The sad tyranny of “passing” as a trans woman

Apology: this post may hurt some feelings or say inappropriate things.  I am apologizing ahead of time, since I plan to say them anyway.  But what I do not do is judge.  I come at this from a place of being inside the tribe.  The trans experience is unique, but we all live it differently.  I look forward to a time and place where being trans is neither celebrated or shamed, but just comes with an understanding that we are just different, as is anyone.

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a really long time.  Most post ideas have a gestation period of about 5 minutes, or less.  I get an idea in my head and then play with it, see where it goes.  This is different.  It has been rattling around like a bumble bee in a beer can for months on end.

Why?

Well, for starters, the transition process is a long, slow road.  It is a kind of dance of a thousand veils with the self, and thus far, every minute of it, even the ugly ones, have been beautiful.  These days I am spending a lot of time learning about the risks of the surgery that looms for me a few months from now.  I am also spending a lot of time trying to learn about vaginas and what it will be like to care for one, and to have one.

I am amazed and heartened by the progress made in surgery.  Through family connections I had the pleasure of speaking to one of the top transgender surgeons on earth from the 1970’s—imagine the strange things which come out of the woodwork—I didn’t even know of his existence until I came out.  He is now retired, but speaking to him at length about the risks of surgery and what it was like back then was moving, informative, and continues to resonate with me.

He described his practice in those days as “plumbing” and was so excited by the change in emphasis from just creating a “hole” to one that is fully functioning and capable of experiencing sexual pleasure.  He gave me a checklist of things to ask for, to check on with the stats of the doctors I am considering.  And all of the scary and terrible things that can go wrong.

In my life, my fear of needles and doctors began as a child.  The trope of male babies in this case rings true.  I “mastered” it.  Sort of.  When in college I used to regularly give blood, something which I felt compelled to do having both a rare blood type, but also as someone who lives to give, but was soon told I really shouldn’t come anymore because invariably I would turn, look at the needle in my arrm, down the tube with blood draining away, and into the pouch collecting it, and had this overwhelming sense that my life force was draining away.  And then wham, out like a light.

It was a great way to get extra cookies and apple juice and to flirt with the nurses.

My self-image as a trans woman

I was in service to a budding young dominatrix at the beginning of my D/s journey.  She, like me, was relentlessly gyno-phyllic.  She was a lesbian.  She was also very gentle and touching with me, and taught me many ways to self-soothe.  Unusually, we never did anything kinky together…or even discussed kinky things that involved teasing me.  Instead we explored sexuality, desire, lust, fantasy.

The greatest lesson she left me with was an understanding of one of my core motivations, and it could have only come from a woman who loves women.  I described to her the feeling I had when I looked at a woman I was attracted to.  Unlike a man, even back then, or at any point in my life, my attraction never resulted in a feeling of wanting to “do” her.  What happened was that I wanted to be her.  On a connection basis this might have extended to imagine what it was like to kiss her, or to touch her arm, to caress her skin.  

But the lesson of being, of wondering what it would be like to be like her, whoever she was.  I always associated this with my only gender dysphoria, and perhaps it was/is.  She shared that this is quite common amongst lesbian women.  I can’t say how universal it is, but I look forward to finding out.  And yes, I wonder if a cis, “straight” woman will ever find enough of what she is looking for in me to thrive in my arms, for a gay woman feels almost as far away in her target affections as to what I am, am becoming.

Ex-Mistress Helps me with body image through tough love

I know that most “men” turn to a dominatrix for kinky fun.  That might have lurked in my mind on some level, but never really seemed to be the reason for reaching out to someone.  I was looking for magic.  And while I think it might have been almost conscious, I can’t be sure.  But the magic I needed was to bust me open, and that required conscious kink.

Kink and the erotic were these powerful forces that we were able to use together to rewire enough of me to liberate me.  I still remember this outrageous feeling of excitement when I met her for the first time, this disbelief that someone could be both so beautiful, so ‘normal’, and actually a dominatrix.

At one point well into our time together we talked about body image, and gender dysphoria.  With a genuinely stern tone she asked me to consider my naked body, and to elucidate how it helped me.  I couldn’t look at my body objectively and not admit that it had save my life.  Being blessed with a high metabolism, and long, lithe limbs, and a tight waist, even at my pudgiest stage in life, it was hard to hate it.

I confessed to her that my body saved my life.  And it was true.  In somatic therapy recently, I confessed to my fellow practitioners-in-training, that it was only recently, post hormone therapy, that I was able to be naked.  Please don’t judge me for this, but I didn’t want to be embodied, so never had sex with the lights on, or slept with my wife without long pyjamas on…we eventually slept apart, but I don’t know if she ever really saw me naked, or anyone in my family for that matter.

I sleep naked now.  I am beginning to love my body.  It hasn’t changed much, only a bit more curvy, and with the most beautiful little, but growing breasts.

The transgender journey

The little changes which take place are so welcome, they are like soul salve.  I don’t know if they would have been enough for my male brain, in other words, how much of my new found satisfaction and comfort just comes from the mental shifts brought on by hormones are hard for me to understand.

