Man-face

Let me preface this by saying that if you’re planning on sending someone fan mail or an ask telling them that they have masculine facial features, you should probably make sure they’ll take that as a compliment, first.  You know, if you see a trans guy (or a cis guy for that matter) saying, “I just feel like I look really girly all the time,” that is the perfect time to write and say, “you have really masculine facial features!”  There is really probably no time that that will ever be a thing I would be happy to get from someone on tumblr.  Or anywhere else, for that matter.  Believe me, every trans girl knows exactly how well she passes (or doesn’t), and she also knows, in great detail, why.

SO, with that out of the way, I will now tell an epic tale that spans the weekend.  Some of you may read this and vilify me, and I suppose if that happens, it happens, but I would ask that you consider the fact that I am taking a look at a lot of reflection, and working through my own feelings and thoughts and conclusions about a lot of things right here, in what is essentially a public forum.  I cannot really take anything back, but, being human, I do reserve the right to change my mind after further thought or discussion, and I hope that you will all allow me that, at least.  I know that I’m not perfect.  This is me stumbling towards perfect, towards the end of the rainbow.

On Friday morning, when I got to the VA hospital, I checked in and then rushed to the restroom, like usual.  As I was washing my hands, I looked up and caught a glimpse of my face, and it just looked super masculine to me.  I don’t know why, exactly.  I talked to a few friends about it.

Jenn pointed out that maybe my jawline hardened when I was tired or stressed, but then revised that to say that when she sees me with stressed or unhappy faces, she sees Jason.  Which made me laugh, quite hard, and I took pictures to show her.  And she said, “there, see?  Sera.”

It was nice.  I recognized, on some level, that my actual face and appearance had probably not changed much from the previous day, and that it was much more reasonable to conclude that I was just having a Bad Self-perception Day, and not a Man-face Day.

After that, I had a few other interactions that gave me pause.  The first was with two other trans women in the speech pathology Voice Feminization Program group.  Both were older than me, by about 25 years for one, and what had to be more than that for the other.  Zelda looked like she had started to transition very very late in life, and had a lot of physical hallmarks of masculinity, such as very broad shoulders and a generally inverted-triangle physique.  She also, like the rest of us in the group, didn’t sound particularly feminine when she started talking.

I cannot remember the other woman’s name.  She was old enough that most of the gendered physical markers were obscured, and it was not until she started talking that it was very obvious that she was trans.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about these two women.  Zelda, in particular, was extremely chatty, enough that it was a constant disruption to even our very tiny group of three.  I found her very annoying, but I wasn’t quite sure why.  I found the older woman unsettling, and I wasn’t quite sure why.

Not long after the group ended, I thought about it some more, and concluded that it must have to do with their capability to pass.  Or not.  And I realized that, for myself, I identify with the binary gender framework.  For me, having to describe myself as basically male or basically female works, because I see myself as basically female.

I am caught in this position where I feel like my capacity to help other people understand just how damaging the binary can be is diminished, because, while I am on the opposite side from where people might try to put me, I do still inherently see myself as one side of that yin-yang.  Mostly feminine, tiny dot of masculinity, and no other terms necessary to describe me.

This gets into part of why I feel particularly fortunate in many aspects of my own transition.  For example, I have never had very broad shoulders or an otherwise obviously masculine body.  It’s always been pretty androgynous, and, now that I’m on HRT, it is starting to become more and more apparently feminine.  I can see, under the shadow of all the facial hair that I still have, how my face will look when it’s all gone, and has been gone for months, long enough for the skin to return to its normal color and texture.  I can photoshop out my adam’s apple in my mind.  I have a pretty good idea what I will look like after my surgeries and treatments are all done, and I am looking forward to getting my body there.

Passing matters to me.  It doesn’t matter so much for safety, although that’s a concern; it matters because so much of what is left of my gender dysphoria in terms what triggers I experience has to do with the disconnect not between my own body and mind, but between my understanding of society’s perception of me (a not-man that thinks it is a woman), and my own perception of myself (a woman who is trying to get everyone else to understand that she’s a woman).

Passing is not super important to everyone, and I respect that intellectually, even while I have trouble empathizing or identifying, because it is not my experience or understanding.  The degree to which trans people can pass is such a cosmic lottery to begin with that I cannot in good conscience dog anyone for how well they pass or don’t, or how much importance they put on it.  Nobody should be put down for anything that is so greatly out of their control.

At that point, I had to really consciously face an uncomfortable truth, which is that trans people tend to freak me right the fuck out.  The huge, huge majority of trans people I have met have struck me as “weird” in some ineffable way, and my best guess at this point is that what I crudely summarize as “weird” is my observance of behaviors that are intended to facilitate passing, but which, in my view, fail, and fail dramatically.

In trans men, I have mostly seen an adoption of hyper-masculine behaviors, which are, predictably, all of the toxic ones.  These guys adopt a lot of really awful methods of interacting with the world in general, and especially with women.  In trans women, I have mostly seen a far less destructive, but still unsettling, propensity for constantly declaring their gender and/or sexuality.  Constantly.  Not in a setting that is gender- or sexuality-focused, like a support group or something, but in settings that are so furiously mundane that literally nobody else is even thinking about their sexuality or gender.  The weird thing becomes not that they are women whom society, to varying degrees, views as men, but that they are going on about a subject that nobody else is even thinking about.

In these ways, most of the trans people I’ve met seem almost cartoonish in their attempts to fit in, simultaneously adorable and pitiable, but also profoundly unsettling.  They (that narrow pool, the majority of trans people whom I have met in person) remind me of little else so much as primitive robots who are desperate to look human, so they can fit in and not be treated like trash, like sub-human things that are there to be mocked, at best.

