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It’s time for another edition of SE(N)O, an essay series on A+ for personal stories we wish we could tell on the accessible-to-our-employers-and-everyone-we’ve-ever-known mainsite, but can’t for personal and professional reasons.
When Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince came out, my friends and were right in the middle of Harry Potter fever. We were wearing Harry Potter shirts and ties, had just sat through a marathon of all the previous Harry Potter movies, and were excited to see the latest installment. The movies were really heating up, and the characters were full on teenagers, acting their most emo and ridiculous. I was there with my brother and some of our guy friends, including the Youth Pastor at my church, a married man of 25.
As we walked out of the theater after the closing credits, we looked around the lobby still buzzing with excitement from the film, and we saw the giant posters of the characters hung from the ceiling. They were ten feet tall and amazing, right above a large cardboard cutout of Hogwarts itself. The whole lobby looked like it was a magical part of the Wizarding World. All that magic was sucked right out of the room when my Youth Pastor friend pointed to the Hermione poster.
In the movie, Hermione was 16 or 17, but when it came out, the actress who plays her, Emma Watson, was 19. It was her first film in the series where she was over 18. Well, technically she was 17 for most of the filming, but that didn’t matter to the men who could now lust after he legally. The Youth Pastor pointed at her poster, smiled smugly at us and said “I’m glad she’s finally legal. Now I can say out loud how hot she’s gotten in these last few movies.” No, it wasn’t a smug smile, it was a hungry smile, a predatory smile. It was a predatory smile that he flashed at us, the rest of his pack, expecting us to become predators with him and start howling along.
This came from a man who’s job was to take care of teenagers, including teenage girls, the same age as Emma Watson in the film. We had all been talking and laughing before that, but when he said that I shut up and didn’t talk for the rest of the night. That movie was ruined for me for years and I never felt safe around him again. This was far from the only time something like that happened to me when I was hanging out with men who thought I was one of them.
Before I came out, I was depressed, dysphoric and I hated a lot about myself, but easily one of the worst about being a closeted trans woman was having to put up with all the things that the men around me would say about women when they thought that no women were around. Not only were these things disgusting, misogynistic, slut-shaming and oftentimes frightening, but as someone who was seen as a guy but thought of herself as Definitely Not A Guy, it makes me feel like absolute garbage.
While I wasn’t confident enough to call myself a trans woman, even in my own head, until after college, I definitely knew that I was not one of the guys from an early age, and as I got older I definitely started identifying more and more closely with womanhood. This already made it difficult for me to make male friends, and then when I finally did make them, I found myself unable to contribute to their conversations. The way they talked about all sorts of things, but especially girls and women, seemed like a foreign tongue to me, and an ugly one at that. But even more than that, since I saw myself as more of a girl than a boy, I started to internalize all of the horrible things they would say and it made me want to be anything other than trans. If I was a woman, what kind of terrifying things would men say about me?
As soon as women aren’t around, or at least as soon as men think that women aren’t around, they often turn into a hivemind of cisnormative, heteronormative, patriarchal bullshit. They love outdoing each other, and so when one of them starts spewing some good ol’ fashioned misogyny, others will jump in, trying to be even more disgusting than the last. When I was hanging out at friends’ houses, or at Boy Scout meetings, or in the boy’s bathroom, I’d withdraw into myself to avoid having to think about the way everyone else in the conversation was talking about women.
It’s not just how they would talk about women, though, it’s how they saw them. A lot of men I’ve known have had a lot of trouble being close friends with women they aren’t dating. There might be girls or women in their friend group, but they’d never hang out with them one-on-one, unless that girl was pretending to be a boy, like I was. On the off chance that they would hang out with a girl, there was always the expectation (or at least the hope) that something more than “just” hanging out was going to happen. It’s like they were physically unable of seeing women as something other than sexual objects they want to conquer.
Going to the bathroom in high school was a complete nightmare for me. In one particular bathroom in my school, one that was in the basement away from the eyes of teachers, high school boys would masturbate onto the walls of the bathroom stalls and even into the soap dispensers. This is where boys went to be boys.
