21 Things Not to Say to a Trans Person

I found this on my Facebook somewhere. I'm going to actually answer them all right now:

1. "When Did You Decide to Switch Genders?"
I never switched. Therefore, I never decided.

What a person asking this question is usually trying to ask is when someone realized they were not the gender they'd been designated at birth, and/or when they acted on that realization by beginning physiological transition processes. I first began to realize that I'd been incorrectly designated male at birth (DMAB) on August 10, 2014. I began transition more or less immediately.

2. "What's Your Real Name?"
Seranine Elliot. I had it legally changed on September 3, 2014. The "nine" part sounds like the number. Most people just call me "Sera," which basically sounds the same as "Sara" or "Sarah." The full name rhymes with "Caroline" with a schwa for the "o," including stress and inflection.

Keep in mind that a legal name change is not free. Many trans people choose a new name for themselves, but do not necessarily have the resources to get it legally changed at the same time. Many trans people are also reluctant to release their previous name, because it is usually used to harass, abuse, and/or disrespect them.

3. "Can I See a Picture of You Before You Transitioned?"
Sure, here's a whole pile of them. Pre-transition and/or pre-realization pictures show trans people under duress. A picture of someone who is not able to be their authentic self can be painful to even think about, let alone share. I publish mine because I want to shed light on my own process, so cis people can see for themselves how ordinary it all is, how human, and so trans people can see that it can be done, even for someone who didn't realize she'd always been a girl until she was almost 40.



4. "I'm Impressed - You Look Just Like a REAL Woman!"
This is meant to be complimentary, generally, but it necessarily implies that trans women are not actual women, which is false. I haven't personally heard this one to my face, yet, but I imagine that I'd probably reply with a thank-you, followed immediately by an explanation of why that's considered an unkind thing to say to a trans woman.

5. "Have You Had the Operation Yet?"
I suspect that most of the people who ask this sort of question are so overwhelmed by their curiosity about something they are usually completely unfamiliar with that they forget they are asking these questions of another human being. And human beings, broadly speaking, do not enjoy talking details about their genitals with most other human beings.

Fortunately, I am a cat.

I have not had Genital Reconstructive Surgery (GRS) or an orchiectomy (removal of the testes). (UPDATE: I had my orchiectomy on January 22, 2016.) If you really care to know when I have either, the best way to find out, honestly, would be to follow my social media. I'd go with my Facebook Public Figure Page, if I were you, but if you don't care about a by-the-minute level of detail, and just want to read a nice summary of it all whenever I get to writing about it, following this blog will do.

6. "Can You Still Have Orgasms?"
Much like #5 above, this is generally not good acquaintance-conversation fodder. The general rule is that if you wouldn't ask it of anybody else, you should probably not ask it of a trans person, either.

I am, in most arenas, an exception, because I have publicly and repeatedly said that I welcome questions as long as they are civil and respectful. My short answer to this question is, "yes." My long answer is probably another entire blog post, at least.

7. "Do You Take Hormones?"
Like most medical issues, this is usually considered private and personal. I am, again, an exception, because I am deliberately sharing my progress with as wide an audience as possible.

Clockwise from the top: #spironolactone 100 mg, #medroxyprogesterone 2.5 mg, #estradiol 2 mg. My now-stable, twice-daily #HRT regime.

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on May 10, 2015 at 10:45am PDT

My specific drugs, doses, and changes to either are usually not too hard to find. I tend to post about them on my Instagram, and share those posts to my Facebook Page. Right now, my Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) regimen is 2mg estradiol, 200mg spironolactone, and 5mg medroxyprogesterone daily.

8. "Wow, I Actually Find You Kind of Attractive - Great Job!"
I've actually heard this one, or some variant of it, a few times. Like #4, it's meant to be complimentary, but it's not hard to see why it isn't. It's objectifying, for starters, and it also makes a pretty bold assumption about someone's motivations for presenting themselves in whatever way. Whenever I've dressed up and put on makeup, which is most of the time when I leave the house, I've literally never done it with the intent of pleasing anyone else in any way. I do it primarily because it feels right.

It also says that you believe that the trans person you are saying this to is not normally seen as attractive by anyone, so they should be happy to hear that you, at least, find them somewhat attractive, so their future will not be as loveless and bleak as you had imagined it would otherwise be. This is kind of a horrible sentiment to share with anyone, for any reason. Even if someone is conventionally "unattractive," pointing that out to them in this kind of backhanded manner is as cruel as any other way of pointing it out. Chances are, they know how they are seen by society at large.

For myself, yes, there is definitely an element of trying to present to the culture, but since I'm a trans ambassador, I worry less about maintaining that presentation than I imagine most trans women do. I'm also fortunate enough to be slim and have relatively little body hair, on a body that was kind of androgynous to begin with, and is also white enough to be treated as capital-W White. Which means people more readily accept me as a woman, all other things being equal, than a trans woman who is comparably dressed, but darker, or with more body hair, or broader shoulders.

9. "Is It Okay to Still Call You 'He'? Sorry - It's Just Confusing!"
(I adapted this question to me; their version shows a presumably trans man to support the text.)

It's not okay to call me "he," because my gender is not male. I appreciate how it could be confusing for people who were around me before I knew who I was; until August of 2014, I'd never directly questioned the gender I was designated, either, so we all just moved along acting as though I was a guy. If I'd been called "she" then, or some other female pronoun, I would've been upset. That's because people tend to not like being called a gender other than the one they think they are. (Which is not necessarily the one they actually are, and yes, I realize that that opens the door to the idea that a trans person only thinks they are a gender other than the one they were designated at birth. But I basically used to think I was male, whereas I now know that I'm female. I've done the work in challenging and examining my own gender, so I'm no longer operating on an assumption. I'm dealing with an absolute truth.)

If you are a cis male, imagine that everyone, everywhere called you "ma'am," or "miss," and referred to you with she/her/hers, instead of he/him/his. As someone who knows himself to be male, and who understands that to be an absolutely true part of your core identity, that would be immediately distressing. It would feel frustrating and degrading, and if you had no way to get most people, most of the time, to gender you correctly, it could even feel overwhelmingly hopeless. And all of that is the very common trans person's experience.

Some people honestly do not know trans people's pronouns, and are visibly agitated while they try to figure them out. I suggest simply asking someone what their pronouns are. Not what they prefer, but what they are. Just like your pronouns, they are simple fact, not preference. Once they've told you what their pronouns are, do your best to respect them, and apologize if you fuck them up. If you do those things genuinely, it will be enough.

10. "What Does Sex Feel Like for You?"
Just like #6, there is a short answer ("fucking amazing"), and a long answer which is far too complex to dump into a survey-level post like this. It would also require co-authoring, or at least getting an okay to talk about some experience(s) in detail, which is, again, way too much for this particular post.

Rest assured that I am not personally shy about talking about sex and my own sexuality. However, I do want to be respectful to past and present partners, and I am also determined to present a balanced picture of who I am as an entire person, so I am reluctant to focus too intently on these topics before I've delved into plenty of other things that are only related by being parts of me. That is, you will probably see a post about my return to World of Warcraft long before you see the post about what sex feels like for me.

11. "Wait - If I'm Attracted to You, Am I Still Straight?"
If you are a woman, then, probably not. If you are a man, then, probably yes. (This is a much more complex question than it seems like, and it's got an answer even more complex than that. As soon as I've developed or found a better model for explaining it, I'll share, but in the meantime, these are more or less correct responses.) If you are unsure about why this could be considered offensive, then consider the same question posed by a person of the opposite gender to you.

12. "Which Bathroom Do You Use?"
In public, gender-segregated bathroom situations, I use the same bathroom as all the other women. Just like #11, it's easy to see how this question is offensive if you imagine someone asking it to you.

13. "So What Surgeries HAVE You Had?"
Like #5, this is usually considered private, personal information, like any other medical information. And as in other questions here, I'm not generally shy about answering them for myself, while explaining why the question is usually considered offensive. I've had no surgeries yet, per se, although I have been getting electrolysis on an hour-a-week schedule since November 7, 2014. The only major surgeries I intend to definitely get as of now are GRS, and a chondrolaryngoplasty, also known as a "tracheal shave." That reduces the appearance of the Adam's apple.

