Trans Advent, door four

[jackironsides]

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.

Comments

[dendriteblues]

Twenty years is a very long time to wait, you have my absolute respect. I agree about social change, it's very nice to see the large world talking about and excepting that gender is not as simple as male and female. The trans spaces on DW seem inactive, which is a shame. I suppose like everything else here it's up to us to invigorate it and hopefully build a similar supportive network.

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.

[jackironsides]

I mean, I wish I hadn't waited that long. It wasn't something I put off through conscious choice.

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.