Transition Thoughts & Reflections - Guest Post #3

All of us, who are transgender, will admit that we wished the general public was a bit more understanding of what it is to be trans.

We - those of us who are trans - all understand each other, right? Well, apart from a recent blog post I did, I would generally agree with that statement.

So, when I asked James if he would like to do a guest post on T-Central, he enthusiastically replied and asked for suggestions.

It was my response that so surprised me. No, I didn't understand. Here's a part of my reply:

....perhaps a little discussion about what has motivated you to do what seems so foreign to many of us....poisoning your body with T...taking a beautiful female body that we (speaking of the MtF's out there) wish we were born with and changing it into a male body....growing facial hair that we so hate....and perhaps most of all, lowering a voice to something that is so difficult for us to change. I don't say this in any way but out of respect for you and your feelings, so don't take it the wrong way. I think you would find a lot of interest in addressing these points besides those issues in your childhood, etc.

Now, I wrote that when the gender dysphoria was screaming inside of me. I was, perhaps, a bit emotional? But, it did make me realize that I do need to better understand my brothers who are transitioning from female to male.

First Jamie, Then James is his wonderful blog and it is so well written that one would think he is majoring in English Literature....which he is.

If you would like to contact James, you can drop me an email or, perhaps, we can get him to show up on the T-Central Facebook page, shown at the bottom of this page.

I'll let James take it from here..

- Calie

My Girlhood: A Very Serious Business

When I was born, the world suggested to me that I was a little girl. I took that suggestion very seriously. Bold colors startled me. Worms startled me. One year, I made a New Year’s resolution to not burp audibly.

Family trips, in particular, illuminated the self-policing that I imposed upon my childhood gender identity. A cousin and I used to borrow my dad’s video camera, write scripts, film ourselves, and exhibit our work at the end of the vacation. She invariably played an invented, comic masculine role and I basically played myself. We filmed music videos and sketches, tragicomedy and slapstick shorts. Our creative range stretched from complex improvised renditions of Shakespeare to thoughtful, existential appropriations of pop culture (such as our medley of “U + Me = Us” and “Total Eclipse of the Heart”).

My cousin’s freedom was stunning. It was one of the first things ever to make me laugh so hard I didn’t even care if I drooled or honked or knocked something over. Thanks to her influence, I found ways to be free with my laughter and my jokes and my facial expressions. I learned to dance with abandon and make noise. I learned to create Barbie characters who were silly or sarcastic, instead of simply smart and pretty.

The one thing that remained off-limits for play, however, was my gender. That performance was too serious to permit play. My gender performance obeyed a set of very specific rules. In hindsight, my personal gender boundaries from childhood don’t make any articulatable sense, except insofar as they were each designed to avoid any question, no matter how small, of my gender. Truthfully, neither my family nor my friends were particularly invested in a rigid template of femininity, and neither of my parents pressed me with gender norms in either direction. In fact, it was in the absence of external gender enforcement that I created my unspoken system of gender self-policing. As though I was trying to give structure to something that made me uncomfortable with its amorphousness.

I grabbed haphazardly at pop culture and young adult novels to generate this set of criteria for making myself the best girl I could be. I slept in a bra and tank top every night. I held my pencils with the smallest amount of finger surface area possible. I bought the smallest size pajama shorts that I could comfortably fit into, and I broke food into dime-sized pieces before eating it. I bought only women’s socks, women’s watches, even boxer shorts explicitly manufactured for women (Victoria’s Secret calls them ‘boxies’). The cute suffixes, the floral fonts, the style descriptors like “flirty” and “glam”—these were the only sure way to assure myself that I was dressing and acting like a girl. Barricaded in this version of girlhood constructed of toothpicks and gum, I was happy in most ways and I felt safe.

Twenty years passed from the world’s first suggestion that I was a girl. I met a queer theorist and I took her class. I met a butch lesbian and I dated her. I wrote several papers about gender in Shakespeare and scribbled one awestruck fifteen-line poem about my girlfriend’s genderbending. A tiny, hard ball of questions broke free and started rolling through my veins.

Those questions were twined tightly after two decades of compression. I tried to loosen one strand at a time, gently. Sometimes I would pull the wrong strand too hard and tighten the knot by accident, like the first time I thought I was ready to wear men’s pants out of the house. Three hours later, I hadn’t stopped feeling like everyone was staring at me and I’d forgotten why I wanted to wear them in the first place. I packed the jeans up (several sizes too big for me anyway, since I had guessed about my measurements) and wore a (somewhat ironically) more comfortable strapless bra and halter-top ensemble for a while.

What was I? I had lived for so long as a girl. Everyone recognized me as such; did that not mean I had been doing it right? If the discomforts could be balled up so small that I could avoid directly looking at them, then why not keep living that way? Why not continue to be easily understood?

Eventually, I realized that being recognizable as a girl was not the same thing as recognizing myself. In daydreams, I had never pictured myself with a face. It took photographs and mirrors to remind myself of what I looked like, because I honestly couldn’t call up a mental image of myself. There were whole swaths of my body I had never looked at. I quite frankly didn’t understand what my genitalia were for. They didn’t seem to have any point, except something vague about relationships that I didn’t think too hard about. I didn’t understand what sex was for, either, but it seemed to make most other people hungry. I lived for how it felt to sing onstage, but I never once heard my own voice and thought, Hey, that’s me singing. I had assumed in high school that the reason I liked Newsies so much was that I liked all the boys, but the line between liking the boys and liking to feel included in the boys was very fuzzy.

For years, my gender was a necessary process, the girl language I wrote on myself so that everyone (myself included) knew exactly how to read my body the moment they looked at it. In a way, I declared my gender as clearly as possible so that no one would look at me twice. Once I started asking questions, though, the toothpick-and-gum structure that was my gender couldn’t hold up for long. I was left with nothing for a while, until I realized that I had the power to build something in its place. Something better, stronger—something made out of my own bones and muscle, spit and fingernails.

I really do like bright colors. I really do care about hairstyles. I honestly would rather drink beers and play Risk than almost any other thing. I connected the wires that run from my crotch to my brain, and they’re both pleased to be gay. I take small bites of pie, big bites of toast. I pee with the men, but not in the urinal. If I walk into someone in the locker room, I’ll grunt, “Sorry, man.” If you’re sad, I’ll put my hand on your shoulder and squeeze. I buy my socks at Costco and the women’s ones fit me better. My gender is made of me.