But these changes, coming in little reveals, are enough.

My doctors tell me that the transition process takes a decade to really settle in.  Hormones do an awful lot, but there are some things that they can’t do:

• The voice post male puberty is the voice, and it can only be changed through a risky surgery and extensive vocal training…but will never sound as it would have, only just less manly;
• Bones which have grown under the influence of testosterone are not going to change.  Hence the desire of many trans people to have facial surgery, or even surgery on the rib cage or shoulders to narrow them.

Other surgeries like a Brazilian butt lift (BBL) or fat redistributiond or lipo I don’t explicitly consider as these results can be achieved at least in part through diet and exercise.

The tyranny of passing

People who live in glass houses…

It seems that so many trans people, if not most, ache to pass.  I don’t know if this is a desire to just be anonymous, which is synonymous with the idea of “passing”…as in being so stealth that nobody notices you.  This is almost exclusively a privilege reserved for the young, for those who never have to experience puberty of the “wrong” sex and the depredatious [I know, let’s just call this word a neologism] marks it leaves on one’s gender identity.  

There is another more likely reason.  99% of trans people are not non-binary, meaning they identify or wish to identify as the opposite sex.  That gives me the pleasure of belonging to the 1% of the 1% (of non-binary and transgender people, respectively, as a share of the total population).  The “problem”, therefore, is vanishingly rare.  But it is personal, and therefore, enough.  And as you can imagine, waking up every day in a body that feels wrong for whatever reason, with a perceived gender identity that doesn’t feel right, is hell.

I am discovering little by little that it is/was a hell that yields incredible beauty.  To me the word “bittersweet” is forever tinged thus.  And it courses through my veins.  It feeds me on my own pain, and not wishing that pain for others, it informs my desire to care for and look after people, informs my desire to feel, and it not just feeds but is essential to my inner witch. 

Will I ever cross the line?

I can’t escape that when I am gendered the way I am becoming, as female, I feel both joy and sometimes wonder if they are just being nice.  Mostly they are, and it is appreciated.  In fact, I don’t really wonder.  One of my siblings, the Godless one, is actually the most affirming in this regard and is the only one who calls me ‘sister’.  

But I had too much time fed by testosterone, and no amount of surgery can ever take that way.  I am a giraffe, taller than 99.9% of women.  My hands are small-ish, for a man, but are unmistakably formerly male.  My feet are smaller by 1½ sizes since starting on hormones, but only “special” women’s shoes are ever big enough.  I am a big girl.

My first-choice facial surgeon has told me I don’t need facial surgery.  What kind of surgeon says that?  Others tell me that body surgeries I am contemplating are not necessary either, but I can’t tell whether they are just worried about the damage to my health that so much surgery will cause.  None of these surgeries are a walk in the park.  2024 and possibly beyond will be a year under the knife punctuated by long recovery times.

And will I ever pass?

Being Non-Binary

I might be fake non-binary.  Had I transitioned pre-puberty I would be relentlessly female.  Probably performatively so.  A girly girl.  I know that.  I might have even ended up liking boys.  I can’t separate my sexual fantasy life that included, has included fantasies of being overpowered by a man, from my present and fantasy past reality.  Had I never gone through a sexual awakening as a male during puberty, I might have never become so female oriented.  I don’t really know.  

What I do know is that puberty for me was characterised by an intensification of infantilist fantasy, of wanting to be a baby, of fetishizing the ritual of being turned back into a baby.  As I think about that now, it was a longing to go back to an innocent state before puberty, before my gender was more ambiguous and sexuality didn’t matter…and I can’t deny that I hated becoming male, hated that I couldn’t hide from it, hated my voice changing, hated no longer being seen as androgynous.

My life as a male from that point onwards became a series of lessons that made me dislike men, manhood, the male, and love women.  What’s the connection.  I saw male behaviour and lust and desire from the inside, and uneasy as it was, I hated it.  I didn’t share the feelings that my male friends did, never shared the predatory lust that came with male desire, or the sense of privilege.  What I felt was pain.  A desire to distance myself.

I think I became non-binary because it post-puberty, the potential to feel female was what I felt was to be forever denied.  So, I have “settled” on being non-binary.  Part of that has to do with not passing, and not wanting to continue to live forever in a state of dysphoria.  But I am a long way from finding full contentment in the body that I will end up with.

My release for the hospital states that “sexual reassignment surgery may not relieve gender dysphoria” as one of the clauses I have had to sign up to.  I know it will, just as hormones have, in part.  I read a beautiful article by a trans sister who wrote that she has spent the last decade learning what it means to be female and will spend the rest of her life doing so, and will possibly never know.  I feel that.  That is both beautiful and sad at the same time.  Bittersweet.

My gender markers

Somehow my wife has decided that it is an affront to her for my children to use my correct pronouns in her presence.  I have asked for they/them or she/her.  They don’t like using they/them because they feel it is awkward to make coherent sentences, and I sympathise up to a point, so I have said, “if you can’t they/them, then she/her”.  They have said they would start after bottom surgery.  

