Leaving a Mark on the American Heartland With My Solo Queer Trans* Woman Roadtrip

trans*scribe illustration ©rosa middleton, 2013

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I have peed on sacred ground and no deity has struck my hot trans* ass down. I have peed in the American West. I have peed in the truckstops and the rest areas. I have peed in the foothills. I have not been misgendered! (Take that, Winston Churchill.)

I have also walked arm in arm with my girlfriend at a midwestern Christian college. The worst that happened was bubbly undergraduates asking if we wanted some coupons. This past year of my transition, 2012, has been one of road travel with many miles revisited across numerous American states.

My first road trip occurred in the summer, when my girlfriend and I moved her brother to college. It was also when we visited my mom to tell her in person of my transition. Needless to say, it wasn’t quite a carefree emotional vacation. Yet there were light moments. On our drive between these two events, we stop to get some snacks. As we wait, a hitch-hiker engages me in conversation:

“Are you guys sisters?”
–No.
“Mother and daughter?”
I look askance. “No. We’re partners.”

After 7 years together, that word still strikes me oddly. It’s the best word we’ve got since we have no interest in marriage. Before transition, “girlfriend” bestowed more heteronormativity than I was comfortable with. At least “partner” introduced queer connotations. Now, though, I’m loving “girlfriend” because of the obvious queerness. It’s a linguistic stake in the ground declaring us a girl-girl couple.

Our stoned friend continues, “business partners? Travel buddies?” My partner finally turns around and states: “girlfriends.” “Whoa! That is so cool!” he goes on and on. We take our food and go back to the car. Two hours later, we’re back in Chicago having dinner with good friends and recounting our day.

Anxiety Checklist

I’m no newbie to the road, having driven 44 states and 6 provinces — more than most people I know. As a genderqueer non-binary male, I bore the cross of whatever locals and cops assumed about me. Those assumptions are gone now, replaced by new ones. So after my first successful trip with my girlfriend, it was obviously time to take my show on the road solo, right?

Not the least of my concerns was driving my friend Xene’s unfamiliar Prius from Seattle to Omaha through possibly inclement November weather. Yet, my larger concern was driving solo as a woman. My overactive imagination wrote the scenarios of the damsel in distress as if my extensive experience had been nullified. Additionally, it wrote the narrative of the trans* victim trope. I’d be lying if I said that my sheer excitement was not perfectly balanced by sheer fright.

Unlike summer, I was on my own. Outside of Seattle, I had no idea what to expect. There aren’t many positive narratives about road-tripping trans* women outside the comparative safety of the urban archipelagos.

A definitive, six-question “What Rogue are you?” internet quiz identified me as a highwayman. That’s cool and fitting. Unlike Noyes’ Highwayman, I made it back fine. Like him, though, I may have engaged in crimes. Exhaustingly, peeing while trans seems a radical political act these days and possibly an outlaw act depending on the jurisdiction.

Correct documents notwithstanding, I was still transporting my penis across state lines. I couldn’t help but have a few concerns. For example, I’m callous and lazy; I refuse to tuck. I don’t go out of my way to highlight my non-standard equipment. However, I can’t be arsed with providing the cis world the misguided satisfaction that I’m ashamed of my anatomy. It’s turned into a point of pride as well as a bizarre, TMI-based, political statement. It’s taken me many years to finally realize that I fucking love my body, all of it.

Yet it’s a defiance I embody while comfortably ensconced in queer-friendly Seattle. Reality is different outside the archipelago, where political statement can become tempered by survival concerns. What could go wrong?

Naturally, these concerns would play out in the many restrooms along the route. Spiro! Amirite ladies!? I can’t be the only transwoman who feels a little vulnerable every time she stands up exposed to those two, centimeter-wide gaps, stage right and stage left, on either side of the stall door. Intellectually, I understand I see more outward than people see inward. Yet in the unfamiliar hinterland, informed scientific knowledge takes a backseat to survival paranoia.

Armed with equal parts excitement and fright, callousness and caution, I leave Seattle’s warm, queer embrace. I feel a little like Bernadette in Priscilla, piloting my vehicle into uncertain territory. All I’m certain of is that I have timelines and I must proceed as the way opens.

As with all proper road trips, this one gives me time to think. Thoughts become beautifully disjunct as the placelessness, unfamiliarity, and discovery distort time in strange ways. The following thoughts cross my mental field of vision. They aren’t fully formed, much less resolved. They’re starting points for future travels, literal and figurative.

Interstate 90 East; Mile 37

Truck Nutz! On the west side of the Cascades? Well played, Washington! As it’ll turn out, these are the only pair of danglers I’ll see. It’s cold, after all; I suspect most have fully retracted toward the gas tank until April at least. I revisit my fantasies about welding a vagina dentata to the front of my Jeep: Truck Teeth!

Eastern Washington

At a rest area, a car parks next to mine. Two women about my age get out of the car. Having known fanfic, I can’t help but ship them. Of course they are a couple. The subtext will not allow anything less! There’s far too much heteronormativity out here anyway.

Despite my imagination, something real happens in a single second. As I sit in my car, fiddling with my iPod, I look up at the driver. As she looks back toward her car, our eyes lock through the windshield for the briefest moment. I’m shook by her subtle expression as she glances my way and non-verbally communicates something wonderful. A warmth washes over her eyes and she flashes the subtlest of smiles. I stop. I probably flash a smile. I feel complete reassurance. I feel admiration. I feel acceptance.

I’ve never experienced this before transition but I’ve been sensing it ever since. When read as a woman by another woman, especially in unfriendly or unfamiliar spaces, I get this knowing look like some secret handshake. It’s a feeling of solidarity maybe? I don’t know exactly but it is completely affirming. Even now, writing about it months later, I’m deeply moved. I tear up every single time I remember it.

Thank you, unknown traveler, you have no idea how much this means to me.

South of Butte, north of Pocatello

The previous night I visited my librarian friend, Regan. We discussed Montana’s “live and let live” ethic and Butte’s “toughness”. As this was my first visit since, we talked about transition as well. Toughness. I cringe when people call me brave. My evolution and becoming has been absurdly, laughably easy compared to others. Still, I appreciate the sentiment.

The road from Butte is the most treacherous, with ice and blowing snow. With resolve, I pilot myself the best I can, through obstacles and hazards. Perhaps I’m finally starting to internalize my own agency and accomplishments. Sometimes I even believe some of my hype.

Pocatello, Idaho

One thing I love doing on solo trips is pulling off the interstates around larger towns and driving through their centers. In all these towns, I’m struck with the social landscape’s overwhelming heteronormativity. I get enough polite looks from trucker dudes, but I’m missing glances from lady-loving ladies. I’ve been getting these more often at home and I really love them. So, this trip reminds me just how much of a fabulously amazing queer bubble Seattle is. I no longer take this for granted. On the way out of Pocatello, I do manage to stumble across the gay bar. Queerness exists in the heartland, imagine that. We’re everywhere.

Salt Lake City, Utah

I had two missions here. Foremost was visiting my friend, Greg, now a university librarian. As it turns out, his partner has written on legal issues of trans* discrimination in bathrooms. These are the coincidences in my life. I’ve chosen correctly to visit friends along the route – the perfect balance to many miles spent alone.

Before seeing my charming friend, however, I planned to pee at Temple Square. Yes, it’s sophomoric. However, given my mischievous agnosticism and the LDS’s relationship to TBLG folks, I wanted to leave this symbolic mark. If nothing else was accomplished during this trip, it was imperative, as a queer trans* woman, to urinate at Temple Square and bear witness to the stunning lack of consequences, divine or otherwise. Peeing While Trans* is a theologically symbolic act, too.

Reader! Next time you visit the amazing North Visitor Center, think: a trans* woman urinated here! The time of the Great Mundane Micturition has passed! We are still here. And I am still peeing. I’m thinking of taking this superpower back on the road, hiring myself to ranchers to mark territory.

Wyoming

Wyoming is the Equality State. Women here achieved suffrage way back in 1870. Additionally, a number of notable political firsts for women have occurred here. For the moment, I take Wyoming’s claim to equality at face value and head into Laramie to have dinner with Kaijsa, yet another librarian friend.

The previous evening, my friend, Cheryl, messaged me: “Safe travels, cowgirl!” Such tiny little words, finally in the correct gender, make me so profusely happy I could squeal.

Sydney, Nebraska

At the motel, the young dude checking me in is checking me out. I think. He’s chatting me up with sheepish laughs and cutesy jokes giving him away. My deeply internalized self-doubt interjects. Exactly 63 reasons other than I’m an unaccompanied chick come to mind. Such ridiculous back-bench arguments occur in my mind’s parliamentary chamber.

I’m quite certain my boobs have been speaking for me. Among several passports granting me passage through the heartland, my boobs are among them. My back-bench voices still try to shout down claims that the face in the mirror is a woman. My front-bench boobs counter those attempts with aplomb. Steadfast against compromise, rising from obscurity, they are fierce diplomats. I can really fill out a pair of A-cups, let me tell you, yet they are larger than life. They take after my tedious extroversion. Regardless how I feel about my face, I flash myself a bit of cleavage and snap back to affirmative reality.

Even I am mesmerized by the ideological power of my own boobs.

North Platte, Nebraska

After some exploration in town, I drive out the long way on the business loop. There’s a cop some distance behind me. I know they’re going to follow me to the interstate because that’s where their work is. Still, it makes me nervous to be around cops when I’m a long way from home.

By this fourth day on the road, I cannot ignore that my vanilla whiteness bestows me an unchecked passport through the heartland. It’s been the elephant riding with me. I’m a middle-aged white woman in overwhelmingly white America. My whiteness and age combine, lending me a certain invisibility that works systemically in my favor. This is partly why I don’t see myself or this endeavor as exceptionally brave. I’m still trying to figure out what I can do with this passport to help open the world for those who don’t have similar privileges.

In the end, unsurprisingly, a whole lot of intersectional issues followed me out of the city and hitchhiked cross-country. I’m being an urban snob but I suspect most people figure that trans* people exist… somewhere else. I have stronger suspicion that most people I ran across in the interior wouldn’t ever expect to see a trans* person in their part of the country. This invisibility leaves me unchallenged.

Omaha!

I have arrived! My confidence now can propel me to the Atlantic. Xene takes me out for dinner and a tour of Omaha that includes a dive bar… serving strawberry champagne… on tap. This is one classy city.

The following day the whole family and I go to the zoo, have lunch, and visit a playground. While I have no desire for kids of my own, I’m happy and honored to be any visible, positive combination of queer and trans and woman in my friends’ and their kids’ lives. I’m actually fairly excited about becoming crazy Aunt Amy.

Xene first introduced me to her 3 year old daughter (Hi Cleo!! *waves frantically*) a while ago, before transition. She mentions telling Cleo that she’d see me again because I was coming. At one point, her daughter asked, “So Amy is a girl now?” Her daughter accepted this without too much effort, Xene tells me. Kids are usually more amazing about these things than adults, I’ve been finding.

Remarkably, as my parent friends keep telling me, kids show amazing, nonchalant acceptance of the fact that people can change genders. It strikes me now that this familiarity may actually be why bigots are afraid to have queer/trans folks around children. Kids accept us as people and will grow into accepting adults.

This trip bookended the final administrative dealings of my transition. A week later, I received my shiny new passport, replete with hilariously unflattering photo. I am now a fully legally credentialed woman. I’m still learning, over-stepping, and growing, of course. But as far my (re)appearance into the world, I have arrived.

I am Amy autonomously, who drives across the cross-country because it seems like a scary and fun thing to do. But mostly, the road is wide open and I must keep moving forward.

 
Amy Dobrowolsky lives in Seattle with her lovely librarian lady and their two lady cats. Let the stereotypes commence! When she is not driving, wrenching on her Jeep, or building art cars, she is an insufferable academic working toward becoming Dr. Amy. She blogs academically at urbanarchives.wordpress.com and tweets inanely as @AmyBoldItalic because Emphasize All The Things!!

The Incredibly True Story Of How Cissexism Made My Same-Sex Marriage Legal

trans*scribe illustration ©rosa middleton, 2013

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Standing in line at the Los Angeles Superior Court in Norwalk, waiting our turn to apply for a marriage license, my wife and I were all smiles. Even when we reached the little windows in the wall, and the woman behind one of the windows gave us a condescending look, telling us with a little twinkle of satisfaction in her eye that California doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, we were all smiles. I slipped my passport out of my purse and presented the inconsistent gender marker to her, of course with a big smile on my face. I’m sure I must have looked quite smug.

You see, several months before, I had filed the proper documents with the California DMV to receive my driver’s license with an ‘F’ in the area designated for sex. However, at the time, passport changes were much more difficult to obtain. Thanks to this simple governmental regulation, my wife and I were able to exploit a legal loophole and obtain a federally recognized marriage, something that still eludes many of our LGBT sisters and brothers. Currently, only nine states out of 50 recognize same-sex marriages, a statistic that is deplorable under a government that touts itself as being, “the land of the free.”

I’ll never forget the look on that woman’s face, behind the glass at the courthouse. Nor will I forget the look on the young man’s face, behind the glass next to her. He was all smiles, too. And it seems that a month later, when we came to the courthouse dressed to the nines, he remembered us. In fact, he asked us if he could officiate our marriage! He was even sweet enough to use “spouse” instead of “husband” or “wife” regardless of what it said on the marriage certificate. He even took photos of us with our close friends out in the lobby where everyone at the courthouse that day could see us, I in my white silk strapless dress and my wife in her long bell-sleeved black dress. We were all smiles. I’m sure we all looked quite smug.

It was important to me to use a form of identification that identified me as male, despite my distaste at being misgendered during a normal workday, or in any other way being identified as a man. I hate that. I mean, I’ve got boobs for crying out loud! I am no man. But, in this case, it was important to me that someone get the clear distinction that I was exactly that, and my wife a woman, and that someone was the United States government. I needed them to see our marriage as being ‘valid,’ despite trying not to seek validation from outside sources. Sure, there’s civil unions and other forms of joint partnerships that carry tax incentives and whatnot. We could have even just had the wedding for ourselves and our friends and family, in someone’s backyard or some picturesque locale. It would have been every bit as significant and sentimental to my wife and I. But in the back of my head, was a whispering voice that kept calling, so quietly:

“…hospital visitation rights…”
and, “…beneficiary…”
and, “…power of attorney…”

These words resounded in my head, in that infinitesimal voice, because I would be damned before some nurse would keep me from seeing my wife, if she were injured! And I would be damned before seeing one single penny of our money end up in the hands of my parents simply because they were listed as “next of kin.”

The US Supreme Court will soon announce a ruling on same-sex marriage cases that have gripped America for years. The nine sitting justices will have the opportunity to determine, once and for all, the fate of millions of LGBT people who have thus far been denied equal protection under the law. I know in my heart that, at least, most of these nine people can see how important it is to a same-sex couple to be able to visit each other in the hospital, or to ensure a surviving partner doesn’t get thrown out into the street, simply because they are not the legal beneficiary. I firmly believe that they will decide in our favor, if indeed protection of the Constitution remains the mission of the Judicial Branch. I don’t see how they can’t. The defendants can’t even make a solid case without quoting a 2000 year-old book of fairy tales.

I honestly don’t even know what to think, if the alternative happens. It would carry far-reaching implications. To me, the matter is as plain as it could be. Each American citizen is granted equal protection under the law. We’ve fought the equality battle for too long to suddenly forget what it means in this country. And to the county clerk, that young man at the courthouse, it was also as plain as could be. I saw it in his eyes, when I smugly handed over my male-identified passport, and smiled at the other, condescending, clerk. Later, we all saw in in his eyes as he proudly pronounced us married by the power vested in him by the state of California.

Any law that can ban marriage from one group of people and still allow it for another, goes clearly against our Constitution and even more than that, is just plain stupid. Especially when circumventing the law is as simple as deciding which form of identification to show the clerk. Being transgender sometimes has it’s perks. Just don’t expect me to answer to “husband.”

Elizabeth is a thirty-something transwoman and wife. She’s a retail slave, part-time writer, and aspiring professional photographer.

Fifty Shades of White

trans*scribe illustration ©rosa middleton, 2013

I never really used to give much thought to the idea that society needs positive cultural images of minorities until I came to embrace my Hispanic heritage and come out of the closet, a set of processes which took a few years in college to do. Having the blessing, or curse, of lighter skin is a double edged sword. It allows a whole world of opportunity a sort of choose-your-own adventure game with your race unfolds. Do you want to embrace your blood, or whitewash yourself?

I did the latter for a while until I went to college. (I look back at my old pictures and realize how damn Hispanic I truly look. Who was I fooling?) Hence, I never thought about why people were complaining about the lack of black, or Asian, or Hispanic persons in media. To me, I was white. I can’t speak Spanish, and the Hispanic side of my family tried pretty successfully to whitewash itself. But none of my father’s side, a family of Puerto Ricans, looks truly white. I used to always drop ‘Puerto Rican’ from my race when people asked me. It’s a wonder that nobody called me out on that in school – I’m pretty sure Joe Arpaio would deport my ass if I stepped foot in Arizona.

I had gender dysphoria and questioned my gender identity well before coming to terms with this, although I didn’t come out of the closet at this time. It was high school, after all! I figured maybe it was some phase, so I never brought it up. I was also afraid of family backlash, having read enough stories on the Internet about transgirls getting kicked out and forced into selling drugs or their bodies to make a meager living; it was enough to scare me from taking a leap of faith until college. That’s not to say I didn’t try to learn about it during high school. I was always curious to learn new things. Being computer savvy, and a loser with no friends at the time, I had plenty of time to surf the internet when in high school.

I ended up finding my first images of transgender women that weren’t Tim Curry in drag or women on the Maury show on the *chan websites. Pretty picture of a Southeast Asian woman, or some buxom blonde. Obviously silicon – whoa, is that a cock?

Yep. Of course, on the net it was to shock people. A trap, to use internet vernacular. But it intrigued me. I didn’t think transgender women could look beautiful before this. I ended up seeing plenty of images of the same thing with various transgender women all throughout high school. I was filled with emotions. Lust, jealousy, surprise, amazement. Naturally at this time I was as horny as a Triceratops, but aside from that, envy and awe filled my brain. How did they do it? Was this all photoshop? What kind of sorcery can do this? I figured I had no chance at hell of looking like these women. I still know that I’ll never match some of them. I definitely remember seeing a lot of Bailey Jay, aka Line Trap. This kid had done something that I didn’t dare to do, and came out amazing. She gave plenty of cisgender women a run for their money and seemed to have shed her skin.

I never noticed anything odd though about her, or any other transgender women that I saw and brooded over with jealousy at that time. I had yet to embrace my Hispanic heritage. However, the truth is that a large number of them fell into two racial categories. They were either white, or from somewhere in Southeast Asia. There were very few Latina/Hispanic girls, and black transgender women appeared even less. Even so, it seemed like every Latina/Hispanic transgirl was in porn, labeled “exotic” or some other synonym. The few non-porn Latina/Hispanic girls I could name were dead. Now, I definitely agree that I could’ve found a better way to learn about transgender women and find role models. I’m glad that more visible transgender women like Janet Mock and Jen Richards are making their way to the surface, but the images are still disproportionate, and damaging.

I hold nothing against transgender porn stars, or any porn stars for that matter. You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do to pay the bills. However, for me, this seemed like the only image of transgender women out there at the time. It stuck with me further when I got to college and brooded over coming out.