Just like most of the things I share about my life and my transition, if you want to keep up on details, my Facebook Page is a good place to start. If you want more long-form analytical kinds of pieces and don't care about knowing that I've had GRS the instant I've actually had GRS, then this blog is all you need to track.

14. Using Words Like "Tranny" and "Shemale" (Even Jokingly)
Yeah, these are slurs, which means their primary purpose is to degrade and dehumanize people. You should avoid using them, unless your purpose is to educate, as I'm doing here. I suppose if your goal is to actually degrade and dehumanize someone, then these are appropriate words to use, but if that's your goal, that's kind of awful, to be honest.

15. "What Did Your Family Think? I Mean Really... It's Kind of Selfish."
My immediate family, to my knowledge, is fine with it. I know firsthand that my brother, his wife, and all of their children are very supportive, and have been from the moment I told them. My parents, though I still very rarely speak to them (I've actually only called them once in the last few years, on Mother's Day 2015), are also, at worst, fine with it, as far as I've been able to tell.

My kids know by now, I'm sure, because their mother knows. She found out at some point after I started publishing this blog, since I found out that she found out when she posted an unsurprisingly very-off-topic comment on the latest post at that time. What any of them truly think of it, I don't know. Whenever I'm finally able to actually see my kids again, I will probably write about it here.

There is nothing selfish about being one's authentic self. What is selfish is to demand that someone else deny their very identity so that you can feel more comfortable. The whole idea that it's necessary to "protect the children" from uncommon genders and gender presentations is absurd for two reasons: one, kids don't have trouble wrapping their heads around them until or unless they are programmed to by their adults, and two, cis kids don't need protection from being uncomfortable because someone failed to model empathy and objectivity for them; but trans kids need protecting from misinformation and ignorance about trans people in general, and from violence, whether they do it to themselves, or someone else does it to them. They also need to be able to see healthy, happy, and safe role models. Role models like me.

16. "How Do You Have Sex?"
Just like #6 and #10, there is a short answer ("usually lying down"), and a longer answer which requires other people to be okay with me sharing intimate details, and for me to simultaneously have the time and energy to do so, and for my social media presence to be in general showing a relatively balanced and accurate view of who I am as a whole person, not just as a sexual being. So, I'll probably write about it eventually, but I wouldn't suggest you wait around for it with, dare I say it, bated breath.

17. "Are You Sure You're Not Just Gay?"
Oh, I'm very sure I'm very gay. I mean, I could be gayer. But I'm pretty fucking gay. This isn't a very good question to ask someone who's come out to you as trans for a couple reasons.

One, gender is not sexuality. I've always been predominantly attracted to women, and ever-so-slightly-but-mostly-just-theoretically attracted to men. My sexual preference didn't change. (I had thought it might, but it's shown no real signs of shifting.) All that changed was my understanding of my reference point to it. That is, I'd assumed I was male, so I saw my self as straight, or straight-preference. I've always actually been female, so I've been gay or gay-preference all along.

Two, it presumes that they've not considered this angle themselves. And that's pretty presumptuous.

18. "So, You're Transgender - That's Like Being a Drag Queen, Right?"
No, because drag queens are men who are pretending to be women, because entertainment, while trans women are women who are actually women, because reality. There can be some physical commonalities between some trans women, and your average drag queen, so I don't actually find it to be completely impossible to understand the origins of this question. That said, I hope you can all understand why it is usually going to be hurtful, and is definitely ignorant.

19. "Why Don't You Try Harder? Nobody Can Even Tell You're a Woman!"
(I adapted this question to me; their version shows a presumably trans man to support the text.)

I haven't gotten this question yet. Mostly because I "pass" pretty well when I've shaved and done my makeup and put together a decent outfit, which is most of the time when I leave the house. But also because, at least in fairly liberal western Washington, people tend to realize it's a shitty thing to say.

The first of many #lowkey looks, since my first classes every school day all quarter are arts classes with paints and clay. When Linta started climbing my leg and blapping, I may have lost my composure a bit. #😎 #Everett #Washington #transgender #veteran #student #trans #girl #girlslikeus #selfie #ootd #outfit #outfitoftheday #nomakeup with bonus leg-climbin' #linta #😄 #cats #catsofinstagram #mycats #ihavealotofcats #cat #kitty #kittycat #🐱

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Jun 30, 2015 at 7:00am PDT

I've seen some raised eyebrows as people worked to determine what I was without being told during this current quarter back at the community college. Since two of my three classes each day are arts classes involving paints and clay, I haven't bothered doing makeup or dressing up ever, for the most part. I've also stopped scheduling electrolysis around massive time windows, to allow for me to grow out enough facial hair for my electrologist to actually get ahold of and remove, without being seen in public. But even so, everyone here just seems to get it.

The short answer to why this is a horrible question is best summed up in this Erin McKean quote: "Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female.’" The long answer, which is a much broader concept, but which answers this question, and many others, is the subject of a future blog post on where gender is.

20. "So You're a Transvestite?"
No. As in #18, these are different things, although they can be understandably confusing from the outside. A transvestite is a man who enjoys dressing and presenting in ways most commonly associated with women, and not men. Another term for "transvestite" is "cross-dresser." A woman is a woman who dresses however she dresses.

21. "Stop Trying So Hard - You Look Like a Drag Queen!"
This is definitely disrespectful, and shows a pretty profound lack of empathy. Nobody's said anything like this to me, but it should be easy for anyone to see why this kind of statement is problematic. Just like #19, it gets into society policing appearance to a nearly-codified extent; but gender isn't determined by clothing. Clothing can help you figure out your gender. It does not actually make gender.

You can test this, if you don't believe me. Or if you are bored. If you are a cis man, go put on a dress. If you are still a man, congratulations, you have confirmed that gender is not determined by clothing. If you think you are or might be a woman, congratulations, you're probably trans, and you've got me to talk to about it. If you go change back into "guy clothes" and you feel like a guy again, congratulations, you are probably genderfluid, which is, itself, a gender, and is not determined by clothing, although clothing may influence your perception of which expression is more prevalent to you at any given time.

My best advice in general for approaching a trans person with your curiosity and questions is to ask yourself a few questions, first. Questions like, "would I be okay with someone asking me the same thing?" and "can I probably look these terms up myself, and not bother them with questions they probably get all the time?"

Cameron's First Pride

I never met Cameron Langrell. I never had the chance to. Two months ago, he took his own life, because he'd been so relentlessly bullied about trying to explore and understand his own gender.

The story of his suicide came to me the way that most stories of trans suicides and deaths come to me.  I found it on tumblr. The article it linked to opened, "Just days after Racine, Wis., teen Cameron Langrell announced to friends and classmates online that she identified as a transgender girl, switching her Facebook gender identifier to 'female,' the 15-year-old took her own life at home on May 1." But other articles quoted his mother, Jamie Olender, saying things like, "'He was always bullied for being feminine,' Olender told the Journal Times. 'We told him to be who you are.'" It sounded like this poor child was living in a house very much like another trans child who had killed herself, too, just a few months earlier. These words read like the words of a parent who was out of touch with her daughter, because she was calling her a son.

Almost everybody has heard the name Leelah Alcorn by now, and Leelah's story didn't just include rejection from peers, it included rejection from parents. Leelah had already figured out for herself that she was a girl. She had chosen her own new name. But her parents would not accept that. Her parents rejected the new name, they rejected the correct pronouns, they rejected their daughter. Because they wanted their son. A son that never existed.

So when news reports about Leelah Alcorn's suicide started spreading, themselves with their own conflicting information about the name and gender of this child that had killed him- or herself, one thing that became apparent pretty quickly was that Leelah's own parents had really rejected this completely, and that that had been a driving force in her decision to end her life, in a really gruesome and awful way.

When news of Cameron Langrell's suicide started spreading, because interviews with Cameron's mother, Jamie, included quotes of her referring to her son by gender-appropriate pronouns for the gender he'd been designated at birth, there was a backlash within the trans community. Almost immediately, the commentary condemned her for contributing to her child's decision to kill himself. For refusing to accept and acknowledge the finality of his conclusion about his own gender.

