Coming out as a trans woman has deepened my values and sense of personhood

The most delicious part of coming out has been a deepening of my relationships with the people who I really needed.  And life has a way of showing us this.  We accumulate people, thoughts that someone might be significant, and sometimes life events, circumstances, prove to you that they are not.  It is best to not even think about such people or even bother giving them the toss, just to forget.

The people we need are the people who need us back, who love us, and who we love, and where love is founded on nothing more than openness.  I place my children on the top rung in relation to this.

It was to be expected that they would have questions along the way, or that they might struggle with aspects of their father going from male to female.  Who wouldn’t?  But they have embraced the weird and wonderful aspects of it and have showed a delightful sense of humour about it whilst also having compassion for me, and also learning from it.

Coming out is a process which requires a level of self-absorption that is both healthy and hard to avoid.  I would have never taken a selfie before, but now I take them almost every day—in part so that when I feel blue and that nothing has changed, I can look at myself and say ‘holy shit’.  In transition, one must wonder, ‘is it ever enough, can it ever be enough?’

I do believe that our attitude is generally what happens.  We manifest not by belief but simply by the way we are.  Here is a non-gender-related example.

When I moved to New York City for the first time, I was a privileged white boy with an Ivy League education.  I leave out all the hidden stuff that this blog is about.  What matters is that this is absolutely how I would be perceived.  I rented an apartment with a black woman and a white man in area that had not yet been gentrified or was even showing signs of gentrification.  The black woman was, like me, Ivy league educated, and like me, in her first real job.  The white man was a few years older than us, and a professional jazz piano player [which made for some incredible practice jam sessions in our living room].  Maybe he romanticised living in a black neighborhood.

My neighbourhood was rough.  There were gangs.  There were shootings.  It was probably not safe.  The one time my girlfriend at the time came over [I was sick], she vowed never to come again—as she tended to me there was a car chase which ended with a car flipped over in front of my building, some scrambling people, and a hail of bullets from the police.  Fortunately, on this occasion, nobody was hurt.

My black friends told me I was crazy to live there.  It was dangerous, so dangerous that they didn’t want to come over.  I didn’t care, but the rent was cheap and the apartment was big.  I did love it there, and I became quite close with the woman who lived there, and we stayed in touch for years.  She has had an amazing career and was absolutely stunning, outspoken, and a wonderfully complex human, and truly feminist.  We spent a lot of our time together talking about her relationships, dating as a black woman, and how black men had a sense of entitlement, that it was almost impossible for her to date a white man and be in the black community—that she would be regarded as a traitor, but she found the black man’s mentality hard to deal with.  She was so eloquent about why a white woman can marry a black man and not suffer in the same way as a black woman who marries a white man.  Things I had never considered.

I wore a very nice suit every day to a Wall Street law firm.  I had just stopped modelling and was doing my very first real job, learning to cope with the commute, the structure that was coming into my life, and having to balance the demands of 9-5 with no longer being able to take care of myself with the same indulgence as I had when I was going on photoshoots and such.  I didn’t make bank, but the parallels to the rhythm of life that I know many Sex Workers have, and the self-care that is required, is familiar territory.  I had to be obsessive in those days about what I ate, about exercise, about who cut my hair, when, how.  I had a gruelling skincare regime, was constantly hydrating, and making sure I always ‘looked the part’.  Part of me missed it, but another part of me most definitely did not.

This is all a very long-winded way of saying that I didn’t get mugged even though I should have been highly muggable.  I should have been an object of hate.  A representative of class dislocation, racial injustice, and a force of change that is embodied in gentrification which should have made me a lightning rod for rage.  I came to that point from a bastion of privilege, one of the top universities in the US, and one which I managed to leave without any debt.  I got into that school because I came from one of the top high schools in the country, an almost all-white, all-male school that believed in muscular Christianity and a Christian moral education.  I don’t think that any of my classmates got SAT scores below the minimums set by the Ivy League schools.

There were three black students in my class: one whose family was very financially successful and had achieved social breakthrough in the city where we all lived, another who was a scholarship student of a dual-income working family from an okay part of town, and the third who was from the inner city, an economic hardship case, but who was one of the fastest runners in the country.  He was the schools “token” case of helping the community.  I’ve written about him.  He’s the one who used to physically aggress me.  I say this, because it is obvious that I should have been a good target for resentment.

I have often puzzled over this.  In my year and a bit living in that apartment, I was never assaulted, but my white roommate was jumped three times.  One of my black friends who lived nearby but in a much nicer area was also jumped, and he was physically built and quite intimidating.  Apart from being tall, I was willowy, and have always looked fragile.

Why them and not me?  Fear.  It isn’t that I have courage.  That I steel myself.  Gird my “loins”.  It is that it doesn’t occur to me to be afraid.  That I should be.  Is this innocence?

The city I spent the most time in growing up, my home town, was majority black.  Very much so.  Even though I lived in a white bubble, it was impossible to go out and not be surrounded by black people.  I know that so many white people in America are afraid of black people.  Maybe I would have become afraid too had I not been totally surrounded by blacks.  And maybe these attitudes get shaped even before we are conscious.  Before racial difference means anything.