The old images came back as I sat in my dorm many a night. Even when I first came out to my friends last April they were still there. The images of women with flawless, silky skin bent attentively on their knees, puckered and painted lips wrapped around a throbbing “stud”‘s dick. The Latina/Hispanic girls bothered me the most.  A bit of a numbing situation when I thought about it at times. It seemed like my future as a transwoman would either be on my knees, or living in grinding poverty – just waiting for someone to come along and kill me and get away with it.

That’s a pretty scary thing to think. White trans women are somewhat visible in the mainstream media — granted they’re commonly the butt of a joke, but it’s a step above sex work being your only form of upward mobility. (And again, I hold nothing against porn stars or sex workers, I must emphasize that point! You guys and girls make the world go around!) That isn’t very promising as you prepare to transition. It definitely set my ambitions down a peg, and it raises an even bigger question than where I will personally go. Where the hell are the transgender Latinas/Hispanics in our society? They do exist, that can’t be questioned. Some cultures even have traditions of third-gender groups. Transgender people are very prominent in countries such as Brazil, to the point that my Brazilian friends just understood when I told them. Meanwhile, in the United States, Latina/Hispanic trans women seem to be rare, or at least hard to see.

Is it that there really aren’t very many Latina/Hispanic trans women in this country? Or are they here and just not living openly? Or is the real problem located in a media that’s not interested in showing real representations of Latina/Hispanic trans women? Based on my own experiences, I can think of plenty of reasons why other Latina/Hispanic trans women may not feel comfortable coming out. It’s possible that machismo culture is an issue.  I know I would be in the closet today if my father were actually in my life. He might’ve white-washed himself as far as interests, but machismo was one thing he was steeped in. It dripped from his body. Religion, possibly is another hurdle. I might not come from a religious family, but I know for others religion has been a reason for them being forced out of their home, hurt, or even killed. While God or Gods have yet to strike a transgender person dead, many a follower has in their name.

For me, though, it was none of these things that made me reconsider the safety of the closet. I worried that this would drive me out of the culture that I had only recently come to accept and embrace. I bit my tongue on telling the people I cared about the most for fear that any reason could drive me from something I had just come to love, tip-toed around it, and broke down in front of a few of my close Hispanic friends when I explained it, figuring that I would lose them, too.

But I didn’t. The same people I was wary of telling turned out to be the simplest to explain to. I received warm words, care, and few of the same painful and strange questions that I got prodded with by my other friends. I didn’t have to hide out from the people I was afraid of losing. Everything went well. Strange. It doesn’t end up that way for everyone, though.

And that’s a problem that needs to be addressed. We can not cure all reasons for transgender discrimination, or reasons to stay in the closet, but we can make it easier and more relatable by bringing prominent transgender women of color to the forefront, and working to create an environment where it’s safe for them to be publicly visible.

We need more women of color leaders in our community. I don’t just mean activists, either. We merely need successful women of color who are transgender and open about it. Stealth is something to admire, but it is also harmful toward the next generations of transgender people. We need to give them people to emulate, look up to, and realize that there is a possibility of success and a good life ahead for them. Trans women (and all women) who have found success through sex work are admirable, but for young trans women who have other dreams, it’s incredibly difficult to live without role models of any other kind. We need to leave our youth with people to aspire to be.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Choose Your Character: I’m Peach, Not Mario

trans*scribe illustration ©rosa middleton, 2013

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Like many children of the ‘80s and ‘90s who had the “privilege” of being born male, I was, am, and will always be a gamer. From my early days, I loved peeking into the worlds of Mario, Mega Man and Sonic the Hedgehog. Video games were my escape from the reality that I was just a fat, socially-awkward little boy doomed to be ridiculed constantly by my brother at home and my classmates at school.

Other people perceived me as different. I knew that something was different about me too, but couldn’t entirely pinpoint what it was. The real world shunned me for some reason, which was why I needed a controller in my hand to feel anywhere near normal. The usual assumption of my classmates was that I must be gay. In their minds, if I wasn’t exactly like them, that must have meant that I was attracted to men. For a little while, I just assumed that they were right. Those secret fantasies I had about being just like one of the girls at school must have been proof. Girls are attracted to boys, right?

Having these fantasies – reaching out into another world, much like I would in a video game – must have proved my desire for boys, right? When I was a child, not many video games allowed options to play as female characters. Super Mario Bros. 2 (at least the U.S. version) was one of the few exceptions. I gave every selectable character a chance, but my favorite was always Princess Peach. Was it weird for a little boy to enjoy being a princess? Maybe. But it hardly stopped there.

I wanted to look like this… But I looked like this

Of course I had friends — I wasn’t an outcast in every social circle. They too liked video games, but I was so much more excited that Pokémon Crystal Version would allow the ability to play as a female character than they were. I couldn’t process why my other male friends didn’t particularly care. Why did I think that it was so cool that Samus Aran from Metroid was female?

I was intent on creating a female character when I started playing Ragnarok Online. I just had so much more fun playing as a girl than as a guy. I could be a guy any time I wanted, but in a virtual world I was free to be someone else. I could act differently and see everything from a different perspective — a perspective that seemed much clearer to me. In Ragnarok in particular – since it was a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) – I was able to take on the role of a sassy girl and interact with others in a way that felt more natural.

Others questioned why I was so intent on playing a female. I was a man, after all, so shouldn’t I have preferred to be a man in a game? Perhaps a manly hero? Unable (or rather afraid) to give the real answer, I simply told them that I preferred looking at a girl on screen for hours on end instead of guy. Now, herein lies a discrepancy. Other people assumed that I was gay, and for a while I did as well. If I really liked men though, my excuse for playing as a woman would have been an obvious lie. A gay male in a similar position would presumably play as a female to better interact with men in game.

Except I wasn’t lying. I did genuinely prefer having a pretty girl on my screen. But that meant that I was straight, right? So was I really “normal”? Most of the rumors that I was gay occurred in middle school. By high school, they mostly stopped – as did my own belief that I was a gay man. The thought of being gay felt like so much of a given that I was actually bored of it. The truth was that women simply interested me so much more.

The idea of playing as a man in any game that allowed me to create my own character bored me. As time went on, the idea of being a man in real life began to bore me as well. In fact, the idea of myself becoming a middle-aged man disgusted me. Yet, I was attracted to women, not men, and only an extremely gay man would ever become a woman, right? That was what I and everyone else believed.

I had to know the truth, but my parents weren’t crazy about the idea of dating in high school, so I had to wait a while. My first date didn’t occur until my senior prom and any possibility of it going normally was destroyed when I found out that she had a boyfriend.

I spent my college years pining for a girlfriend to the point that many women found me a bit creepy. It didn’t help that I was chubby and hairy. I figured that it was normal for any man to be disgusted by the fact that he was covered in thick hair and a perpetual five o’clock shadow that still remained fully visible even after shaving. I didn’t realize that I was the exception. I had some female friends, but they would often go on their girls’ nights out, which would mean that I was left behind.

I was a geek and I didn’t like the idea of hitting on random women in bars and nightclubs. I preferred a series of Super Smash Bros. Brawl matches over going out and getting drunk (as always, playing as Princess Peach). Perhaps that was why I was lumped in with all the beta males who simply wanted sex but had nothing going for them that the average straight girl wanted. I was different from them, though. Sure, I desired sex, but I also had something that I needed to figure out. I spent seven years wanting to find the truth but only ending up with disappointment. Of course, I did extremely well in any video games with dating elements, like Persona 4, but virtual dating and real dating are two very different things. I could master playing as someone else, but as the old cliché of dating advice often goes, I needed to be myself.

Yukiko, I really hope you’re bi

After growing my hair out and giving up all attempts to be like other men, it finally happened. I had my master’s degree by this point and was now teaching my first college-level class. My salvation came from a cute, quiet bisexual junior (not, I should mention, one enrolled in my class) who admitted that she had a thing for me. Finally, I had my chance to figure out who I was.

My time with her was great, but something was off. Did I wish that she was a man? Not in the slightest. I was fine with having her as my girlfriend, but I didn’t feel right as her boyfriend. Secretly, I knew why, but I just couldn’t believe that someone who was transgender could also be a lesbian. It went against everything that I thought I knew. I decided to stick it out in the relationship, hoping that my transgender feelings would go away. They didn’t. She questioned whether we were really a good match for each other and whether she rushed into the relationship too quickly and eventually, she broke up with me.

I had to do something, lest I continued aging into someone I clearly wasn’t. I did some research, and found a number of resources – including articles by Autostraddle’s own Annika – that confirmed what I suspected all along. I did more digging and over the course of months located a therapist, followed by a laser hair removal service, a fertility clinic to cryopreserve possible future children, and an inexpensive clinic that had no problem prescribing hormones. On February 12, 2013, my 26th birthday, I finally had it, that pill bottle with 30 low doses of estradiol, in my hand.

I’ve told a good number of my friends, including my roommates, my parents and my ex. Nearly everyone has been completely cool with it. My mother insists that she sees nothing feminine about me, saying that she can only think of me as her little boy. However, she also says that she will support me no matter what path I take in life. Coming out wasn’t easy, but I’m so glad that even in a southern state like Florida I can be surrounded by such great people who will support me no matter what my gender identity or sexuality may be. I’m not out to everyone yet, though, so I’d prefer not to post any pictures of myself quite yet, but the least I can do is show that as a gamer and a geek, I have some serious style as a woman.

Soon, my pretties, soon.

With time, Matthew, who always was a mere avatar genetics forced me to play as, will be in the past and Monica will fully replace him. It took me so long to discover her inside of me because heteronormativity and all the accompanying assumptions about gender and sexuality kept her hidden. Once the beard is finally gone and the hormones take full effect, I’ll finally be able to live as the lesbian I always was to begin with. Video games are still a nice escape, but now it’s time to start living.

Monica is a self-proclaimed “trans lesbian princess” living in Jacksonville, Florida who is still early in her transition. She teaches English to college freshmen and is the self-published author of her action comedy vampire novel, Blood on Fire, which is the result of her hate of all things related to Twilight. She is also a fiend for video games, owning a multitude of systems from classic to modern.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Identity Theft: A Trans* Intersex Woman On Traumas and Surgery

For me, being intersex has been nothing short of difficult, scary, painful, and shameful. When I was four years old, my family or the doctors or both, decided I needed ‘corrective’ genital surgery, because my genitals were non normative. I don’t know much about the details of how the decision was made because my family hid this from me and never explained or talked about what happened to me. It was off limits.

I don’t remember exactly what my body looked like before my surgery. I do remember having my surgery though. I was four. I was told it was because I couldn’t pee straight and that it needed to be fixed. I was taken to the hospital and walked back to the operating room. I remember resisting and crying on the way. I remember begging the nurse and my family not to go through with this. They tried to bribe me by telling me I could ride in a toy car for little kids to the operating room. They told me everything would be okay. They lied.

When I awoke, my genitals hurt and were bloody and swollen. They asked me to go to the bathroom to see if I could still pee. I’d had no trouble peeing before the operation, but they’d cut some things off, sewn some things up and rearranged things down there and they wanted to make sure everything still worked. I went to the bathroom with my mother and tried to pee a little. It burned. I quickly gave up on that, and insisted I didn’t have to go pee. My mother turned on the water in the sink while I sat in the stall. I pretended to try, and told her once more that there just wasn’t anything to pee out.

She gave up, and the doctor told her to call later and let them know if I’d gone to the bathroom. I walked around my grandmother’s house for days without any underwear and a t-shirt of hers because any contact with my genitals was so painful. They brought me ice cream to pacify me.

I don’t remember speaking to my family about the surgery again until about 20 years later when I confronted my aunt about it and asked her for details. This was after four years of not having contact with any of my family, due to my queer and trans* status. They weren’t safe people; we’ll leave it at that for now. I met up with my aunt in a McDonald’s with my partner at the time and asked her about what had happened. She said that I was “peeing out of the bottom of my genitals” and that it needed to be fixed. I asked her what was wrong with that. It’s not hard to sit and pee after all, half of the population or more do it every day.

A year later I heard from my mother for the first time in five years over Facebook. She said something impersonal and superficial, and I used it as an opportunity to bring up the surgery. I told her what I’d learned about being intersex. I sent her information about intersex people and trans* people and asked her to read it. She replied by saying she only intended to say hello, indicating she had no intention or interest in reading or learning about these things.

It was disappointing, but I was used to it. I can’t pretend I haven’t hurt over it, but I’ve tried to convince myself that biological relation doesn’t mean someone cares about you or that they have some kind of inalienable bond with you across space and time. My grandmother told me I would never have anyone feel proud of me or appreciate me again after I moved away and reduced my interactions with my biological “family” to e-mails and nothing more. They all stopped speaking to me soon after, mostly in response to me criticizing their homophobia, racism and various other hateful beliefs.

I didn’t officially come out to them until much later due to the fear their reaction stirred up in me and to the abuse they’d already inflicted on me throughout my childhood. When I did come out, it was only to certain people: my sibling, and two aunts, people who had minimal or no authority over me as a child. Word got around and from what my brother tells me, they reacted as though I’d murdered someone and would soon be falling into the deepest pits of hell for my ‘sins.’

+ + +

Knowing my history, as with many other intersex people, has been nearly impossible. It’s been hidden from me by my family, doctors, society. I didn’t even know intersex people existed until I was 21 years old and in college. After an exam with a doctor and a comment asking if I’d had genital surgery for my ‘condition,’ I got curious for the first time and felt brave enough to research it. What I found was life changing to say the least. I’d already started experimenting with my gender and how I would express it, and I’d always felt like something wasn’t quite right about it and my body’s history. Of course having an intersex condition doesn’t imply any particular sexual orientation or gender, but at the time I had such a limited vocabulary and this felt like a justification of my newly-discovered queer identity. I needed hard scientific evidence that there was a cause to all of this, that it was out of my hands to some extent, because I’d been raised to hate and fear people like myself. Gender-nonconforming behavior or queer sexual orientations were things that would literally get you killed. I was brainwashed by an extreme fundamentalist Southern Baptist family and culture, and I really did believe and fear burning in hell and bringing on bad fortune and punishment from a god that didn’t like queer people.

Having some kind of tangible physical evidence of the nonsensical, illogical things I’d been conditioned to believe was both relieving and terrifying. I had no understanding of where I was going and was battling internalized homophobia, transphobia, and intersexphobia every day. I became very depressed and had regular anxiety attacks. I had to convince myself I was not mentally ill, live as intelligently as possible and take care of myself. I had to prove to myself I wasn’t going to be irresponsible, frivolous and dangerous, as I’d been led to believe all queer people were. What made it even harder was the negative portrayal and information about queer people that was available and prevalent, and the way people around me reacted to me exploring and expressing my identity.

Some people began to look at me as though I was unreliable, dishonest, sexually promiscuous, deviant and sick. My grandmother had once suggested that I was doing this to be popular. What a joke. I wish I could be more ‘popular’ and accepted for being queer and intersex and trans*. Others asked invasive questions about my genitals. Some, such as my partner at the time, felt my femininity diminished hers and that I was now competition. Many agreed with the doctors. Doctors are seen as all-knowing and infallible, and if they did this, they had good reason.

The doctors themselves were less than helpful. When I first found out I had an intersex condition, I had a doctor try to convince me that wasn’t actually intersex,because my genitals had been normalized and didn’t look like some of the “most ambiguous” genitals he was aware of and had pictures of in a book. It seemed as though he was trying to comfort me, as though if I’d left believing I was intersex, it would somehow be a bad thing, a crisis.

+ + +

I didn’t tell another doctor or seek any assistance on the matter until four years later. The doctor is now my OB/GYN and prescribes me hormones. He understood me for nearly two years as just your average transgender person. The reason I told him about my intersex history was because I wanted to change my birth certificate gender marker. The law in North Carolina states one must have a letter from a physician saying the person has undergone “sex reassignment surgery” and if it does not say exactly that, then no change to the gender marker will be made.

I hoped to find a way to get my birth certificate changed. Could we argue that my surgery as a child was “sexual reassignment” and get my gender changed? My doctor no; technically that was a “female-to-male” surgery and the surgery I needed to have and document for a gender change would need to be a “male-to-female” surgery. So essentially, because some asshole doctor somewhere decided to perform this surgery, and assign me male, I have to fix his mistake by having more surgery. How is that okay? How is that logical? But this is what my doctor told me would need to happen before he wrote a letter.

Many trans people don’t want surgery or can’t have surgery for medical reasons or because it costs tens of thousands of dollars, and that can prohibit someone from legally being recognized as the gender they are, ever. This group of people includes me. It was interesting to see my doctor’s face and reaction when I told him the only thing I would change about my body would be to undo the surgery that was forced on me as a child and that otherwise I was not unhappy with my genitals and didn’t want to change them. He replied, “Well, you can undo it if you have the surgery.” He seemed perplexed that I wasn’t unhappy or loathing of my genitals and advised that I remove, cut, and scar more of my genitals in order to cover up the first surgery.

But not only did I not loathe my genitals, removing more sensitive, functional genital tissue, including a large portion of the glans of my clitoris to reduce its size to a more “normal” size seemed like a bad idea to me. I enjoy my sex life and surgery seems like it would reduce functionality and sensitivity.

I know lots of trans people decide to have genital surgery, and of course that’s their right. But it’s also my right to elect not to. It’s terrible to push someone to choose surgery or expect them to simply because they are trans or intersex. I’d been traumatized by the mutilation that was forced on me as a child, and have no desire to relive it.

This discussion ended with him trying to convince me that I wasn’t intersex, that due to the fact it was successfully erased by surgery, I was essentially making it all up. In his words, my surgery was to “correct a birth defect,” it was not mutilation. He discouraged me from investigating further and looking into my health further; “It’s probably an isolated thing,” he told me.

+ + +

So as it stands, I have conflicting documents. My birth certificate says “M” while my drivers license and the social security administration say “F.” And eventually, when I get together the money to buy a new one, my passport will say “F.” But who cares, right? My various IDs should be enough, right?

As it turns out, no. If it were discovered that my birth certificate were in conflict with my ID, my ID would be reverted to male. If I were to unfortunately be caught walking while trans* and brought into custody or arrested for any reason, I’d end up in a facility with males and treated as a male.

I already have to deal with the fact that if I apply for a job and they run a background check, they will find out that I had a previous name, one that doesn’t fit my appearance or gender. So I will either have to let them know up front – to prevent being accused of fraud or deception – by filling out “previous names” on the application, or I can hope they don’t actually run a background check and find out what my old name was. It’s unfortunate, unfair and illogical that intersex people get assigned a gender and a sex and are expected to either stick with them (even if they’re wrong) or fix someone else’s mistake with expensive, risky surgery on their genitals.

I’ve wondered what would happen if someone like myself asked my genitals be returned to their normal state, as they were before surgery. Would any doctor be willing to leave their operating room with genitals that weren’t part of this constructed binary? I don’t foresee ever being able or allowed to exist as something physically “in between” to any degree in so far as my genitals are concerned. That body, my body, is unacceptable. If we define sexual orientation based on anatomy, as most people do, who would an intersex person be expected to be with in order to be heterosexual? We are destructive to heteronormativity, to the notion of “men and women”, even to ideas like “gay” and “lesbian” if we define sexual orientation purely by anatomy. So what’s next? Where do we go from here? And how do we get there without violating the bodies and identities of more intersex people?

About the author: Amelie is an intersex, queer, trans* woman pursuing a Master’s degree in pure mathematics. She attained her undergraduate degrees in German and Mathematics, and has studied abroad in Germany at Ruprecht-Karls Universität Heidelberg. She has experience with working inside the university system with administrators and educators to change policies and develop educational programs offered to faculty, staff, and students. She has also experienced first hand the way in which gender and sexuality are understood in western European countries. When she isn’t studying mathematics, she is active in the community and tries to educate and raise awareness around intersex and trans* issues.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

I’m A Trans Woman And I’m Not Interested In Being One of the “Good Ones”

trans*scribe illustration ©rosa middleton, 2013

CLICK HERE FOR MORE TRANS*SCRIBE

A month or two after I started living full time out as woman, one of my friends suggested I talk to an acquaintance of his, an older trans woman who had been out for years.