I would get sick to my stomach every time my friends led me into this bathroom, but not because of the disgusting walls and shady soap, it was because of the conversations that I knew we would start. I’d pretend I wasn’t listening while my friends would talk about which girls they wanted to fuck and how they wanted to do it. They had a game where they’d look up sex acts on urban dictionary and then say which girl they wanted to do that particular move on, or rather to. I already was called gay by the people who didn’t like me, so around my friends, I’d pretend to laugh and then completely hate myself for it a minute later.
When they aren’t talking about who they’d like to have sex with, men love to talk about the actual women they’ve already kissed, had sex with and dated. By “talk about” I really mean spread rumors about, go into graphic (and often completely made up) detail and brag about how slutty they were. All throughout high school and college I had to listen to stories about how this girl — who was in our friend group, she was our friend — was willing to give a hand job if you said she was pretty, or that girl — another person the guys called a friend — would give you a blow job if you said she didn’t look fat. And how pathetic these girls were for being so desperate to touch these guys dicks.
It gets even weirder though, because they don’t just tell these stories to brag about how much action they’re getting, they serve the double purpose of also being a way that they can backdoor insult all the women they know. If you can make yourself sound cool and make that girl in your fifth period sound like a slut, you’re having an extra great day. If you can make her sound like a slut who’s also a mess, that’s even better. The only thing a man likes to tell other men more than the name of a girl who gave him a blowjob is the name of a girl who gave him a sloppy blowjob.
Since I was usually much closer with the girls they were talking about than the actual guys doing all the talking, I had to sit there knowing that their stories were complete bullshit while the half dozen guys in the room hooted and hollered and offered up their own exaggerated or completely bullshit stories. On the rare occasions that I told them to not talk about our friends that way, they’d get mad and start making fun of me too. I still get furious about the way my guy friends would talk about the girls that were my best friends. It’s disgusting, it’s infuriating and I hated it, but I was also afraid to do anything about it. Instead I just filled myself up with self-hate, shame and the desire to disappear.
Even the “good Christian boys” that I knew would tell these kinds of jokes and stories, so the way I saw myself, I wasn’t even good enough at being a boy to be a total square. Why was I so bad at being a boy? Why didn’t I see girls the way all my friends did? Why didn’t I even want to? Still though, being a failure of a boy was safer than being a girl. At least then I didn’t have to worry about being called anything worse than a sissy and a queer. And I had dealt with that since elementary school. I was used to being called a pussy, but I was terrified of being seen as a disembodied one. I withdrew into myself in high school, and it was largely because I didn’t know how to participate in this part of guy culture. I wasn’t like them and so I tried to not be like anyone, not even like myself.
Things got even worse when I got into college. At least before I was only dealing with high school boys talking about high school girls. Now I had to deal with something new. Waiting for girls to turn 18 is a favorite hobby among adult men. When a girl finally does, men are immediately completely open about how hot they think they are. The example with Harry Potter is just one of the many instances from my memory. This is a regular thing, men telling other men that they get excited whenever a girl turns 18. It means that that girl is fair game, that she’s fresh meat. It’s not only said by men who you’d think of as pedophiles, it’s widespread, and not only that, but they’re completely open about how they’ve been turned on by the underage girls for years, and it’s just now they’re relieved that they can finally say it “without sounding like a perv.” The Youth Pastor at my church wasn’t the only man there who would talk to me about this kind of thing, a lot of them did. This was the kind of men my church lifted up and held as an example to all the other men. These were Good Christian Men who liked to talk about Sexy 18-Year-Old Girls.
My church taught me some of the worst lessons about how men were supposed to treat women, and this was done in the pretense of raising good, Godly men. According to a lot Straight White Men, modern society is getting way too feminized, women are getting way too much influence, and they must be stopped. It’s like they’re scared that women actually be better than them at something or that they might have a woman telling them what to do. They can’t handle that thought, even on a person-to-person basis. A lot of people are surprised at the disgusting way Donald Trump is talking about women this election season, but he would’ve honestly fit right in with a lot of the Men’s Groups at my old church. It’s terrifying.
