(This is a casserole post, one I started writing around late April, and never finished, a companion to ‘Key Largo.’)
So I was here in the city, and my well-meaning friends had conversation after conversation with me about my gender. The gist of almost all of them was as follows:
1) I did not look like anything other than a man.
2) I would have to invest a great deal of time and effort if I wanted to look like anything other than a man.
3) No one agreed on what, precisely, I’d have to do to look like a woman, or what, precisely, made me look like a man. But there was much work to be done! It would involve many elaborate and painful beauty rituals whose mechanics I had never mastered.
Then I went to Chicago. I dressed in boy clothes, since I was confident that I wasn’t passing as female at all and didn’t exactly want to travel as a transwoman. Passive-aggressive boy clothes, anyway, to match my passive-aggressive mannerisms: baggy sweaters and baggy pants and a hat jammed over my Jefferson Davis haircut. I had had one laser treatment, was smack in the middle of the grace period, and there was perhaps some breastiness there from the right angle and in the right light.
I was she and her and ma’am the entire time. I was sirred perhaps twice. I could not get gay men to look at me to save my life.
I even got shooed out of the men’s room at Borders! It wasn’t an, “Excuse me, are you…?” incident, either. It was a Class-A Wrong Bathroom Event. I was leaning against the wall across from the urinals, waiting for the two stalls to open up. The men in them had apparently gone into labor. A seventy-year-old man shakily relieved himself into one of the urinals in front of me. I was wondering if I even wanted to use the stalls when a guy who’d been washing his hands at the sink looked over at me. Maybe he caught the mingled disgust and doubt on my face, but he started cracking up and said, “Uh, you’re–you’re in the wrong washroom.” (What was I supposed to say? What can one ever say? “Is that why there are urinals in here? Oh, my God, I was so confused! Thank you so much!”) I said, “…No, I’m not.” And then he started yelling at the guys in the stalls to get out, because we had a line out here (i.e. me). So I’m kind of wondering if he even believed me.
Then I came back here, and my friends were once again telling me how mannish I looked and how much help I needed–which they were happy to give me! I was going a little nuts, actually. What was so different about Chicago? What was I doing differently? Was it the hat? I missed Chicago. I wanted to go back, maybe move there.
I was talking to a friend of mine about a week after my vacation, and she was telling me what I could do to convince her that I’m a woman, and talking about how incredibly male and masculine and manly I looked, and I said, “But, but, but, I went to Chicago last week and passed as a woman the entire time–even in men’s clothing! All I had to do was wear a hat!”
And she went off on this long rant (she wasn’t shouting, but I’m not sure how else to term it) about how, well, Chicago is the Midwest, and it’s different there, and they have all those enormous rawboned Scandinavian women, and they all wear those sloppy sweatshirts and baggy pants and they all look like big butch dykes even when they’re straight women, and they’re very tall there, and very broad-shouldered, and I was wearing that bulky overcoat….
I was listening to this and finally–finally!–I thought to myself, Wait a minute, that’s completely fucking ridiculous! That makes no sense at all! I was in a major metropolitan area, not a Soviet propaganda poster! There were plenty of femmey women in Chicago, and far fewer bearded lesbians! Baggy men’s clothing doesn’t make it harder for you to pass as male! I didn’t pass as female in Chicago because the Sasquatch would pass as female in Chicago! I passed because I–because I–because I looked like a woman! I looked like a woman in a bulky overcoat! And that means I look like a woman now! I’m not the problem! I don’t need to pluck my eyebrows! I don’t need to stuff my bra! I need new friends!
That was when I started to feel much better.
I had no idea that this would happen. Round the turn of the year, I believed that I might never be able to go back. Then I believed that I’d be “passing” as female, with a great deal of heartache and a lot of effort and expense, for years if not forever. Then I believed that I might be passing as female after several months. I believed all of this because this was what the people around me were telling me, including my transition therapist, because I’d been telling myself it was too late since shot one, and because I’d been passing completely as a big strong butch guy for about two years (okay, not so much with the butch part). I used (still use) the men’s locker room; the last couple of people I came out to as ftm didn’t believe me. Right before I quit, I was starting to describe myself as post-transition.
It was–is–weird just to be so modular. You’re not supposed to be able to change like this. I assumed that I’d be passing as female for years if not forever. Accepting the possibility of sex-change is itself counterintuitive; the idea that the reversal can be accomplished this quickly is really shocking. And it’s also strange to go from completely male to passably female.
And I’m having trouble figuring out how to process everything that’s happened. I’m under internal pressure to discard old proprioceptive genders, in order to sustain this new one. At the same time, I still have trouble trusting that I look like a girl to people I meet. At the same time, I’m having to sustain the male presentation at work, and doing so successfully (“Have you lost weight?”). At the same time, people who knew me as male still obviously think of me as male and do not believe that I can pass as female at all let alone do so without much effort. At the same time, people who knew me as female are either confident that I can become a girl, confident that I already am one, or insistent that nothing ever changed.
[That last bit is no longer true–I am full-time, as it were, and the people in my life have moved on from disbelief through amazement through praise to a stated belief that I always looked sort of androgynous. Progress. I decided to keep them all after all; it’s not as though I’m any more objective, and now they’re telling me what I want to hear.]