My friend thought his acquaintance might be able to give me some tips on surviving as a trans woman. I was thrilled. Here, I though, was someone who had the answers. Surely she would be able to point me in the right direction. We had arranged to meet in a coffee shop. In my excitement I arrived an hour early. It was going to be awesome.

Copyright Ivy Daley

What actually happened was that she showed up and asked why I wasn’t dressed like a woman. I was wearing skinny jeans, a studded belt, and an ironic t-shirt. I liked how I looked. I looked, in my opinion, like a queer woman in her mid-twenties on her day off, which, shockingly, I was.

But no, I was informed, I wasn’t being a woman right.

She was neither the first nor the last person to inform me that I’m doing it wrong. There was I woman I met soon after moving back up to Boston in 2011. She had transitioned in her teens and most folks wouldn’t know she was trans unless she wanted to tell them. She had a real heart for women who were just starting transition, but she had expectations for those people. She couldn’t stand ‘bricks.’ She explained that bricks were women who looked “like a man in a dress.” A cinderblock was even worse. A trans guy who was too femme was feathery.

Copyright Ivy Daley

I’ve been told that if I’d only start pitching my voice up, or stop wearing pants, or start wearing make up, I could totally pass, that no one would have to know the shameful secret that I’m a trans person.

There’s another side too. In college I asked the instructor of a Women’s Studies course I took if she could recommend any reading on trans issues. She suggested Sheila Jeffreys’ 2005 book ‘Beauty and Misogyny,’ which contains a delightful chapter in which Jeffreys uses pornography depicting young trans women of color to explain why there’s no such thing as trans and how trans women(no mention of trans men or non-binary folks for some reason) are actually evil, essentially pornographic simulacra reinforcing harmful gender tropes.

It’s a great double bind. If you present in a traditionally feminine way, you’re just being a misogynistic parody of a woman, and if you fail to present in a traditionally feminine way, well ha! There’s the proof that you’re not really a woman right there.

And even if you are “really a woman,” that might not be enough. At a Christmas party last December a Smith alumna defended Smith’s decision not to accept trans feminine students by explaining that even if trans women were women, they had still been socialized as boys and men, and that Smith, as a safe space for women and trans men, had a right to defend their students from such people, from the inexorcisable specter of their privilege.

I know women who identify as “heterosexual with a transgender history.” They’re trying so hard to get away.

But you know what’s worse than being somebody’s idea of a bad tranny? Being somebody’s idea of a good tranny, an acceptable tranny.

Last fall I was at an event in a room full of professional acquaintances. A musician who I’ve done some good work with came over to talk to me. This guy is a kind, thoughtful man who I trust. I’ve known him for about two years.

“Vivian,” he said, “it’s so nice to have you here. You always seem to happy and relaxed, and you’re always so open about being trans.”

At this point I’m smiling, enjoying a nice compliment. Then the horror began.

“All the other trans people I’ve known are always so stressed out and unhappy, and are just so difficult. You do an amazing job of making people comfortable.”

And by then I was ready to leap on him to get him to be quiet. The only other trans person he knew, as far as I was aware, was standing a few yards away. I don’t know if she heard that or not, but I really hope not.

That’s not a unique example. I’ve had a lesbian in her 60s tell me that I was the first trans woman who ever got along with, that I’m cool and queer instead of “uncomfortably trying too hard to be a straight woman.”

Copyright Ivy Daley

Here’s the thing: People fucking despise trans women. Often the nicest thing they can thing of to say to trans woman is “gosh, you are so little like a trans woman!” Being trans is something to avoid, to exclude, to escape, at worst to nobly bare up under.

But I’m done with it. You can be trans or cis. You can be super femme, you can be ultra butch. You can be straight or queer. You can have people saying you’re a transcendent beauty who just stepped off a Renaissance canvas, you can have people saying you’re a stomach turning monster. You can be a light in the world who every person you meet loves and devotes themselves to, you can be an awkward storm cloud who drives everyone away.

I don’t care. Sun shines and rain falls on the just and unjust alike. I don’t want to know who the Real Good Ones and the Real Bad Ones are. We’re all people. We all deserve to be treated as valued members of humanity. That’s all.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

I Had Facial Feminization Surgery

trans*scribe illustration ©rosa middleton, 2013

CLICK HERE FOR MORE TRANS*SCRIBE

On March 22^nd, I paid a dude to knock me unconscious, peel back my face, and cut out big chunks of my skull and jaw. He was surrounded by nurses, which is always a good sign, and I have his solemn word that he went to grad school. But that’s what happened. That’s what I spent the better part of five months making sure would happen. It’s a surgery that I think of as the final component of my transition, a struggle to claim and assert a female gender identity spanning many years.

“Facial feminization surgery” (FFS) is a subspecialty of transgender medicine drawing from cosmetic and reconstructive oral, dental, maxillofacial and otolaryngological (ENT) surgical fields. FFS describes any procedure(s) performed on the head and/or neck in order to increase the likelihood that their owner will be “recognized as female” by observers, including and especially herself. You can remove bone bossing and cartilage outgrowths caused by sustained exposure to testosterone and augment soft tissue features, such as facial fat, which have not responded adequately to HRT. Some of the techniques used for FFS are subtle and borrowed from routine cosmetic medicine, like facial fat grafting and rhinoplasty. Others, such as brow reconstruction, are more aggressive and incorporate the most sophisticated tricks in the modern surgical playbook. FFS isn’t really about getting a new face – it’s about getting the face you would have been able to take for granted without that unfortunate first go at puberty.

While FFS tends to be “beautifying” and can make it easier to walk among the mean girls, morons, and psychopaths who litter the Earth, these are fringe benefits. People get FFS to treat gender dysphoria, a pervasive, limiting and even life-threatening form of discomfort experienced by transgender people.

This model isn’t perfect, and doesn’t fit everyone’s experience, but it’s helped me understand a lot about myself, and speaks to why I pursued FFS. As a child and young adult, I’d stare at my face in the mirror every chance I had and have no idea what I was looking for. These things would happen, I’d realize that they were at least a bit unusual, and I was left to figure out what the hell it said about me. It wasn’t fun, and I kept it to myself.

A few months after college graduation, I had one of your textbook near-death experiences and decided to grow up. Learning about FFS was one of a few things that helped get me started. I’d begun reading about gender reassignment, and saw a few of the classic examples of aggressive facial reconstruction. I had never really dared to ask myself if I would want something like this, it had seemed out of reach in some obvious, fundamental way. Allowing myself to think otherwise was like flipping a switch. I was still terrified and thought that I was almost certainly going to die, but it was impossible to take back. It was what I needed to do. So I did it.

I “went full-time” eight months ago, almost two years after deciding to transition. It was better for me than I’d ever dared hope, and fixed problems I didn’t even know I’d had. I actually knew what good mental health felt like. On the very same week that I’d made it all legal, I landed a new job. Not only did this let me escape my second layoff in two years, I began working immediately with new people. These weren’t just good coworkers, they were people who hadn’t known me as a guy, or worse, as a ticking time bomb of sensitivity training. I was given my first managerial position and charged with coordinating a small army of volunteers. I became a published author. I was settling into a life that felt like my own, and my voice and confidence improved rapidly.

Many of the compulsions, neuroses, and anxious or painful feelings I’d come to associate with my gender dysphoria had faded out of even the background of my life. My face had improved, but it remained a source of anxiety and distraction, even on good days. HRT had helped a lot, but it has limits. There isn’t a pill made that can change bone structure like that. Every single day, I had moments where my face would make me feel insecure. I’d overcompensate in ways that left me feeling embarrassed and depressed, and often found myself distracted from people I cared about.

In some ways, it had gotten worse: I hadn’t liked being a guy, but the world accepted it and my face fit into that. That obviously didn’t help anymore. I had a year until I would be learning medicine, in a new city, with new people – I wanted to give it everything I had. I didn’t want to spend every morning in Chicago fighting my reflection to get out the door. If there were ever a good time to get major surgery, this would be it.

My doctors were supportive, but they could only tell me so much. There were one or two names half-remembered, promises to “look into it” for me. That chicken came home to roost months later, as a jarring email from the head of the local plastic surgery department. Dr. B wrote to reference one famous guy – the father of the FFS field, more or less – and declared that while he’s “never done much of this, really,” he would “probably be the next best option” if the Big Name were unavailable. Well shit, doc, that sounds like a plan! Why don’t you just come over, hit me with a 2×4 and we’ll get to cuttin’.

I collected names from web directories and journal articles, and cross-referenced them exhaustively with 7-10 of my friends who’d had FFS procedures ranging from minimal to highly aggressive. (I’d helped moderate a small online forum, and had stayed in touch with trans people all over the world.) I drove downtown during lunch one day, rubbed off my makeup, peeled back my hair, and had a photographer document my features at their most exposed: hairline, brow, thyroid cartilage, chin, and jaw.

My pictures went out with a short letter, walking through who I saw myself as and how I felt about my face as best as I possibly could. I made sure to stay positive – I liked my severity, my cheekbones, my close resemblance to my mother and younger siblings. I tried to explain what worked and what didn’t. “Passing better” would be nice, but I knew damn well that I was beautiful – the problem was that my focus and confidence were at the mercy of lighting, cosmetics, and a charitable mood. Reading these old letters, I’m struck by how much I had to worry about. I wanted to do this once and to have that be enough, forever. I had that unthinking fear of “excessive plastic surgery” like the paparazzi were just around the corner. I didn’t want to lose myself, I didn’t want to be a fucking Barbie doll. A couple of very high-pressure paragraphs, but it turned out alright. My friends insisted, “these guys are used to way worse.”

My friend Eliza Gauger signed on for mock-ups and aesthetic support. Eliza and I had met through unconventional public health outreach work, but she’s also a killer artist, model, dancer, and the last person you want to cross in the dead of night. We both understood FFS as a science developed to produce conventional, Western, cis-passing beauty. That isn’t necessarily bad for me, but it’s bad for plenty of other people and recognizing the implicit bias in the field is kind of disturbing. It seemed important to understand what these changes meant to me, and to other people, and why. Some of same cultural filters applied in other STEM topics are found here. It’s all good when you’re asking what to cut and how to stitch it back up. It’s less convincing to say that you can atomize the face and collect statistics on modifications of its components and come up with reliable aesthetics. I think it would be a fine thing if plastic surgeons were to pay artists lots of money to interrupt them during consultations, don’t you?

I worked through my list. One of the famous names had seemed like a good option, even if his approach – “I’ll list every single procedure I can think of that would help feminize you, just pick the ones you want” – made my skin crawl. I asked one question too many about a technique he’d developed and recommended to me, one too many about insurance, and his people stopped talking to me. It was as simple as that. Another charmer gave me two sentences: “My colleague, Dr. Q, can do the surgery. He recommends jaw and chin reduction.” Another surgeon seemed to catch on that I was just a bit neurotic. I’d approached him with a plan cobbled together from previous consultations and he started to pick out trivial aspects as “risky” or “unusual.” Fortunately, these were things that I knew were bog standard in the FFS subspecialty, like combining a brow reduction and hairline repair. It’s the same fucking incision! A similar drama played out over chin and lip procedures. He used every chance he had to suggest that other surgeons would turn me into a circus freak. I’m convinced that he was trying to scare me into working with him. It was horrifying.

I wrote Dr. T while he was performing charity surgeries in Eastern Europe, and we began corresponding extensively by email. He was finishing his training before inheriting a well-known practice in my area. We got along well: Dr. T was the first and only surgeon I’d contacted who would directly connect his advice to the goals I’d expressed. I’m not sure that anyone else had even talked about family resemblance, not even to tell me if I was worrying about nothing. He was also the most willing and able to have a full technical and aesthetic discussion about his recommendations. It was some of the Bill Nye experience I’ve chased in my academic and professional life.

Dr. T had started with the “rule of thirds.” When a face is divided into vertical thirds of relatively equal height at the lower brow and just under the nose, it tends to be read as more feminine. Women in my family have powerful chins, but androgen exposure had pushed things a bit far in my case. A reduction in that area was one tool for restoring proportionality. Something about the lower half of my face had bothered me, but it had been hard to figure it out. This idea sat well with me. Jaw reduction is a more aggressive approach, with a longer recovery.

Other recommendations were extremely conservative, but clever – Dr. T mentioned that fat grafting tricks that might help with my brow, among other areas. While it’s true that fat grafts are less invasive and can look great, they’re difficult to make permanent. Whatever I did needed to stick, and my brow bothered me.

For the brow, you have two basic options: reconstruction and reduction. A simple brow reduction is limited, because you cannot expose the patient’s frontal sinus. The size of this cavity varies dramatically, and it is sometimes even absent, just like the bossing that covers it. But it needs to stay intact, and that’s made aggressive brow reconstruction the shining jewel of FFS techniques. There are multiple variations, including several that call for removing the entire bone and grinding it down on a table before grafting it back. With rare exceptions, these are techniques that are universally recognized as sophisticated, safe, and effective.

This is where I’d been discouraged. I had assumed my options were generally safe, and had seen the degree of change that was possible years ago.  I wouldn’t mind something radical per se, but I wanted to talk about it. Unfortunately, while the Great Men behind these techniques do genuinely beautiful, sophisticated work, they all seem to think that theirs is the only sane and effective approach for reduction. When I consulted with one such surgeon, he hardly seemed to care about matching the brow to the patient, even in the context of his preferred technique.

Dr. T’s response indicated that he felt competent with at least one of the aggressive reconstruction techniques, but he’d reached similar conclusions. It does make people look very different. It was up to me, but from how I’d described myself, that didn’t seem like what I was looking for. And no, really, it wasn’t. Eliza had made a mock-up of combined chin and simple brow reduction that was kind of astonishing to look at, and Dr. T was willing to sign off on its accuracy. That would do it.

A reduction genioplasty (chin shave) via osteotomy and simple brow reduction/brow lift would be the major components of my operation. I also insisted on a lateral hairline advancement. While Eliza and Dr. T had correctly noted that my central hairline was well-positioned and the sides were almost totally unnoticeable, it was exactly the kind of thing that drove me crazy. Every gust of wind, hairpin, itchy spot, tie, or hat disturbed the thick horns of scalp running up both sides in a classic “M” shape. I had to style my hair differently to compensate, and rearrange it carefully when I tied it behind my head. It just fucking sucked, and like I said – same incision.

I’d waffled on reducing my thyroid cartilage. The “Adam’s apple” is such a stereotypical focus when people talk about trans women’s bodies. Mine really wasn’t prominent, but I wouldn’t miss it either. I hated the idea of getting cut more and risking my hard-earned voice just for other peoples’ benefit. I slowly came to feel that it was something I looked at, and did bother me a little, and it might hurt to have that be the last thing that got to me in this way. It went on the list.

So basically, I was ready to go. Then other people happened.

Transitioning While Genderqueer (Despite the Standards of Care)

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In August of 2011, I managed to make an appointment with a counsellor.

I had been trying unsuccessfully for more than a year to see someone about receiving hormone therapy and this was the first step. It had been a difficult task — four years of trying to find a mental health professional that my insurance would cover and that would see me without me having to try to kill myself first. As I walked into the therapist’s office, I recalled a time the previous year, when I had called a local behavioral health center. I had been on the verge of doing something drastic and the woman’s voice came through the receiver in a calm juxtaposition to my desperation, “Oh, we only see patients who are recovering from an attempted suicide, not people who are feeling suicidal.” Despite being one of the darkest hours of my life, that memory became, as I entered the small office, a way to calm my nerves. I had already seen the most deplorable parts of the United States’ mental health care system, hadn’t I? My head started swimming with other questions. Had my information been right? Was this counsellor used to trans* patients? Would she be supportive or weirded out? Would this be a waste of time or the freeing experience I hoped it would be?

The lobby was small and well furnished. On a table near the door was the item I was looking for: “Matt, 12 o’clock, 6 pages,” read a yellow sticky note affixed to some papers on a clipboard. The name on the sticky didn’t have the same pang of regret, didn’t leave the bad taste in my mouth that it usually did. It felt more like a farewell to an old friend than an insult. For a moment I could understand the look I had seen in the eyes of those close to me when I have come out to them in the past, all the excuses of “quirkiness” they would make for me being washed away as understanding falls into place like the final piece of a puzzle. When someone comes out to you as trans*, I’m told, at least for a little while, it feels like losing a friend and it was at that moment that I felt I understood; seeing my old name was like being reminded of a fond memory of a friend you never got to say goodbye to.

I sat down on the sofa and waited, filling out the six pages of standard medical and legal histories and explanations to which the sticky note was affixed. I tried not to stare at the door across from me until, finally, it opened. I had come out to plenty of people over the years. I have been telling friends and family that I would prefer to be a girl with varying degrees of articulation and success since I was about four years old. I had not, however, come out to a perfect stranger. I hardly noticed the other patient leaving as the therapist looked toward me, smiling, and introduced herself, “I’m Linda.”

Linda asked me about my job first, probably noticing how nervous I was. While I was getting seated, she’d glanced through the papers I’d filled out, so she probably already had an idea of why I was there. I found myself brushing off the job question, answering quickly and in few details once I realized my true purpose in seeing her was no longer a secret. She could tell I was not interested in skirting around the issue, so she finally breached the subject, “What brings you here today?”

I considered several possible answers, as I had over and over in my internal practice sessions, and decided to stick with the plan. “I feel like I’m trapped in the wrong body, I’m transgender,” I said. I had weighed the options beforehand and I knew the risks of saying too much. Most people in the medical field operate on parameters set down in what at the time was known as the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care, which required a person to fit into a list of binary gender affirming criteria in order to receive hormone therapy. I was legitimately afraid of not being allowed to go on hormones because I felt more genderqueer than transsexual.

Over the next fifty minutes she asked me probing questions, surprising me with her openness at my responses and at her ability to get an idea of who I was without making it feel clinical. Yet, I always kept my gender nonconforming views to myself. The horror of not being able to transition was too much to risk, even though Linda was respectful and kind regarding the answers I did give. I told her the truth when it fit in with the accepted trans* narrative. I had known my body didn’t fit quite right since before I could speak. I had struggled with depression and in my relationships with other people because of my dysphoria. I even told her that I had grappled with the idea of transitioning for a long time, feeling like it would be a sign of defeat; that I would have lost a battle of wills against a misogynistic society which disallows feminine behavior in males. I divulged that, being a fairly spiritually-focused person, I also felt like I should be able to put myself into a state of mind where the dysphoria wouldn’t bother me, but that nothing I did seemed to help. When it came to where my personal experiences diverged from the accepted narrative, I left pieces out and downplayed events, making sure not to divulge too much information. I even steered the conversation myself near the end — something I rarely do — intentionally keeping away from subjects that I felt might warrant further investigation on her part. We talked about reactions of friends and family, difficulties presented due to the taboo nature of transsexuality, of the fear of rejection at work and the lack of legal rights for transgender people. We talked about clothes, appearances, passing, and the inevitability of being read.

Despite my fears and distrust for the system, I was surprised at how liberating the experience still was. I cried several times. Not the built-up, explosive cry I often had when talking or thinking about these things, but a half hour of eye-dampness. The freedom to let the tears sit there on my face without shame was exhilarating.