But that was not a conclusion he had reached. It was not a conclusion that he had shared with his mother in the way of telling her, "I would like you now to call me by a different name, I would like you now to refer to me with female pronouns, she, her, and hers, instead of he, him, and his." He had changed his Facebook gender marker to "female." But he hadn't told the mother who had encouraged him to be who he was to treat him any differently.

All of this was there in the news articles I found at the time, I didn't need to hear it from Jamie herself. But what I did need to hear from her was that she knew that there was at least one trans person who'd read enough of the story to know that what she was being accused of by the trans community was completely off-base. Someone who would defend her against these allegations, because they were, to put it as mildly as possible, exceptionally counterproductive.

This is a parent who did exactly what anybody would wish that their parent would do. This is a parent who heard her child come to her and say, "I think my gender might be something else." And she said, "okay." When she found out Cameron was being bullied at school, she approached the school district about it, to make it stop. She gave her child the time, and the space, and the love that he needed to figure out his own answer. And it sounds like she was one of very few people who did that.

In the end, there weren't enough people giving Cameron that time and space, and also the love, the surety of acceptance, no matter what conclusion he reached. And when he looked out on a future like that, where so few people would accept him, where so few people would love him and see him as the person that he was, the person that he'd discovered he was, he couldn't bear the thought of it, and he ended his life.

When Caitlyn Jenner was publicly sorting out her own gender identity, in as much secrecy as one can have when they are constantly surrounded by cameras and rumors, there was a lot of confusion as a result of The Interview with Diane Sawyer that she gave while still identifying as Bruce, and asking to be referred to as male until further notice. Even though he'd expressed that he had always been a woman. This confusion is one of the reasons why I am doing what I'm doing, living as loudly and publicly as I can; to try to unconfuse all of this.

When my very good friend and fellow trans blogger, Ramona, sorted out her own gender, she wrestled for years with what it was, with what to call it, so that other people could know. So that she'd have an answer when she was asked, "what are your pronouns?" "What is your name?"

It's Match Day! Go #CrewSC! #BeMassive #ColumbusTilIDie #LickSaltLake

A photo posted by Ramona P. (@dksb17) on Jun 27, 2015 at 3:35pm PDT

When I discovered I was a girl, I came out to my very closest friends privately, one by one, in person, face-to-face. And almost nobody asked me if they should start using different pronouns, or if I had a different name that I wanted to be called by. But one of my friends, Joe (you might remember Joe from a previous post), asked me — after being almost completely ambivalent to my revelation of being the opposite gender, on the other end of the spectrum from what I'd just been assuming I was, and what everyone else was assuming I was, too — Joe asked me if he should refer to me by female pronouns.

He asked because we played League together a lot back then, and were usually using Skype or Curse Voice while we did. Sometimes strangers from the queue would join our voice chats. But he asked me that, he asked me what my pronouns were, essentially, though it wasn't quite in that perfect distilled language of the trans community. And no one close to me had asked me that.

So when Joe asked me what my pronouns were, I kind of stood there and blinked and felt uncomfortable for a few seconds, and said, "I don't know." And then I stood there and blinked and felt uncomfortable for a few more seconds, and said, "you know what, keep using the same name and pronouns for now, and when it starts to feel weird, I will tell you, I will ask you to change them." And he said, "okay."

And it was that easy. It was that easy because, even though I'm guessing that I was probably one of the first, if not the first, trans person Joe had ever had any real direct contact with in his life, he understood that I was going through some kind of process. That I wasn't coming to him, having reached a goal, saying, "look at this thing that I've done, look at this conclusion I've reached." He understood that I was coming to him saying, "look at this revelation I'm having. Lots of things are going to change." And he asked, "what?" and "when?"

He understood that it was my change, and my process, my transition. He understood that it was my conclusion to draw. So he didn't try to tell me what it was, or what it should be. He just asked. He asked, and whatever answer I had for him, he was fine with it.

When Caitlyn Jenner finally did do the big reveal, after the big interview with Diane Sawyer, she came out, the way that a lot of trans women kind of wish they could come out, minus the paparazzi everywhere for years beforehand, fueling tabloid rumors and bad Photoshopping. I imagine a lot of trans people wish they could just appear, one day, in a body and in a gender presentation that their entire culture accepts completely as being whatever their gender is.

I imagine that a lot of people, not just trans people, also wish that they were worth $100 million. That, to the extent that money can solve problems, they had more than enough to solve all of them. The reality is that very few trans people have access to the smallest percentage of those kinds of resources. The reality is that very few trans women can afford to be Republicans.

The reality is that most trans people go through this transformation over the course of several years in full view of everyone. While they keep going to school, to work, on errands, and back home to their families or friends or roommates. That every minute detail of every embarrassing procedure unfolds in slow-motion all day, every day. It means that the day before electrolysis, if she can even afford to have it done, the trans woman is out without makeup, showing 1/8" of stubble, because she needs to have enough exposed hair for the electrologist to be able to accomplish anything.

right side detail before #electrolysis

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on May 9, 2015 at 11:50am PDT

It means that her makeup might look reliably relentlessly awful while she tries to teach the hands of a 40-year-old man how to apply it. It means that she takes a cocktail of pills a couple times a day in front of whoever is around to see her do it. It means that she might constantly awkwardly reference her own gender, a pulsing drone to remind everyone what pronouns to use, delivered via such unsubtle phrases as "I need to use the little girls' room" literally every single time she has to pee. It means that her breasts will appear smaller or larger as often as she feels she has to stuff her bra more, or less, or not at all.

It means changing rules around the house, that her door that used to almost always be open to the will and traffic of a dozen cats would be now almost always shut and locked, because everyone else in the house was a guy. Because she now needed the privacy to change clothes. She now needed the privacy to observe the changes her body was undergoing with the influence of Hormone Replacement Therapy.

The point is that everyone's transition happens at different speeds, and everyone's transition ends up at a different point on this spectrum, and that the paths each person takes to get there are all as unique as they themselves. And if you can understand that, it becomes very easy to understand corollaries; that many trans women elect not to have vaginoplasty. That some come to terms with their penis, have reached a place in their own mind where it is not triggering for them, where it does not aggravate their dysphoria. That still others have the means, but feel the risk outweighs the reward. That most have no coverage, and lack the resources otherwise, to get the operation done in the first place, and so never even bother seriously debating the question anyway.

But whatever the reason, it's their decision because it's their gender. It's their choice of how to represent themselves in the ways that they suppose will win them the broadest correct interpretation of that gender. The physical changes are not so much for themselves personally and directly as they are for the broader culture that they live in to correctly interpret their gender, and to correctly understand their gender and engage with them appropriately for their gender in the context of their culture.

When I say that it's not specifically for themselves, I don't mean that it's not for them at all, because we internalize our culture. My ideas of what is feminine and what is beautiful are all determined by modern Western beauty standards, because that's what I've been surrounded by, that's what I've grown up with. I don't personally find body hair attractive. I've never found it attractive on anyone, of any gender. I'm going to great lengths to have most of my body hair permanently removed. I'm starting with my face, because that is one of the most common and visible culturally relevant gender markers.

A step I want to take beyond that, to have the leg hair permanently removed, for example, is a combination of my regard for bare, smooth legs as more feminine than not, and the fact that my skin tolerates all methods of hair removal very poorly. Shaving, depilatory creams, tweezing, sugaring, threading, and electrolysis. Waxing irritates my skin very badly, too. But only once a month. Only for a few days.

That's not just some arbitrary decision that I've made because I've just decided out of nowhere without any context that that expresses femininity. It's because my culture views that as a marker for femininity, and I've internalized that. So when I get it done permanently, and while I keep it up with waxing until then, I'm motivated by the culture that I've internalized, rather than truly by myself. It's so that when I look at myself, I see what I want our culture to see, so that it will understand me and interact with me in ways that are appropriate to my gender: as a more-feminine-than-not woman. Because that's who I am.