I try to work on developing compassion.  If I can’t understand, I want to at least be able to accept.  I remind myself that if I had been born with their genes, if I had lived their experiences, I would ultimately do the exact same things in the exact same way.  I police myself and try to make sure I am not a klaxon that sounds “WOMAN, WOMAN, WOMAN” over and over.  I cringe when I see someone else doing it.

All of this sounds very harsh, I know.  But understand this.  Like most people, the things that upset me the most are the things I dislike most strongly in myself.  I realize that I am not really being directly unsettled by my conclusion about someone’s capacity to pass or not.  I am unsettled because seeing someone else trying to pass calls into question my own capacity to pass.  Or not.  And that terrifies me.

It also frustrates me, because, as I said, I have pretty high expectations for how things will go overall, for me and my own transition.  I honestly believe that I will reach a point, probably in about 2-3 years, where people will not know I am trans unless they already knew, or unless I go out of my way to tell them.  Being around other trans women has, thus far, in general, left me feeling like I’m winning a contest I don’t even want to be in, and I hate that that is the sensation that I get out of these encounters.  That I feel compelled to pity someone who may want nothing of the sort from anyone, let alone me.  That I feel inherently superior on the basis of a social rule that disgusts me.

On my way out of the building, a nurse flagged me down, and told me about how I had come up in her conversation with a colleague the other day.  I did not remember her, but she said she had checked me in to the speech pathology clinic the last time I had come to the hospital.  Apparently I was wearing one of my three pairs of cat tights that day, too.  She had told a co-worker about checking me in, and said “he had the cutest cat tights on.”  And then, she told me, her co-worker corrected her, saying, “no, she had the cutest cat tights on.”

She was upset, because she wasn’t sure how to categorize me.  This is where the binary gets to be a problem.  For her, understanding me as a woman and not a man is a big enough mindfuck.  If she were to have to try to understand me as something other than the only two concepts of gender that she knows, she’d really be in trouble.  As would most people, I imagine.

Complicating matters is the fact that the VA has managed to update only part of my records.  So, while the files almost all say “Seranine Elliot,” they mostly also still say “Male.”  She would look me up to check me in, and it would say, “Mr. Seranine Elisabeth Elliot,” which might be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.

But, being a conscientious nurse, she wanted to be helpful, and not offensive or insensitive.  So she asked me, what is she supposed to do when she is faced with that kind of disconnect?  And how does she know the difference between a trans woman and a drag queen?  I told her that I was glad she asked, because my dream job is to be a sort of trans ambassador to the cis world.  To show them that my being trans is kind of the least interesting thing about me.  And then I told her that I didn’t really know for sure, because everyone understands their own gender differently.

I did advise her that if someone who the records say is a “mister” shows up in 100% clothing and makeup that is made for and sold to women, that person probably sees herself as female, and would probably like to be addressed and interacted with appropriately to that.  I also told her that if she wasn’t sure, she could always just ask, “what are your pronouns?”

I got her email address for a lead on how to potentially impact policy for VA Healthcare in regards to trans veterans, and I will elaborate to her in that way that if someone she might guess is male is presenting as female, and it’s in their daily life, and not for a performance of some kind, that she is probably a trans woman, and not a drag queen.

Anyway, we went on to talk about fashion for awhile, and I told her about the little boy who spotted my cat tights the other week at the VA and made me bust up laughing with his commentary about them.  I told her that I like to wear the cat tights because I like seeing people’s faces light up when they see them.  I like walking around and making people happy just by walking around.  (Mostly because I’m lazy as shit, and doing much more than walking around in order to make people whom I don’t even know happy is probably not a thing I would really get on board with.)

I left the VA hospital and went to see my crush at her work, the weed store.  I was not out of anything, and really had no reason at all to go there other than the fact that it’s literally barely over a mile from the VA hospital, and that I figured she would be there and I get giddy just thinking about her.  And she was there.  I told her about man-face, and she made a duck-face at me and said it was nonsense, and that I was beautiful.  That made me even more giddy.  Then she said I had caught her right on her way out the door on an errand her boss had set for her.  That made me slightly less giddy, but it was still nice to see her.  If there is a disposable chapter in this story, this paragraph is probably it, but, I don’t care. I am fucking bonkers for this girl.

I digress.  On Friday night, I had to work on a group project at the school, so I was downtown for the quarterly Up All Night event.  This is my fifth quarter at the school, but only the first Up All Night I’d bothered going to.  I’d wanted to go in the past, because sometimes they will set up acoustic drums and record some music, but I was never already going to be there anyway, so I just didn’t go.

After wrapping up my project, though, I figured, I’m already here, so I may as well go see if they’re doing anything cool down by the Open Mic setup.  If nothing else, I’d heard there would be free Subway.  Subway is not my favorite thing in the world, but Free Subway is close.

I got down to Studio A, and saw a lot of Open Mic stuff set up, but no drums, and no Subway.  I asked the instructor who was supervising the entire event if he would not please set up drums, so I could play them, and, having previously had me in to drum for him for his class to record, he thought this was a great idea.  He did veto me on toms, though.  Sadface.  But, drums got set up, and I played for the better part of the next four hours.  It was super fun.

Afterwards, one of the other instructors, himself a trained musician and drummer, complimented me on my drumming.  That felt very nice.  What also felt very nice, though, was the literal non-stop stream of compliments that I had gotten all day long, even from people I had not confessed to about the whole man-face thing.  People just thought I looked really great last Friday, even while I thought I did not.

Today, a strange man approached me in the hallway and said, “that was you drumming on Friday night, yes?”  And I was like, “yeah, sorry, haha,” and he said, “no, no, you were very good, it made my night.  I was just here to see Paul [Kikuchi], and I recognized you from when I saw you when you were playing, and it was great.”  Paul Kikuchi is a working musician and drummer who also serves as adjunct faculty at the school.  So, this guy, Paul Kikuchi’s friend, knows what a really great drummer sounds like, and he still felt compelled to call me out for my drumming being “great” and “very good” when he saw me in the hallway.  That felt incredible.

