Talking Trans Things: Part 1

Or: The most common questions I’ve been asked as a trans woman.

International Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV) is March 31st. Although this pair of posts have been worked, reworked and edited ad nauseam for a few months now (I really thought they’d be up in January at the latest), there could not be a more fitting posting deadline to set for myself than TDOV.

These posts will likely be the most personal and candid I ever have or ever will share and if you prefer my witchy, poetry or music-focused content, maybe just scroll to the bottom of this one for the good news on that front.

But if you’re interested or willing to learn a bit more about my personal experience as a trans individual, I invite you to read on. In this post I’ll be addressing two of the most common questions I’ve been asked:

Why would you want to be a woman?
Why give up your male privilege?

CW: In this and part 2 we’ll be talking about gender, sex, sexuality, mental health, childhood bullying, physical and sexual violence, and adjacent themes. Nothing graphic or explicit, just some topics you can expect to be present.

Part 2 will be posted tomorrow and will cover the questions:

Have you had “the surgery”?
So, are you gay?

And I want to be super clear from the top: These responses and reflections are based on my experience as an individual Trans Woman who began transitioning in her thirties. Everyone’s experience is different, there is no one right or wrong way to “be trans” and if you know or meet a trans individual who doesn’t want to share anything about their own experience: RESPECT THAT!

You are not entitled to anything from anyone.

I speak openly about my experience because when I was younger, there was no trans representation. I suffered so much pain because I didn’t have a name for my feelings or experience. When I began evaluating my own gender identity later in life, the voices I could find helped me navigate my own chaos. I’m simply adding my own voice to that collective experience.

Despite the narrative and attacks currently being advanced against us, or perhaps just in spite of them, I will continue to be open about my experience with anyone who wishes to learn, or at least listen with respect, for as long as I can.

Passing Privilege

Before we get into the questions, however, I want to talk a little about “Passing”.

If you’re unaware, in the Trans Community, “passing” typically refers to being perceived, or “passing,” as your gender identity, meaning your gender identity and perceived gender by others align. You’re not viewed as a trans man or trans woman (or misgendered), you’re just seen as a man or woman.

I want to be very clear that passing in my opinion should NOT be something trans people focus on or worry excessively about (not discounting the obvious safety concerns of “not passing” in dangerous scenarios or hostile locations). It is also my belief, based on my own experience, that focusing too much on this can do more harm than good. It just feeds the toxic expectations society puts on us of what a “normal” man or woman should look or behave like.

Early in my transition, I put significantly more effort into my presentation whenever I went out in public compared to now. Starting my transition towards the end of the COVID pandemic meant wearing a mask to hide my not-yet-lasered facial hair didn’t generate many second looks. However, broad shoulders, a lack of a chest, short hair, a difficult-to-not-notice bulge between the legs in jeans or leggings, lack of vocal training/practice and still seeing myself as more “male” than not made every adventure into the world outside my home an anxious experience.

I knew I didn’t pass, and I felt I needed to if I wanted to be a ‘valid’ woman. Feeling half like an imposter and half like I was lying to myself when I called myself a woman.

Shapewear (SO MUCH shapewear), breast forms, tucking, and figuring out how to communicate whatever I needed to say in as few words as possible to hopefully keep my voice from giving me away were the staples early on. Makeup, accessories, and determining which clothing styles were flattering on my body type were easy learning layers. Learning the subtle differences in how women vs men carry themselves and interact with others? Well, as an autism enjoyer- I’ve never been good with social cues or interpersonal interactions, but I tried to mimic as best I could.

It was all exhausting, and I still felt incredibly exposed and like an imposter more often than not. A walking asterisk. There were times when I would spend nearly an hour in preparation just to stay home, as I couldn’t stop picking apart my appearance in the mirror and convince myself to go.

The threats, the derisive statements, the absence of local support (save for one coworker at my office who was an ABSOLUTE SAINT), and the escalating attacks on people like me by people in power.

And don’t get me started on using public bathrooms…

About two years into my medical transition, with about a dozen sessions of laser hair removal on my face, and with ample vocal practice… I no longer had to do much prep work; I could simply get dressed (sometimes throwing on eye makeup if the mood struck me), go, and pass.

Now that I’m nearly four years into my transition, I have to confess “Passing Privilege” is a very real thing.