This past weekend, I went to my first Pride event, in Seattle. It was my first Pride event anywhere, my first Pride event of any kind. Kim (#girlfriend) was excited to take me, and I was excited to go with her. People kept asking me how many I'd been to, or if this was my first one, and I'd say, "this is my first one. When it was on last year, I didn't know any of it applied to me." Pride happens in June. I hadn't figured out that I was a girl until August. And while I had been supportive of LGBT concerns and problems, and fully on their side, I was also miserably depressed, and so the extent of my work as an ally was tabbing out of League every so often to Like a few pictures from the event.

#relaxitsjustlove #seattlepride2015

A photo posted by Kim (@kiminoa_seattle) on Jun 28, 2015 at 6:03pm PDT

When I went this year, my first time, something that really struck me was how completely on-alert everyone was to look out for each other. Everyone. I saw someone drop his phone, and I and maybe 15 people on either side of me in each direction shouted, "PHONE!!!" Before it hit the ground, this guy turned, and looked, and saw it land. He picked it up, and said "thanks!"

I saw a little girl running by the fountain slip and fall and cut her elbow and bang her head pretty good, and stand up and start crying. This guy in shorts, just shorts, near the fountain ran up to her and made sure she was steady on her feet. He had her direct him to her adult, and he stayed with her the whole way, telling them what had happened before taking off back to where he'd come from.

Early on during the event, during the parade portion, Kim and I were not feeling especially well, so we ducked away from the main parade route, and found somewhere to sit down and have some water and a bite to eat. We got out our phones and started scrolling through Facebook. One of the things that I saw was a post from Jamie, who had added me as a Facebook Friend when I'd first contacted her. It was a picture of Cameron.

Jamie posts pictures of Cameron fairly often. As I imagine anyone would who had lost their child so young, so suddenly, in such a horrific way, for such an awful reason. I know I would. To remember who they were, to remember how they were. I saw her comments elsewhere, that it was coming up on two months to the day from the day he'd died. And I realized that he would never go to a parade like this.

And that devastating sense of loss that had connected me to Cameron, the same way it had connected me to Leelah Alcorn and Taylor Alesana, was brought into really sharp relief. Part of what was so crushingly sad about these girls' deaths to me personally was that I thought that something that might have really helped them would have been to see a trans woman like me. My age. To know that there's a life after high school for girls like us. To know that there are ways to survive for girls like us. And to know from firsthand experience that there are entire major cities that will love girls like us. And I started crying, right there on the spot.

My First Pride came very late in life, because I did not know who I was. Cameron's First Pride never came. Because he never had the chance to figure out who he was.

NSFW

NO STOPPING FOR WATER.  None. C'est interdit.

So, I'd like to be able to talk about sexual things on this blog, through the lens of my own sexuality and thoughts on it. I've been debating how to go about this for some time. On the one hand, I'm extremely leery of being regarded as part of the "T-girl porn" culture, which is, I imagine, (prior to the whole Bruce Jenner media frenzy) one of the only ways in which many cisgender people have ever been exposed to the idea of a trans person. (In second place is The Silence of the Lambs, and don't even get me started on that.)

But on the other hand, when I have written about intimate events, actions, and thoughts, the responses I've gotten, most often from other trans women, have been resoundingly of gratitude and relief at the real reassurance that things that they had thought and felt were not things unique to them. That they weren't as alone as they'd previously believed, and that to feel the emotions they'd been feeling was not wrong or dirty. And in the end, I feel like almost anything I can do to help make the lives of other trans women even infinitesimally better or easier is going to be a thing I need to do if I am able. And I am able to write. Quite well, in fact.

I suppose that when this blog has been around for awhile, fingers crossed, it will become apparent that sex and gender, as topics, appear not terribly more frequently than they cross the minds of people in general, anyway. This should, I hope, contribute to my goal of sharing my life as fully and honestly as I can, to demonstrate how much more like everyone in the world I am, than unlike.

I will make every effort to appropriately tag posts that deal with sex and sexuality, or that show perhaps more of my body than is appropriate in some settings, as nsfw. But that is, really, more of an acknowledgement of the realities of our culture (that these topics, and images of the naked body, even in mundane and non-sexualized contexts, are literally "not safe for work") than any tacit agreement that shame and filthiness are intrinsic parts of sex or sexuality, or our bare bodies.

With all that said, my number one debate had been not so much about whether to write at all, but about tone; how to approach writing this way if I was going to indeed do it here, seriously, rather than in fragments on my tumblr. My first thought, to counteract the idea that there was anything pornographic about what I was sharing, was to use the driest, most clinical language possible. But sex is not really dry and clinical. We have to approach it that way to study it in any useful, quantifiable way, but that is not its nature.

On top of sex not really being a dry or emotionless topic, inherently, there's the fact that I do already have some idea how to talk about sexual things, because I often do this with my friends already. And we're casual about it. Nobody says "I stimulated him orally until he ejaculated into my mouth, at which point, I swallowed the semen." Right? Nobody's high-fiving you for that. We say, much as you probably say, "I blew him and swallowed his load." High five.

So, that's the tone you can expect from me when I'm writing about sex. It's not going to be overly (or overtly) sexual just for the sake of being sexual, but it is going to be casual, while remaining as descriptive and detailed as it needs to be to get the point across. The point of the text will never be to describe any particular event, but rather to describe enough of it to provide the full and necessary context to understand my conclusions about it. It would be the way I would say things to my friends, because really, that's what I'm hoping you will all be. And I'm hoping that my openness, as soon as I can manage to really get over myself and be as open as I'd like to be, will really help a lot of people feel more comfortable with their own sexuality. I'm sure I will start to get some unsavory attention for this, but I suppose I'll have to just deal with that when or if it happens.

Anyway, a couple of positive things happened for me in the shower just now. The first was just noticing a bare boob shadow for the first time, against the shower wall. I was like, “is that my shoulder? Noooo... Cooooolllll...” (I confirmed what it was, naturally, by cupping and lifting it. It was the left one, if that matters to you for any reason.)

The second (and far more impactful) was that I regarded my penis as feminine for the first time. It was purely subconscious, like my spontaneously regarding myself as beautiful (in a sexual context) when I’d been in the shower the other day. I immediately felt very similar sensations to that previous time — I at first felt very warm inside; happy, and pleased with myself and my body, as it is.

And then I felt a strong sense of unease.

It wasn’t quite so strong as the last time, but then, this was not a sexually charged moment. I don’t think I was even washing my penis, at the time. In any case, I didn't start crying, I just felt sort of gross. I am going to guess that this was a manifestation of cultural influence on my own self-perception. My unchecked thought was that my penis was feminine, which pleased me, because that is how I perceive myself; but my higher, culturally-influenced thought has always regarded any penis, automatically, as absolutely masculine. As literally representative of masculinity.

Ultimately, a lot of my own perception of my gender is tied very strongly to appearances, not just in the visual, but in the visceral aspects of creating those appearances. Which means that, since I will spend a great deal of my life wearing clothing, I need that clothing to be what I perceive as truly “feminine” clothing. (Realize that I am only speaking for myself, here. Whatever defines femininity to you personally is up to you, of course, as it is for me with my own body.)

And that means that I do still think that, even if I consider the possibility of a future where I do not dissociate as strongly from my penis as I do right now, I will end up having full SRS, and not just an orchiectomy. I’ve not touched it in months, aside from incidental contact; nothing sexual, at any rate. Not by choice or force of will, but because I rarely even register its existence anymore. This has been one of the most pleasing results of HRT.

I do still start crying a little bit sometimes, depending on my mood, when I see myself naked. Mostly because of the penis. Somewhat the facial hair and adam’s apple, but those can be addressed to some degree with shaving and makeup and lighting. But the penis is just... there. It’s this big, external reminder that my body isn’t what would really feel right to me. It’s a body part that ultimately defines what it means to be a man for a lot of people, and that is not an easy association to erase when the vast majority of one's entire culture is bent on reinforcing it.

And that is the real issue. I've been wrestling very much recently with how far to transition. My first thought, on realizing I'd misunderstood my gender for my entire life, was that I wanted a completely female body, to the greatest extent possible. And at the time, that meant vagina, breasts, hips, slimmer natural waist, no facial hair, no adam's apple, fundamental vocal frequencies about an octave higher, and certainly not a penis or anything associated with it. The reason that I wanted this was for comfort. To feel right in my own body, to feel at home, and not like I'm stuck in a maze that I cannot understand any more than I can escape.