All right.  Soon enough.  But before I go in for this surgery, my legal markers will have changed.  When I read the letter from my primary care doctor to be presented along with my request for a change to my birth sex on my birth certificate I felt this strange and intense joy.  In a way, it is to erase my male past.  I don’t know how I feel about it.  In the modern world, I do not feel I have a choice.

But when I am legally female, I will start to use women’s facilities, and complete this last aspect of my social transition.  That means that in no space or domain will I ever play the male.  And that means my tolerance for being gendered male is going to plummet.  Already I have a feeling of upset when someone who sees me and ‘sirs’ me or ‘him/he’s’ me when I am, as always, dressed as a woman, because I know they can see, and have made an active choice to call me what I am no longer.  I used to think it was okay, but I don’t anymore.  Also because I am now formally conscious of being discriminated against.

Don’t call me a man.  It belittles what I am doing, becoming, and my lived reality.

My wardrobe and men’s clothes

I have kept a few nice items of men’s clothing.  Including boxer shorts.  I don’t wear them now but contemplate wearing them after surgery.  I joke that this means becoming a drag king.  I don’t know what it is, but playing “boy” somehow feels all right to contemplate for me after I imagine what it will be like to have a vagina and an increasingly femme body.  

Surgery

For someone who is scared of blood and needles, it is strange that I have only resolve in the place of fear regarding bottom surgery.  I am prepared to not come out alive.  Whatever it takes.  I don’t want to be maimed or have severe post-operative problems.  And there are a freakishly high number of issues that arise, even with really well-regarded surgeons.  Sadly, there are far more surgeons who should probably not be doing such delicate surgery than there are people who are great at it.  That’s why the really good ones have multi-year waiting lists.

I am not afraid of this surgery, and so look forward to it.  I know that I will feel female, much more so, and will also be regarded as such by more people.  It blows my mind that only 18% of trans women have sexual reassignment surgery (bottom surgery, the creation of a vagina).  There are many reasons for that, among them money and access, but also fear and desire.  These are the ones that “society” hates the most, never wondering what their motivation or reasoning might be…but also not just accepting that one can feel ‘female’ or at least ‘not male’ and not have bottom surgery.

I can’t imagine it.  Getting to have a vagina is my version of having a baby.  A right of passage, and one which has an equal or greater medical impact on the body as childbirth.  A vagina is also a lifetime commitment for a trans woman, one which requires ‘maintenance’ and care.  These factors as well as the physical and emotional vulnerability that comes to me with the presence of a vagina, are welcome and beautiful.  I couldn’t imagine doing this without bottom surgery.

But I won’t look any different except when I am wearing a bikini.  I will still look unmistakably trans.  I wish it didn’t matter.  But somehow it does.

First, society does not make it easy for us to just be.  Socially, the collective stares, judges, others us.  The desire to “pass” is a manifestation of the very real desire to disappear.  There is safety, but there is also just feeling in line with the social construction of gender.  One might like it, but it is so imponderably heavy as to be inescapable.  And that leads me to this rabbit hole of never-ending surgeries.

I don’t really want them.  And yet I do want to have had them.  But even then, will it make a difference?  Will people stop gendering me male.  Will people stop ‘othering’ me for being trans?  I can’t count it.  That’s about them, not about me.

A positive version of the future

While there is pain in having been male through puberty and beyond, I don’t regret it, because I have the most beautiful children and have had an incredible life, rich, enriching, privileged, joyful, filled with laughter.  Even if the dysphoria was always there.  It is that foundation on which I have the found the courage to make this change.  And I do it with a sense of confidence that I do have a right to occupy a space, that I do have a right to not be small, that I do have a right to not be invisible, that I have a right to be very, very present.

Part of my goals for myself include not being a female doormat.  I know that so many women live this way, feeling a need to please.  Male me was defined by this.  My wife uses it to bully me still.  But as a woman I won’t have it.  I am not taking that across the Rubicon with me.  Talk about something difficult.  I don’t think transition has anything to compare with what lies ahead in relation to this aspect.  Transition is a motivator, but the shadow work associated with the embedded behaviours of needing to be a people pleaser are so much harder.

I seek to forge an identity that has nothing to do with passing.  I am a trans woman, and I don’t need to pass.  I can be beautiful and tall and defy everyone’s expectations of beauty.  One of my children said it to me best, “you just need to be successful.  There’s no greater gift you can give to the trans community than that.  Be rich and successful.  Don’t be a victim.”  Ah, from the mouths of babes.

Over this Thanksgiving holiday, I have had the love-wrapping experience of my children working with me to choose my new name.  I like the idea that I named them, but that they will name me.

I am so proud of them, and through their eyes, can see a world were trans people can just be. The gender binary is toxic. And while I may wish to disappear across the line, I cannot, and will forever occupy a liminal space between the sexes. The world needs that, and even though I am an unwilling and unlikely warrior, the fact of my existence makes me so.