Though the Standards of Care have changed since my visit to Linda, the fear of people not fitting into the two (not-so-)neat categories of “male” and “female” hasn’t. It would have been nice to share my entire truth with her, but I feared my story would be seen as diverging from the typical trans* narrative too much. I had these fears for several reasons. First of all, there’s a pervasive portrayal of trans* women as, at worst, sexually exploitable and good for a laugh or, at best, depressed, misunderstood, and most importantly “trapped in the wrong body.” Despite what I told Linda, I don’t feel like I am trapped in the wrong body. To begin with, the only way I’m trapped is by society’s idea of gender’s intransience. If it were not for that social paradigm I could freely express my gender in any way I choose without the “trap.” For another thing, I am intersex, so the idea of being “trapped” with the wrong sex organs is a bit of a moot point in my case.

Also, though it is apparent (especially to Autostraddlers) that sexuality is not a product of gender, there is still a strong push for trans* women to date men and not other women. There is also an assumption that trans* women must be feminine and not masculine despite cis women being afforded the freedom to be “tomboys.” I have always been bisexual and didn’t see that changing with hormones (and it hasn’t). I also have mixed interests which involve things that are typically categorized as both masculine and feminine and had no intention of changing what I like based on my gender presentation.

Possibly the most important way that my goals do not align with those of the media’s representation of trans* women is in “passing.” I dislike passing as either “male” or “female” and sometimes feel that when I give into the pressures to do so I am being disingenuous to the fact that gender is a social construct and not so much a biological imperative as the world at large would like us to assume. This isn’t to say that I want people to use gendered pronouns for me however they see fit. If society is so firm in its gender binary system, then I expect to be called “she” when I am presenting as female. The fact that I prefer to be called by female pronouns rather than male is a matter of preference and I feel it should be respected.

So, if I don’t identify with the accepted trans* narrative, why, you ask, did I want to transition? Why should people who don’t fit into that narrative be able to transition at all? As I touched on before, if I have to choose a box that says “male” or a box that says “female,” I would prefer the one that says “female.” That box just feels more comfortable to me. Even for people like me who don’t really buy into the whole concept of boxes, one box can feel so uncomfortable that death begins to seem like a fairly nice alternative.

Furthermore, transition can be a social statement. If a trans* person isn’t passing, it is a testament to the fact that gender is merely a paradigm that people buy into. Likewise, when people find out your starting point is different than what they expected, it forces them to entertain the idea that gender isn’t as black and white as they’ve been told. As a corollary, both hormones themselves and the experience of being treated as part of the opposite group than you are used to have a way of broadening your own perspective. The hormones affect your thought processes and cause changes in the way your brain physically works. The subtleties of navigating social spaces as a female when you used to be perceived as male or vice versa create a powerful change in the way you see the world. To put it another way, the effects of transition can be, under the right circumstances, very enlightening.

Most importantly, just like with sexuality, people should be afforded the right to express gender in any way they see fit. Frankly, I, and others like me, just like being perceived as a female better than being perceived as a male (and like being perceived as something else entirely even more). It shouldn’t be up to anyone else what gender category an individual chooses to be categorized as.

What’s the point of all this? Instead of making rules for what experiences people can have, let’s all choose to embrace the differences in each other and respect the choices each of us make in our journeys through life.

Madeline is a writer of speculative fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. She writes short stories, flash fiction, and is currently working on several longer projects. She has also written for several periodicals and maintains a blog at apheline.tumblr.com which discusses gender, sexuality, disability, and other activism.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

It’s Not Okay: Intimate Partner Violence in Radical Queer Spaces

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“If we only speak of our oppression from the position of safety, we’ll be forever silent.” – from the zine Betrayal: a critical analysis of rape in anarchist subcultures

Yesterday, I had a panic attack. Although I am a trans woman who has been physically and verbally harassed multiple times for being who I am, I was not ready for it. Although I am a trans woman who has survived suicide attempts and considered killing myself many more times before, I could not handle this sudden wave of anxiety. Because despite all these problems I have had in my life, I have lived a relatively privileged existence. My periods of anxiety, fear and stress have either been within my control or directly resulting from a source outside of myself.

Never before have I had my own fear knock me down, literally making my knees buckle as I gasped for breath in between unsuccessful attempts to soothe myself by repeating, “They are not even in the same state, they are not even in the same state…” I am sure this is hard to imagine for people who have only known me as the gregarious, ditzy, carefree person that I regularly present myself as. It is probably even harder for the people who have seen me on stage in one of my various punk and metal bands or walking through the streets with a megaphone yelling about how Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by the U.S. government. But now I’m showing y’all this part of myself: the damaged, vulnerable me.

The LGBTQI community, including the radical leftist community inside and outside of it, talks big shit when it comes to love and ending violence but very seldom confronts intimate partner violence. Although the word “abuse” has become synonymous with intimate partner abuse in a broader sense, you only need to search for “trans abuse” online or in a library to see that the standard narrative is that most, if not all, violence against trans* people comes from individual community outsiders, though sometimes there is a recognition of the hate being part of a larger social problem.

Even pieces written in an attempt to expose the problem, such as Kae Greenberg’s “Still Hidden in the Closet: Trans Women and Domestic Violence,” spend a significant amount of time going over how non-LGBTQI people harm trans* women. The idea of the normative trans woman—the heterosexual, white, skinny, shaved, dolled-up skirt-wearing femme—makes it hard to conceive of intimate partner violence coming from within the community. After all, why would a trans woman be getting intimate with anyone except for a straight man? Or rather, why would a cis lesbian be with someone who looks so straight? Greenberg’s use of the term “domestic violence”, as well as uses in similar reports, is very appropriate. It is difficult to apply domesticity to survivors and victims who are lesbian and queer (thus the increasing use of the term “intimate partner violence”), but the trope of the normative trans woman fits it. Furthermore, aside from her trans* status, she also fits the mainstream image of a domestic violence victim. And just as with cis women, the compounding factor of racism makes women of color more susceptible to being the targets of intimate partner violence (Toni Newman gives a stunning account of this here and in her memoir I Rise).

I burst through the door to the outside. It’s cold, especially since I took off my jacket to show off my Siouxie Sioux-esque outfit to the other attendees of the goth-themed party. A few people smoking cigarettes look over at me, the looks of confusion and curiosity written across their faces like a bolded, laminated and italicized warning to me to not say a word. Soon after, a friend opens the door behind me. “Hey I, um, followed you,” he says, awkwardness slowing down his normally brisk and cheery voice.

“I can’t believe this,” I say, “She’s following me around. When I try to talk to Edwin, she walks up to talk to him. When I try to get closer to the stage to listen to the band, all of a sudden she has to go over to that section. Can you please tell her to stop?”

He pauses in sour contemplation long enough for a person nearby to interject, “Hey, honey, are you okay? Is there someone predatory here?”

“No, no, she’s fine,” my friend says immediately, though just as quickly realizes his mistake and, stumbling, says, “I mean it’s not okay, you’re not okay, I’m sorry.”

Perhaps the Men’s Rights Advocates are to blame (I’d like to think this is true on a number of issues). Their hyperbolic presentations of the situations of male domestic violence victims (such as one guy who told me that 60% of domestic violence victims were men) often blame society for not perceiving women as being capable committing intimate partner violence. I would also like to think that trans women being read as men, even by those who try consciously not to, does not play into the denial—but it almost certainly does. I would like to think that the role that trans women are often regulated to in queer polyamorous relationships, so aptly described by Savannah Garmon, of being someone’s “thing on the side” does not play into the ability to minimize the nature of the violence—but it definitely could. BDSM, trans women with large bodies “being able to defend themselves,” and the old “well, why haven’t you called the police?” are all possible excuses for and dismissals of trans women’s experience of intimate partner violence.

I feel so lonely but can’t talk to anyone but myself. Have you ever been at that point? You forget what it feels like, what it feels like when you first were together. Her happiness is now difficult to view as anything except a prelude to anger; her romance only comes to haphazardly patch up the holes she has torn in your trust. Sound familiar? You look into her eyes when she says “I love you” and you only see every look of disgust, every cissexist and transphobic gaze. Why would you subject yourself to this? But it has so thoroughly become your life: you feel like you depend on her for everything. After all, she is the woman who has “been a woman for much longer than you have.” She tells you how to dress, how to eat, what to watch, what to read, who to hang out with, who to like, who to talk to, who to interact with online, how to spend your time. She has control, yet you both can feel it is precipitous. If you are not with her you must be with someone else: she tells you that you are in an open relationship but becomes enraged if you ever discuss attractions to others. She has no problems explaining to you how attracted she is to your best friend, though. She can’t help it, she is attracted to masculine people. She tells you that she was first attracted to you because you were, and are, manly; she tells you that she has supported you in every step of your transition and you have been selfish the whole time and only thinking of yourself. She hits you, but she was just drunk, she was just so angry, she was just joking. Why can’t you take it? Your needs are too much for her and her needs can never be met by you because you are inferior. You are an annoyance, a chore, a child: dirty, lazy, ugly, smelly, macho, stupid, slow.

In places like New York City, where I currently live, there are many resources for trans women and other queer and LGBTI people who have suffered intimate partner violence, most of them free and peer-conducted. And yes, legal recourse for a trans woman survivor against her attacker is near impossible (even with the help of a wonderful group like the Sylvia Rivera Project), but I generally distrust the state’s ability to liberate or protect us anyway, so it’s not discrimination I am particularly concerned with. What is really worrying is that we, the LGBTQI community, pretend that intimate partner violence is not an issue.

Maybe it’s karma.

I watch them arguing again. It’s my senior year of college in Virginia and I’m hanging out with my friends at a party. Roman and Gabriel, two of my best friends, are yet again fighting. He shoves her, she shoves him back; she giggles, but for a second I think I see fear in her eyes. Everyone looks at the ground or laughs nervously. Later I ask her if she’s okay and she gives me her characteristic big smile: “You know Roman, that’s how we kid around. Besides,” she winks at me, “You of all people should know how hot it is.” I try to smile back, but the effort only barely hides the grimace that surfaces as soon as she turns away. Sure enough, when she visits my partner and me many months later, she recounts to us how abusive the relationship had been and how it would take her awhile to ever trust anyone, to ever open up to anyone ever again. As soon as she leaves, my partner turns to me: “She acts like she’s such a victim when obviously there was abuse on both sides.” Awkwardly, I shrug my shoulders and look around the room. My partner doesn’t notice how uncomfortable she’s making me because she’s caught up in her own conjectures: “It’s like how we are sometimes.”

If you are or have been the victim of intimate partner violence, I want you to know that I believe you. I trust you and I know that you are unsure, confused, anxious and may be a bit of a mess, and I want you to know that that is okay. You are beautiful and worthy of love, protection and respect. I want you to look at the following list of resources and even if you can’t call or email them right now, maybe go to the website and read more or put the phone number in your contacts list. As trans women, it is not fair that we must so often be survivors not only of a transphobic, transmisogynist, cissexist society, but also survivors of intimate partner violence committed by those we trusted to help us exist amidst the oppression. But we are amazing for being able to do it, and we can change our communities to stop these types of violence from happening to more of us.

[1] See”Domestic Violence: A Resource for Trans People” by Barking and Dagenham

The Anti-Violence Project
www.avp.org
Manhattan, NY (212) 714-1184
24-hour Bilingual English/Spanish hotline: (212) 714-1141

Center for Anti-Violence Education
www.caeny.org
Brooklyn, NY (718) 788-1775
Self-defense classes, free for survivors and special programs for trans* youth

generationFIVE
www.generationfive.org/index.php
Oakland, CA and National
(510) 251-8552
Child sexual abuse survivor advocacy

The Network la Red
www.tnlr.org
Boston, MA
Hotline: 617-742-4911
Survivor-led advocacy group for trans inclusion in survivor programs and shelters

NYC Domestic Violence Hotline
1-800-621-4673
24-hour Bilingual English/Spanish

Right Rides
www.rightrides.org
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 964-7781 and (888) 215-7233
Free rides home in service area on Friday nights from 12 AM – 3 AM

Sanctuary for Families
www.sanctuaryforfamilies.org
Manhattan, NY
(212) 349-6009
Counseling for trans women survivors, especially immigrants and victims of sex trafficking

Safe Horizon
www.safehorizon.org
Manhattan, NY
Intimate partner violence hotline: (800) 621-4673
Rape, sexual assault and incest survivor hotline: (212) 227-3000

Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program
www.mssm.edu/SAVI
Manhattan, NY
(212) 423-2140
Counseling for survivors of violence who practice the Jewish faith

Trans Pride Intiative
http://tpride.org/
Dallas, TX
214-449-1439
Advocates for making shelters more inclusive of trans women

About the author: Emma Caterine recently left Virginia to move to her dream city of Brooklyn, New York. She completed a B.A. in English and a B.A. in African-American Cultural Studies from the College of William & Mary. She has done work in the past with labor organizing, archival science, LGBTQI activism, radio and venue management and volunteer coordination. Emma brings her diverse set of experiences to Red Umbrella Project, a sex worker advocacy group, as a Program Officer and will be helping to coordinate RedUP’s advocacy for the “no condoms as evidence” bill S1379/A2736 as well as other legislation and policies which impact sex workers in New York. For more info on NCAE you can reach her at emma [at] redumbrellaproject [dot] org or for other questions, comments, or concerns at emmacaterine [at] gmail [dot] com.

The Future of Gender Is the Present For Trans* Characters in SciFi Novels

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It has been quite a ride for trans folk of late. A hundred years ago terms like “transsexual” and “transgender” didn’t exist. Even the idea of gender as something separate from sex was unknown. Where might we go in the next 100 years? Well, when that sort of question comes up, people often turn to science fiction. What do the leading names in the field tell us about the future of gender?

Actually, as most science fiction critics and writers will tell you, SF often isn’t about the future. That is, the authors don’t generally try to predict what our world will look like in years to come. They may suggest possible futures – perhaps ones we need to guard against – but often these imagined futures are simply discussions of the present dressed up with spaceships and aliens as a means of encouraging the readers to think outside of the box.

That’s clearly evident in discussions of gender. Throughout the 20th Century, it seemed that most of the authors who put gender changes in their books had never met an actual trans person. There’s very little understanding of gender identities or the idea that people may need to transition, as opposed to choose to do so. For example, Steel Beach by John Varley postulates a world in which people merrily change between stereotypical macho males and stereotypical girly women. Sexual orientation is held to be inviolate, so if you start out a determinedly straight man you’ll be transformed into an equally determinedly straight woman, simply because your body has changed. It sounds very much like an idealized newspaper portrait of a “sex change.” The primacy of the gender binary is unquestioned (though Varley did allow for gays and lesbians).

Of course mainstream politics wasn’t the only influence. Noted feminist writer Joanna Russ produced a book that dipped into the same well as that which inspired Janice Raymond‘s notorious polemic, The Transsexual Empire. In The Female Man, trans women are manufactured to provide compliant wives for men. All of the “real” women in the world have long since gone off and founded a lesbian separatist state. Being a feminist who listened, Russ later repented her early simplistic view of trans people, and the book remains a classic of feminist SF, but is nonetheless problematic for trans women.

One author who seemed to have a clue was Robert A. Heinlein. His Friday contains a trans character and talks about test-tube babies using the same “not natural” language currently directed at trans folk. There is a gender change in I Will Fear No Evil, where an old man’s brain is transplanted into the body of a beautiful young woman, but the book reads more like a straight male’s fantasy of becoming a woman than an actual trans narrative.

An even better example is Triton by Samuel R. Delany. The central character of the novel, Bron, is hugely socially dysfunctional. Eventually he decides to become female because he has concluded that society is massively biased in favor of women. If he were around today he’d be writing blog comments complaining about misandry. But Bron is a social failure as a woman as well. Delany makes the point that real trans people are not like Bron by adding Sam, a character who is a very successful trans man. Both Friday and Triton are perhaps more revolutionary in predicting large-scale polygamy as a social norm.

While many books postulate a world in which medical science has made gender reassignment easy and popular, few authors have asked themselves what this would mean for society. An honorable exception is Iain M. Banks. His Culture novels are set in a far future where all sort of interesting technology is available very cheaply (including anti-hangover pills and drugs with no side-effects). Banks is on record as stating that for cosmetic gender changes to be frequent and commonplace you must first create a society that has true gender equality. If that wasn’t the case, he said, almost everyone would want to be a member of the dominant gender.

While The Culture might be free from discrimination (and hangovers), other writers have postulated a backlash and set books in theocratic dystopias. In Kim Westwood‘s The Courier’s New Bicycle, queer folk are allied with sex workers and petrolheads fighting back against a religious fundamentalist government. The strange alliance has come about because climate change has led to motor racing being outlawed. It is one of the first books I have read with an obviously non-binary lead character. Sadly it is currently only available in Australia, though a U.S. edition has been promised.

Why should gender persist into the future? If medical science can provide gender reassignment on demand, would people not sometimes choose something outside of the binary? I mentioned Heinlein’s Friday earlier. In it, California has outlawed gender discrimination and as a result it has become fashionable to adopt a non-gendered appearance. Other writers have gone further. The Gethenians in Ursula K. Le Guin‘s The Left Hand of Darkness are humanoid, but change gender naturally as part of their lifecycle. The Wikipedia article about the Gethenians speculates that they may have been created from homo sapiens through genetic engineering as part of an adaptation to the harsh environment of the planet they have settled.

In River of Gods, set in a near future India, Ian McDonald suggests that it will soon become possible for people to obtain surgery to become gender-free. The process of becoming a “nute” is highly complex because it involves making the whole skin a sexual organ, making up for the lack of genitals. McDonald uses this to illustrate the complexities and dangers of trans lives.

A rather less painful option might be for us to spend most of our time in virtual realities. In Glasshouse by Charles Stross, people can assume any body shape they want. If your preferred identity is that of a purple-furred gay rhinoceros, or of a be-tentacled horror from beyond the stars, so be it. The trouble with virtual worlds, however, is that they are created by people, and their creators might have godlike powers over them. The hero of Glasshouse finds himself trapped in a female body in a world modeled on 1950s America.

Another problem with infinite choice of body forms is that variation might go out the window. In the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy of novels, beginning with Light, M. John Harrison postulates a world in which off-the-shelf bodies, based on common ideas of the perfect appearance, are adopted by thousands of citizens. Fashion-conscious people don’t just wear the same sorts of clothes, they wear the same sorts of bodies.

It leads us to ask the obvious question. If medicine becomes that good, would trans people exist at all? Right now we don’t know what makes us the way we are. Whether we like it or not, doctors and psychologists will speculate and some will claim to have “cures.” Currently this appears to be all quackery, but it is the job of science fiction to ask how technology might develop. Many science fiction novels are set in a world in which children are grown in vats rather than wombs and precise scientific control could be used to standardize embryo development on the binary model, eliminating any physical aspects of gender variance. Other authors have suggested that increased understanding of the brain would allow personality to be edited at will, and that might include gender identity if it is indeed “all in the mind”.

The fact that scientists are still arguing over whether our natures are caused by social, mental or biological factors or some combination thereof suggests that any treatment that will work better than transition is still a long way off. Then again, even a technique that allowed you to test for a trans or intersex condition might lead to parents opting for abortion. The better medicine becomes, the more pressure there will be on parents to only produce babies that conform to social expectations.

However, the idea of a cure assumes that the gender binary remains dominant and socially desirable. What if that changed? A few writers have dared to take that imaginative leap.

Back in 1993, Ann Fausto-Sterling wrote a famous essay in which she postulated that mankind actually has five distinct sexes (“The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough“): male, female, feminine-male, masculine-female and intersex. Everyone now understands that her ideas were a bit simplistic, but at the time they were revolutionary and a science fiction writer, Meslissa Scott, wrote a novel expanding on the idea.