I can’t even tell you how many men I’ve known who’ve quit jobs or stopped volunteering at the church because they were tired of having a woman for their boss, or even just put off by the general idea. They would publically give some other reason — he was overextending himself, he needed to put school first, it just wasn’t a good fit — but in private he would tell us it was because he just straight up didn’t like being told what to do by a woman.
For a lot of men, women are seen as inherently weak, and so if one of them is in charge of you, you must be weak, which as a man, is the worst thing you can be. Other than feminine, of course. When you’re a woman and your guy friends are telling you about how they quit their job because a female coworker got promoted to their manager, and he’s expected you to be on his side, it’s so fucking frustrating. I felt confused, I felt angry, I felt sad. I was still trying to be a guy, so I was trying to agree, but agreeing meant that I was insulting myself. I was caught between hating myself for trying to convince myself I was someone I wasn’t and hating myself because I actually knew who I was.
When I was still in the thick of trying to be myself, I would go to monthly Men’s Breakfasts at my church. One topic that would be brought up again and again at every breakfast was how the men of the congregation could take back the church from the women. Seriously. They talked about “big” issues, like how there were more women on the staff than men (but of course the three top ranking staff members were all men), that more women volunteered to help with church activities than men and that more women were regular church attenders. I had to shove biscuits and gravy into my mouth to stop from laughing. At least a couple of the men knew how to cook.
Other things we talked about were even more ridiculous. One piece of evidence that the women were taking over the church, and our lives, was that in one of the gender neutral bathrooms in the church, there was a small painting of a rabbit sitting among some flowers. When the man leading the discussion asked how the church could become more man-friendly, how we could get more men to regularly attend on Sundays, a whole group of men suggested painting over that rabbit. They refused to use that bathroom because on the inside they thought it looked too much like a women’s bathroom. This was the nicest bathroom in the church, and after that issue was brought up, I started liking it even more.
That level of immaturity and aversion to all things feminine was par for the course with most of the men I would hang out with. They didn’t expect any of their bros to call them out if they made a women-belong-in-the-kitchen joke, when they bragged about their latest conquest or when they’d make crude comments about their favorite starlet. I can still remember the look on my friends’ faces when I was brave enough to tell them that they were being gross. They expected that kind of thing from a girl, but this was guy time, and I was breaking the Bro Code.
Sometimes they would just turn the jokes and insults on me, but sometimes they’d get mad, like, really mad. Men are taught to violently reject femininity in their lives. They’re taught to mock it and belittle it, and in a way, be afraid of it. When the men I knew saw femininity in people they viewed as women, they tried to control, dominate and deride it. When they saw it in me, someone they viewed as one of the guys, it was to be mocked and forced out of me.
For a long, long time I hated how much my femininity would show through. I never really was good at being one of the guys, but I tried for so long that still to this day I’m afraid I’m acting like one. Whenever I tell a girl I like her, whenever I just compliment a girl on her hair or smile, whenever I take the lead in anything, I feel guilty about it and I hate myself for it. I don’t want to be like all those guys who tried to make me one of them. Being a trans woman makes me afraid to take up space, to raise my voice and to even have a sexuality, because I associate all of those things with the overly aggressive and often predatory and violent versions of those things that men taught me I should have if I wanted to be like them. I have an especially hard time being around men, who remind me of how much they wanted me to hate the person I was inside.
Just recently I was hanging out with my only straight cis guy friend, and he started to tell a story about one of my best friends — a woman we’ve both been friends with for years — one that he used to gleefully tell me before I came out. I’m not even going to talk about it, but it was a story about how much of a “slut” she was in high school. Back then, I let him finish the story and didn’t laugh when he expected me to, and just change the subject. This time I interrupted and didn’t even let him get started. “I don’t want you to ever tell story again. I’m serious. Not ever again,” I told him as I turned our fun-filled night serious for the moment. I don’t think he had fully realized that I wasn’t “one of the guys” anymore, and that he couldn’t talk about other women like that around me.
Of course, #NotAllMen act or talk or think this way, just more than enough of them do.