All of this has prompted me to re-examine the whole “undateable me” thing that I wrote about the other day.  I just wonder how much of all that is in my head, too.  Maybe I have it backwards, maybe almost everyone sees me as a woman, and only a handful of people see me as a not-man who thinks it is a woman.  Maybe almost nobody at all sees me as a man.

For myself, I am in this weird split of simultaneously putting a lot of effort into passing, and also, putting in none at all.  I get up much earlier than I used to, in the name of getting ready, just like a lot of other girls — makeup, putting together an outfit, and so on.  But after that, I basically just walk around being myself, without going out of my way to try to appear especially feminine, or even to appear non-masculine.

I think that part of my distress with interacting with other trans women comes from seeing the effort they are putting into passing.  I end up caught in this sort of circular argument where I believe that the idea of “passing” needs to be destroyed, but since it still exists, I understand that people feel compelled to do it in order to feel more at home in their own heads, but then I want to remind them that they are women, and, therefore, anything they do is something a woman would do.  That there is no need to “pass,” because their behavior, by definition, is a woman’s behavior.  So we should just toss out the whole idea of “passing” or not.  And so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

On some level, I kind of almost hate myself for not having the total and absolute acceptance that I feel is due trans women everywhere.  The fact that my natural, visceral reaction to the huge majority of trans women that I’ve met is one of being deeply unsettled is, itself, very disturbing to me.  I’m not beating myself up about it, but I do feel like it is important to recognize it, to seek out its roots, and to figure out how to transform it within myself to something that is closer to the ideal.

In a way, it puts me into a similar position as the one I found myself in while dating men for the first time.  I have seen both sides of that.  I have been a “guy” out on a date with some girl, saying idiotic one-liners and hoping she thinks they’re clever enough to make me worth fucking.  I have been the girl out on a date with some guy, losing my shit laughing at those bad one-liners, and having my brain perpetually melted by seeing so many things like that from the “other side.”

I want to be able to use these facts (that I am trans, and that I understand how it can feel to be trans, but that I also understand how it can feel to be weirded out by trans people) to get somewhere more enlightened about all of this.  Somewhere enlightened enough that I can explain it to the world in terms that will make sense to the greatest number of people.  I want to solve the problem within myself, and take that to the world and say, “this is how you fix this, this is how you bring that intellectual ideal and your own gut feeling into harmony.”

Sigh.

I have a lot of work to do.  But, I doubt that I am the only one.

P.S.: Please do not feel hesitant to reach out to me or interact with me if you’re a trans woman, whether you feel like you pass very well or not.  I am absolutely here for you.  Honestly, even if I can’t stand anything else about you, I will be here for you as much as I can be.  I promise I will do my level best to not make my issues into your problem, and I will always, always remind you that you are valuable, and that you are important, and that you matter.  That the world needs the woman you are.

P.P.S.: Trans men, you are also welcome to reach out to me or interact with me.  I will probably have some trouble relating to some aspects of your experience, but I will do my best and hope you will be gentle in correcting me if I fuck something up.  Granted, I cannot quite wrap my head around having a cis woman’s body and being really upset by that, but I very intimately understand having a cis man’s body and being really upset by that, so.  I’ll try to map that as closely as I can.

P.P.P.S.: Cats and owls, you are also always welcome to reach out to me or interact with me.  For any reason.  I love you forever.

Undateable Me

I am considered undateable by the majority of my peers and contemporaries.  Undateable because nobody actually sees me as a woman.  They respect my pronouns, they believe and respect that I understand myself as a woman, but they do not see me as one.  They see me as a non-male person who believes it is a woman.  If asked, they would defend the intellectual, rational, and correct answer that, of course, Sera’s a woman.  But they do not believe it.

From a distance, or in low light, I pass pretty well.  I have a fairly slim body that was more or less androgynous to begin with, and my physicality and mannerisms are pretty much all neutral or feminine.  With a conservative course of HRT, I am starting to fill out where I should.  But up close, it becomes clear what people see.

Up close, straight men do not see me as a woman.  They see me as a safe outlet for their latent homosexual fantasies, an outlet that would let them look doubleplusgood when they get caught out, because they could appear to be progressive by saying “she’s a woman, how dare you question that?” and they could also appear to be straight by sticking to that.  So, in general, straight men see me as a non-male person who thinks it is a woman.  No longer one of the guys, but probably never one of the girls.

Up close, gay women do not see me as a woman.  They see me as a confused non-female person who thinks it is a woman.  It’s fun to spend time with, it’s cute when it follows me into the bathroom, and it has a good fashion sense that’s fun to talk about, but it’s not a potential partner, because it is not a woman.  No longer one of the guys, and so, not really threatening in any way.  But definitely not a girl.

The few people who really do instinctively see me as a woman, intuitively, are all very close female friends.  Maria and Hailee both have reacted with confusion when I complain about a trans girl-specific penis problem, and then explained their expressions afterwards by saying that they forgot I had one.  Jenn, whom I was with for about six years, and who is still my very best friend, could not remember my birth name the other day.

I am, in this way, stuck.  Between my own demisexuality and now comically high standards, and the extraordinarily narrow pool of people who both find me attractive and see me absolutely and always as a woman, the points of intersection are few and tiny.  I feel like my worldwide dating pool is probably capping out around eight people.  And that makes me sad.  The irony is that I am not sad for myself.