But I have since realized that that sense of comfort does not really come from inside me. It lives inside me now, but it came from my environment. It was cultural. This is the confusing part about it, for a lot of cisgender people, I think. Passing can be about many things. It's often about avoiding discrimination and harassment and violence. Sometimes even death.

At its core, for me, passing is about personal comfort, and that is informed by our culturally-defined perceptions of gender. When I am out in public, passing is to some degree about what everyone else sees. But when I am alone, and, truly, all the rest of the time, too, passing is not about what everyone else sees, it's about reacting to the judgments that everyone else makes and acts on. And I carry those with me everywhere. I imagine everyone does.

The thing that I've realized, thanks to discovering Laura Jane Grace, is that we can change those cultural definitions. And to some extent, this is already happening. Everything I am doing is geared towards doing that, if you really examine what I'm trying to accomplish.

I spent a few days really agonizing over what to do about my voice. I felt such a tremendous sense of obligation to not change it. Because representation is so, so, so incredibly important. But then I acknowledged that I'm already greatly shaped by the cultural definitions I'd developed and carried over the course of nearly 40 years. I recognized that to not get VFS, possibly making my own life more unpleasant than it needs to be, would be martyring myself to some degree. And I concluded that that isn't necessary.

Where that's left me in regards to transition broadly is not very different a place than I was before, but with a very different mood. Previously, I had a plan, and I was very driven in moving it forward and sticking to it religiously. Now, I have a rough outline, an order of operations (haha), and the actual plan part of my plan is to just see how I feel when I reach the point where I have the resources to actually take the next step. Whatever that may be.

Feelings Are the Best

I know you’ll probably think that’s sarcasm, but it’s not.

Have you ever had your heart, like... not broken, but... like, you saw it roll off the edge of a table or something, right as it went over the edge, and there was nothing you could do to stop it, and now it's got a little crack? And you're just like, "oh. Well."

Captain America was flirting with me last night on Ok Cupid. It was a really light and pleasant conversation. He obviously didn’t really understand trans women or trans issues very well, but he seemed to be genuinely making an effort, and not fetishizing. He behaved as if he were honestly open to challenging his core beliefs, and revising them as appropriate. I felt like he was flirting with me as a human woman, and not as a trans girl like the ones from his favorite porn, or whatever the hell it is that I get much more often.

I had some trouble sleeping, so I allowed myself to imagine him in bed with me (which, by the way, is a terrible idea). Mostly just lying there in his arms. Some other stuff, too, but mostly that. And I got to kind of air some of my fears in a safe and vacant space, and just sort of enjoy that warm feeling you get when you immediately like someone on several levels, and you know that they feel that way about you, too.

I woke up stupidly early this morning, and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I went to see if he’d sent me any notes. And he hadn't.

But he had deleted or suspended his account.

So, to recap (and expand), this was my journey:

1.     he’s kind of cute
2.     he’s kind of a tool
3.     okay he’s trying
4.     he really is kind of cute tho
5.     oh my god that is adorable
6.     ok here are some things i am afraid of
7.     yes thank you
8.     goodnight
9.     if you’re still up, i can’t sleep for some reason
10.     this feels so nice
11.     oh

And I got upset. I mean, I got really upset. I was sitting here crying, feeling like an idiot for ever even responding to him in the first place, trying to imagine what possible scenarios could result in a man who had just been very contentedly flirting with me literally four hours earlier suspending or deleting his account before I woke up the next day. Like... I mean, he said he worked on a tugboat. Who the fuck works on a tugboat? God, I’m such an idiot, sometimes.

I challenged a lot of this stuff. Internally, I mean. You know, like, “no, I’m not an idiot, I just opened myself up and then he disappeared, and that’ll probably happen again, but I can’t become too afraid of the possibility of this kind of pain to keep being open.” Anything that I had been automatically concluding was bad about me, or my fault, I was able to challenge and basically discard. And I gradually stopped crying.

So now, I’m just kind of like:  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I had been upset. I had been really very upset. I felt the feels. And then they left. And now I’m basically fine again. And it’s that easy.

I spent so long avoiding feelings at all. I literally spent decades experiencing no emotion because I had become so afraid of how painful it was. My favorite therapist used to ask me, at the start of every appointment, "how do you feel?" and I would answer, "I don't know." But one day, maybe six months along, I said, "sad," and he said, "good! That means you're starting to experience emotion again." I was not pleased.

But now that I’ve discovered who I really am, I’ve also started to feel. Everything. Completely. All the time. And I love it. All of it. Even the bad. It’s so much simpler and cleaner this way. It feels natural. It feels right. It feels like being alive. And now, instead of carrying around some nameless distress that I can’t put my finger on for the rest of the day or the week or whatever, I’m just barely annoyed.

Feel your feels, people. Just... fuckin' feel 'em, it's so much better, I promise.

Cellos for Violins

One of the only things I liked about The Jason Construct was his voice.  It wasn't always that way.  I always wanted to be a good singer, and I always wished I was, but I didn't get any real encouragement, and friends would usually take cracks at my singing voice, so I did it less and less.  Even when I took my very first demos to a real studio to get mixed and treated by a real audio engineer, the guy said my songs sounded good, but that I needed to get a new singer.  And he wasn't even trying to be a dick, he was just being an objective professional.  (Fun story: I ran into him again about 20 years later, when I went to my school's open house to find out more about it.  He's an instructor here for audio, and used to head the department.)

In a way, he wasn't wrong.  I did need a new singer.  I needed the new singer that I became after I started learning how to actually sing, instead of just doing it and hoping for the best.  It started with a book: Set Your Voice Free, by Roger Love, a "vocal coach to the stars" kind of guy who had coached the likes of Billy Corgan and Michael Jackson.  The book came with a CD, and I was able to do exercises as if guided by a live coach, sort of.

I made noticeable and excellent progress with my voice.  The difference is hugely apparent when you compare an older song like one big walking, which predates my exposure to any vocal training of any kind, to i've lived too long, or three days in a hospital, both of which I wrote and recorded after working with the book.  The first song is a bit pitchy, definitely screamy, not inherently unappealing, but definitely of a garage aesthetic.  If the sound of a clearly untrained singer wailing over washed-out guitars with a high noise floor appeals to you, then it's a shame we didn't know each other back then.  In the second two, it's clear that someone has given me a stern finger-wagging about proper breathing, and there's the beginnings of an understanding of middle voice.  It's all much stronger, purer, steadier... less pitchy until I get to the very highest chest voice notes when I'm belting.

By the time we get to more recent recordings like resection, which follow two quarters of vocal coaching with a retired professional touring opera singer who had over 30 years of experience, an even bigger improvement is heard.  I have more confidence, so any shakiness in delivery can be attributed to the emotive performance, not incapacity to actually hold a note.  It becomes a deliberate choice to introduce it (or allow it to be introduced, more accurately) rather than just a quirk of this performer.  Harmonies beyond the simplest arrangements are still magical and confusing to me, though.  I have been known to drift from track to track, and stumble my way through multiple keys on my way.

But then I had my gender revelation.  And I felt so incredibly, indescribably happy.

One of the first things to really bring any kind of melancholy back into my head was realizing that part of why my voice had always bothered me and seemed inadequate was that it was a male-typical voice.  I mean.  Testosterone will do that.  Usually.  Anyway, in sort of having become accustomed to my depressive state, I had started to cling to my voice as the one really redeeming quality about me.

I've always loved the sound of the cello.  I can't even remember the first time I heard one.  I can't remember not knowing and loving that sound.  One of the most effective ways for me to try to come to terms with the placement of my chest voice range (about an octave lower than I would feel more natural in) was to tell myself that I was more like a cello, which I adore, than a violin, which I could kind of take or leave.

And then I realized who I was, and without really thinking about it too consciously, I stopped singing.  I had gone from constant singing anytime I drove anywhere by myself to sort of humming along in falsetto, maybe.  I had gone from bringing my guitar to school and just breaking it out and playing little sets wherever I was, to barely even touching my guitar.