Before entry into a cycle of privilege, we lived through a financially challenging period that was the result of divorce.  We grew food because we couldn’t afford to buy it all, we barely heated our house in the winter, just enough to keep the pipes from freezing (which by the way doesn’t really work, as our frozen pipes was an all-too-frequent occurrence), and I went to the local public school.  My teachers were mostly black, my classmates were mostly black or latin, all of my friends were black.  And my mother wasn’t racist.

She went as the date of a very well-known black singer of the day to the White House and described him as the ‘sexiest man alive’.  For years we had a picture of them hanging in the hall—I wonder what happened to it.  I was a member of the local boys club, which was after school sports, and I don’t remember there being other whites.  

My very first proper kiss was with a black girl in my class who was gorgeous and confident, in herself, and in my attraction and devotion to her.

Later, when I was in high school, I developed a passion for photography, and I would take pictures of people and places in my city.  I would walk alone in rough neighbourhoods.  I remember some man coming up to me, telling me I had a fancy camera and could he hold it.  I imagined that was a euphemism for stealing it.  And he could have just taken it from me, like candy from a baby.  But he didn’t.  We just talked a bit, and he got curious and asked what I was doing there, what I was taking pictures of, and I asked him about him, and we just talked.

Being polite can be intentional, like you do it for a reason, but that feels to me like strings attached.  Or you just are that way.  I don’t know if you can be raised to be polite and respectful, or whether it is core to who you are.

One of my dearest and deepest friends is staying with me right now.  My children really like her.  My wife absolutely despises her.  She knows me probably better than anyone on earth, and she does not judge.  She also dominates me.  Not in a kinky way or for any other reason than that she is my friend, she knows that I respond to it positively, and also because it is naturally how she is.  And I listen to her.  Not because she dominates me, but because I respect her.  And I listen to her even when it hurts or is uncomfortable, and this I do because she is dominant.  It predisposes me to take that extra pause, that extra time, and make sure to listen.  And what I listen for is what she is really saying, because even if I don’t like it, I know that what she is saying to me is always intended to be for my benefit.  She can be wrong, or off, but she is one of the rare people in my life who can do “open-heart” conversational surgery on me and we can both just kind of detach ourselves from it and look at it as two third parties objectively discussing.

I can’t remember what we were talking about, but at one point she said, “you are so utterly and totally submissive.  It is who you are.  It is evident.”

“No way,” I said, “I am so dominant in my life, in every aspect of my life.”  She gave me this look.  You know the look.

“You don’t speak like a dominant person.  You don’t carry your body like a dominant person.  It doesn’t mean you aren’t strong.  You are one of the strongest people I know.”

“I don’t know what makes you think that.  I’ve never thought of myself as overtly submissive.”  She gave me the look again.

“Why do you think people talk to you, open up to you?  You just told me a story about a woman you had just met who let you tie her up and play with her erotically having just met her.  You are non-threatening.  Totally and utterly non-threatening.  And that liberates people.”

Something to think about for sure.

Well, I have written previously about the one time that I was accosted in my neighbourhood by a gang, but they left me alone and we just chatted.  And I wondered why, then, and this a post in reflection of that could be.  It didn’t occur to me to be afraid.  Innocence.  Yes.  But there is something deeper in that.  I see everyone as human.  I feel them.  I don’t call myself an empath, which seems to be a popular thing to say these days.  And as an ADD human if anything, I display many of the characteristics of an inconsiderate, self-centred, aloof person.  Don’t let the illusion fool you: ADD people are hyper-sensitive—when you don’t see it, it is not because they don’t feel it, but because they don’t feel safe enough to let themselves feel what they really feel. Weird, but true.

Anyway, these guys who surrounded me were just people, fellow humans.  I was polite, they were polite.  We just saw each other as we are.  They might have intended to rob me, they certainly surrounded me and blocked my path.  But for whatever reason in their original intent, it changed.  And I guess what it comes down to is that being a afraid of someone, a group of people, is a form of disrespect.  I was not afraid because I am courageous.  No.  I was not afraid because it wouldn’t have occurred to me.  And I don’t think that I am oblivious.

One of the by-products of the multi-cultural life I have had is to be hyper-vigilant.  Being very aware of what is going on around me, always.  It is a superpower.  This skills lends itself to what I do for a living: negotiating.  I can read a room, all of it, for hours on end, picking up the subtle queues even from the bit players who are not central to the discussion.  My colleagues always seem to miss this.  That is why I am a closer, and they are not.

It is all related.  I live without guile.  I have no room for it in my life.  I don’t cheat at cards, or other games, I don’t seek to bend the rules to suit me, I don’t think ill of people until they do something to me to make me reconsider…and instead of fighting with them, I just don’t interact with them.  There is something else.  Had I shown fear to the group of men who had surrounded me, I somehow give legitimacy to their “othering”.  And it is precisely this othering which I should have nominally represented, a seemingly rich (or at least on relative terms), white guy gentrifying the neighbourhood at a time where race riots were taking place and there was real tension in the air.

None of this is to toot my horn.  It is a long, long roundabout way of reflecting on the process of coming out, of being trans, and why I don’t really have fear in relation to being me.  So what?  I am trans.  I don’t have a problem with it.  Why should anyone else?  I don’t present myself as something I am not.  I try to look good.  I don’t try to make myself look like I was a born woman.  I don’t really wear makeup.  I don’t think it flatters me.  At least not yet.  Maybe I will someday.

I just am.

And my question is this: why can’t we all just be?  What would be wrong with that?