Acceptably different

  • Posted on August 4, 2012 at 7:28 pm

It’s a conversation that will never end: if society has one standard and we don’t fit, and the standard doesn’t look like changing any time soon, what should we do? The choice is varied and individual, but the opinions collide when they are too strong. Those of us with a conviction that something was horribly wrong with our bodies almost from birth, have no need of a description other than of their innately-felt gender. Only one thing matters: correction. Being trans* is transitory. It ends. At the other end of the spectrum, those who appreciate and enjoy fluidity love to occupy and even celebrate being of mixed or ambiguous gender (or none).

And everything in between. For many the saying applies that transition never ends. It does mean that our relationships with cisgender or gender-binary social attitudes can be very different. Yet the one thing that probably occupies all of us along this spectrum, is the need to live within society with freedom of expression and acceptance as we are.

Ay, there’s the rub (as Hamlet said, thinking about uncertain dreams).

When celebrants of overt diversity are taken as icons of transness, those who wish to disappear into their singular (binary) gender identity (called going stealth) can find it hard. Whilst one will dance in a club and shout ‘I’m a tranny!’, reclaiming abuse as empowerment, the other lives in fear of some slight giveaway in their otherwise complete physical transition ‘outing’ them. I am more on the border, lucky enough to blend like camouflage except under closer inspection, happy enough to explain my position, and just seeking acceptance as always a bit different.

For me, cisgenderism (ie, insistence on the binary) is simply not good enough. The sheer numbers of us who do not fit, whatever our response, are overwhelming. A proportion of us are transsexual, meaning we have a sense of the binary and a definite preference that we feel we must attain, but that doesn’t mean we don’t recognise others are most definitely non-binary. I have no idea how many trans* people of all kinds I am nominally connected to thanks to the Internet, but it must run into many thousands around the world, even if we only count friends of friends, and there is a huge diversity.

Male and Female are as meaningless as the bodily humours in mediaeval medicine. They once sort of helped describe most animals at a very broad level, but I suppose it was also long before gender-changing creatures were discovered to be so. Nonetheless, cultures developed around the world that understood and held in esteem, those who were neither male nor female in some sense. And I cannot say this loud enough, in our culture that has forgotten this: the gender binary concept is false.

For me, though, it is still firmly in place. I have to accept that for the majority of people I am different. Two things have been on my mind in the past days and weeks: who notices and who cares? Whenever we see something that stands out a bit, we want to know why, so we can get it back into order in our minds. Today I was walking in busy streets and just felt noticed a bit more than usual. I don’t think the lack of mascara was the only reason, and maybe it really was only me, but when a couple walking by simultaneously look at you and hold their gaze a tad too long, you sort of know they spotted something not quite right. Does it bother me? No, not a lot, I just wish it never happened.

The other situation was potentially a lot more tricky. A new job. Suddenly I am under close scrutiny by the same people from 9 to 5 every day. And no, the voice does not hold up too well. I don’t think husky meant sexy! As it happens I have been incredibly well received. I know they know, of course. They know I know that too, etc. And I feel … well, normal. I am just me, and all my old skills, experience and knowledge are being used again, and I am just working. I know that some questions have been asked, and they have been formally answered, and I have had no sideways glances in my presence. It is lovely just to get on and do what I do, officially female, discernibly transsexual, but at work and earning my keep, hoping I don’t get asked about family things like marital status.

I got called ‘he’ twice this week. And I haven’t even worn trousers once. I put it down to fitting in with the blokes because my experience lies in understanding technology like they do, thinking about it like they do, explaining it as they do. Who else would discuss these things that way? ‘He’ does. Maybe she is not a proper woman after all. But accepted nonetheless.

As time goes on, I will recognise that they know I know they know about me, and I will freely correct them without feeling I am outing myself and needing to explain in more detail. But I shouldn’t have to. Being trans should already be so normal, because the gender binary is so patently incorrect, that it is OK to be unequivocally trans with whatever identity I choose to live with.

