Facing the “job market” again as a trans woman

Feeling the everything is at stake

I don’t want to fail.  Failure to me looks like a change in my standard of living because I came out as trans.  If there is anything I should have a right to, it is to fail on my own terms.  Nice way of putting it.

There is a reality I face as I have already seen work denied me for being trans.  And while people in the work world are nice to my face, I am no fly on their wall in case they speak of me differently when I am not there.

Part of my interest in Sex Work is that it can be a lucrative career.  Can be.  Though I think for only a very few.  I don’t know, but I suspect, that there is youth, beauty advantage to that.  Of course there is.  Who am I kidding.  But I get so much encouragement from people who know, and who tell me that trans girls make bank.

We shall see.  I will keep you posted.

In the meantime, I feel as if I need to put as many irons in the fire as I possibly can.  The irony of my former professional life is that my foray into Sex Work will likely kill my prospects there forever.  Too easy to find me.  Vanilla, respectable businesses don’t like the stain of controversy.

How many dominatrix CEO’s do you know?  There should be more of us, that’s for sure.  What I really do know is how much I enjoy what I am doing.  But I also know that the party is over.  My divorce has completely drained the coffers, and it isn’t over yet.

I am getting a court-ordered allowance from my own money, but the source it is coming from will run out soon enough. And then what?  I have several books in the pipeline, but you know what?  As sexy and exciting it is to publish, the money sucks.  Unless you are Jilly Cooper or the Barefoot Contessa, there isn’t much money in writing.  It’s a hard lot done for the joy of the art or from a position of already having enough wealth.

That’s okay.  I will publish anyway.

I will also continue to look for work in my old field.  I just need one client at a time.  And anyway, I am better at what I did now than I was when I last did it.  The path is clear before me.  It is up to me to make it happen.

And isn’t that something?  My other choice, to be an entrepreneur, normally a scary endeavor, as a trans woman is potentially less risky.  Being dependent on others for work, having a “job” provides a false sense of security.  False. When someone else controls your destiny, they can change it at will.

In honour of myself, I insist on being more successful than I was pre-transition.  I owe it to my life as a woman.  To make my life even more delicious than it was before.  I also owe it to my love life.  Because success attracts partners.  People love to be around winners.

I watched my mother age into the dating pool.  She lamented most bitterly about men who were losers.  Mostly it had to do with their earning power.  I judged that aspect of her, but she was old-fashioned and wanted a man who would support her financially.  I don’t want a man or a woman to support me financially.  I don’t want to support them either.   I want to be a DINK household.  I want to be with a hot woman with her own career and life and prospects, fully in her power, fully in my power, so we can just blow the lid off of everything.

I want us both to be able to surprise each other, to lavish each other with generosity, to be free enough to just lean into love.  Everyone teases me about how I fall in love every week, and how I have so many new flames all the time.  Have I met her?  The good news is not knowing.  The good news is that even when the answer is always ‘no’, there is always someone else who might be…and that is true of all things in life.

But isn’t this what we all want?  It is just that wanting it is not enough.  Making it happen is what is required.  And that is no small feat.  To accomplish it is to be accomplished, to achieve, to make it happen.

Is there anything better in life?  Is there anything better than a sense of accomplishment?  Is there anything better than making it on your own steam?  Is there anything better than achieving financial independence?  Of being able to control your own destiny?

I was “accused” of being the product of privilege, and of course I was.  But I also grew up in a house wrecked by divorce, with a deadbeat father who wouldn’t often pay his risible alimony so that our home, where we lived with our mother, though grand, was often heated in the winter just enough to keep the pipes from freezing—and they often did anyway.  We couldn’t just go to the store and buy what we wanted…we ate a lot of beans and pulses.  We also all worked in a community garden—my siblings, my mother, and I.  Every darned weekend.  And we didn’t do it as hobbyists, didn’t do it to have a natter and a cuppa with our allotment neighbor.

Nope.  We had a double plot, and we grew our food.  I hated going there every weekend, but it was true how much better the tomatoes and carrots tasted when we grew them ourselves…not just because they were actually tastier, but also because we had grown them, they were also the fruit of our labours.  And that always tastes sweet.

In school, I remember a classmate commenting on how privileged I was to have a car and a moped.  I needed them.  I needed the car to drive my boat to the river every day to train in my sport.  The life of a young Olympic hopeful.  But I also needed my car and my moped to get to work.  I worked every weekend and on several weekday nights to earn money to buy my independence.  In those days I lived in the basement of my father’s house.  My mother had finally remarried and moved away.