Scott needed a reason why binary genders were less dominant. She settled on a side-effect of something valuable. In her future world faster than light travel is possible, but dangerous. Humans have to take special drugs in order to survive space journeys and a side effect of these drugs is to significantly increase the likelihood of non-binary births. In Shadow Man, most of humanity has got used to the idea of five sexes. The action, however, is set on Hara, a socially conservative planet. Although all five sexes are commonplace on Hara, most people refuse to see them and legally everyone must register as either male or female. Mostly Scott satirizes the way that our society refuses to admit that QUILTBAG folks exist and insists that everyone identifies with the binary.

What Scott has done is effectively force mankind to abandon the gender binary. If people want to travel to the stars, they have to accept that a five-gendered society will result. But is there anything that might cause us to give up the binary voluntarily? Kim Stanley Robinson thinks that there is. His latest novel, 2312, which has been short-listed for the prestigious Hugo and Nebula Awards this year, suggests that longevity might be the key. What if, Robinson asks, it was proved that intersex people live a lot longer than males or females? Wouldn’t rich people quickly lose interest in supporting the gender binary and have their babies modified to come out intersex? And once celebrities start doing it, won’t it become fashionable?

The characters in 2312 are not as convincingly non-binary as those in Shadow Man (Scott is a lesbian, while Robinson is straight and probably has a lot less experience of people who perform gender in non-binary ways). However, the idea that society would voluntarily abandon the gender binary is groundbreaking, as is the idea of a world in which the only people who are wholly male or female are those whose parents were too poor to afford the treatment.

With trans people becoming much more visible in society and some even achieving acclaim as science fiction writers in their own right, the chances are that more such thought experiments will be written. Already anthologies such as Beyond Binary (edited by Brit Mandelo) and Scheherazade’s Façade (edited by Michael M. Jones) are providing writers with venues in which to explore gender issues in short stories. Exploring how the world might be different is what science fiction writers like to do. I look forward to seeing what they come up with next.

Cheryl Morgan is the first (though now not the only) openly trans person to win a Hugo Award. She runs a small press and an ebook store, and would particularly like to direct your attention to her podcast series, Small Blue Planet, in which she interviews SF&F writers from all around the world. You can follow her on Twitter as @CherylMorgan.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Freezing My Assets: On Transitioning and Wanting To Be A Mom One Day Too

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In the early days of my transition, it happened sometimes that I would get frustrated with someone messing up my pronouns, but once in awhile, there would be someone who got it right that made up for any number of people getting it wrong. One such person was the secretary at the desk at the andrology clinic who explained to an orderly: “She’s here to deposit her sperm.”

To be clear, I have no desire whatsoever for children at the moment. I’m not maternal; I don’t understand how one can get so excited when a baby figures out how to use a spoon. I can do that, and I can do it without making a mess of myself – most of the time. Nevertheless, being trans means you have to plan ahead. It is possible, somewhere down the line, that I’ll stop seeing babies as small, unemployed, inarticulate noise machines, and when that day comes, I’m kind of tickled by the idea of being one of the very small number of lesbian women whose child can answer the question of which mom is their biological mom with “both of them!”

With that in mind, I made my appointment, drove out to the university’s medical complex, and checked in at the andrology lab. I sat across the waiting area some distance away from the desk filling out the forms. An orderly went behind the desk, and perhaps he wasn’t paying much attention to me, because he became very confused when the secretary said, “Can you take Miss Catherwood to Room 1?”

Bear in mind that these little rooms have nothing in them but a sink, a bunch of porno magazines, a TV with a bunch of porno tapes, and a chair which no woman in her right mind would sit in. There is only one thing that these rooms are used for. So after being asked to take “Miss Catherwood” to one of these rooms, the orderly glanced at me briefly, then asked the secretary, quietly but audibly enough in the nearly silent waiting room, “why?”

The secretary told him, quite simply, “She’s making a deposit.” Increasingly bewildered, he asked, “A deposit of what?” and the girl said in a tone as though this should be completely obvious, “Of her sperm.” Like, duh. This was about the time I got up and brought the forms back to the desk.

I appreciated the secretary’s attitude, and moreover, it managed to momentarily distract me from the fact that I was actually very nervous about this. Not about ejaculating in public, I have a history that adequately prepared me for that sort of thing, but because I was worried that I had waited too long to do this. I had already been on hormones for some time. One thing the doctors warn you of is that, not-unexpectedly, going on a high dose of estrogen as well as a testosterone blocker does not do wonders for your fertility.

I found myself getting the wrong kind of worked up on the way to the room, thinking, “I’ve totally screwed this up, my sperm are probably all floating at the top of the ball, belly up, or swimming in circles in estrogen clouded waters like goldfish dropped into a murky swamp, wondering what the hell’s going on around here.” Then it hit me that by getting myself so worked up, I might make it worse by scaring them; do sperm get test anxiety? I had to calm down. I chatted with the orderly to distract myself.

He told me I had thirty minutes to produce the sample, and I responded, “Thirty minutes? That doesn’t leave a lot of time for foreplay. No time whatsoever for cuddling afterward.” He didn’t seem to appreciate the joke. Not willing to give up so easily, I asked, “Well if I’m going to be cutting corners anyway, what is the fastest anyone has ever been in and out of here?” and he responded, “I don’t know. A couple minutes.” I nodded: “Two minutes. Challenge accepted.”

Not so much as a grin.

Inside, I lifted my skirt and got to work. I didn’t manage to beat two minutes, by which I mean I beat for more than two minutes, after which I had a little form to fill out that asked some basic questions such as how long it had been since my last ejaculation and that sort of thing. It asked if any semen was lost (dribbled out) during collection. On the blank I wrote, “Nope!” and signed “Annie Oakley.”

Like a girl bringing home her first A+, I proudly marched my little cup to the lab where I was to give it to the doctor who would analyze it. Along the way, I explored a little, very curious to see what the freezer section of this combination doctors office and pornography supercenter looked like. I didn’t find it. Arriving at the doctor’s office, I gave him my sample, and he told me to wait while he pulled up my file to make sure he had my information. While he was doing so, it occurred to me, “He’s a sperm doctor; this guy has got to have a good sense of humor.” Hoping he would make up for the humorless orderly, I asked him, “So… what makes a guy go into the sperm trade?”

His response was disappointing. He just said, “Oh, I don’t know, the job was open at the right time, I was qualified to….” blah blah blah. I don’t know why, but I really thought the sperm guy would have something more witty to say. I expected, “I heard that it was an UP AND COMING business!” or something to that effect. I suppose I can’t complain about a medical appointment that includes an orgasm.

The doctor called that afternoon with my analysis while I was in the supermarket, the freezer section to be precise. Already, I’d been expecting tragic news about the state of things down under, and I thought a tub of ice cream might make me feel better (don’t think about that one too hard). I checked the caller before answering and thought to myself, “Damn, that was really fast. Didn’t take long to count ‘em, not a good sign…”

I stood gazing at the container of frozen ice cream I had just pulled out as I listened to him begin to explain how the whole thing worked. I knew what he would say. I knew I shouldn’t have waited so long after going on estrogen and spironolactone, and the tub of Karamel Sutra melting in my hand wasn’t going to bring me much comfort. He was about to break the news that I would never have a child of my own, and nothing else had ever made it so clear that I wanted one.

I really, really wanted one.

He laid it all out for me.

The average man’s sperm count is TWENTY MILLION.
The average woman’s sperm count is ZERO, and I had TWENTY-EIGHT MILLION more sperm than the average woman.

He also told me that average sperm motility is 60%, while mine was about 70%. That means rather than swimming in circles or floating aimlessly, my sperm apparently shoot around like armor piercing missiles. Naturally, to all of this I responded, “Yes!” and did a happy little dance in the freezer section of Jewel-Osco which attracted no small degree of attention.

When I was finished celebrating, I thanked the doctor and hung up. I placed the ice cream gently back in the freezer and shut the door.

I was in a fine mood for the remainder of the day, but those few hours spent wondering, and those few moments spent convinced that I had thoughtlessly traded away my ability to have a child, stuck with me. I would not have traded it for nothing, of course; I would have traded it for a body I am finally comfortable in and a life worth living. And yet, some part of me thought, “Yeah… but still…”

It dawned upon me that this question of the ability to have children is not a frequent one in our discourse. Perhaps because, as part of the LGBT community (not to open a can of worms), we are among a group of people who already face a certain reproductive challenge that most heterosexual couples do not. Or perhaps it is because, unlike lesbians and gays, previous generations of transpeople have not necessarily shared this problem.

Thanks largely to a more accepting social climate, over the last thirty years, the average age of transition for a transperson has plummeted. Now we see teenagers and young children transitioning, and like anyone else, I’m filled with joy for them, and perhaps a touch of envy. Riki Wilchins recently wrote a somewhat controversial op-ed discussing the fact that due to the gradually lowering age of transition and the slowly shifting culture, the experiences of the new generation of trans people would bear little resemblance to the experiences of the generations that have come before.

And in most respects, I think we can agree, good for them! No decades of crushing inner turmoil trying to live a lie. No having to explain to a spouse of twenty years that you’re not who they think you are. And in the cases of transitioning in childhood, maybe even no struggling with the physical aftermath of the wrong kind of puberty. Good for those kids. Jerks.

But among those experiences this new generation of early transitioners will not share will be that of fathering or mothering a biological child, and while we may argue about the degree of significance, it is a thing that is lost in transition. I know many older transgender people who were married and had children prior to their transition; I also know many younger transgender people who, having transitioned early, will not have those experiences — in most respects, a very positive development. And yet, some part of me thinks, “Yeah… but still…”
To be entirely clear, here is a brief list of things I am NOT suggesting:

+ That the benefits of transitioning do not outweigh the losses. This is not an argument against transitioning at any age.

+ That everyone must want a biological child, or even want children at all. Certainly, many people do not.

+ That one could not love an adopted child or a child born with the assistance of a third party every bit as powerfully as a child that is their biological offspring. Of course they can.

All I am suggesting is an addendum to something already commonly understood. The decision to transition is a major one, one with many consequences, most of them positive, and it is a decision which must be informed. All I suggest is that considering the matter of fertility should be part of that informed decision. Because it is an important one, and it is one we might not think about until it is too late.

Author’s Bio:I’m a PhD candidate at Northern Illinois University where I teach English and Gender and Sexuality Studies. My fiction, creative nonfiction, and critical work has appeared in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, Towers Literary and Creative Arts Magazine, Autostraddle, The Huffington Post, 34thParallel, and Plenitude. I believe in life writing as a way to understand ourselves and the world around us. Find me at rhiannoncatherwood.wix.com

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Clicks on a Keyboard: Dungeons, Dragons, and Trans-Feminism

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“Click” can best be defined as the moment you became conscious of the personal being political, the moment you learned a social fact through a deeply personal interaction. Your “click” moves you from an individual experience to a collective empiricism. It connotes the precise instant that everything changed; forever.

Yet for me, my click was a bit longer and slower than that. It was a pastiche of revelations and experiences – both good and bad – that enhanced my feminism. You see, that’s another part of this: the story I’m going to tell begins with me already being a feminist, but ends with me making peace with being a woman. To me, this is vital to a feminist consciousness among women. In my own case, I learned this through video gaming.

Being a transgender woman means one has a “special” relationship with gender and with womanhood in particular. For many of us, part of our self-discovery necessarily involves a dawning of pride and acceptance of one’s own gender. I grew up socialised to believe that femininity and womanhood were inferior and should be either avoided or pitied. As a young trans girl trying to find her place in this gendered world, this was a mirrored feedback loop that fed a dramatic self hate: I hated what I feared I was, and hated myself for wanting it. I feared that to be both a woman and trans was to consign myself to being permanently unlovable.

I came out as a feminist when I was 15 because my father’s depredations in the household — with my mother as a long-suffering housewife who endured years of psychological abuse — put the lie to the notion that sexism was a thing of the past; but that did not click away my own self-loathing and fears about accepting my gender.

What finally did that was video gaming and roleplaying. As I suffered through severe depression and suicidal ideation, I discovered roleplaying games to be a wonderful oasis that enabled me to live as someone more closely approximating what I would choose. Through heroines like Bastila Shan, or the ones I created from the ground up in Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, I gained secret role models who gave me hints of the kind of woman I’d like to be.

Bastila Shan

Single player games provided me with visions of female power. Women with swords, spells, lightsabers, martial skills, elegance, high education, class, guts, skill, and who – above all – showed no shame in who they were. If these fictional characters could do it, so could I. But since I was still being forced to live as a boy, where could I possibly begin?

The psychology of trans girlhood is a curious, liminal space existing somewhere between the generalities of cis girl and boyhood. But it’s also remarkably internal, shivering beneath a shell of deeply, unwillingly affected gender, preventing social interaction (for good or ill) as—in my case—a woman. As I grew up, I felt feminine self-loathing, the acute threat of men’s power and privilege and strangely vulnerable when I was around powerful men engaged in rape apologism. And for all that fear and loathing, I could not claim womanhood with any pride or confidence; I tried to shrink ever deeper into that torturous iron maiden of a shell.

Strangely enough, it was playing World of Warcraft where I learned how to be a proud woman in the midst of a patriarchal society, and where my transgender transition would properly begin in earnest.

As I wrote in a recent paper for Women’s Studies Quarterly “To be quite sure, this was not a possibility that was bullet-pointed as a selling point on the back of World of Warcraft’s packaging. ‘Uncover your transgender identity!’ is scarcely marketed as a feature of online games of any stripe; yet it happened.” The game provided me with two things: first, a space where I could enter a social world as a woman unapologetically, in the form of my avatar and her roleplay backstory; second, an experimental virtual world where I could practise resisting patriarchy from the subjectivity of a strong, proud woman, and not merely someone shivering in the shell of a coercively-assigned gender.

I confronted the realities of stalking, harassment and male sexual entitlement openly for the first time. It made gaming difficult, but it also showed me that if I stopped hiding and pretending I wasn’t a woman, I actually did have the strength to withstand this fusillade of machismo. In so doing, it taught me empowerment; what Virginia Woolf memorably called the “habit of freedom.” I also made lasting friends there, explored my sexuality there, and when it came to the harassment? I learned to fight it.

Quinnae

In that world I was “Quinnae” and “she/her” to everyone, and I quickly became known on the forums for prosaic tongue lashings and verbal self-defence par excellence. I found shelter in communities of fellow women gamers, people to commiserate and laugh with. All of these people existed as avatars and text on a screen, yet they saved my life.

It showed an illumined path to accepting my womanhood in the real world. Each click on the keyboard brought me one step closer to loving myself.

The game offered me the opportunity to stand in the shoes of a woman character I had created, a thoughtful, strong woman modeled after my newfound role models and representing a potential vision of myself. The scholarly Night Elven Priestess who became my main character in WoW was how I explored womanhood, became a woman and learned to take pride in being a woman. She taught me how to stand up for myself, how to fight back and eventually how to take control of my life.

This ‘click,’ as it were, took roughly a year and a half to run its course. But when it did, I was ready to accept this was no longer a cute, long eared fantasy: this could be real. The habit of freedom now churned with its mighty pistons, the old shameful shell rattling and cracking as it did so. Anger from being lied to about womanhood, rage at having it suppressed, fury at having sacrificed 20 years of my life on the altar of patriarchal essentialism all came pouring in. But beautiful emotions as well: a profound sense of self-love and hope, the realisation that I could emerge from the cave of gaming addiction and make Quinnae’s hyperactive self-actualisation into a livable life for the real me. For Katherine.

Thus it was that in the great “Name:__________” space of life, I deleted my old name and re-entered Katherine Cross.

I was starting a new game. And this time I would be in control.

About the author: Katherine Cross is a research assistant in Hunter College’s sociology department and is preparing doctoral research on gender identity formation in virtual worlds. A radical feminist and author, her writing credits include Women’s Studies Quarterly, Feministing, Kotaku, The Occupied Times of London, Questioning Transphobia, and the Border House, where she is co-editor.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Trans and Schizophrenic: When Diagnosis Impacts Transition

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The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) recognizes both gender identity disorder and schizophrenia as mental illnesses that can and do coexist. So I was surprised to find that, when my doctor would not prescribe me hormones without a letter from my psychiatrist stating that my gender identity issues weren’t a product of my schizophrenia, the psychiatrist said he would never write such a letter.

“You can’t prove a negative,” he said. “I’m not saying you’re not transgendered, but I can never be sure that this transgendered thing is legitimate.”

So there it was. Although I could pass pretty well without the hormones, one day I would develop male-pattern baldness and other secondary sex characteristics of the wrong gender. I was doomed to become irreversibly masculine.

My parents and I were stunned. In modern times, most people wouldn’t think it was mentally healthy for a person to conceal her gender identity and live as the wrong gender for the rest of her life. How, then, could it be not only right, but necessary for someone who had already suffered a psychotic break to live that way? Even worse, my mother asked him if he understood what an emotional blow it was for me to hear that I could never have hormones for the rest of my life. Basically he shrugged and said “that’s protocol.” Before my mother could recover from her shock at his response he went on to say that because my medicine was so effective for me, he would only need to see me once every three months. I was forced to consider the possibility that he just didn’t give a damn about my happiness.

If he had read my medical records he would have known that my first psychotic break was exacerbated by my fear that I would never be recognized as a woman. In my senior year of high school I had come out to my parents and friends as trans. I began seeing a therapist and after six months I got her to sign off on my getting hormones. At the time, my therapist’s approval was all I needed, and so I initiated hormone replacement therapy. All this time I had been taking anti-psychotics for past mental health issues that included toileting in a bucket, fear of robots from the future, and running around in my underwear in the middle of winter. But I hadn’t actually been diagnosed with schizophrenia yet, so no one stood in my way of getting hormones.

That would change as my symptoms progressed. Despite loyally sticking to my medication regimen, I fell ill again. I was afraid that Israel would invade the U.S. and so I thought I had to get the president’s attention. Jill Biden taught at the school I was attending, and when I saw her secret service detail I began to scan them closely with my eyes to see if they had any devices to communicate to the president with.

“Who is she?” one of them whispered to another.

“I think she’s a student.”

I became fearful, so I left. Next week when I came back for class, a couple of secret service agents pulled me aside and interviewed me.

“Why did you run from them? Did you know they were secret service agents?” they asked.

I became fearful so I started banging my head against the wall to control my thoughts, but they then decided to take me to the hospital because I was hurting myself. “We need to take you for a psychological evaluation because we think you’re a danger to yourself.”

I turned and tried to run, so they wrestled me into handcuffs and brought me to the emergency room. At the emergency room I tried to run away and so they tied me to the bed. Blinded by rage I screamed, “You can’t stop me from killing the president!”

“How would you kill the president?” one agent asked.

“If you donate to his campaign you’re entered into a raffle. The prize is a seat at a dinner with him. I’m going to win and choke him at the dinner.”

I was committed to a psychiatric unit, and when I was discharged three weeks later the secret service pressed charges and I was arrested. They dropped the charges after I’d spent nine months in jail because they decided I was too mentally ill to understand the charge or the court proceedings. I was transferred back to the same psychiatric unit and two months later I went home.

But I was haunted by memories of my time as a female in a male jail. While in jail, I ran into several problems because I looked like a woman. I had inmates chasing me around the corridors, offering me food for sex, and one inmate even sexually assaulted me. The worst part was that they wouldn’t give me my hormones in jail. So when I got out I immediately went back to the doctor who had prescribed them to me. She wouldn’t do this without a letter from my psychiatrist because I had been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

“I know you were on hormones before, but I just need some extra assurance,” she said.