Having the privilege to simply be viewed as a woman instead of a trans woman is still a little strange to me. Sexual harassment and misogyny aside, it’s nice to not feel like a walking asterisk and to just blend in as any other woman going about her day. Though that privilege has also led to some interesting moments of unmasked bigotry.

The “we can always tell (when someone is trans)” group of bigots are shining specimens of not only the Dunning-Kruger effect but also survivorship bias. If I decide “screw it, I’m not shaving my face this week,” or relax my voice too much, I certainly experience the transphobia and vitriol you’d expect from these ghouls, just as I experienced plenty through the start of my transition. But living in a rural area of a purple state, I also experience it in the most bizarre way when hateful statements are not directed at me, but shared with me because I’m “a fellow woman who’d understand” or “a woman that needs to be protected from those perverted men” or any of the other unhinged justifications I’ve heard. It’d be hilarious… if I wasn’t all too familiar with the danger these types of individuals pose.

When, instead, someone expresses support for the community, whether or not they personally know any trans individuals, or at least a genuine curiosity to understand it better, if the setting/scenario seems safe, I’ll usually offer a conversation starting with some variant of “Well, I can’t speak for all trans folk… But I’m trans, and I’d be happy to share some of my experience.” I’ve had some lovely conversations this way; I’ve also had some incredibly awkward ones, but each one reminds me why I share what I do. To be visible. To be that representation in my community.

It’s also been incredibly affirming when they express disbelief at the revelation that I’m trans.

They don’t see an asterisk; they just see me. A woman.

Anywho, onto the questions:

Why would you want to be a woman?

Because I am one.

Bluntness aside, if you’ve never experienced gender dysphoria, it can admittedly be a hard idea to understand.

Consider, however, men who get hair transplants or wear a toupee, get breast reductions due to gynecomastia. Maybe testicular cancer created a need for a penile implant, or perhaps testosterone levels were so low hormones were prescribed.

Medical interventions were used to changed their physical appearance and/or body’s chemistry to better align with their gender. Their gender just happened to be “on the same side” (cis) of the gender spectrum as their sex assigned at birth.

What about a woman who needed a mastectomy and opted for reconstruction or now wears breast forms or another prostheses? Breast augmentation? Undergoing hormonal treatments for menopause or deficiencies? Wears a wig, or mascara/false lashes? Getting a little more superficial, always wearing a face full of makeup, or getting laser hair removal for stubborn lip/chin or leg hair? Brazilian butt lift or body contouring procedures?

These are all things done so that their outer appearance and inner chemistry better reflects their identity (at least they should be; far too many women torture themselves trying to appease others’ desires/expectations).

It’s not due to a distorted perception from dysmorphia (well, perhaps in some cases it is), it’s an incongruence of self causing discomfort or distress. Dysphoria.

Now consider a man who hates the sight of his facial hair, despises the deepness of his voice, and, despite enjoying weight lifting, is horrified at the prospect of a buff physique, and so avoids it.

One who wishes they were born a girl so they wouldn’t have to struggle with all the parts of their body that feel foreign. They could wear dresses and skirts without judgment, be a princess, be a witch. For the sake of brevity, I won’t get into all the unnecessarily gendered things in our society, but consider this man who has never felt like a man, hates seeing their reflection and every “male experience” forced on him made him uncomfortable down to his core.

A discomfort that could be summarized as “I don’t belong or feel whole in this body”.

That’s a bit of what my experience growing up in the 90s was like. I couldn’t name why or how, but I felt like I was in the wrong body. That I was some weird “other” that didn’t really belong anywhere I was told to be. Ridiculed for not “being a real man” when I hated everything about being a man. Presumed to be gay since I didn’t embrace the masculinity standards of society, yet unable to find a label myself that sounded or felt right.

Eventually, my depression and anxiety skyrocketed, and many of these thoughts and feelings started to get repressed. I started to kinda just go through life numb.

Somewhere around 2014-2015 when there began to be more and more trans representation, I was in horrible shape, massively overweight, and rocking a neglected denial beard; the repressed thoughts started to come back, finally with a name, yet they were quickly dismissed.

“I’m too old to transition.”

“I’d never be an attractive woman.” (Seriously, read this and the next 15 or so comic pages from Real Life Comics if you have the time as it visualizes the mental reconciliation that many trans folk, myself included, have experienced better than I could ever describe.)

