The writing project I was working on is finished. For now. I’m in the process of catching up on my sleep and my workouts, which is hard, because the two goals are mutually exclusive.
Anyway.
While I was trying to thrash this thing into shape, I bugged a dear friend who’s an excellent editor with many questions and drafts and meandering emails. For some reason, he thinks I have some reciprocal interest in his problems, so he sent me a draft of a piece of writing he’s working on for something else. His subject is trans communities, particularly the online ones, and the purpose they serve for transpeople. We’ve been talking about them and their dimensions a lot lately. Off of that, I thought I’d write a little bit about my experience with them.
Despite the exploding visibility of transpeople, we are still isolated and still suffering from a lack of information. This is particularly true when general social reception gives way to the concrete details of trans lives, both in and after transition. Unless we are very, very lucky, none of the adults in our lives are able to offer much advice. Our doctors may even be ignorant. We have achieved greater acceptance and formal acknowledgement than ever before, but we are still marginal.
We have had to step in and create substitutes for ourselves, and I am continually amazed at how well they’ve worked. I can’t imagine how we survived before the internets. I get the sense that it wasn’t easy; I know that it developed in the face of rejection from all kinds of care providers; I know that it originated the word-of-mouth principle on which we thrive today. Online communities are more open, more accessible, and more flexible than anything that’s come before them, and we’ve made very good use of the medium. I was lucky enough to come out when these exchanges were fairly well-established. There were yahoo groups, livejournal, and too many personal websites to count.
They have been an invaluable informational resource. I can ask about hormones, surgeries, recovery issues, surgeons, referrals, the HBSOC, legal name and gender changes, negotiating the DMV in any state, workplace protections, bathroom harassment, higher education, academia, coming out, family, dating, romance, safer sex, parenting, adoption, divorce, custody, passing tips, injection protocols, travelling while trans, transgendered history, certain large-scale employers, insurance carriers, physicians, therapists, pharmacists, drug interactions, certain chronic health problems, eating disorders, depression, sobriety and treatment for addiction, and a thousand thousand other things. And I will find some transguy who has experienced a similar situation and can point me in a useful direction. Most of the time, I’ll hear from a few dozen. Is this guy reputable? Where can I find a friendly internist near Oberlin? Anyone ever been to this support group? What does “real-life test” mean? What do top surgery results look like? Are there any information resources available for LDS families? Is anyone else bisexual all of a sudden?
But they serve another purpose, one that’s at least as vital: they help us to understand that we’re not alone. And forgive me for the melodrama, but they help us to understand that there is life after transition.
In popular terms, transition is described as a kind of suicide, extreme damage to life undertaken out of some senseless compulsion. On television and in movies, transsexuals are generally either killed–CSI, Boys Don’t Cry, Ally McBeal; or punished with violence, ostracism, and extremely fucked-up lives and personalities–CSI, Boys Don’t Cry, The Crying Game, Law & Order: SVU, Nip/Tuck, Better than Chocolate, Normal, Queer as Folk, The L-Word, Transamerica. (That last is the only portrayal I can think of wherein a transwoman gets to have a job. And didja notice how, in the most positive mainstream portrayal of a transwoman yet to hit the silver screen, there are no friends or acquaintances anywhere in Bree’s life prior to the roadtrip?) (Also, one notable exception: Transgeneration–although I would count that more in the information-sharing tradition than in the pop-culture one.) Combine that with a bunch of extreme and extremely rapid changes, and a family that’s probably going through the eight stages of grief, and the message to nervous newbie trannies is clear: life as you know it is over, and from here on out it pretty much sucks.
The senseless part is there, too. Transpeople are opaque. They’re allowed to recite a few canned phrases–“trapped in the wrong body,” “never felt like a boy,” etc.–to explain the motives behind transition. They’re also allowed to talk about how they’ll be a “real” man or woman after surgery. They don’t really talk about what it feels like, or how they got where they are, or what they think will happen next. Trans activists complain, and rightly so, that this communicates an extremely narrow, two-dimensional version of the trans experience to non-transpeople. What they don’t describe is how difficult it is for transpeople themselves to identify with these non-characters, and how much loneliness that can create.
That was where I was coming from when I started to come out. I was sure that no one would ever love me, touch me, sleep with me, hire me, rent to me, admit me, or talk to me ever again. I was sure I would never, ever pass, ever, not after hormones, not after surgeries. I didn’t think I could make this work, and I was flailing around in terror.
The ftms I encountered made it clear that it was possible to negotiate transition and to live life after transition. They’d found jobs. They’d gone on to grad school. They’d found partners. They’d found doctors who treated them respectfully. They’d gotten their families to come around. They were happy and well-adjusted and sane. They’d survived and done well for themselves. Their presence helped me to understand that I could, too.