jackironsides (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jackironsides) wrote2019-01-04 10:27 pm
jackironsides) wrote2019-01-04 10:27 pm
Entry tags:
Trans Advent, door four
My parents had friends around for dinner tonight. Two of them, R & J, I'd met before I came out. One, Monica, a lovely woman from Berlin, I'd never met. I was fairly sure that R & J hadn't been told I was transitioning, but Monica had never met me before! Maybe she'd guess my gender correctly; who knows.
It was a pretty nice evening. And then, just before they all left, Monica told me that she thought the enormous picture my parents have on the living room wall was a good one of me. It was taken about six months before I came out, and I am dressed in high-femme mode, with lipstick and a sundress.
I had forgotten it was even there.
I can't express the crushing feeling I had from this one well-meaning complement. I don't know how it came across to Monica. I don't know if I managed to say something polite.
I really wish my parents would take those fucking pictures down.
It was a pretty nice evening. And then, just before they all left, Monica told me that she thought the enormous picture my parents have on the living room wall was a good one of me. It was taken about six months before I came out, and I am dressed in high-femme mode, with lipstick and a sundress.
I had forgotten it was even there.
I can't express the crushing feeling I had from this one well-meaning complement. I don't know how it came across to Monica. I don't know if I managed to say something polite.
I really wish my parents would take those fucking pictures down.
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For what it's worth time does help. You start to look so different that new friends see the old pictures and go "Who the hell standing next to your mom? I didn't know you had a sister."
I know it's a cliche, but things get better. I hope you have a better day today.
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Part of me is afraid that I'll never pass, what with my wide hips and the fact that I'm short even for an AFAB person (I'm five fucking two, ugh). I'm a little afraid to look forward to a day where people stop reading me as female, because what if it never happens? My only solution is to try not to think about it, which unforch means that when stuff like the moment with Monica happens, it's like getting hit in the face by a large fish.
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BUT, in counterpoint, I present to you my friend Will. Who got dat booty. He's 5' 3" ish? You can see his proportions, his softboiTM face. But even in a dress I don't think anyone would call him female. Obviously he's post-op and that helps, but he's only been on T a few years.
Yeah many of us won't ever be celebrity style Dorito men, but beauty standards are not realistic for either gender. In every day life there are lots of ways to express masculinity, and I have no doubt that you will find an expression that works for you.
All the same, yes, I know exactly what you mean about Monica and having the rug pulled out from under you. It's especially disappointed when you've just started to think they get it.
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Honestly, being on tumblr and seeing lots of trans guys posting pictures of their progress through medical transition helps allay a far amount of those fears of never passing. Seeing how much people change over time on HRT is extremely heartening. (Yet another reason why it would be really nice if we got to see some trans characters in the media, especially trans men. Argh.)
(Also, another side point: this is one of the reasons it was so gutting to me that tumblr just started censoring all trans content in the last couple of months.)
It's just that that fear is a large part of what caused me to suppress my gender when I first started thinking of transitioning (now nearly 20 years ago 😱). That fear's been with me a long time. I've been trying to pay attention to my discomfort about transition, and 99% of the time when I drag the feeling into the light, it's the same old fear of not passing. I know the general feeling in the trans community is that we don't need to pass, but I have been in the QUILTBAG community for twenty years, now. I remember when the correct term was still 'transsexual'. When we were still classified as mentally ill. When the whole emphasis was on passing. It's still hard to break that attitude down.
But, you know, I've been on T nearly eight months now, and it *is* starting to make a difference. And hopefully I'll be able to get top surgery through the gender clinic this year - though I don't know for sure. I've been on the waitlist for an appointment nearly as long as I've been on T, and I know they only have a limited amount of grant money to help people pay for surgery each year. And since I'm on the desperately small pittance that is Newstart, I need all the help I can get. Since my parents are ... not enthusiastic about my transition (although they are supportive), I have 0 plans to ask them to help me pay for it. Which might mean waiting for the following year or financial year to get a grant. Or launching a GoFundMe or whatever, I guess, but I'd be deeply worried about how that might affect my benefits.
Also, yeah, lol, definitely no to the Dorito shape. I might've had some chance at it had I transitioned a decade or more ago, but my chronic pain and fatigue have made becoming a gym junkie a complete fantasy. But at least there are men like Taliesin Jaffe and Travis McElroy who model masculinities that fit where I am right now.
I guess that is one benefit of having waited so long - we're starting to see societal change about our constructions of gender, which is nice.
(Plenty of disadvantages to having waited so long, but let's leave that for another day.)
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As a non-binary person I'm surprised to hear that the trans community considers passing unnecessary. All the trans people that I know personally very much want to "pass." Not in the sense that they want to hide their transitions or that they feel compelled to look cisgendered, but in the sense that they want most people that they meet to use the right pronoun without being told.
Obviously for the non-binary community confusion and bucking norms are half of the appeal, but I would have expected a slightly different outlook for trans people. That's good to know.
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I'm not saying that the community sees passing as unnecessary, but there's been a lot of Discourse about it, and the forward thinkers say that the next goalpost, so to speak, is for trans people to be allowed to exist without focusing on passing as cis. That we are our genders regardless of what we look like.
I was fairly well bedded in with the trans community on tumblr, and I follow a lot of trans folk on Twitter too, both binary and nonbinary trans folk. So this is going to shape my experience of the discourse - I absolutely follow at least as many nonbinary as binary trans folk, if not more so.
The old aim used to be passing not only as one's gender, but as cis, if we're being honest. There's a fair amount of discussion about how trans men are almost invisible, not only because there's no media attention on us, but because a lot of trans men, once they pass, go stealth and pretend they were never anything other than cis men (at least to the outside world). Jamison Green talks about it a bit in Becoming a Visible Man, about how it was hard to maintain a community, since lots of trans guys would disappear from their involvement in the community once they reached a certain point in their transition.
But passing as cis is not a perfect goal, since it leaves behind the whole nonbinary community, along with those of us binary trans folk who may never pass perfectly as cis, even if we are seen as our correct gender.
Like, there's all that gatekeeping bullshit that the transmed community pull, which basically says that if you're not trying to medically transition you're not 'really' trans, which is exclusionary to so many different trans people. It exludes some nonbinary folk (I know there are nonbinary folk who explore HRT and surgery), but also folk like a few trans men I know through twitter, who can't medically transition because of their weight.
I'm not really here for gatekeeping of any kind. God knows even the "you're not trans if you're not dysphoric" stuff technically encompasses me, since I was repressing my dysphoria so thoroughly that I would have been hard pressed to be able to label it as dysphoria. Until I finally came out mid-2017, when my dysphoria became whelming and I stopped being able to suppress it.
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