“I’ve made it this far like this, why change?”

The feelings weren’t repressed again, but they were suppressed and hidden. Never spoken about, yet always lingering. There was nothing I could do, so I stayed numb.

I stayed in this state of denial until I learned I was going to be a parent. The reality of having a tiny human on the way that I was going to need to care for made me realize just how much this depressive denial cycle was impacting me, and after several months working through the pain with my therapist…

I finally accepted who I always was. A woman.

And so I took the steps to start helping the outside reflect who I was inside. To ease the dsyphoria, to resolve the incongruence and become whole.

Why give up your male privilege?

Because I’m not a man.

Bluntness aside once more, male privilege is a very real thing too, though admittedly, I didn’t realize how real until I came out fully.

Retrospectively, I feel there are two tiers of it. The passive societal level and the psychopathic abuser level.

For the former, it was not something I thought I experienced until it was gone. Applied for a job I met the requirements for? Get at least an interview. Project assigned to the team with only one male member? Guess who is assumed to have taken the lead and gets the credit. Go to the mechanic? Don’t have to worry about a load of BS or needless upsells.

It’s a man’s world after all.

And that’s not even touching on the safety/harassment concerns men, quite simply, rarely face compared to women. Though this is a double edge sword, as when I was sexually assaulted more than a decade before my transition, I was dismissed because “that can’t happen to a man”. Combine that personal experience with domestic violence statistics that show roughly 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men experience physical violence from an intimate partner, and I think those numbers are much closer than many people would believe or admit.

Which leads well enough into the psychopath type of privilege.

Although an odd comparison, I’d best compare this type to the classroom scene in Disney’s “Education for death” a World War II propaganda film. In the scene a story is told to a class of young German boys in which a rabbit is chased and devoured by a fox. When asked what the lesson of the tale was Hans, the boy who the film follows, replies sadly “the poor rabbit”.

His teacher explodes with rage. Hans is scolded and sent to the corner to wear a dunce cap while his classmates jeered, before proceeding to rattle off the ‘correct’ answers:

“The world belongs to the strong!”

“And the brutal!”

“The rabbit is a coward and deserves to die, I spit on the rabbit!”

Given a second chance to andwer, Hans quickly changes his views, tearfully shouting:

“I hate the rabbit, there’s no room for weaklings!”

When I was in Boy Scouts, I was pushed off a brick wall, nearly split my skull. What happened to the boy who pushed? Nothing of course, boys will be boys after all. I transferred to a troop on the other side of the town, where my reputation of “complaining” followed. So when a similar battery happened in the new troop, with the same dismissal of “boys will be boys” the lesson I took was simple:

“Men being violent is fine as it indicates strength. Being the victim of violence just means you’re weak. Complaining about it only invites further violence.”

I assumed an unbothered mask, like all emotions had been wished away vis-a-vis Timmy Turner in Fairly OddParents, burnt out in a couple months and ended up leaving the scouts despite the joy other aspects of the program gave me.

Junior high school and high school had a similar ecosystem on display. Unable, and frankly unwilling, to quit school like scouts, I kept the unbothered mask, disassociated, channeled an Animal House “Thank you sir may I have another” type attitude in public, while leaning on my theater and music friends (and therapist) in private.

College? I went to class, then hid in my room, grateful my roommate ended up not attending and I had a double unit to myself.

Entering the workforce? I knew to not react to or engage with the frankly disturbing conversations that were common between my male coworkers in the kitchen.

All of these experiences just deepened the sense of being an other that didn’t belong in society the way I was expected to be, and fed the depressive cycle that nearly claimed my life on multiple occasions.

So I’m happy to be without this “privilege” even if it means I need to face additional challenges, even if it makes me the target of a very different flavor of harassment.

While existing in the world became a bit harder, living became so much easier.

TLDR for part one:

Why be a woman? Because I am a woman.
Why give up male privilege? Because I’m not a man.

I find it a little amusing how much I ended up writing about these two questions when the response really could be that simple.

Tomorrow part 2 will be posted and cover the more personal questions:

Have you had “the surgery”?
So, are you gay?

Then I plan to go back to some basics and share primarily tarot spells and blessings, some musical moments, and later this year MAYBE some short stories to tease the book most of my creative writing has been allocated to for some time now.

Until then, Stay Magickal