I’m still who I am.  I’m still me, I’m very happy and content with my self-knowledge, and my understanding of Seranine.  I am a beautiful, kind, charming, compassionate, witty, and intelligent woman.  I know this.  But I wish that other people could see me as all of those things, too, and not just most of them.

A Now-Open Letter to Any TERF

I corresponded briefly with a girl who is, for lack of a better term, a TERF.  She never responded to my last letter, which is too bad.  I’m not going to post her reply to my previous note, which prompted this one, because it was a private Ask.  But, I will share what I sent back to her with all of you, because I wrote it, and I think it’s important.

In her last note to me, she had essentially said that she very strongly resents males trying to define womanhood to her, and that women deserve a way to sort themselves by shared oppressions, and safe spaces in which to discuss issues specific to themselves.  That, like other trans women, I am male, and that I (and other trans women) are trying to tell her that the word “woman” is not for her or other women to use anymore, but for us (trans women) instead.

Here, more or less, is my reply:

I agree, I also would resent males trying to define womanhood to me.  I would resent anyone doing that.  I don’t know what other trans women may have said or been reported to have said, but for my part, I am not interested in telling anyone that the word “woman” is no longer theirs.  I am interested in bringing everyone’s definition to the expanded place that includes women like me.  It is not a zero-sum game.  Acknowledging that I am a woman will not make you less of one.

I am not a man who believes he is a woman. I am a woman who believed she was a man.  I do find it ironic that your issue is with someone else telling you what your gender means in terms of fitting into larger society, but that that is the very thing you are then doing to trans women.

Trans women have quite a lot in common with cis women insofar as how society treats them.  Yes, our childhoods were different.  But I also don’t know any trans woman who would not give anything to be able to go back and have an even slightly more authentic-feeling girl’s childhood.  If you are a cis woman, you cannot understand the hell that is gender dysphoria.  You can sympathize, but you cannot empathize.  It is something I would not wish on anyone.

So I again agree with you, we deserve a way to categorize ourselves by our shared oppression.  Trans women have many experiences that distinguish them from cis women.  The difference matters enough to be worth thinking of these two groups of people as two separate groups, in some instances.  But they have many more things in common than they have differences, so it is more useful more often to think of them as one general category of people: women.

Being groomed to be oppressed from birth is probably the single greatest difference between your childhood and mine.  But, sadly, it does not take long before the publicly out trans woman experiences the vast majority of daily misogynistic microaggressions and more minor sexual assaults, the kind that are still incredibly damaging, but too common to take the time trying to report when, most likely, nothing will come of it anyway.

I was groped on the street in December.  I have my pepper spray, and I’ve been keeping myself prepared to deal with a direct physical assault of any kind.  But I was not prepared for someone walking the opposite direction to just reach out and run his hand along my crotch, across my thigh to the outside of my leg, and then just keep on walking, never breaking pace even slightly.

I had never in my life experienced anything remotely that vile.  I think I was in shock, because I was so confused by the unexpected nature of the assault.  I ended up getting on my bus and going to school anyway, because it was finals week, and I could not be late.  But it did some very real and lasting damage.  I could not focus for at least a week.  At all.  I was hypervigilant for over a month.  I am far more uneasy around unfamiliar men than I was before that, and the catcalls that were previously just annoying are terrifying, now.

I had involuntary and grossly intrusive thoughts that disgusted me, and left me feeling like a disgusting sub-human for having them.  Sometimes the thoughts would also arouse me, which made me feel even more disgusting, because all of it was out of my control.  All of it.  These thoughts would just show up, and destroy hours of my life because I could not focus on anything else when they arrived.  Perfect timing, right at the start of finals week.  My therapist tells me that all of that is normal in response to sexual assault.

It was barely three months since I was out publicly as trans.  Three months.  That’s how long it took for someone to sexually violate me.  Yes, it was a very minor assault, as sexual assaults go.  But people who have never experienced one at all have no idea the kind of deep and lasting psychological damage even a minor sex assault can have.  It really does not take long before the trans woman is living the same day-to-day experiences as any other woman of her ethnic background and social status.

Except that sometimes, people call her a man.

So, I’ll leave you with this question.  Who decides what you are?  Are you what you say you are, or are you what other people call you?

I Have Panties that Fit

I went to Aerie the other day.  Really, I went to the mall with my friend to try this crêpe place, which was underwhelming.  But, while we were there, I saw that there was an Aerie store.  Since the only three pairs of underwear that I own that actually fit me right now are Aerie, I went in.

I asked the salesgirl if she could help me in the dressing room area with something kind of embarrassing.  It occurred to me on the way back there that if there was ever a time for someone to be like, “oh god, this dude in a dress is gonna attack me when he gets me alone back there,” that would probably have been the time.  To her credit, she did not demonstrate any behavior that indicated she felt anything like that at all.

She also remained very professional and helpful when I told her what my problems were (being trans, and having only three pairs of panties that fit, all indirectly from her store), and while she gave me an answer — a pretty solid guess on cut and size.  I bought seven pairs, with their 7-for-$27.50 (or something like that) deal, got them home, and tried one on, and it fits, hallelujah.

So, I’ve gone from three pairs of panties that I can actually wear, up to ten, and that is much, much nicer.  The end.

P.S.: I love Aerie forever now.

Jason Was Dead

There’s a thing called “dead-naming” in the trans community, which is making use of a trans person’s birth name after they’ve rejected it (usually by selecting a new name of their own choosing).  This is, naturally,  a very rude erasure, but I have been going through some things lately that got me thinking about the choice of words for this concept.  “Dead name.”

When I was born, my parents named me Jason.  Jason was a miserable, miserable person.  As anyone would be who not only had no idea who they were, but also did not realize that that was the problem in the first place; that every struggle they had with mental health and self-esteem and relating to other people stemmed from that.  Jason spent basically his entire life from some point in early puberty until August 12, 2014, wishing for death.

