more just didn’t believe, or were trying to figure it out. I leapt up into the air in front of the window to the kitchen and held my arms wide so they could see that there really breasts there. No fakes. And then I walked over to the waitress and ordered us tea. There was no more staring after that.
Today, in the lift at Paddington station, I needed to go up, but the residents had just come down and none were getting off. I pushed my floor choice and the elevator declared itself for me and planned its upward trajectory. The wife of the young couple turned to me as the door was closing and asked me, “where do you get the Heathrow Express?”
“Quick, press the button to open the door,” I said to the husband who just seemed stricken, unmoving. I reached over him and pressed the door button, and the doors opened just in time.
“Just go through there,” I said pointing to an arch into the station. She smiled and thanked me and her husband waddled along behind her.
As the doors closed the remaining fellow passenger now taking the return trip back up to where she same from said, “you are so stylish.”
“Thank you,” I replied.
“You’re beautiful.”
“Thank you, that’s really sweet.” She was kinda cute too.
“I’m a fashion designer,” she said with a sweet New Zealand accent—one of my faves. I have to get better at sharing Instagram and such with people, or these random encounters will just remain that. About 20 minutes later, I bumped into her again, all smiles.
The lingering encounter of the day took place in a very busy Camden town. An apparently drunk “Eastern European” crossed the road out in front of the station, inserted his drunken self between me and my companion, grabbed my arm and was repeatedly shouting something at me as he forcibly turned me towards his friends, and kept shouting a word over and over. I pulled my arm to take it away, but he didn’t let go. And I was compelled to reach a leg around behind him and body check him to flatten him, but I didn’t because I was so taken aback.
He was shouting to his friends, “man”, “man” thereby proving that he was wrong…one of his friends had most likely commented on me, and he felt the need to prove his friend wrong by showing his friend that I was not in fact a woman as his friend likely thought when he undoubtedly made a rude sexual comment about me as if I were female. You follow? But this drunken fool, by grabbing me by the arm and forcing me to turn around was proving that his friend was right. What man, drunk or not, would forcibly turn around another man to show his friends that I am a man? Only someone who at least on some level has acknowledged that whatever it is that I am, I am not a man.
Fascinating that the only two incidents that I would call teetering into the range of hate crimes have taken place in England and both by “Eastern European” immigrants. I love the welcoming of asylum seekers and refugees, but more must be done to impart values. We don’t physically accost people in England. We don’t throw food at people because what they look like makes us uncomfortable.
And then, back at airport security, the exact opposite that happened from what happened just a few days earlier happened. As usual, I triggered the alarm. But this time a woman just stepped up and gave me a full pat down. And I was wearing pants this time. Was it the jewellery? Was it the pants? Why do I get gendered female more often when I wear pants than when I wear skirts or dresses? Was it the bra? The corset? She liked that. She asked about it as she felt it.
“Are you wearing a corset?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. She smiled.
The other day it was a pimply faced guy who looked not a day over 18 whose broken-voiced, “I’m going to pat you down,” was met with me by an “oh, no you’re not.” The manager wanted to know what was up. I’d rather not be patted down by a man, I said. “You have to be; you are a man, are you not.”
“I am trans. My passport says ‘M’.”
“Then it will have to be a man.”
“I’m not okay with that.”
“You can go in the privacy tent.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, “I’d rather it were out here where everyone can see.”
“I don’t want him to touch my breasts. Anyway, the security light only indicates the ChapStick,” that I was now holding in my hand.”
“Full body,” she said.
“Woman than,” I said.
“I’ll call a supervisor, and they can say what to do.”
She came over and apologized where I was sitting and waiting.
Twenty minutes later I was still waiting for the supervisor and the change of shift had happened, so the pimply faced scrawny guy with the nervous hands was gone. The men on duty were better. “I said, “okay, let’s do this.” Back through the security machine. And the man patted down both my breasts and my groin, despite there not being anything on the security screen this time around. I was wearing a modest, but tight skirt and blouse.
I’ll tell you if there is one thing that’s going to get me moving up to Scotland is what they are mocked for: self-declaration of gender. The transition period that all trans people live through, when we are definitively neither one nor the other, is the most dangerous for us. And yet, the way the law works, the way access to surgery works, to hormones, it requires this of us—that we show our commitment by putting ourselves at risk.
It is a bit strange. That’s why so many trans people rail against the gate keeping. I stopped being a man when I stopped thinking like one. That took me about 6 weeks on hormones. I can’t speak for other people. And it is a sad state that there are probably men who would lie and pretend to be trans to gain access to women’s spaces. And ladies, we are just as much afraid of those kinds of men as you are, perhaps more, as we have even more to lose by their presence, and more to fear from their comments and violence and micro-aggressions.
You can guess where all this is leading. I hate having to pass to be socially acceptable. That people are made uncomfortable by my presence as a trans person is a good thing, because it stirs something inside of them. While I would prefer that everyone embraced us, even the negative responders are a positive of sorts, as they are forced to confront themselves. And passing becomes an easy way out, a question of money, a question of access to surgery. Nowadays, a good surgeon can “fix” most things. They can your hands smaller, they can cut your collar bones and make your shoulders smaller. They can remove ribs and make your waist more snatch.
All this? One of my therapists, yes, my favourite therapist, is not a supporter of surgical transition. Her belief is that it is a Western indulgence. She is right. But her point has no sympathy for dysphoria. We can idolise and fantasise about primitive societies and how and whether people like me, the third sex, was really respected and became shamans. Or simply castrati. I suspect that families with gender divergent children offered them to the local power brokers as slaves, maids, servants, whatever. They certainly understood bloodlines and not wanting these aberrations to reproduce.
I know I wouldn’t be here anymore had a little boy me not found a text book that showed sex change operations. That lit a flame which I have hidden inside of me, kept safe and protected for oh so long. It kept me alive, a resolute desire to be a woman, to not die a man, to experience life as female.
I won’t quite get there, but I’ll get closer than I could have hoped for through community. It’s already happening. I have so many signs of having entered a kind of sisterhood, and there is nothing which matters more right now than that. And it brings a joy that is lived in every cell of my body.
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