And so I accept my being different, I call it normal, and I recognise that some people do not get it. And this is why I feel so let down by the UK’s wonderful NHS. By the time I am prescribed hormones I shall be well on the way to being able to apply for my gender recognition certificate (GRC) simply by virtue of having got on and lived as a woman for long enough. Thank goodness for the Internet! These protracted periods of being unsupported, delayed, forced to live with a physiology that feels all wrong, may be called ‘real life experience’ by clinicians, but believe me, once you have committed yourself in society as ‘acceptably different’ you will know if there are any doubts, and every day you are forced not to progress is not ‘real’ at all, it is damaging. If you can’t get the hormones, if you can’t afford laser or electrolysis treatment, you can be unacceptably different for much too long.

It isn’t all grouse though. I want to thank the lovely people at work who have included me, by complimenting me on my dress, or my necklace, or my nails, and by sending me emails on doing my nails a different way, or where they get their favourite cosmetics. That all means I can live with this painfully slow journey into being as little different as possible.

(Just don’t call me ‘he’!)

 

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2 Comments on Acceptably different

  1. renee.blatchley says:

    Hi Andie 🙂

    I identify very closely with your post, and I have come to much the same conclusions.

    I am more on the border, lucky enough to blend like camouflage except under closer inspection, happy enough to explain my position, and just seeking acceptance as always a bit different.

    This so well describes where I am in my simply being me as a transwoman. I have been searching for a good way to describe this and you are spot-on!

    When you wrote “acceptably different” it immediately made me think of my own desire that people find me “pleasantly peculiar” – I *know* they will find me “peculiar” but I very much want the overall impression I leave to be “pleasant.”

    Another way of describing my trans-ness seems to put people more at ease:

    Once I lived as a special sort of man, and now by God’s grace, I live as a special sort of woman

    When I was a “special sort of man,” I was truly a woman driving a (generally) male-appearing body in (generally) male-seeming ways (but my woman-ness was very present, but not effeminately so). Now I am still a woman, but I now drive my body in and into ways that are more typical of other woman; I am a “special sort of woman” because I am “becoming” along a different path than my natal sisters.

    Because I have realized that for me to be whole means that I must integrate who I was as Brett into who I am as Brettany. This means that there is a sense in which I will always be trans, always semi-out. For casual encounters, I am simply a woman, but when people get to know me, under “closer scrutiny,” then I share with them than I am a transgender woman, and possibly explain what that means in my particular case. I seemed to be in a blessed position where I pass comfortably well (even in a swimsuit), but that I am comfortable and at ease with myself enough that it’s okay for people to know that I am trans…

    It really is okay if they know my origins as long as they are willing to accept where I am today, that I live as a woman because that is who I am.

    Being authentic is such a freeing place, and it puts me at ease with myself, and others have shared that they too are at ease with my trans state *because* I am so at ease with it…

    …I think that once can have this sense and the tremendous internal and social benefits simply by working toward becoming oneself. I move from living as a man to living as a woman very gradually over the course of five years, and throughout that process, I may have appeared a bit odd, but throughout I was also myself, always myself, always at ease. My being at ease was not always the product of feeling wonderful about myself or being unaware of my appearing very trans, but I had come to abandon myself to the process of becoming me, and so I made gradual adjustments knowing trying things to see if I felt more congruent, knowing that most people would not understand, but being as nice and kind a person as I can be, and being as true as I can be: this abandonment to the process, come what may, is maybe what allows me to seem very comfortable in my skin though my gender dysphoria is intense.

    Andie, what you wrote here was *so validating* to me, and did my heart tremendous good! Thank You for sharing it!!!

    Andie? thank you for letting me share some of my thoughts also. {very small voice}

    • Andie says:

      Thanks Renee; I really do value your comments. Your journey sounds very like mine. We are lovely, ordinary and kindly people, living as best we can, albeit acceptably different. But it is our bearing, our self-confidence, that convinces others that being trans is just a variant, with which they too can be completely comfortable.

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