He would see news of people’s deaths in horrible tragedies.  9/11.  School shootings.  Theater shootings.  Helicopter crash.  And he would feel even more horrible.  Why was he still living, when all these people who wanted to live were dying?  Why couldn’t he somehow trade places with them at the last possible second?  Why couldn’t they be alive, very confused, but alive in western Washington, while he could finally be free?  People with families and futures and hopes and love, dying, for nothing, while he was living for nothing.

It was not technically death that he wished for, though.  He wished to not continue living the way that he was living.  Every day was an agony so severe that he had largely become numb to it, and every other sensation.  Being unable to conceptualize a life that was so completely different from that as to be an acceptable condition in which to live, he most often said that he hoped he would die.  Every day.  Literally, every single day.

He would wake up, and his first thought would be, “oh.  I guess I didn’t die in my sleep last night.”  He would try to make new friends, because on some level, he understood that he needed them, but he hated himself so relentlessly that he was perpetually confused by having made any new friends, every time it happened.  He would try to find girls to date, but even when things went somewhere, he would find a way to sabotage them, and hate himself while doing it.

When Jason realized who he was, that he had always been she, it was as if a great cloud had lifted from her ecosystem.  Not a fog of pure water vapor, but a polluted, murderous miasma of soot and carcinogens that made breathing a chore, and not an affirmation of being alive.  A cloud that was slowly but surely sucking all the life out of joy, and all the joy out of life.  It cleared as if beneath a sunburst.

And yes, some things about her changed.  But she was, at her core, still the same beautiful, charming, funny, intelligent, and compassionate girl she had always been.  The only real difference was that she refused to beat herself up, she refused to hate herself, she refused to reject herself.  She immediately loved and appreciated who she was, all that she knew about herself, and was eager to learn more, to fully discover who she could be.

Jason was born dead, for lack of a better way of putting it.  His parents literally gave him a name for a dead person, someone that would’ve been happier stillborn.  Jason was a shell for Sera, a protective husk that she needed to hide in to survive when she was little.  To hide from everyone, including herself.  The Jason Construct just kept running for far longer than it should have.  I suppose it was well-built.

I made many friends at Everett Community College, mostly through theater and improv classes.  But lately, over the course of the last six months or so, many of them have disappeared on me.  Never with a word of explanation, and often after having been very supportive of me and my transition, my revelation about my actual identity.  They will unfriend or block me, without any warning, without any sign that there has ever been any problem between us.  In milder cases, perhaps they stop inviting me to events, whether because they themselves do not want me around, or because some formerly mutual friends might be made uncomfortable if I am there.  This is, I feel, just a precursor to joining the others, and cutting me out altogether.

In one case, a very very close friend blew up on me with this bizarre and completely unfounded rant about how I was freeloading off of taxpayers, because I am using the G.I. Bill.  It felt like a kick in the face.  I explained, as calmly and non-aggressively as I could, why that concept of things was completely baseless and wrong, and then told them privately how hurt I was by their comments, and that I really needed them to acknowledge that they’d been terrible to me, and were sorry about it.  I got no response at all.  Nothing but “Seen.”

They ended up being one of only two people that I cut out, after I concluded that someone who could treat me so horribly, but fail absolutely to acknowledge it in any way at all was not really someone who loved or respected me as much as I deserve.  Not because I’m so amazing, but because I’m a human being.

The fact that all of these phantoms had been so supportive up until the very moment they cut ties is baffling.  It’s also very painful, and mildly crippling.  I call them phantoms because they are still in my life, in some way.  I hear about them from people who are still friends with both of us.  I am left without any explanation at all, but also without the finality of death.  These people whom I love were not taken away from me.  They have, en masse, willfully decided that I am not worth loving.  That I do not deserve their time or their respect.  And I cannot make sense of that, especially now that I love and respect myself.

I still love them, so this is very confusing.  Now that I am finally happy, now that I have self-respect, self-esteem, self-love… NOW is the time that they don’t want me in their lives anymore?  Was I only tolerable when I cared so little for myself that I would put up with nearly anything?  I can’t get my head around people wanting me in their lives BEFORE I knew who I was.  Surely the non-stop wry cracks about how I hoped I would die on my way home that night were more exhausting than almost-daily pictures of my smiling face in a new outfit on Facebook.  How could that not be the way of things?

I have made some new friends.  I have reconnected with some old friends.  Maybe this is all for the best.  People who liked me miserable and dark and in constant need of attention do not like this new me, who is basically happy, usually emotionally bright, and, while she does indeed love attention, does not have a ravenously insatiable need for it as she did for most of her life.

But it still hurts.  And I still miss them.  Every.  Single.  Time.

Roller-coaster

Wheeeee!

In the past week, I have:

1. Met and recorded a very talented and professional musician for my Portfolio Prep class,
2. Been misgendered at a bank while tired and short of patience enough that I had to literally run out of the place to cry in the privacy of my own car,
3. Been asked where I got my amazing blue gradient tights by a stranger at the VA hospital, after being complimented on my outfit all day,
4. Gotten my permanent disabled rate ORCA (transit) card while people gave me looks that said “you aren’t disabled enough,”
5. Been asked if I would be interested in joining a photography project as a model,
6. Lost (another!) one of my best friends for reasons unknown (again!), and
7. Gotten to feed horseface and assface carrots while their owner smiled approvingly, and said, “they’re just big pets.”

It’s been up and down, over here.  School continues to exhaust me and leave me with little time or patience for the people I would love to give both to.  It’s also left me with little energy to blog about my transition as I used to, beyond the usual selfies.