When I was actively psychotic I never mentioned my desire to transition. It’s only when I’m healthy that I pursue hormone replacement therapy and laser hair removal. When I was at my worst, I couldn’t even think about my gender identity. I was too preoccupied by my fears. I was afraid harmless things, like street signs or trees, were trying to kill me. I became concerned only for my survival. I couldn’t even think about my gender identity.

My parents have noticed the trend that I only talk about transitioning when I’m healthy, and they support me in my transition. But even with my parents on my side my psychiatrist refuses to write me the letter I need. No matter how long I’m mentally stable, no matter how long I live full time as a woman, he will never approve me for hormone replacement therapy. This is why my parents and I were so stunned at my psychiatrist refusal to even discuss the matter. It doesn’t mean I can’t transition. What it does is create an additional financial barrier. This doctor was not the first to refuse to write me a letter for hormones. Every doctor that I’ve seen within my health insurance has refused. So I have to see a private psychiatrist for several months to get his or her approval. The only way around this is to take black market hormones, which I don’t want to do.

With my parents’ encouragement, I hope to share my story to help other people in my position. No one should have to live as the wrong gender for his or her entire life because they have a mental illness.

About the author: Sam Ashkenas is a twenty-year-old former college student. She came out as trans at the age of seventeen. At the age of eighteen she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She initiated hormone replacement therapy, but was taken off the hormones after being arrested. Now she is out of jail and working to get back on hormones.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Do Not Consume Psilocybin Mushrooms While Trans*

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trans*scribe illustration © rosa middleton, 2013

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This is about cisgender people, and men, and the person I love the most, and myself, and how they’re all going to hurt me. They’re going to hurt me so bad that I might confuse my life with a nightmare sometimes. This is about the first time I ever did mushrooms, and it’s about how being trans* affects everything, even bullshit bourgeoise attempts at pharmacological liberation.

We drove out to the mountains for my first trip, because Bobby and Willow insisted that nature was the only appropriate place to eat mushrooms. It’s the middle of February though, and we’re out in the woods for less than an hour before the cold drives Willow and I shivering back to the car while stout, stoic Bobby quietly accompanies us. He loans Willow his jacket and she immediately disappears inside it. He doesn’t feel the cold, or if he does he won’t ever show it.

The drugs had already started their work on Willow before we started walking, and the exertion metabolizes them faster. She stumbles frequently, and looks at me like she hasn’t seen me before, and apologizes to the stones when she scuffs her feet on them. I fall into the trap of the newbie, imagining myself immune to the experience, with little more to look forward to than a slightly different kind of being stoned, when my stomach turns and the forest ripples around me. Willow turns to me, her face glowing like a pagan sun.

“Do you see it?”

One time, in kindergarten, I went to the bathroom and regarded my genitals. They seemed hollow, like a rubber prosthesis, and I killed time while my little bladder evacuated by searching for the seam where the doctor had sewn this strange business over my vagina. This occupied my thoughts for a little while, well into recess, and then someone asked if I wanted to pretend to be Power Rangers. It’s important to keep a sense of perspective. Decades later I will trot out this memory like a show pony and present it to therapists and dubious peers in an effort to prove the validity of my own lived experience, leaving out the part where I was distracted by pop culture. So far none of them have related the moment they knew they weren’t trans, so I still feel I have the edge in these exchanges.

The dashboard of Bobby’s Subaru is turning into a spider’s face, but that’s okay because the spider seems pretty chill. Like it’s doing an impression of Marmaduke. I look over slowly, to ask Bobby why he would buy a car made out of spiders, but his big hound dog gaze is locked on the steering wheel like love at first sight. Whatever he’s seeing I don’t want to interrupt it.

Willow leans past us, points out the windshield and asks if we see Them. I follow her finger and watch as the mushrooms show me the Appalachian mountains the way Van Gogh would have seen them, all flowing colors and rivers of infinite fractal motion. Bobby and Willow insist they see faces in the trees, but atheism is coded too deep in me. If there are faces out there they know I’m not worth the time.

A rough morning is blossoming into a wonderful afternoon. The car’s heaters have chased away the sudden cold snap. Warmth and laughter fill my chest. Willow laughs with me, and I notice for the first time that when she really laughs, in that way that almost feels like a crying jag, her voice catches and sounds like a velociraptor. It reminds me of an old friend from Boston. I tell Willow this, and that the reminder makes me happy because my friend was very nice sometimes.

“You know,” Willow says, “I think that’s the first positive thing you ever said about her.”

Our time together didn’t end well.

“I’d never thought of her as a full person before,” Willow continues. “She was always just the cliche of the tragic tranny.”

I am looking in the passenger mirror when she says this. The last two words slide into my already stuttering forebrain. The woman in the mirror melts and shifts, her brow thickening, her jaw jutting out, her cheeks darkening. My throat catches, and I start weeping.

I am dressed as Thomas, now. The only times I get to be Meredith are when I travel the ether. I sit on one end of a ratty old sofa, my hands clasped in my lap, while Dan sits on the other end. We watch America’s Got Talent in almost total silence. His wife is at work.

Donny was the first person I ever had sex with. Or should I say he was the first person to have sex with me? I hadn’t really wanted it but I’d wanted to want it, and I hadn’t felt like saying no, and I’d climaxed anyway, and he’d violated my already-fragile trust in a way I wouldn’t discover until after. Complicated has always been easier than tragic, for me. That was nearly a decade before, though, and it never stopped me from coming over whenever he asked. Even when puberty dug in its claws, twisting me into a hairy, broad-shouldered monster, and he stopped wanting me unless he was drunk or couldn’t find somebody better, I came over. I even came to his wedding.

He starts fidgeting. I look away from the show to find him rubbing himself through his jeans. I pretend not to notice.

“Being married and bi sucks,” he says. “You’ve got needs that your partner just can’t satisfy.”

I could satisfy them though, right? I think. Because I’m a man, right? The thought is like a punch in the stomach, but I learned not to flinch a long time ago.

He keeps rubbing. I agree that that seems rough and focus on Howie as he says something criminally unfunny. Donny eventually stops rubbing himself. I wonder if he feels ashamed, but he married a woman with an erotic furry tattoo on her back who wore a backless dress on her wedding night, so who knows if he’s even capable of shame.

The next act on the show is a troupe of dancers who are clearly male-bodied, but might as easily be drag queens as trans women. I dig my fingers into my thighs. He makes a crack about the ‘men’ on stage, and I suggest that they might consider themselves women.

“Not until they get the surgery,” he says. “If it’s got a dick, it’s still a man.”

I say nothing. I leave when his wife gets home, and I never speak to him again.

My trip is threatening to turn bad. I want to talk about death, and I can’t help but imagine people I see as corpses waiting to be unborn. Willow knows I shouldn’t indulge it, but I can’t let it go.

“I don’t just want the dark stuff,” I say, rubbing my cheek against the cold curve of the car window. “I also want the sun, and these colors, and…like, to touch a baby.”

“You want a baby?” Willow says, in a whisper.

“Of course I do.”

I rub my stomach absent-mindedly. We both look at my midsection and, for a moment, share a vision of my stomach and breasts swelling. We see a child growing in the womb I won’t ever have. We blink and it’s gone, and the tears come again.

There is more snow in Kevin’s yard than I saw in two decades in Tennessee. I trudge through the stuff, my legs going numb, toward a door I’ve never seen before. I knock, and wait, and melting snow seeps through my waterproof boots, and finally a tired-looking man in his late 30s answers in a bathrobe and a day’s beard growth.

“Thomas?”

I nod and adjust my bag, trying to ease the ache in my shoulder.

“Come inside,” he says.

“Thanks.” I cross the border and immediately tense up as the sour, bachelor smell of Kevin’s condo hits me. I put my bag down in the hall and take off my boots while he watches.

“You really don’t mind me staying?” I say. “Just until my friend and I find an apartment.”

“Ben said you’re cool.” He shrugs and wipes his nose. “Besides, it’s been too quiet since my girlfriend left.” He gestures up a narrow stair and walks off. “Your room’s up there. There’s an air mattress in the closet.”

I hop up the stairs and find myself on a partial loft looking out over the condo’s living room. The man is directly below, sprawled
out on his couch, turning the tv’s volume back up.

“Thanks again!” I say, leaning out and over him. He looks up and half-smiles. I hesitate before continuing. “You might…I wanted to give you a heads-up, you might see me wearing some weird stuff. Like, women’s clothes, and stuff. I’m transgender? And I moved up here so I could-”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, yawning. “I’m in the fetish scene too.”

We make it home somehow. One minute we’re on the mountain, and then I’m running around my building’s parking lot licking trees and being glad I’m not a dog, and then, somehow, I’m in bed with Willow and we’re taking our clothes off. Most of what happens next I learn from her later. Bobby comes to check on us, or stare at us, or try to join us. I don’t know. I can’t look at him. His beard scares me, and his heavy eyes, and everything male about him terrifies me.

The trip finally turns bad. Willow wants to have sex but I keep finding a penis where my vagina should be, and I know if I go inside her I’ll be gone forever. Each time she kisses me I shove her away, telling her not to eat me. I kick and push and moan. I grab her face and hold it inches from mine, and her beautiful, beautiful face becomes a mirror. I know the mirror is a liar, though, because I could never be gorgeous and normal like this image. Willow leaves me alone on the bed. I will feel very guilty later, but for now I come completely unmoored.

I chew my lip as my inbox loads. Have my editors responded yet? I picture them, in their Manhattan stylishness, laughing and rolling their eyes as they read my message out loud for the entire office.

“What a freak!” they must be saying.

“He was already ugly and fat, but a tranny to boot? How tragic.”

“A talentless hick and a pervert!”

“He can’t even write convincing female characters!”

“Is this a good enough excuse to cancel his contract?”

The screen finishes loading and there it is, at the top of my messages. My mouse hovers over the title, I’m not sure for how long. Finally, bracing like a woman before a firing squad, I click it.

“It’s cute you didn’t think we suspected,” they wrote.

“We absolutely support you.”

“We love your writing.”

I take a few minutes to cry before I notice the attachment at the bottom. An image pops up. It’s a book cover, MY book cover, and, “Meredith Lee” is printed across the top. The tears keep coming.

I have lost myself. Space, time and memory blend and fracture. I dip into the void and pull back up, obsessing with angles, curves, and echoes. One coherent thought stays in the foreground: that I must find the correct reality.

I crawl up from the darkness and look down. My eyes graze the obscenity between my legs. I shut down. Wake up. See a day’s hair growth on my hand. Shut down. Wake up. Feel a patch of stubble on my chin. Shut down.

The actresses are about to come out. The audience rutsles. Willow and our friend Amy discuss what they know about the Vagina Monologues while I think back to the last production I saw, before I was living even part time as a woman. An interesting piece of trivia comes to me.

“I think they did an all-trans woman production of this a while back,” I whisper to Willow.

She frowns. “I’m not sure how I feel about that,” she says. “The show’s about growing up without male privilege and the difficulties of being female-bodied, isn’t it?”

I swallow and try to sink into my chair. A moment before I’d felt like a woman among women, invisible through belonging rather than erasure for once. The feeling evaporates, and I see myself from outside, and I remember how belonging and normalcy are for other people.

“Are you mad at me?” Willow says. I don’t know how to tell her what I feel in this moment, so I tell her I’m only a little hurt instead.

It feels real when I wake up, but I still have a male body. It must be another dream. I shakily walk over to a bookshelf and pick a book at random — Orlando, funnily enough. The pages remain the same no matter how many times I look away and back again, almost like I’m awake. I must be dreaming though, if only because it would be too unfair for this to be my real body again.

Willow’s voice drifts into the bedroom, and Bobby’s answers. I shuffle toward the living room without putting on panties as a final test. I would never go bottomless in front of anyone but Willow in real life, so if nothing stops me from doing it now I must be dreaming.

It turns out I’m not dreaming, and I absolutely would go bottomless.

Willow sits me on the bed and tells me to close my eyes. She clumsily pulls something from the closet and spends a moment rummaging through one of her drawers. Her daughter Vanessa — our daughter more and more each day — bounces excitedly behind me.

“Can I look yet?”

“Y-yes,” Willow says. She is shaking so much that she could power our entire building. I move to comfort her, but she directs my attention to an oil painting leaning against the wall.

The painting is a mermaid reclining on a rock in the middle of the ocean. Her upper-half is a little chubby — fluffy, Willow calls it — with pale, pillow breasts sagging the tiniest bit. She has a little bit of an underbite, which only serves to make her smile a little lopsided and sarcastic. her long, black hair falls over one eye, but the other is large and brown and full of laughter.

“This is how I see you, Mermaid,” Willow says.

I look at the painting’s left hand and see a gold band around her ring finger. Willow sees me look and pulls a white box from behind her back, almost dropping it because of her tremors. She looks at me, eyes painfully wide. She is paralyzed by her anxiety.

“Do you need to ask me something?” I say, a smile and a blush spreading across my face.

“Do…do you want…?” Willow squeaks.

“Yes,” I say, and the three of us fall into a desperate, crushing, bonfire of a hug.

“Our Mermaid!” Vanessa squeals.

“I was hoping your trip wouldn’t be as gender-centric as it was,” Willow says, opening another berry smoothie.

“Me too,” I say, trying to decide if I want to eat anything. My stomach is tying itself in knots at the thought of how mean I was to her on the bed.

“Did you learn anything, at least?”

I unwrap a cheese stick and shrug. We watch the snow fall for a few minutes, before deciding to play Super Mario World while we’re still tripping a little bit.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Fat, Trans and (Working on Being) Fine With It

click here for more trans*scribe

One of the scariest things about the early steps of my transition was shopping for clothes. I wasn’t ready to go out in “girl mode,” and even if I was, I didn’t have the clothes to do so. Every time I went into a store I was deathly afraid that the cashier would ask who I was buying the dresses for, that other customers would realize what I was doing, or worst of all, that I would bump into someone I wasn’t yet out to. Even though it should have been fun buying new outfits and picking out clothes that finally reflected who I was and what I liked, it was huge cause of stress in my life.

What made it even worse is that I’m fat.

I’m about six feet tall, I wear a women’s size 12 shoe, and a size 20 dress. So not only do I have to deal with the crippling dysphoria that comes from having a body that I often don’t even recognize as my own, I also have to deal with the cultural misogyny that tells me that a woman can’t be as big and fat as I am and still be desirable.

Photo © Meyllen DJneres

When I started coming out, I also started getting people telling me that I wasn’t a real woman. I was told that I was claiming God made a mistake, that I was making the wrong choice, that I was kidding myself. I was told that even if I dressed and acted like a woman, because of my genitals or chromosomes, I would always technically be a man. I’ve been able to block most of that out. My friends and family have, almost universally, been incredibly supportive and accepting. They see me as the woman I am. There are still a few comments here and there about “biological women” and “biological men” but I’m learning to manage those. Even though I had learned to ignore people saying I’m not a real woman, I now have to deal with an entirely new criticism of my body. Now that I’ve started presenting as a woman, people feel free to comment on how I look.

Photo © Meyllen DJneres

Apparently, now my size is fair play. As a guy, the last time I remember someone making fun of me for being fat was in the ninth grade, but as a woman, I get comments on my weight almost every time I post pictures on my blog. Whether it’s someone commenting on one of my photos saying, “And this is why america [sic] has fallen into ruin. You are morbidly obese,” or porn blogs sending me messages saying they would love to see naked pictures of my “sexy fat ass.” As a woman I have to navigate this strange world where people either feel like my fatness is somehow hurting them or exists only to feed their fetish. And it sucks. I already deal with enough body image issues as it is, you know, the whole dysphoria thing, and I really don’t need society’s standards of how big a woman can be to give me more.

I don’t need stores to only carry dresses and pants up to a size 12. I don’t need stores that only carry women’s shoes up to a size 10. In the town I live in there are only two stores that carry a wide selection of women’s clothes that fit me. Building up the courage to get dressed, put on makeup, do my hair and then go out in public to do some shopping only to be told “We don’t have anything in your size” feels like an affirmation of all the times I was told I was a man. I’m lucky if the thrift stores have more than two or three nice things that are my size. If I want new clothes I have to shop online, go out of town, or wait for the stores to restock their supply. It’s not fun. It makes me frustrated with my body. It makes me even more frustrated with the fashion industry that says women who look like me don’t deserve nice clothes.

Photo © Meyllen DJneres

My dysphoria means that sometimes I look in the mirror or I look at my body and feel sick to my stomach at what hormones have done to me. They have misshapen my genitals, given me hair in all the wrong places, messed up my skeleton, and made my voice sound like it’s coming from someone else. It’s hard to see myself as someone who I can like and love, let alone as someone that another person could like and love. I’ve lost sleep because of how I feel about my body. In the past I’ve even withdrawn from my friends and stopped socializing because of how I feel about my body. But it’s getting better. I’m learning how to not hate what I see. I’m reminding myself that some women are hairier than others, some women have broad shoulders, some women have small boobs. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point. I’m not about to let even more body hate derail that. Yes I’m fat, but that doesn’t mean I have to hate that about my body too. There’s already enough I don’t like. So instead I do my best to embrace my fatness.

It’s tough as hell dealing with so much that tells you you’re not being a woman in the right way. If they’re not attacking you for what’s in your pants or in your genes, they’re attacking your for your height and your waistline. And then when they will accept fat women, they say that they better have curves in all the right places and be a perfect hourglass figure. Well, I’m not. I have broad shoulders, small boobs, a big belly and fat thighs. It hard to love my body sometimes, but it’s still beautiful. It’s still sexy. It’s still desirable. It’s just hard sometimes to see that. That’s why I have to practice purposeful body love. I’ve had to learn an entirely new set of exercises and techniques to deal with an entirely new type of attack on my body.

Photo © Meyllen DJneres

My body is my own and not here for other’s critique or objectification. Sometimes I need to remind myself of that. Sometimes I get dressed up in one of my favorite outfits and take some pictures, not to share with anyone else, just for myself. Sometime I look at fat fashion blogs and smile at all the other beautiful, amazing, gorgeous women who look like me. Sometimes I go shopping so I can find a dress that I know I look amazing in, despite what other people might think. Sometimes I take a bath, relax and just try to enjoy the feeling of being in my own body. I listen to music by Jill Scott and Aretha Franklin or watch Hairspray. I surround myself with friends who tell me I’m beautiful and compliment me on my looks. I remind myself that looks aren’t everything and that no matter what people think and say about my body I am a smart, talented, creative and powerful woman. It’s taking some time, and sometimes I struggle to love my fat, transgender body, but I’m getting there. I’ve learned that loving my body for all of its fatness has helped me to love my body for all of its transness as well.

Photo © Meyllen DJneres

About the author: Mey (short for Melínda) is a 26 year old queer trans Latina who lives in Idaho with her cat Sawyer.  She loves scifi, fantasy, horror and comic books.  Her hobbies include reading books and watching movies, going to concerts and being a comedy nerd.  She’s afraid of heights, airplanes and whales.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

On Faith And Gender, Or Why I Dress Like A Man On Fridays

TRANS*SCRIBE ILLUSTRATION © ROSA MIDDLETON, 2013

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Hello, my name is Miriam. I’m a 30 year old trans woman living in Texas. And, because it’s Friday, I’m dressed like a man right now.

Not one of my prouder moments.

No, this isn’t part of some gender fuck art protest. In fact, my reasons are very old fashioned. You see, I’m a Muslim, and in order to enter a mosque, I have to do so as a man.

Mosques, unlike churches, are gender segregated. It comes from Bedouin tradition dating back to long before Islam. In modern times, it’s justified (like all gender segregation) as a way to free straight, cisgendered people of sexual temptation.

