In a binary world there is only ugly for this trans woman

The binary world is the world we live in.  Female-male.  Anything that doesn’t fit with that seems out of place.  Weird.  Exotic.  Not normal.  Uncomfortable.  What we are not used to can be seen as ugly.

The relentless pressure for a trans woman to “pass” taps into this energy.  “If I can just fit in, all will be well.”  And for many trans women, performative femininity is the point.  When you grow up in a body that you don’t want and look on with jealousy and longing at the standards of female beauty that I believe all girls are burdened with, all those feelings become more intense, severely compounded, because you know that you are not that.  You can do your best to become a facsimile of that, but that’s all.

I had a poignant conversation with a woman who regretted her TERF feelings, and with whom I had many joyful conversations.  She was resentful of trans women because her own failures as a woman felt drowned out by the trans debate.  She absolutely abhorred the term ‘cis’, as in a woman born a woman at birth.  “Why can’t I just be a woman?” she raged.

Her ‘failure’ as a woman was that she was unable to get pregnant.  There was an anomaly with her ovaries, and her sense of failure at being able to step into her womanhood, what she felt was her purpose, and the essence of womanhood, had scarred her forever, made her feel a failure.  I bring this up to say that body issues are not isolated to trans people at all.  Every woman, even the most beautiful, has had deeply critical looks in the mirror in ways that almost no man has ever had.  Although this is changing for men, it is not in a positive direction.

The impossible beauty standards that we have created for ourselves are the problem.  I am glad that we begin to question it, and that even the most rarefied of it, the fashion industry, is being forced to reconsider beauty.  But beauty standards still exist, and they are almost universally toxic.

Am I too fat?  Am I too thin?  Is my skin colour too this or that?  Do my boobs look nice?  Is that a wrinkle?  I wish I didn’t have freckles.  Are my eyes really different shapes?  Is my nose too big?  My belly button is ugly.  It’s horrible, and so true, and is nearly universal.  So why can’t we do anything about it?

I do have a faith in humanity, and in our ability to outgrow ourselves.  I believe that culture is real, and it is cumulative, but that it is also very fragile.  It is very easy to forget civility and for us to revert to barbarity.  We are surrounded today by violence and war, toxic politics, injustice of all kinds.

In my little corner of the world, the gender binary has been an all-consuming life passion.  Not to uphold it or revere it, but to dismantle it.  To understand it.  To label it.  To identify it.

And despite a lifetime of grappling with it, I am no closer to the truth.  The gender binary, this relentless social need to place people in strict gender roles and gender boxes is as firm as ever.  We are gradually becoming broadly more tolerant, but the fight back against it stems from fear.  Gender roles serve the patriarchy.  They serve institutions of power.

We tie gender to reproduction as a way to control women.  We encourage beauty standards as a way to distract women.  It is a reinforcement mechanism.  There are many women who wake up and realise just how much power their sexuality is.  A woman who is in control of her body and her sexual power is terrifying to many men.  Hence the structure and stricture against it.

We have religion that places shame of female of sexual power at its very foundation, and this is true of all of the Abrahamic religions, but also many others.  The unspeakable practices that are meted on girls and women around the world are simply means of denying women this fundamental tool, their agency.

My readers will know that I consider the woman who chooses sex work as a profession is the ultimate class rebel.  And that holds true for a woman with an Ivy League or Oxbridge education as much as one who never went to college.  It is the most fundamental and outlandish affront to a system that addresses patriarchal power structures head on.

Push back comes to this argument because of how people equate sex work as catering to the male gaze.  But what is empowering about it is that it is paid work.  And it can be so highly paid as to put it on par with the most highly paid corporate work, the domain of Harvard Law School grads and such.  And that there is a market at the price range is proof of how powerful it is.  The offense to the patriarchy is for market forces to exist in an area where privilege is felt or believed to extend—the divine right to sex that belongs to men.  This is the toxic energy of the incel.  But it is also the toxic energy of the entitle client, or of the person who legislates against female bodily autonomy.

And that is fundamentally what the argument is about.  There is solid line from abortion to sex work to equal pay in the work force to the gender binary.  One of the reasons I love being around sex workers so much, and I mean around them not as a client but just in their company, is driven by this sense that they see me as a human with kinder eyes than any other human.  Every day they are faced with toxic masculinity, of the entitled man, of man also in vulnerability, and this experience is eye-opening for them.  There are few things they don’t get to see.

I am not forced into a box.  I can be beautiful.  I feel this in the kink community too.  Usually.  Although my budding experience as a domme and a conversation with a man about whether I was a cross-dresser or not showed that not all kinky people know when to keep their mouth’s shut.