No electrolysis, today, by the way.  We are trying an experiment that started this week, where I will see her every other Saturday, instead of every Saturday, but for two hours instead of just one.  Should result in the same ultimate clear time for my facial hair, but save me a lot on gas and commute time, and free up every other Saturday for me entirely for homework or whatever.

Right Out of the Oven

When I got to the VA Primary Care Clinic this morning, this wrinkled old white dude shouted, “SMILE!” at me. Nobody’s ever done that before, although I knew it would happen, eventually. I turned in his direction before I’d processed what he said, because I had heard a loud noise (him barking at me). Once I understood what he’d said, a split second later, my face showed my irritation with him before I turned back to what I was doing. As I was looking away, I saw him turn to an equally old and white comrade, and say, “she doesn’t wanna smile.”

I didn’t have the time or the energy to get into it with him right then, but I did resolve, next time, to say something back. I’ve come up with a canned line that I think will work, something along the lines of, “oh, I’m sorry, sir, we’re all out of smiles, but I do have this fresh middle finger for you.”

Playing "What If?"

I often daydream about the life I never had, the life I should have had, as a young woman, as a girl who knew she was a girl from the moment she even perceived gender in any way. But I realize that it’s fantasy, that my life would not have been magically delicious if I’d figured this shit out sooner; that I would’ve been a young woman, yes, and that I would also have had all the same joys and successes that any young woman can have; but that I would also have made many of a young woman’s mistakes, and suffered many of the abuses that young women suffer.

I’m incredibly lucky to have realized my dysphoria when and where I did, at the age that I was (that I still am). I have a patience and perspective that I could never have had if I’d realized when I was 8, for example.

I’m not at all suggesting that it’s better to start transitioning later, just that there will always be difficulties, and there will always be things that are easier, whenever we are talking about multiple periods within a lifespan. You are responsible for your own happiness. You can focus on what the world owes you, what you know you deserve, but will never be given, or you can focus on what’s good, or maybe even better, about the way things actually are.

I’ve discovered that the more I allow myself to feel grateful for the positive aspects of my transition, the more positive aspects I realize there even are.

Two Things Are On My Chest

I have to get two things off my chest. One positive, one negative. I’ve been meaning to post about the positive one for awhile, but the negative one has kind of forced my hand, because they are related. Bad news first.

I had to block someone today. A guy I met at Ai, and felt close to as a friend, someone I’d played songs with and carpooled with, and generally got on pretty well with. He posted a video the other day called “The Wife Hack,” which features some run-of-the-mill misogyny, the old “crazy vs. hot” graph kind of thing. Not really funny at all, and actually only mildly offensive because of how common it is to have that sort of background drone level of misogyny just in the air all the time. The kind that we all just expect to be there anyway.

But, towards the end of the video, the presenter warns men that if they meet a girl who is less than 3 (out of 10) crazy, and more than 8 hot, they have to get out of there, because “that’s a tranny.” He goes on, as if that wasn’t bad enough, to say “it’s a dude,” to the approving guffaws of his production crew.

I’m sure most of you can see what is wrong with that. If you honestly can’t, allow me to explain. First of all, “tranny” is a slur, as bad as any homophobic or racist or sexist slur against any other group of people. It is almost never funny, and when it is, it is delivered expertly from a VERY select group of people. It is a word of hate and violence, and its primary purpose is to strip people of their humanity, to make it harder to identify with them; to make it easier to hurt or kill them without remorse.

Second, when you call a trans person “it,” unless that is the pronoun they identify with, you are denying their identity. You are saying that you know their gender better than they know it themselves. You are saying that their gender is their physical sex, in defiance of not only that person, but every creditable medical authority on the issue, who practically unanimously agree that gender is in the mind, not the body. When you say that a trans woman “is a dude,” you are perpetuating the extremely damaging myth that a trans woman is just a guy who wishes that he was, or thinks that he is, or is under the delusion that he is a girl. That is almost exactly backwards. A trans woman is a neurotypical female who has a physiotypical male body.

In any case, that storyline is the thing that allows people TODAY, in America, to murder trans women nearly without repercussion in every state except California. (The so-called “trans panic” defense, that states that someone was so dismayed to find that their lover had parts or a history they didn’t expect that they HAD TO MURDER THEM.)

I have been very lucky to have realized who I was when I did, and where I did. I did not have to live with the conscious knowledge of my dysphoria in secret for very long at all. Even then, knowing that I was constantly on a journey towards public life as my real self, it was bearable. But there are other trans women who are nowhere near as lucky as I have been, who figure out who they are, and then are forced by family or friends, people who supposedly care about them, to pretend that they are someone else. I can barely imagine what hell that must be. It is almost certainly the reason why trans women have a vastly higher suicide rate than many other groups, by volume.

If all of this is pointed out to you, and your response is something along the lines of “I still think it’s funny,” or, “learn how to take a joke,” you are saying that your laugh is more important than someone else’s BASIC DIGNITY, than their simple HUMANITY, and you fucking disgust me. Do us both a favor and block me right now if that is you. Don’t just unfriend me. Become invisible to me. That is the kindest possible thing you could do for both of us.

And now, on to the good news. I have been so incredibly blessed (says the agnostic girl) to have friends who have supported me so completely as I travel the long road of transition. Most importantly, friends who have been perfectly at ease to be out in public with me, at the movies, at the mall, at a restaurant, at Target, at Costco, at the court house, at Starbucks… anywhere, everywhere, as if the fact that I’m trans has no real significance as far as being seen in public with me — the way it ought to be, but the way that it, sadly, often is not.

So, a long overdue and heartfelt thank you goes out to Hailee, Dillon, Kat, MJ, Alex, Jackson, Amy, Brandy, Joe, and, of course, Jenn; and anyone else I may have forgotten about just now, as I rattle these off off the top of my head. Please consider that a further compliment, to all of you — that your numbers are so great that I can hardly remember who’s been out in the world with me, in Seattle, in Edmonds, Arlington, Smokey Point, Everett, all over the place. Just out with their friend, Sera, like she’s any other friend of theirs.