In practical terms, it means that gender presentation determines whether you enter the men’s or women’s area. Overall society is already wary of trans* inclusion into women’s spaces. You can imagine what orthodox/ultra-orthodox mosques would say, especially when you factor in my being queer.

They would tell me to leave and never come back.

And you have to enter a mosque. Group prayer is major part of Islam. Aside from Friday service, there are funerals, weddings, and holidays. And those are just the required times. It boils down to a simple decision: dress like a man, or lose part of my faith.

That scares me. To say Islam is important to me is an understatement. Islam is life. It’s saved my life countless times, and allows me to embrace life as it is. It’s as integral to my well-being as my transition. And it’s not like I harbor any personal conflict between being queer, trans*, and Muslim. God made me these things, all praise be to God. But Islam is not an island, and my personal peace doesn’t erase the conflict with the greater community.

The consequences of that extend far beyond the few hours a week I’m in the monkey suit. For starters, having to pass as male means I have to keep an androgynous appearance at all times. Even something as simple as getting my eyebrows done could raise suspicions. And I’m deathly afraid of a judge finding out and declaring that I’m not “really” full time.

Which is would be silly. Transition is almost never a straight line from one gender or another. It’s full of lapses, de-transitions, and a lot of ambiguity. In that sense, this could be seen as the last vestiges of manhood before I fully come into my own. But many trans* narratives also involve trans women forced to live their lives in the closet. These Fridays could be my life. Not that I wouldn’t (again, nothing I wouldn’t do for my faith).

So why not fight back? Why not change mosques? Try to pass as cis- and enter the women’s area? Find some other queer Muslims and hold our own Prayer? Simply demand my right to pray without having to crossdress?

But fighting back isn’t as easy as it sounds. For starters, the local community is too tight knit and knows me too well for me to pass undetected. It would only take one person to say something. It’s also the problem with establishing a queer Muslim community. Queer Muslims, the ones who don’t simply walk away, are forced in the closet as much as possible. I can count the number of Muslims I’ve met post-transition with one hand in my pocket.

As for fighting for my rights: well, for starters you need leverage to push back. And then there’s Islamophobia.

Screw you, Microsoft, Islamophobia is a real word. And it’s not partisan, either. There’s more than enough people in the queer community perfectly willing to disparage Islam for their own purposes. I don’t want my narrative to be used against my community, and I know that once I start protesting, I’m not sure who would get involved.

Because it’s not as if America’s Islamic community is categorically homo-/trans*phobic. Being a religious minority means learning to be non-judgemental. Keith Ellison is the vice-chair of the LGBT Equality Caucus. Then again, I’m not sure if I’d be allowed in his mosque.

Mosques are beautiful places. You see such a deep expression of faith there: Muslims who haven’t prayed in years picking up right where they left off. Reverts finding their first conscious taste of Islam through these doors. Mosques accept everyone from rich professionals to skinheads with earplugs.

And, truth be told, I’m not particularly out to judge my fellow Muslims, either. I may think that gender segregation is bullshit, but I’m not interested in trampling someone else’s right to it. It would simply be nice to have a way of opting out of it without leaving the mosque.

Until then, I’m just going to be here in a tank top, doing my best impersonation of The Aggressives.

And praying.

PS: I just want to note that Daniel Pipes, Michael Lucas, Pamela Gellar, Newt Gingrich, and pretty much anyone featured here and here can pre-emptively go fuck themselves.

About the author: Miriam lives and works in Texas, and currently blogs for I Am Not Haraam. She’s not very good with bios.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Call and Response: On Body Snarking and The Word “Tr*nny”

Introduction From The Editors [if you skip this, the article won’t make sense!]: We’re big fans of The Lingerie Addict, Cora Harrington‘s blog about — you guessed it — lingerie! — which just-so-happens to be the most popular lingerie blog in the whole entire world. Recently Cora, who is cisgender and often posts photo shoots of herself in lingerie on her blog, wrote a really thought-provoking post about her experiences being called a “tr*nny” online by cyber-harassers and the “unique issues mesomorphic (muscular) women deal with in the lingerie and fashion and beauty industries.” Cora also mentions that she’d love to hear a response to her piece from a transgender person or a companion piece on the same topic. So, after reading her (awesome) post, I thought, let’s republish this post and also make that response happen, and so I had my Executive Editor hit up Mey (short for Melínda), a queer trans* femme blogger who I’ve been following on tumblr. I love Mey’s writings about identity, beauty and body image, as well as the posts of her outfits, and I knew she would have a valuable perspective on the issues Cora raised in her post. Mey was on board for the assignment, obviously, and so today we have two essays for you — Cora’s original post, and Mey’s companion piece. We hope you like them both!

for more trans*scribe posts, click here

TW: Hate Speech

cora/treacle tart [photo by cheri pearl]

by Cora/Treacle Tart

Whether it’s your first time here or you’ve been a reader for years, I firmly believe that talking about lingerie doesn’t mean just talking about bras and panties. Lingerie is also an excellent lens to talk about other, important things that are happening in our world. Very often, these other conversations center around topics like body image or self esteem or beauty standards, and I very much see today’s blog post as a continuation of those discussions.

In the conversation on beauty standards within the lingerie industry, especially as related to body shape and size, there are usually only two sides represented: thinner women and thicker women. But women don’t just come in two sizes or or two shapes or two body types, and all the body celebration talk can start to feel a little exclusionary if you have a build that’s neither ectomorphic (thin) or endomorphic (thick). And as I was thinking about some of the unique issues mesomorphic (muscular) women deal with in the lingerie and fashion and beauty industries, I also began to think about some of the related (but by no means identical) issues transgender women face in the same spaces. And all this stuff has been percolating in my mind for the last few months, until I finally felt like I had to talk about it.

In the previous paragraph, I mentioned transgender women. I’m not a transgender woman. The gender I was assigned at birth and the gender people see me as is also the one I personally identify with. I’m aware that puts me in a privileged position, so I want to be clear that I’m not speaking for or on behalf of anyone. This is specifically an article about my personal experience with the word. However, I understand how difficult and delicate talking about these topics can be, and I hope this article serves as a spark for conversation within the comments section or even a guest post from someone within the transgender community. I’ve also tried to be as aware and careful as possible in the language I’m using (which does include some offensive/potentially triggering words), but if I’ve made a misstep, please do tell me. And of course it goes without saying that transphobic and/or homophobic remarks, of any kind, will not be tolerated here.

The first photo that elicited the slur. IMAGE VIA POC PHOTO

As many of you know, there are lots of photos of me online, usually in the pinup style. I have pretty stable self-esteem, so I’m not terribly bothered when people call me ugly or what have you. If I’m not your cuppa, great. But about a year ago, as TLA was starting to get a lot bigger, I noticed the beginnings of a strange new pattern. People started calling me a “tr*nny” in the comments of some my photos. Even now, as I’m typing this, my brows kind of furrow into a confused expression.

It’s not that I’m offended and appalled anyone would think I’m transgender (because, obviously, there’s nothing wrong with being transgender), it’s just that I’m a bit taken aback people would attempt to use gender identity as an insult. 1) How is being transgender a bad thing? 2) Why in the world are you still using those slurs?

But as it happened more and more (never what I’d call “frequently,” but often enough to take notice) and as The Lingerie Addict established itself as an anti-bullying environment, that whole thing got me thinking about body snark. One of the most offensive aspects of body snark is that it’s used to delegitimize women (as the popular phrase like “real women have curves” makes clear). Suddenly, instead of just being a woman, full stop, there are degrees of ‘real’ womanhood to aspire to. And if you don’t make the cut, then I suppose you’re a fake woman. Which is just weird. And silly. And wrong.

The MAC ad Samantha refers to in her piece. IMAGE VIA HARDBODY.COM

As I mentioned early on, the conversation on body snark is very often limited to just thin and thick women (the “skinny vs. curvy” thing) as though women only come in only those two body types and no more. That makes women with my kind of build (muscular/athletic), feel like the ‘odd chick out’ because it’s not only alienating, it also makes us invisible…which makes insulting us easier. And as highlighted in a Blisstree article by Samantha Escobar last year, muscular women face a very specific kind of body snarking, described in detail in the excerpt below:

We all know that our society often fat shames people they deem overweight and sometimes body shame those declared too thin, but many men and women consider very muscular women to be “gross” or “unappealing.” I find this strange, since — while I don’t remotely condone it — fat and thin shamers tend to at least cite health as a typical reason for being assholes. When it comes to insulting muscular females, this logic makes no sense; typically, those women work out frequently and eat incredibly well in order to achieve the bodies they have. Why insult them?

Well, it goes back to that “balance” thing regarding our bodies. We’re “allowed” to be strong and toned, but give us some solid definition, and bam — suddenly females are not “feminine” enough anymore. They’re constantly accused of doing steroids or being men, which is both absurd and insulting. On television, ultra-muscular women are typically cast as transgender (which is by no means a negative identity, but most muscular women were not born men; plus, television tends to insult the transgender community through most of these plot lines, as well).

Way back when…

I definitely empathize with this Catch-22. In my past, pre-Lingerie Addict life, I was an avid martial artist, runner, and weight lifter. My particular body type allows me to build a lot of muscle very easily, and that also means I appear muscular and ‘in-shape’ with very little effort. I’m asked at least twice a week about my ‘killer arm routine’ when the honest truth is…I don’t have one. And I’ve had some very awkward conversations with guys saying they couldn’t date me because I was “too strong” and they were worried I’d “beat them up,” (as an aside, needing to have a partner that’s physically weaker than you is very interesting to me…but that’s a subject for another time).

What’s even more distressing is how often these claims of being “overly masculine” or “inappropriately muscular,” are also linked to race. While prepping this article, I spoke with a couple of models I know who are black, and they revealed that the “you look like a man” remark was unusually common for them as well…at least far more common than it was for white models they knew.

It’s like people are so confused/threatened when you don’t have an ideally feminine face or body or build, that it becomes open season on questioning your gender. It’s, in effect, saying “Your body is so unattractive to me that I have decided you don’t even count as a woman anymore. You are a fake woman. You are incorrect. And you need to conform.” Rest assured, it’s body snark, taken to a very ugly extreme. But that’s not the worst part of all this. My experiences with obnoxious gender policing aside, being called a “tr*nny” has made me think even more about how marginalized actual transgender people are.

The second photo. IMAGE VIA Viva Van Story.

When someone calls me that, whether they’re attempting to be insulting or not, I’m able to say “no” and move along with my day, confident in the knowledge that the conversation is over. But I wonder…if I really was transgender and said “yes,” what would happen? And it’s not a pleasant question to think about when you consider the extreme and horrifying violence that transgender people (especially transgender women), face in our society.

If I was a transgender woman and out and publicly visible about my transgenderness, would people feel like they had the right to be awful towards to me? To insult me or harrass me or encourage violence against me? While these particular possibilities are mostly a thought experiment for me in this context, they are very real concerns for transgender people. And I can’t imagine what it must be like to constantly worry people will turn against you and want to hurt you (verbally, physically, or otherwise) over circumstances you literally have no control over.

From my perspective, someone’s gender identity is their own personal business. Whatever’s happening below the neck has nothing to do with you. And asking if someone is transgender is not the kind of thing you casually inquire about via Facebook comment. Not all women are “thin” or “curvy.” Some of us are broad, muscular, powerful, athletic types. And if you do feel the need to ask if someone is transgender or not, first ask yourself why. Why is it your business? Why do you need to know? And will it change anything you think about this person? Finally, just avoid the word “tr*nny,” altogther (along with its analogues “shemale,” or “he/she”). Gender is more than your body shape, and one’s gender identity is not a slur. So let’s move past all that.

I know I’ve talked about a LOT of stuff in this article, so it’s definitely time for some conversation. What do you think about the snark against women with muscular body types? How do you feel when someone uses the words mentioned above as an insult? And have you ever personally encountered any of the things I’m talking about here? I’m looking forward to chatting in the comments.

About the Author: Cora Harrington is a 20-something knickers junkie and Seattle resident who started The Lingerie Addict because her friends were tired of listening to her talk about her lingerie. She also loves fruit roll-ups, makeup, costume jewelry, and comic books… though not necessarily in that order. Follow her on twitter.

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Tr*nny Means Someone Who Isn’t Accepted As A Woman

mey

by Melínda

The internet seems to be very confused about whether or not “tr*nny” is a slur, and even what it really means. Pop stars and members of the queer community use it as though it’s a harmless word that belongs to them.

We have Lady Gaga saying, “I just don’t feel that it’s all that sexy. It’s weird. And uncomfortable. I look at photos of myself, and I look like such a tr*nny!”

Katy Perry added that “I mean, I can’t be a full tr*nny every day of the week. That’s an exaggerated part of my personality. It’s me hamming it up.”

Ke$ha chimed in with “Freaks are what make everything mildly more interesting in life but with tr*nnies, they make me want to be a better woman.”

Perhaps most often, it’s used by website commenters when they disagree with the way a woman presents herself. But first of all, let me clear one thing up. That word is not just an innocent shortening of the word transgender. It’s not a term of endearment. It’s not a word that queer men or cis women should use to greet their friends. It’s a slur. It’s a derogatory term used specifically against trans women to try to put us down and take away our womanhood.

Online, the place I mostly see the word tr*nny isn’t in people spewing hate and saying that trans women deserve to burn in hell or should die. I mean, sure, there is definitely some of that, but I usually see it used as a way of insulting the way women (whether they are trans or cis) look. Whether it’s our fashion choices, our makeup, our height, our weight or our skin, everything is apparently up for grabs. It’s used if you’re too tall, if you have small boobs, if you have broad shoulders, a strong jaw, big hands, a short haircut, too little makeup, too much makeup, too many colors, too many sequins. If you think she’s too masculine, she doesn’t “pass” as a woman in your book and you can use the slur. If you think she’s too feminine, she’s just “performing” womanhood and you can use the slur. Either way, women are judged on how well we fit into a narrow and ridiculous idea of what femininity should be.

As a trans woman, not many things give me a headache the way the entire concept of passing does. Passing is the idea that if a trans woman (or any person who is presenting as a woman) looks, dresses and acts a certain way, people won’t be able to tell they are anything other than a completely “normal” woman. If you look at online trans communities or forums, you’ll find tons of tips on how to pass better – everything from hair removal tips to workouts to how to walk and sit more femininely.

All of this presupposes that there is only one right way to look like and be a woman. And it’s infuriating. On the one hand, whenever I go out in public or post pictures online, a part of me is deathly afraid that I’ll be insulted or worse. I desperately want to be accepted as the woman I am. On the other hand, I hate that in order to feel safe, I’m expected to fit into the very narrow box that is labeled “woman.” Tips on how to pass always seem to say that you should avoid building muscle mass and avoid wearing clothes and makeup that are too costumey, that you should try to hide your shoulders and soften your features. Trans women are often told that if we want to pass, we have to try our hardest to be petite, soft, have just the right amount of femininity, and not stand out too much. But what if I want to be a different kind of woman? What if I want to look like Grace Jones or Kate Moennig? What if I want to look like Beth Ditto or Dolly Parton? They’re all cis women; don’t they pass?

Grace Jones, Beth Ditto, Kate Moennig, Dolly Parton

This is where the entire idea should fall apart. This is where people should realize that women can have muscles or fat or be masculine or wear outrageous makeup or wigs and still be women. But many people haven’t caught on. Instead of seeing diverse women and realizing that it’s okay to be a fat or tall or muscular or skinny or whatever-else-you-want-to-be woman, they cling to their outdated ideals and just start calling cis women “tr*nnies” if they don’t look “feminine” enough. Now, this isn’t really an insult, as being trans isn’t a bad thing. But people still try to use it as one. And for cis women, this must be strange.

In her article for The Lingerie Addict, Treacle addresses this by asking, “When someone calls me that, whether they’re attempting to be insulting or not, I’m able to say ‘no’ and move along with my day… But I wonder… if I really was transgender and said ‘yes,’ what would happen?” There are a lot of answers to this question.

In a worst case scenario, it can be deadly. A frighteningly large number of people think that it’s acceptable to beat or murder a woman because she’s trans, especially if she’s also of color. Having your transness be visible is seen as an open invitation for scorn and even violence. Since they attempted to “trick” you or “trap” you (another slur that really needs to be put to rest), and since they are a tr*nny and not a woman, it is somehow acceptable to hit them. Other times, it means that people will simply stop seeing you as a woman. They will forever see you as a tr*nny, or if you’re lucky, a “transgender.” In a best case scenario, you say “yes” and try to move on. You know that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being trans and that they aren’t telling you anything you don’t know or haven’t heard before. They’re trying to insult you, but they are failing. Because in the end they’re just showing that they are so ignorant or foolish that they think they can take a part of your identity and use it as a slur.

Even owning transness as part of your identity doesn’t mean you can forget the connotation of the word in question, though. “Tr*nny” doesn’t just mean someone who is trans, it means someone who isn’t accepted as a woman. The word turns trans women into the “other.” By taking away our womanhood, by saying, “is this a woman or a really well-put-together tr*nny?” like the commenter does in the picture that goes with The Lingerie Addict’s article, they are saying that the two are distinct and separate categories. They are saying that I can’t be both. Furthermore, if you have to specify “really well-put-together,” you are implying that most are not. They are comparing a beautiful woman to me and saying that if she were like me, that wouldn’t be a good thing and that she would be less of a woman. They are saying that there is something wrong and insulting about a fundamental part of who I am. And that hurts.

These slurs are far from the only problem trans women face when it comes to being judged by online commenters, though. There’s another type of body snark, one that at first seems a lot less harmful. It happens when trans women post pictures of themselves and get comments from people saying things like “I never would have guessed you were trans!” or “You pass so well!” or worst of all “You don’t look trans at all!” These people are trying to compliment us, but really they’re saying that “looking trans” is a bad thing. They’re saying that looking like this thing that I am is something I should strive to avoid. They’re saying that there is one way to look trans, and that it’s undesirable. But I know trans women who range from 5’3″ to 6’6″, from a size zero to a size 28. I know trans women who are as femme as all get out and I know trans women who are as butch as they come. There is no one look that describes trans women. Just because a trans woman has less muscle or more hair or narrow shoulders or wide hips, that doesn’t make her any more of a woman. All trans women are women. Each is as real as the next.

When someone online calls you ugly or says that you have terrible taste, that’s subjective. You can try and brush it off as just their foolish, and wrong, opinion. But when someone calls you a tr*nny, and you are trans, in a way, they’re right. You are transgender. And they are using that part of your identity, that thing that is a part of you that you have no control over, in an attempt to drag you down. They are trying to say that your womanhood isn’t as valid as someone else’s. They’re wrong, but it still hurts. Even when they use the word to try and insult or criticize cis women it still hurts. A part of who you are is used as a word to delegitimize women. They might not be attacking you directly, but it certainly is a microaggression. It seeps all throughout internet culture and casually tries to reinforce the idea that trans women are not “real women” and that women who don’t fit strictly conventional beauty standards are not doing womanhood correctly. It hurts all women and especially hurts women who are already oppressed. It works to try to force all of us into narrow definitions of womanhood and femininity and it needs to stop.

About the author: Mey (short for Melínda) is a 26 year old queer trans Latina who lives in Idaho with her cat Sawyer.  She loves scifi, fantasy, horror and comic books.  Her hobbies include reading books and watching movies, going to concerts and being a comedy nerd.  She’s afraid of heights, airplanes and whales.