Part of this had to do with writing.  A quick pass over my earlier lyrical work reveals a pretty clear and serious trend.  Everything I wrote was rooted in self-hatred.  I had an endless void of it to draw from, and I wrote pretty prodigiously.  The works that are "complete" enough to even share on the web site make up probably less than half of all material I've actually produced.  The rest is scattered in 20-second clips on various drives, ideas for later, along with scraps of lyrics in tiny text files with names that make no sense to me until I open them, and remember how that particular play on words worked.

But suddenly, not only did I not hate myself anymore, I loved myself.  I liked myself, on top of that.  I would still hear music, but not as often, and not the same kind.  I had stopped hearing lyrics entirely.  My need to share information about myself was channeled elsewhere.  I revamped my tumblr, turning it from another run-of-the-mill League of Legends blog into a much more fashion-oriented blog, with much more feminism than I had previously reblogged, as well as shared pictures from my Instagram.  The one constant between the two styles was cats.  Lots and lots of cats.  Okay, and owls.  But those are really just flying cats, and you will never convince me otherwise.

Another part of why I had stopped writing, never mind that nothing was really coming to me anymore, was that I felt very acutely how wrong my voice was for me.  I wrestled with how to solve that problem for awhile.  My preferred course for awhile has been to try to acquire or save up enough money to get Voice Feminization Surgery (VFS).  Yes, that is a thing.  I had seen some videos, patient testimonials, from a place called Yeson Voice Center.  Videos like this one:

This same bit of text was used when I first started going to speech pathology appointments at the VA hospital.  It's phonemically balanced, so it provides a good "drone" to get a baseline on someone's vocal properties.

Speaking of speech pathology, that's another possible "solution."  I never liked the idea of trying to change my natural vocal habits, because it feels too much like an act.  I want to be able to just relax and be myself, not worry about whether I managed to convince enough people that my voice was a cis woman's voice.  I've noticed that in interactions with strangers that are going to be very brief, such as with a bus driver (usually), I will pitch up, and try to alter timbre as much as possible, too.  Which, you would think, I would consider to be putting on an act.  But it's so automatic that I don't think of it that way.  But with friends, or on dates, or for more extended interactions, I just relax and talk.

A long time ago, I fell absolutely in love with a band called Crumb.  I used to frequent Moby Disc, when I lived in Los Angeles.  I would scour the dollar bins, and try to find cool, edgy, unknown bands.  Most of them were trash, to be honest.  But a few of them were just.  Fucking.  Amazing.

Crumb was one of those bands.  I started going to every Moby Disc location I could find, so I could rifle their dollar bins, and get every copy of Romance is a Slow Dance, to give away to anyone I thought was worthy of it.  Not long after that, Seconds Minutes Hours came out, and I happily paid full price for it.

Years later, I started looking for their work again, because my copies had been lost when our storage locker had been robbed, along with all the other CDs I owned, basically.  And I thought that Crumb had put out more records, at first, but a closer look showed that it was a different band called Crumb, and still more research showed that my beloved band called Crumb had broken up after their second album.  But, I did finally find some old MP3 rips of those albums that had managed to survive, and I started listening to them again.

And somehow, I found good-Crumb lead singer Robby Cronholm on Twitter.  And I wrote him a note kind of telling him about how I'd found his band way back when, but didn't know they had broken up, but that I found his new band while I had been looking for his old one.  I told him that I was glad to know that he was still making music, and that I looked forward to hearing more.  I asked him if he'd listen to some of my music, if he wasn't too busy, and let me know what he thought, because I really respected him as a songwriter, as a singer, as a musician.

And he wrote back.

This blew my fucking mind, at the time.  This guy, to me, was really basically in the same league as Billy Corgan or Morrissey.  Really, I felt very much as if either of those guys had written me back.  I would listen to Crumb, then some Smashing Pumpkins, Morrissey, back to Crumb... it was all professional-quality music with high production values, excellent songcraft, and very, very skilled performance.  So, I told him that.

And he wrote back again, gushing that anyone would ever compare him to Morrissey, because Moz is one of his main influences, and a major idol for him.  (I will finally confess, here, for the first and last time, that I already knew that before I wrote him and told him that, because I had read it somewhere else.  But it was still true.  Sorry, Robby.  Everything you know is a lie.)

We chatted on and off for awhile, but at one point, he sent me a note asking how I was doing, and I didn't see it for, oh, I don't know, maybe three years?  To be fair, it was right around the time Jenn and I had gotten evicted, and were homeless for a fair time, without the best and most constant access to the internet.  The first time I saw that note was in September of last year, about a month and a half after I had realized who I was.

So, I told him everything.  And, to be honest, I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I was optimistic.  He'd been such an absolute sweetheart before, taking time out of a busy schedule to listen to some random schlep's music and tell them that he thought it was really good, and actually make specific comments about specific songs by name... it felt like he really cared about other people and was a really great guy.  But some really great guys have one big problem, and it's hating trans girls.

Robby Cronholm is absolutely not one of those guys.

Seriously, what an absolute sweetheart.

Anyway, part of this went over my head at the time.  I didn't know the name Laura Jane Grace.  And as this was while I was pounding my way through 21-credit quarters at school, I didn't really give any of this much thought.  Partially, I realized later, because I didn't even understand his sentence because of the probable autocorrect error, "translation" for "transition."

Very recently, I saw some interviews with Laura Jane, and some performances, and I thought... wait a second... her voice is like mine.

This gets into everything I was talking about in my last post.  I started to think that maybe the reason I felt like my voice was wrong for who I really am was that I was buying into a variation on the myth that femininity is only and absolutely defined by certain sizes, textures, and colors of things.  This is really not that different from how most girls feel every day about their entire body, because our media is constantly telling girls that their bodies are okay, I guess... but they could be so much better, if only they bought this and used that.

I'm telling my story because I don't want the next trans girl like me, who figures out, just shy of her 40th fucking birthday, that she's been someone else all along, to feel like there's nobody else out there like her.

So now, I don't know.  I don't know what to do about my voice.  Before making the whole Laura Jane connection in the first place, I had started singing again, but only in private, because I figured that if I kept up on good vocal health and strengthening/toning techniques, I would recover much more quickly from surgery later.  This was also the number one reason I agreed to try the voice feminization program at the VA hospital, with the speech pathologists.

Not long ago, I was in a Live Sound II class, and we needed a singer.  So, I got up there and sang.  I didn't want to, but I felt like I was the best qualified among those there by a fair margin, even as out-of-practice and self-conscious as I was.  I suppose it's sort of ironic that when everything else flipped in my head, the one previous positive, my own view of my own voice, became really one of the only big negatives.

Later on, that instructor approached me outside of class about collaborating musically.  He has a degree in music composition from Cornish, and generally knows what he's on about.  He's also the drummer who had complimented me at the Up All Night event (in the paragraph by my selfie in the pink dress).  I obviously said yes.

That, then, combined with having later found out about Laura Jane Grace, and hearing her sing and speak with confidence, had left me debating just how necessary VFS was, and how good it would be.  Not just for me, but for everyone.  VFS is not cheap.  It has risks.  And even if I get my voice pitched where I want it to naturally sit, with the right harmonics, it may impact how well I can sing. There's even a slim chance that something could go wrong, and I could lose my voice entirely, permanently.

Oh, or die.  I mean, it is a major surgery with general anesthesia.

When I first realized I was a girl, I considered all of that, and determined that I'd rather try to get a voice that fit my self-understanding, even if it meant I could possibly never sing well again.  Even if it meant I might not be able to even sing or speak at all again.  Even if it meant I might die. That was a risk I was willing to take, rather than live with this voice.  But why?

Because there's no representation.  There are no girls out there like me, being shown in a positive light, speaking with their deeper voices.  Girls who have cellos for violins.