You are not just showing me that my being trans is no big deal — you are showing everyone.

And that means the world to me.

Sensitivity Training

My electrologist and my esthetician are both cis women, and they will answer some of my questions and concerns with phrases like “women have that problem, too.”

I know that they mean “women who were assigned or designated female at birth, sometimes expressed as ‘AFAB’ or ‘DFAB,’ have the same problem that you, a woman who was assigned or designated male at birth, or ‘AMAB’ or ‘DMAB,’ are asking me about.”  Getting upset with them for not having the vocabulary that they, in their own lives and social strata, do not have any real reason to have or understand, is pointless.

At best, I would upset them and make them feel shitty for having not known something that they had no real reason to know.  At worst, I would perpetuate a stereotype of the embittered trans woman who hates the world because she thinks the world hates her.

So I get over it.  I know what they meant, and they know what they meant, and taking offense because someone told me I’m supposed to is a waste of everyone’s time.

If I hear from either of them (or anyone else from whom I receive trans-related services, or commonly feminine services like waxing) that they have so many new trans clients, I might bring up some vocabulary to educate them, and empower them to feel more capable of connecting with their clients as people.  But, until then…

Morning Belle

I tend to sleep naked.

It’s just the most comfortable way to curl up, for me.  I’ve preferred it for as long as I can remember, probably from the first time I tried it.  It’s not always possible, but right now I have my own room, and some modicum of privacy, so I am basically always naked by the time I’m bedding down for the night.

This of course means I also wake up naked.  While I assumed I was a guy, my head was too full of despair to really notice myself in the mirror, and even when I did, it was with disgust and self-loathing.  Most mornings, I would just get up, throw on some pajamas, and get on with the morning routine of cat maintenance and getting ready for school or whatever.  That was after my daily realization that I was still, unfortunately, alive, and that I would probably not be so lucky as to die that day, or later that night in my sleep, which was my most fervent wish for a very, very long time.

Even after I realized I was a girl, my mornings would go similarly.  It’s a more involved routine, now, with shaving and makeup and stuff if I’m going to leave the house, but, less the persistent wish for death, the start hadn’t changed.  I would get up, either not notice my reflection at all, or if I did, not really pay it any mind, throw on some pj’s, and do my morning bit.

But now it has changed.  I wrote the other day about waking up and catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and really being happy with what I saw.  I wrote about it because it was unique, it was a one-time event, and that made it remarkable.  But the same feeling struck me today, although I did not sit around and revel in it.  Mostly because I’m ravenous, and I’m about to go find some food.  But before throwing on pajamas so I can leave my room and go forage, I saw my reflection and I smiled and watched myself stretch.

I was pleased with myself and my body and what I am.  What I am now, and what my body is becoming, a little more every day with HRT, and a little more every week with electrolysis.  Some people confuse this kind of self-love with vanity.  It’s nothing like that.  There is no context of comparison, here.  I don’t look at myself and think, “look at that sexy bitch, so much hotter than all the other girls,” or anything of the sort.  It’s just me, and without any point of reference for comparison, I love myself, I love my body, I feel feminine and beautiful and sexy and mysterious, and I’m so much happier than I’ve ever been.

On Misgendering

I was misgendered a few times yesterday, but most of them did not really bother me that much.

The first time was one of the nurses accidentally saying “him” about me, but when I called her on it, she got really defensive and said she had not said that (which is kind of nice, I guess, it at least shows that she knows it would be wrong).  I pointed out that she had done it while not looking at me, and that I’ve noticed that that’s relatively common among people who absolutely do not mean to misgender me at all.  I think it’s because they only hear my voice, and their brain automatically says “male,” which makes sense.  It’s kind of frustrating, but it doesn’t upset me the way that someone deliberately being shitty about my gender would.

However, if a trans person says you’ve misgendered them, odds are that they heard you right and you slipped and didn’t notice.  Given that their dysphoria is a real and awful thing to have to live with, it’s probably best to just apologize for it sincerely, even if you don’t remember doing it, or think you didn’t.  Acknowledge the fact that they are vastly more attuned to incorrect gender pronouns addressed to them than you (likely) are about (hopefully accidentally) using them, and just let them know that you would never intentionally do that.  Maybe even thank them for pointing it out, if you really want to come out like a hero.

The next time was when I went to the Travel window (where veterans get their reimbursements for travel expenses related to getting medical care).  I was signing up for direct deposit, but my legal name is one thing, and the name that my bank (still!!!) has is my old one.  I didn’t want there to be any problem, so I was explaining the situation to the lady at the window, and showed her my court order for the name change.  She was asking a superior about what to do, and at first, she referred to me in the masculine.  While I was upset, and maybe visibly so, since there was this thick panel of bulletproof glass between us, shouting at her about it would’ve just been embarrassing, so I had to ride it out.

The really cool part about this is that while she was trying to explain the situation to her supervisor, she seemed to become confused, herself, about what she was saying, as she looked back and forth between me, my paperwork, and her supervisor.  Midway through her explanation, she switched to feminine pronouns for me, and stuck with them from that point forward, and for some reason, that was far more pleasing to me than if I had corrected her and gotten a simple apology and had her correctly address me from there.  Something about it was really beautiful, and I felt (oddly) more acknowledged in my gender than any other way that it could have gone, I think.