I don’t want to feel pressure to conform.  I don’t want to feel as if I have to get surgery on various parts of my body to adhere to a beauty standard that I never created.  I understand as a former male model, that I was objectively beautiful.  And as a gender bent former male model, that allowed me to occupy this liminal space that quite literally kept me alive and prevented me from serious acts of self-harm.

As I transition, what I see in the mirror is someone who is more beautiful every day.  That is a dream for any trans woman.  We all want to look younger, and that is happening on such high doses of oestrogen.  It won’t last forever.  My face is changing shape, becoming more like what it was when I did model in my twenties.  Even though I am gaining weight, I look thinner, curvier.  My curves have become obvious enough that even a boxy men’s suit can’t hide them.

But I like existing when the people around me can relate to me with their masks off.  In that way, life in Italy is a kind of truth serum.  Everywhere I go I am stared at.  Not just noticed, but stared at.  And they stare at me now no matter what I wear, because I look different, ambiguous, confusing.  Even in running clothes, all bundled for the cold weather.  I love it here.  There is no place in the world I love more.

But I must also face a dawning reality.  I have to live where I can be me.  And I don’t know why, but being stared at feels like interference.  I am really good at turning it out, but it still feels like cognitive dissonance.  The only city I have spent time in as a trans woman where I have really felt good is New York.  In London I have not always felt safe.  Usually, but that isn’t good enough.  

The irony in that is that London is my hometown more than any other city on earth.  New York, on the other hand was a city I really disliked living in when I was young, fresh out of college, still modelling, beginning my first ‘real’ jobs.  And it wasn’t that I didn’t have friends or partied—I did, and so many of my classmates had moved to NY, so there was something fun going on all the time.

But NY was lonely and alienating in those days.  At least it felt that way to me.  Now, what I have felt is the opposite.  I am going to call it an alternative lifestyle community, a kind of hippy energy without the hypocrisy that existed in the old days when the word hippie came into existence.

In other words, I am rebelling against the pressure to conform.  The pressure to adapt to the binary.  And I can’t help but feel compassion for my trans brothers and sisters who feel this relentless need to ‘pass’.  I understand where the desire comes from, but I also am saddened that we can’t all just rejoice in how weird we are.

When I think myself as Queer, this is what I mean.  I know it means sex usually.  But to me it is a more existential label.  Queer simply means not in a box.  Non-binary means not in a box.  I have always called myself non-binary, in part because I am so late in the transition game that I will never fully escape what a life of testosterone has done to me.  But when I took the step to change my birth certificate to female, something clicked into place for me.  Had there been an option to record X on my birth certificate for gender, as there is in more sensitive countries like Argentina, I might have, and certainly would have six months ago.  But now I don’t feel that.  I feel woman inside of me.

And I go back to my conversation with my reluctant-TERF friend and her lament about her inability to have babies.  I feel this so deeply, that when she opened to me and shared that as her truth, I couldn’t help but cry.  And knowing what it feels like, and her knowing and seeing that I knew too, helped her see that a trans woman is not her enemy.

I pity the TERF more than anything.  Their rage and anger is such that they don’t know who is on their side.  I pity the woman who votes against women, who polices other women and their bodies with shame, or attempts to control whether they carry a child or not.  So many of my women friends lament how other women often compete with them, and how much more effective they would be as a block if they could stand together as men do by default.

I feel this, but I also think that women are far more complex than men are.  Women are not black and white.  As a result, women are by definition outside of the binary.  

No wonder that it feels so good to become one.

But it also means that it is important for me to feel like one, and to not be constantly reminded that I look weird or out of place.  The ugly duckling is just ugly if you can’t see the person.  Sometimes when someone looks at me a certain way, I know that they see me in the way I wish to be seen, as a ballerina giraffe.  I want them to see in me a rejection of the male world, an embrace of the feminine.  I could do more, I could a lot more, I could wear makeup, I could have more surgery, but I don’t want that for me.  I want people to see me as a natural trans woman.  I don’t want to be hidden.

And that’s what is so tough to me about my living situation.  For as much as I love being here, I also don’t want the weight on my shoulders.  I am a hypocrite, I guess.  But I never asked to be a freedom fighter just because I changed sex.  And if you stare at me, I will think you are doing so because you think I’m ugly.  And if you think I’m ugly, I don’t you living next door.

There is a very practical reality in this too.  Divorce has reduced me financially.  I will need to work again, and to work hard.  During transition it is almost impossible.  But after, there will be no hiding that I am trans woman.  I had planned on starting a business, but I don’t know whether I can do it here, whether fighting toxic energy is of interest to me.  Do you turn and face it down?  Ignoring it is not my personality.  Fight or flight is the only possibl reaction.