But now that I've seen some representation, and I look at everything I say I'm trying to accomplish here, I feel like I almost have a responsibility to NOT get VFS.  To keep carrying out my mission of living out loud as much as I can, of promoting myself into every possible space, of becoming everyone's trans neighbor that they know and love, or at least don't hate.  To show everyone that it's okay to have a voice like this and be a girl, because I'm a girl, and I have a voice like this, and look at me, out there, living life.

While I was mulling all of this over, I messaged a friend that I met through school, another Cornish grad who works professionally now as a musician in Seattle.  I asked him about an event going on tomorrow, downtown, and we started talking about similar concepts for the future.  I mentioned wanting to cover a whole Radiohead album, because Thom Yorke is an absolute genius, and I love, love, love singing along with him.  My friend, Tristan, said he'd always wanted to cover The Cranberries' first album.

It wasn't long before he asked me to send him a demo.  I froze.  I was terrified.  But I mean, come on.  I had literally just told him that I could do this.  And then he asked, and I was like, Jesus Christ, are you serious?  He said, "send me a video of you singing dreams, maybe just the vocal thing after the first chorus when it changes keys."  In case you don't remember, he's talking about this part, which I'd completely forgotten about when I told him I could probably sing it.

Merde.

I listened to it through a few times to try to remember how it went, the pacing and cadence, the breaks in and out of falsetto.  I had no real warm-ups.  I had not really been doing anything for my vocal health or readiness all day besides drinking my requisite daily fuckton of water, and sitting here in relative silence.  But then I went ahead and tried anyway.

I still can't believe I sent this to him.  In my goddamn pajamas, no shave, no makeup, and no backing music.  Solo vocal covers of existing songs that have supporting instrumentation always sound weird as shit to me.  Then I sat around for a few minutes trying to pre-emptively console myself.  This guy had just graduated Cornish, which has two very prestigious voice programs; one for classical, and one for jazz.  And he had literally just said that he needed "a fucking good singer" to pull this off.  And I briefly was a fucking good singer, I thought.  For a guy.  When I was in practice.

But I'm no Dolores O'Riordan.  Just like I'm no Kimbra, I'm no Imogen Heap... none of the artists I feel like I ought to sound like, in my own head.

Anyway, he watched the video, and it sounds like he wants to put it together with me and see if we can't pull it off.

So, for now.  Um.  I guess I'll start trying to sing more, to sing like I used to.  More seriously, with warm-ups.  With less shame about the fact that I sound, to myself, like a guy.  I sound like Jason.  But maybe that's not true.  Maybe Jason just always sounded like Sera.

What Even Are We?

I have had.  A pretty emotional couple of days, here.  I still have so much to backfill on writing about, I need to actually write down some of the events and the general dates, so I can remember to write about them in the coming days.  But sometimes, a number of events collide and draw my attention to that point of intersection between them.  Today's collision occurred at "what even are we?"

Because I thought I knew what I was.  I'm a trans woman!  So, I was designated male at birth, but that was wrong, because I actually identify as female.  One of the only two possible choices, as far as most people in Western cultures understand, so.  Great!  That's me, all sewn up.  But if I say I'm trans, and Quinn says he's trans, but his experience is not mine, is one of us more trans than the other?  Or less?  Am I better at being trans than him?  Very much like the whole TERF War thing, the answer is, "no."  As he says, "not all trans narratives and experiences are the same."

He describes himself as nonbinary, but uses he/him pronouns. If nothing else, that, right there, confuses the shit out of me.  I'm not here to challenge him, or try to say that he's wrong.  Not at all.  Here, too, I recognize that the problem is not his gender identity or expression.  It's my (in)capacity to understand it.  My reaction isn't good, because it's a confused one.  But it's not bad, because it's not an angry or fearful or violent one.

Much worse than that, though, is how the general population, who is, by and large, cisgender, sees us.  Here is a tasteful example of the kinds of messages a trans woman can expect to get when she is dating. Not only does this guy, I imagine, have no real idea how to approach women in general, he has not even the slightest clue what he's on about when he wants to approach a trans woman.  I mean, he literally doesn't even know how to refer to me.  Predictably, when called on it, he gets defensive.

People can get defensive when they feel like they've done nothing wrong, and are being attacked for it.  Even if, when called on the wrong thing that they've done, they start to see how and why it's wrong; because of the nature of the dialogue, and the subject, the conversation is adversarial.  And I'm disappointed in myself for going so heavily on the offensive that there was no room for him to actually realize how painful it is to be treated like that constantly, to connect and identify with that, and to ask why things are like that.  To ask how he can help.

But this guy probably just legitimately has no idea at all that trans women struggle.  That we're not rare, beautiful, exotic birds, which, maybe, if one is very lucky, can be caught or tamed or touched just once in a lifetime.  That we're people.  That, because we're not the norm, we're punished in a variety of ways.  Among them, being murdered without repercussion because someone basically didn't like that we were trans.  It's like some guy you've never met before just sidling up to you while you're caught in a firefight in a warzone, while all your people are dead or dying around you, asking if you wanna go the mall later and maybe get some Indian from the food court.  How out of touch can someone be?

To be fair, a large part of why I blew up on him had very little to do with him.  Ordinarily, given our match/enemy numbers, I would've just ignored the message, or maybe put it up on my tumblr, but without any response.  But I'd just been through about an hour-long emotional barfnado which was chiefly characterized by me shaking, with tears in my eyes, while trying to write a response to a post I found from another trans woman.  I was very upset.

I had initially planned to repurpose a lot of what I said there into a standalone text post here.  But then I thought, if I rearrange my portion for clarity, the sense of my struggle to even articulate it would be lost.  So would the frustration of that, of writing to someone to communicate with them, but being unable to find the words. That also is where the tone lies, I think.  It reads less like expository, and more like a scene.  There's a lot of passion to it, and a lot of pain, in both parts.  I had also spent most of that hour, ultimately, getting to the point that her voice mattered, and that we need her to keep using it, so I thought it would be extra hypocritical if I turned around and just summarized her post to set mine up, or something.

It's not just that the different viewpoints matter.  It's that there are different viewpoints at all, and that they all matter.  The trans story in the mass media right now is very rudimentary.  It's like watching a JPG load over dial-up.

Oh, right, I turned 40 yesterday.

Anyway.  Right now, "transgender," in the mainstream media, means, what.  Bruce Jenner?  Chaz Bono? Laverne Cox?  Lana Wachowski?  Their stories are their stories, so they have that inherent value.  I'm not going to try to convince anyone that my story is more important than any of theirs, or more necessary.  But I will argue that it is as least as important as theirs, and at least as necessary.  Because the trans experience is only very rarely defined by wealthy celebrities.

If you're a black male, which celebrity defines you?  Denzel Washington?  Laurence Fishburne?  Maybe someone younger.  Jaden Smith?  But if you're a black male in America, your experience is almost certainly light years away from that.  It is, depressingly, probably quite a lot closer to Eric Garner's.  Or Trayvon Martin's.  Or Jonathan Ferrell's.

My experience as a trans woman is not even remotely close to the celebrity trans experience.  Most of us don't have the resources for clinically proven effective treatments for our gender dysphoria.  Some, like Zaira Quispe, try dangerous "back alley" measures.  Some, like Leelah Alcorn, kill themselves.  Far too many, like Penny Proud, are murdered.  Stories like Legacy's on tumblr are commonplace.

Celebrity stories are the book jacket.  They're the synopsis on the inside flap.  They're still people.  But so are we.  They still matter.  But so do we.  There are so many more stories, and without them, the trans experience is not defined.  It can barely even be understood.  It's a couple of big blocks of different colors that might be trying to represent a cow, or maybe an airplane, or love.  Who can even tell?  We need more blocks, higher resolution.  We need the rest of the picture to load.  We need more pages.  We need more stories.  And we need them to be heard.

Panicked Honk

What a whirlwind the last few days have been.  The common threads tying them all together have been kindness, beauty, and generosity.  I hit a milestone of six months being out in public as myself, seven months since realizing who that person was in the first place, and I went ahead and did a look back at days 1, 90, and 180.  Comparing pictures from 9/12 and 10/12 of 2014, and 3/12 of 2015, I felt like I was looking at someone's 1 week/3 month/6 month puppy photos.