“When Body Snark Becomes Even Uglier…” was originally published on thelingerieaddict.com. Republished WITH PERMISSION MOTHERF*CKERS.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Getting With Girls Like Us: A Radical Guide to Dating Trans* Women for Cis Women

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trans*scribe illustration © rosa middleton, 2013

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Recently, I went on a dinner date with a cis woman that ended a bit awkwardly. Some of the conversation we shared was nice, we talked about film (fyi – an easy topic to hold my interest, ladies!), our common roots back in the States, and her background in performance art. At one point she shared with me her frustrations over a performance meant to showcase artists from our region in the U.S. The thing is, whoever put together this particular exhibition had invited a number of men from her theatre program to participate — meanwhile she and several of the other women who graduated from the program found out about the event later when one of the guys posted it on facebook.

It’s pretty easy to feel anger over such blatant sexism, and it immediately reminded me of some of my own experiences of feeling ignored at times in my own workplace. But then she said something that struck a really odd chord:

“Yeah, it’s supposed to represent artists from the South, but it turns out it’s just a total sausage fest.”

Okay, we all get the basic intended meaning here. But is she really implying that the men who were invited to exhibit their work were asked to do so on the basis of their genitalia? As a woman I have to say that having a penis never got me special treatment in the academic world. And given that she was aware of my body configuration I have to think that is a strange comment to make to me on a date.

Sadly, the situation only further deteriorated with the appearance of the word “ladyboy,” and the fact that somehow the subject kept getting changed when I tried to discuss these things. After the point that she referred to me as a “trans woman” as opposed to a “woman woman,” I found it difficult to bring myself to even say much for the last few minutes of our little disaster date.

Okay ladies, let’s stop right here and get our game together. One point is that this isn’t just a matter of grossing out a trans woman over dinner; it’s also a matter of a cis woman making herself look like kind of an ass. And beyond that, this kind of ignorant cissexism just gets in the way of us getting closer and having fun together.

Now, if your response is to start worrying over having to figure out all this ‘complicated trans stuff,’ then I would emphasize a lot of this boils down to respecting us as women just as much as you would want to be respected yourself. And the fact is that trans women are a component of queer women’s communities, so a lack of respect amongst us just means more devaluing of women, when society dishes out plenty of that for all of us already.

Not to mention that this results in some probably well-intentioned cis women missing out on connecting with lots of beautiful, amazing trans women. So with that in mind, I have put together some suggestions for cis women on thinking through some basic trans issues, including ideas on approaching trans women in a romantic or intimate context. And I want to be clear that working through this stuff applies the same in the context of a casual hookup as it does a romantic date.

I also want to be clear that the following represents only my own perspectives; I don’t speak for all trans women. Most importantly, whether you agree with every single point or not, the main thing is if you just think through some of these issues a bit you’ll probably be in a better place to come off as a well-intentioned friend rather than a jerk who doesn’t know any better. And you’ll be in a better place to have more fun.

Community Inclusion

In the last few years this situation has improved in some respects at least in some parts of the U.S. and Canada. But the fact is that there are still parties held in some places in which admittance is “women OR trans” only, meaning in this case that one should be either woman or trans, but not both. But even at parties, clubs or women’s spaces where we are included, many trans women have at times expressed feeling more tolerated than accepted.

As a further point, our inclusion in much of queer women’s culture is still nominal at best. As a nearby example, I’ve gotten some laughs out of some of the serial lesbian content on the sidebar here at Autostraddle, but I’m still waiting for a woman like me to show up on screen and join in the fun. Also, it’s rather cliché at this point that mainstream lesbian-oriented content tends to show more interest in trans men’s stories (who are, after all, not women) than ours (The L Word being the most obvious example).

Look, I get that it takes some time to work some of these things out, but part of my point is just that making it clear you believe trans women should be included is a good step towards developing meaningful friendship with us. On the contrary, referring to a bunch of dudes as a “sausage fest” might not be such a cool/sexy/romantic thing to do (regardless of anyone’s actual genital status… after all, some men have a vagina).

Recognize Our Perspectives

I realize there are a wide variety of trans narratives out there, and maybe it could seem like a lot to work through. But the basic script isn’t that difficult: respect our identities and our bodily autonomy, and when you’re not sure, find a gentle way to ask that doesn’t put anybody on the spot. (And if it’s just not your business to know something in the first place, then don’t ask.)

Another good idea is to understand that many trans people (including a number of trans-feminists) have come up with language to describe the cissexist world they see around them, and to challenge society to do better. Please respect our way of describing the world.

Sadly, a small group of aggressive anti-trans activists have gone far out of their way to introduce a lot of confusion about words like “cis,” claiming that it has some type of anti-woman meaning. This is completely false (and it makes no sense considering the word describes cis men just as it does cis women).

The word “cis” means “not trans” and it has no other meaning in this context. The point of using the word is to acknowledge that trans identities are equally valid and that cis privilege exists in our world and should be challenged.

It also conveniently provides you with the opportunity to refer to a “cis woman” instead of a “woman woman” and avoid wrecking our hang out session.

Please adopt this language, even when trans people are not around.

Cut Out Trans-misogynistic Language

This should go without saying, but referring to trans women as “trannies” or “shemales” is not only ignorant, it’s adopting language that is associated with social stigmatization and even violence against trans women. And having one of those words appear in the middle of our dinner-date is, um, anti-climatic in just about every sense of the word.

And from a trans-feminist perspective, I would emphasize that what underlies trans-misogyny is nothing more than misogyny itself. Remember ladies; you can’t buy into hateful language specifically directed against trans women without chipping in on hatred against women in general.

Dating Us On The Side

There are lots of wonderful, workable approaches to relationships out there, and different things work for different people. One of the awesome things about the queer women’s communities is that I think we tend to be much more open about possibilities for intimate relationships. Some women are poly, some are looking for an exclusive partnership, and there’s everything in between. Personally, I don’t even know if I have a strong preference; I think I’m more open to just working out the dynamics between individuals when the time comes.

I happen to have had a couple of awesome relationships with cis women who were already in long-term, (explicitly) non-monogamous relationships. That said, I can’t help but notice there seems to be a pattern in which I am invited to be someone’s “thing on the side.” While I can’t know for a fact if this is because I’m trans, I have heard other trans women relate similar things. In principle, I have no problem entering into such relationships with someone I trust and with whom I feel genuinely close. I’m just saying I know I’m not the only trans woman who feels a bit frustrated when this kind of thing seems to be on constant replay.

Fetishizing Trans Women

Again I’d like to think this goes without saying, but sadly I see it happen plenty. Look, I get that drawing the boundary between healthy, affectionate sexual curiosity and fetishization might not always be an exact science (and it might be a little different with different women). Personally I think I’m pretty relaxed and I can work with you as long as it doesn’t all reduce down to one thing (*cough*). However, if you’re on a date with a trans woman and your thoughts about her body are constantly distracting you from the conversation, just stop yourself and think: what if I was interacting with a guy and he kept having these kinds of thoughts about my body instead of listening to what I was saying? Would I feel comfortable around him?

Don’t reduce us to our genitals

(1)
Obviously this follows pretty strongly from the don’t-fetishize-us thing. A big part of this is what should be a pretty obvious hard rule: don’t put us on the spot with questions about our genitals.

Personally, I happen to be pretty open about this stuff (you might even notice a subtle dick joke appears in the previous sentence), but even if you know something about my body from reading one of my articles, that doesn’t make it cool to randomly bring my junk into the conversation if you meet me in real life.

Just the same, if you meet a trans woman who is a sex worker or if you’ve seen pornography in which a trans woman appears, that doesn’t give you some special right to ask her questions about her body anymore than it would if you met a cis woman who was involved in sex work.

(2)
Then there is the other side of the coin: some cis women might have an issue or feel uncertain about hooking up with a woman who has different genitalia than her own. First of all, you should never feel pressured to do anything you don’t want to do or that you’re even unsure about. If you aren’t comfortable or you just aren’t into it, say no.

That having been said, if genitalia is the one and only reason for not being into someone, I do think it is worth thinking through that. The result of your thinking could very well be “no, that’s not for me,” and that’s fine! We definitely don’t want to be with anybody who doesn’t want to be with us. But responding to one of the claims that some have made, I would emphatically state that nobody’s physical body is a representation of patriarchy. Such a statement is not only somewhat cruel to inflict on someone who herself is oppressed by patriarchy, it is also pretty defeatist from a feminist perspective (if we were really to buy into the idea that penises are the source of patriarchy, rather than socially constructed male privilege, aren’t we pretty much saying that patriarchy is a permanent fixture of human society? Eek).

Talk With Us

Beyond all these more detailed considerations, another key point is simply communication. Of course there are a myriad of situations that could arise that I’ve never even thought of, but if two people really care about developing a positive friendship or intimate relationship (whether for one evening or a committed partnership) then they will be willing to sit down together and talk through these things.

I have written previously about some of the alienation I have experienced as a trans woman dating in the queer women’s community. Now, I want to emphasize here again that no one is obligated to touch a woman’s penis if they aren’t into that. However it’s also important to emphasize:

1) Not every trans woman has a penis.
2) No general means exist to distinguish trans women from cis women.

The implications of these two points together are that statements such as “I am attracted to cis women but not trans women” simply do not make sense and are rooted in social prejudice.

(As a side comment, before moving on let me briefly address something that appears in the previous piece that I linked above. My article from about a year ago contains a reference to the concept of the so-called “cotton ceiling,” which deserves a brief comment here. While several trans woman-hating “radical feminists” have intentionally misconstrued this concept in rather bizarre ways, there are also a few trans people who have made statements in relation to this idea that I think are problematic. Hence, after having some time to reflect on the previous debates about this I have come to the conclusion that the “cotton ceiling” should be considered an unhelpful concept for this type of discussion and should be set aside by trans activists moving forward.)

Hooking Up

Awesome! Glad we made it this far. I would say, “now comes the fun part,” but actually the whole process of getting to know one another should be fun. And the fact is that respecting your potential partner and vice versa is really sexy, and it’s actually not that hard… err, difficult, to do.

At this point, again, the key is communication. There are trans women who like being touched in certain places or in certain ways, but not in others, just as a similar statement applies for many cis women. Those boundaries must be respected throughout by everyone involved. The key is to keep the channels of communication open throughout, and to rely on active consent as the model for sexual intimacy at every moment.

Underlining all of this of course is the opportunity for new experiences of friendship, solidarity and more.

About the author: Savannah is a queer trans woman and physicist originally from the great state of Carolina (that alone should tell you which one).  She also writes on trans feminism and other social justice issues on her blog leftytgirl, preferably while listening to metal.  Savannah presently lives in Tokyo where her principle hobbies include singing at karaoke clubs and getting lost on the subway.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Leaving It on the Court: When My World Changed, Sports Stayed

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trans*scribe illustration © rosa middleton, 2013

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“Hey guys, I think this was my last game. I just don’t think I can keep up with the commitment anymore. There is so much going on for me right now with the baby and everything.” That is what I told them as we left the court at the end of our brief playoff run. New parent equals stress and sleepiness and crazy schedules. Some of them had been there before and could sympathize. They got it. Well, kind of. I never shared with the team the real reason I was leaving; that I newly identified as trans* and was struggling to balance my role in this men’s community basketball league with navigating my gender transition. All of the daily determination, energy and focus on my transition didn’t seem relevant in this highly gendered space. My teammates didn’t know that I was ending my run in this men’s league because I had to leave my male identity on the court. I was trying to push forward as a trans* woman and this was holding me back.

My parents enrolled me in sports programs at an early age. Mine was a childhood filled with weekend soccer games and after school basketball practices. Season after season, I followed a similar pattern: lace up the cleats or sneakers, eat oranges at halftime and mostly have fun. Sometimes, I wonder about what my path would have been had my parents encouraged participation in the creative activities I value as an adult. Then, I watch my toddler spend his days throwing, kicking and chasing various balls around the house and think, perhaps my parents just did what seemed right at the time. I was a good athlete, after all.

But looking back, maybe I allowed myself to hide in athletics. Maybe the constant practices and games prevented me from having a better understanding of myself. Maybe the physical activity helped to repress my feelings of difference and distract my mind from the questions I had about my identity. It’s a tidy narrative to explain why I didn’t begin to identify as trans* until adulthood, but I’m not sure it’s that simple. Perhaps that is how it went down for me, but the truth is, I don’t know and I’m okay with that. I have no interest in a lifetime consumed with analyzing my past. What I am committed to doing is moving in a positive direction. Whether I like it or not, sports are part of my story.

I now have a more nuanced understanding of sports and know that they’re more complex than simply competition and athleticism. The culture maintains a rigid allegiance to the gender binary. Gender transition, or any type gender nonconformity, throws a wrench into the works. The controversy surrounding MMA fighter Fallon Fox’s recent disclosure of her transgender background is a prime example. Fallon and other trans athletes such as Kye Allums, Keelin Godsey, Johnny Saelua and Gabbi Ludwig have started to challenge those norms and break down preconceived notions. What all of these athletes have in common is that they just want to compete as they are. And when it comes down to it, that’s what I want as well.

I am a good basketball player. Short, yet quick and solid at defense. I have a nice jump shot and often know just where to make the right pass. I was a nice fit at point guard for this group of guys. Still, regardless of how well things went on the court, the awkwardness of the post-game was undeniable. Small talk was difficult with the other players and I avoided the locker room at all costs. For months prior to leaving, my teammates noticed my body changes. I hadn’t yet started female hormone therapy, though I was physically very different than when I began playing two years earlier. I presented differently. I no longer used the same name. I was increasingly open about my trans* identity with friends, family and coworkers, however I wasn’t ready to be open with my gender identity on the court. I reached a point where it was no longer enjoyable or comfortable to keep playing in this environment, so I drafted my exit story. That was a year and a half ago and I haven’t been back.

When I first began to embrace myself as trans*, my world turned upside down. I felt unprepared. My sense of self and priorities were shifting. I had a new lens through which to view the world. I experimented. Things became awkward. I adjusted. I acted like I thought trans* people were supposed to act. I sought to be non-binary while simultaneously just wanting to fit in. It was an unsettling yet exciting time of self-discovery. As my transition continued, I realized my happiness included accepting the self that had always been there. Instead of rejecting my masculine biography, I welcomed it. I recognized this aspect of my history was integral to my development, then and now. I was breaking free as a woman, yet learning to love my past. It was at this intersection where I was most joyful and at peace.

These days, I’m not participating in any organized team sports. Raising my beautiful, adventurous toddler with my wife is the closest I come. I work out a couple times a week and maintain a regular yoga practice. Yoga has enabled me to connect holistically to my body and keeps my stress level down significantly. During my transition, focusing to keep my mental and physical energy up has been crucial. I feel great after a productive session at the gym. I feel happy about strength training to develop my hips and butt. I feel in charge and motivated as I work on my core.

Still, I have been itching to get back on the basketball court recently. The other day, I played with my little guy and shot some hoops for the first time since that last game. The rapid succession of air balls highlighted the practice looming ahead of me if I plan to play again. The musculature of my upper body is vastly different, a result of the feminization process initiated by estrogen. I grasp that I won’t be able to play exactly like I used to, though that is okay. I will find a new strategy. I have a reminder on my calendar to sign up for a local queer women’s league in the fall. I think this will be a more comfortable environment for me to get back into playing. Playing for the first time in a women’s league might trigger a whole new set of anxieties; however, I am a much stronger and confident person these days. I love the uniqueness and complexity of my gender and know that I will be ready to play ball when the time comes.

About the author: Robyn lives in New England with her love Gina Marie and their beautiful, ball-throwing toddler. She is interested in exploring a range of issues, like gender, cooking, parenting and the politics of sports. In theory, she rides her bike all of the time. You can find her on twitter (@1brobyn).

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

Wigging Out: How I Found Beauty in Baldness

trans*scribe illustration © rosa middleton, 2013

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Hi. My name is Nika and I’m a wig addict. It’s been four months since my last confection.

Waaaaaaaay back in high school an undisclosed number of years ago (let’s just say that it’s more than seventeen), I had long strawberry blonde hair. It was never thick or all that luxurious, but it sure looked pretty. It was my one ‘socially acceptable’ expression of femininity that was still in line with the masculine image I tried to present. It was my grunge period: Cobain locks, flannel shirts over band tees, stompy boots and jeans that were held together with elastic straps and hope.

There were still homophobes who called me ‘fag’ and other slurs despite the fact that I dated only girls. It didn’t hurt so much as bewilder me. Still, I was glad that they didn’t guess my shameful secret that I had mostly repressed (surprise! I’m transgender). They didn’t know I was a girl. I was safe.

A few years later, I dreaded cleaning out the shower drain. Hair… and more hair. Sure, drain clogs suck, but… HAIR! My hair! I hated brushing it, always wondering if there was more hair on my head or on my brush. Hair, why you no stay on head? Stay! Bad dog! I took to wearing bandannas and keeping what was left of my hair up in a ponytail. Yeah, I was becoming that ‘guy.’ You know, the one with the long, lovely priestly tonsure. It drastically lowered the choices when deciding who to go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show as.

After about a year of this (I may have masochistic tendencies), I looked in the mirror as I was about to tie on my bandanna and thought, “Enough.” Scissors? Check. Razors? Check. Shaving cream? Nope… Never mind, let’s do this thing! That was the first time I shaved my head and I wept. If by now you think I may have been attached to my hair instead of the other way around, you’re on the right track.

Fast forward through a dozen years of deep depression, self-imposed isolation and several hats and other head coverings. It wasn’t all about the hair. I’m not quite that vain. Being bombarded during this time by images of beautiful women with long hair while having male pattern baldness certainly made it easier to repress being transgender. At work about four or five years ago, still presenting as male, I took my hat off and one of my coworkers burst out laughing. She hadn’t known that I was bald on top. Ouch!

In an effort to accept the baldness, I took to taking my hat off now and then and gauging people’s reactions. There’s that masochism of mine stopping by to say hello again. Eventually, I got used to it. A pair of bears slaughtering 42 of my coworkers wasn’t at all necessary, thankfully. That’s unsanitary!

Having worked through a lot of things in the swamp gas between my ears, I finally came out in public on July 19, 2012, as a woman… wearing a wig:

Shortly after, I was sporting a longer wig that suited me much better:

I was a card-carrying member of the gender binary and the western ideals of feminine beauty. Sure, I didn’t dress like anyone else in town, but if you replaced the fun clothes with a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, I would have looked like most other girls in town. I wore a wig every day. It didn’t matter if I was heading to work, going to a bar or even going for a bike ride; I wouldn’t step outside my door without a wig on my head. I posted pictures on Facebook, Google+ and other social media sites while wearing these wigs. People loved the photos. I was pretty! People even complimented me in person. I was accepted!

I grew so dependent on wigs and the acceptance that I received while wearing them that I wouldn’t even answer the door without putting one on. It was an idealized and overly feminized caricature of me that I would put on for acceptance. It wasn’t really me. I was becoming a Monster High doll without the undeath or lycanthropy. A punk Barbie. After a few months of this, I had another ‘enough’ moment when I reached for a wig when my phone rang. Sad, innit?

I abandoned my wigs almost entirely. I did wear one as part of a Halloween costume, but that’s a costume! No, I’m not rationalizing. It wasn’t a relapse. Now, I shave my head every few days and I’m loving it. It’s much more Sinead O’Connor than Dr. Evil and much, much more comfortable to live in.

I found my own beauty in baldness. I like me a lot more now. I’m expressing beauty much more consistently with my own internal image of myself. The hard part is remaining true to yourself. Pinnochina has gone from being a plastic doll to being a real girl. Wigging over and out!

About the author: Nika is a 35 year old trans*feminine androgyne or trans*androgynous woman depending on which way the wind is blowing and how many angels are currently dancing on the head of a pin. She’s a punk omni equalist and polyamorous. Currently, she’s in the process of relocating to the Philadelphia area.

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.