It was a black period at home.  My father was who he was.  We were not close.   My friends and family were through school and sport.  Work that hard, relentlessly, at something, you bond, deeply, with your fellow travellers.  Friends for life.  And indeed, they are.  Still are.

My working life was an excuse to never be home.  The money was an excuse to keep me away from needing my father for anything.  Even conversation.

My room was pretty grim.  It was not meant for habitation.  I had to go up two floors to take a shower, or three.  My “bathroom” was that there was a toilet in the basement in an airless closet.  My room was damp.  Anything which rested against the wall would grow mold, including my mattress.  So, I lived in the middle of the room.

The only good thing about it was that I had an entrance of my own, or rather exit, so I could come and go as I pleased.  And I did.  I was resident with my father, but not present.  It was as if they had another life upstairs, and they did.  He had remarried, they were a “happy” couple, they had kids, my half-siblings.  I was and am close to my “halfs”.  But I noted and resented the huge difference in circumstances between their lives and mine.  Their rooms were painted.

I am not that smart.  So many kids in my class were brighter than me by far.  My best friend ended up being the valedictorian, and his twin brother, second best in our class.  The two of them were one of only a handful of kids in the nation who had perfect scores on their scholastic tests.  I remember them both and one other person receiving awards for it.  They all ended up going to one particularly well-known University.  But I remember that there were times when we would be in conversation, and I could feel the brain power that they possessed.  It was greater than mine.

My brain couldn’t keep up.  But it had a quirk that theirs did not, and one which has stayed with me ever since.  The ADD brain is different.  It is often creative, more creative.  And creativity adds a spark of the unexpected.  It is the unexpected which most often changes the game.  And that is what I have found in life that I am most suited to.  What else?  The other way to cope?  To work harder than others do?

So, yes, in a way, I was born to privilege.  But in another way, a more profound way, I created my privilege.  And I can be happy that my children have had more secure and glamourous lives than I did because of this.  And I can be also happy that I found my way into a similarly good school as my genius friends, only a cooler and quirkier one…which suited me just fine.

Yes, I had all the advantages of being white and male.  But we didn’t have money.  And yes, I did have a divorced mother who worked at any job she could take, but it wasn’t enough.  But with what there was, she put us into good grade and high schools.   Robert Kiyosaki says in his life-changing book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, that his own father shared an obsession that school was the meal ticket.  That was certainly my mother’s philosophy, and my father’s if he cared, and it has also been my own, and thus far, it has worked.  In other words, the dichotomy between the hustle and economic thinking described in the book, is not an either or, but rather a case of having your cake and eating it…which comes from perspective.

I asked one of my children the other day about privilege and the burden of responsibility of being a part of the elite.  And I don’t write that sentence lightly.  When you attend one of the most prestigious schools on earth, you are in the elite, no matter how it is paid for.  And with that comes an additional “burden”.  We call it a burden.  But it isn’t.  We might also call it a duty.  But burdens and duties sound unpleasant, and things we have to do rather than might want to do.  I prefer to think of it as a “calling”. 

When given so much, when we have found ourselves “arrived”, our calling must be to use the tools to the greatest extent possible, as in to the very best of our abilities.  In other words, to throw ourselves into life with insatiable lust.  To flex our muscles, to work them, and to pursue everything that we set ourselves to with boundless and playful energy.  Nothing matters more than our obligation to ourselves to be the best we can possibly be…and the more so, the further ahead the starting point.

There is nothing worse than laziness.  Not for how it feels, but for the waste that it is.  The idle rich.  The entitled.  The “couldn’t be bothered” types who don’t put in the extra effort.  That is the tragedy.  And of course it strikes everywhere.  

Often people are disconnected from their own power, feeling that no matter what they do, they can’t make it.  Or worse, they get into a cycle of blaming factors outside of themselves.  It’s true that the world can throw awful surprises at us, and some of these are so great that they do break us.  But it is also true that disruption is not about being a victim, it is about changing, adapting, being relentless.

I have just thrown a spanner into my own works.  Quite literally.  I took an established deck of cards, a well-ordered life, and made it hella complicated.  Sex change.  Divorce.  No job.  This is getting interesting.  What can’t I do?  I want it all.  Don’t you?