September 12, 2014, December 12, 2014, and March 12, 2015; one, four, and seven months to the day from my first realization that I'm a #girl. From one #selfie to the next, I don't feel like I look that different, but I was struck by the obvious leaps in physical #confidence, especially between the first two. The girl on the left looks like a newborn fawn. The girl on the right looks like she's about to go unintentionally break some hearts. #trans #transgender #transsexual #transgirl #transwoman

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Mar 25, 2015 at 2:56pm PDT

I knew I would look different, but I was not ready for how different.  I had not realized how much my body language had shifted, or what sort of energy I was projecting then and now.  Back when I started going out into the world as Sera, I was clearly very happy, and there's a sort of innocent beauty to that, but I definitely looked (and felt) like a newborn deer.

By the second picture, after only three months, there's a confidence, even as my expression seems to be focused on possible problems with the outfit I'd thrown together that day.  There's a sense of self-assurance, a sense that, even if I don't put together a decent look, I'll be able to figure out specifically why it didn't work, and come up with something more interesting the next day.  This looks like a confident girl, but a girl who is on some level not quite a girl, someone who is studying very intently what "being a girl" means to her, so she can live true to that.

But, by the third picture, a real relaxed and natural femininity is coming through, and, in a way, that makes it the most mundane picture of the triptych.  It's not a trans girl, figuring out her girl-ness, experimenting.  It's just a girl, who threw on a dress and some cute tights, and took a quick picture before heading out for the day.  The beauty is in the mundanity.  The questions it evokes are not "what is gender?" or "was that really born a boy?" but "where'd she get that dress?" or "I wonder what she's up to tonight?"

It was a nice lift to my confidence as I headed into the final few days of the quarter.  During those final few days, we had professional musicians in to play our pieces from Music Theory II.  A cellist and a pianist were tasked with cold-reading about 15 pieces by 15 composers, and playing through them as best they could.  When they started playing mine, I was overcome, and started crying.  I knew the notes, I'd written them.  I'd heard it in MIDI through Sibelius.  But I wasn't ready for how beautiful it would sound with the live cello and piano.  Even when I watched the video of it later, showing it to Kat, I started to tear up at the beginning.  It was just so beautiful.

In the ensuing days, I have had my entire weekend through today saved by someone covering the cost of my weed vape (freeing up money for me to do things like eat, and have gas in the car, while also having my pain management), I have had my closet door fixed and dinner bought (and brought to me!) by a different friend, I have had Alex bring me home 90% cacao dark chocolate, and double dark chocolate ice cream when I was going mad with my first actual true craving for anything in my life, and I have had Shayla buy me a delicious chicken mole lunch before spending the afternoon hanging out with me and going thrifting for a little while.  I have had a random antiques shop keeper give me a little bunny bank, from the '70s, the exact kind I had as a kid, and had forgotten about until I saw it at that moment in his store.

HE GAVE ME THE #BUNNY #BANK OMG I HAD ONE AS A KID AAAAAAAAHHHHHH

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Mar 27, 2015 at 7:12pm PDT

You may look that over and think, okay, big deal, a few people bought some things for you, or gave some things to you.  And that's technically true.  But the touching thing about all of them, to me, was that they showed some consideration for me, and some knowledge of who I am, along with a kind or loving gesture of generosity.

With the weed vape, this person had an opportunity to pick one up at a great price.  They thought, "I don't use these, but I know someone who does, and I bet she'd really like this," so they got it for me.  They thought about me, without any real substantial interaction with me yet, ever, and they got me this gift.  And, quite randomly, it happened to not only be a thing that I do in fact really like, but also a thing that saved my weekend and any hope of my being social through it.  More than anything else, though, I am really just so incredibly touched that they thought of me.  I did not think that I figured that high in their mind.

With the bunny bank, I was wandering around in downtown Snohomish, which is a very, very small town, making its downtown only slightly larger than a very upscale living room.  I was waiting for Kat to get home, because we were going to have a sleepover.  I didn't want to go eat, because I was hoping she'd get home soon enough that we could go grab dinner together (with money that had been released by the gift of the weed vape).

No but really, do you guys know who this is? This is Kat, one of my very very best #friends. She is the one I confided in about (what I thought were) cross-dressing fantasies and the like, and she was supportive and encouraging 10,000%. She bought me my wedges, my first pair of women's shoes, the thing that was key in my revelation, and the dam breaking open in my own psyche. Kat literally saved my life. #trans #mtf #transgender #transsexual #transgirl #transwoman #girls #besties #selfie

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Mar 29, 2015 at 5:48am PDT

So, basically, that left antique shops.  I was down for that.  Unfortunately, they were all closed.  Well, almost all of them.  One was open, and had an older gentleman sitting inside it near the front, going over some paperwork.  We got to talking, and he mentioned he has a daughter my age, and how he, like me, was a veteran.  He was very friendly and kind, and it was nice to just talk with some stranger somewhere without the topic going straight to my gender.  I told him I'd be back the following week, with Jenn, to buy two of the bunny banks, and he jotted down his number and said I should call ahead to make sure he was open, because he keeps whatever hours he feels like.  How small-town is that?

After I'd thanked him and left, I wandered around for a bit longer, and then returned to my car to warm up and grab my jacket.  I got ahold of Kat, and she made it plain she would not be back any time soon, so I had to go do something about dinner.  I'd also built up a pretty serious need to pee.  I wandered back into town, but I was getting this look from one guy in particular, outside a biker bar, that I could not read at all.  Usually, I can tell if the look is generally positive, neutral, or negative, but I could not read this guy even a little bit, and that was far creepier than it would have been if I had just gotten a negative vibe off of him.

I found myself back in the antiques shop, asking Michael, the owner, where I could safely go to get food and a bathroom in town here.  I related the thing about the guy whose gaze I could not decipher, and how it was kind of freaking me out.  He asked which bathroom I use, and I said, "I use the women's bathroom."  He told me that normally he doesn't offer, but since I was a veteran and all, I could use his restroom, at the rear of the shop.

When I came back out, he was talking about the place across the street for food.  I told him I wanted a basket of chicken strips and fries, and that that was basically all I'd wanted for about a week.  He said he wasn't sure if they had that, but that they definitely had fish 'n' chips (which I said I'd settle for), and that he knew the staff there, and they were all good people.  He told me to say hi to Lisa for him.  So, off I went.

#fried #chicken #strips and #fries ❤

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Mar 27, 2015 at 7:32pm PDT

He was right.  All the staff were very friendly, and nobody gave me any funny looks.  They let me order off of the kids' menu (since I am tiny and do not eat much), and I got to finally enjoy my greasy basket of chicken strips and french fries.  Michael even showed up to sit with me for a bit, saying he had had it with his taxes, and what was the point of being one's own boss, anyway, if he couldn't just close up shop and go eat when he felt like it?

Before leaving, myself (when Kat told me she was just about home), I thanked him for coming to sit by me.  Much like I talked about in a previous post, when cis people sit with me out in public, and just spend time with me like they would with anyone else, it shows the whole world how not big a deal my being trans is.  I told him as much, and he told me one last time that I was very brave, and that it was inspiring to see, or something along those lines.

With the chocolate, that is kind of Alex being Alex, but usually when I offer to pay, he tells me how much it was, and I give him that money.  This time, he told me the price, but then quickly added that I shouldn't worry about it.  Jackson, the guy who came to fix my closet door, was the same way.  I asked him how much the fast food was, and how much the door parts were, and he said he'd gotten it, and for me to not worry about it.  People just coming around and taking care of me.  And it feels so nice.

It also feels nice to not question it, to not sit here and be like, "what do they want from me?" or "what did they do?"  To just accept that I'm kind and fun and cute and whatever else, and people like being around me and seeing me smile.  There are people like that in your life, too, who want to just be around you and see you smile.  You might not know who they are, but they're there.

On top of all that, it's a beautiful sunny day, and it's Trans Day of Visibility, so I am just being flooded with images of all the variety and wonder the world has to offer.  I'm so overwhelmed by it all that I honestly think I'm making less and less sense with every word.  So, I'll leave you with this:

When you find yourself, celebrate.  Everyone will want to join in.  Let them.