The last time I was misgendered yesterday was in the kind of situation that it still most commonly occurs in, which is when I call phone support for anything.  I don’t blame these people; my name is kind of unusual, and I still sound like a guy on the phone.  I had called about a problem with my phone bill, and the guy who answered kept calling me sir, so I gently corrected him.  He apologized profusely, and I let him know that it was okay, and that I wasn’t upset with him, because I understand why he’d make the mistake.  But he seemed genuinely upset that he’d insulted me (in his view; I didn’t feel particularly insulted), and got my payment for the billing changes reduced after convincing his supervisor that that’s what they ought to do because of his rudeness.  Or however he characterized it, I don’t know.

The thing that all of these events have in common is that none of the people involved really deliberately misgendered me, or refused to acknowledge or accept my gender.  And that is extremely heartening.  Not just for me, but for trans people in general.

Loving the Skin I’m In

I woke up early this morning after a very busy day yesterday.  I’d crashed around 9:30p last night, hard, and woke up to no alarms or anything else at about 2:45a today.  I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I felt beautiful and pretty feminine.  (Usually, I only feel beautiful and feminine when I’m not looking in a mirror, unless I’ve done my makeup and gotten dressed.)

I got up and looked over myself more fully in the full-length mirror, and felt really pleased.  My breasts aren’t really all there yet, which is to be expected after barely over two months on HRT, and a really low dose, to boot.  But they’re coming, same with my hips.  I had my eyebrows waxed yesterday, shaped in a much more typically feminine fashion, and I’m going to continue with my plan of having the electrologist kill stray hairs as they come back in, so my brows will stay this way permanently without my having to go have them redone every month or anything.

I had also just gotten my legs waxed yesterday, and while they’re still a little irritated, they’re smooth and beautiful, and I love them.  Bare, smooth skin is one of my strong personal markers for my own femininity.

I sort of wandered around my room naked for awhile, petting cats and talking with them, and just feeling really warm and happy in a way I’ve not felt since I first realized my gender dysphoria.  I have loved myself since then, but I have not always been in love with myself, and today, so far, I am.  I’m not happy with my body in terms of where it’s at; there are things I want to keep improving on, like having the facial hair permanently removed, and getting into better shape.  But I’m grateful that I have such a thin frame, and that it was never particularly masculine, because that makes it so much easier for my feminine aspects to develop and really define me, physically.

I almost want to share nudes.  Almost.  Nothing pornographic, mind you, just me and my bare skin, being beautiful and happy.

What’s In a Name?

My name is Seranine Elisabeth Elliot, which you would already know if you had seen the video I posted recently.  As a trans woman, I had more cause than most to legally change my name, so I thought I’d write about where each part came from.

As a child, an infant, our parents give us a name.  Sometimes, that’s all they give us.  My family name was McKendry, a name that my brother and his family, and my children (as far as I know) still have.  I don’t have a problem with the name aesthetically or anything, but given my relationship with my parents (i.e., there isn’t one), along with the sense that my name, along with my literal identity, had been effectively stolen by the mother of my children, I was not keen on keeping it.  My other two names were Edward and Jason, and I was never fond of either.

Seranine (/sɛrəna͡ɪn/) is an unusual name.  I thought I had invented it, but after I had it legally changed, I noticed that some rare few women around the world also go by the same.  I’m not sure whether they pronounce it the way I do, and I don’t know that I’ll ever find out.  Its origins lie in a story I have been ever-so-slowly developing for a little over a decade.  The heroine is Sera Nine, and in some iterations, the first part of her name is an acronym.  Her world is a mildly dystopian future, and she’s a cyborg.  After much rumination, I realized that a lot of what that world was about, and what her place in it represented, was a metaphor for my then-undiagnosed dysphoria.  One of her primary internal struggles is one to determine whether she is even really human.

As for Elisabeth, that has long been one of my favorite girl’s names.  It appeals to the engineer in me, because it is supremely flexible.  You can go by Elise, Lisa, Beth, Betty, Lisbeth, Libby, and so on, and still get away with saying “short for ‘Elisabeth’” if you really need to.  I don’t really feel like an Elisabeth, per se, but I do like the parallel that a name with many derivatives holds with a life that now feels as though it can go almost any direction I like.

Elliot was initially chosen for two main reasons — one, after the character from Scrubs, a character I always liked, and who faced some occasional confusion over her gender because of her name; and two, because upon researching the meanings of various surnames, I discovered that one possible interpretation of “Elliot” was “noble struggle.”  I thought, what more noble struggle is there than the struggle to know oneself?  Not long after I was mostly settled on using it for my new surname, a close friend of mine let me know about her son, Elliott (named for Elliott Smith, the musician), who they believe has gender dysphoria.  I found this to be a happy coincidence, and am glad that she has figured it out early, and also has a supportive family who wants the best for her.

Appearances

When I assumed without thinking about it that I was a guy (who did not know she was actually a girl) I never liked the way I looked.  I always felt very unattractive, and traits that I possessed that could have been described in neutral or positive ways were things that I always thought of in the negative.  Some of that is a little bit Western-Standard-of-Beauty-by-Gender-related (my former male “chicken legs” became female “model legs”), but a lot of it falls outside of that, and the bottom line is this:

I was never unattractive.  I was actually always very attractive, but, in not believing myself to be so, I never made any effort to take advantage of it.  Not take advantage of it in a bad way, but more in terms of looking into fashions that would flatter my frame and whatnot.  Basically, the things that I am doing now.

Doing this kind of full-body self-examination to some degree on essentially a daily basis has helped me love myself and the shell I live in.  Yes, there are some things I would like to change, but they are, by and large, specific to gender appearance, and little else.  I’d like to be slightly more toned and have a little less excess fat, but I really don’t have much, to begin with, and I love myself enough now that I am able to recognize that the schedule that I have (21 credits per quarter, every quarter, no quarters off) does not lend itself well to making time for regular and reliable exercise.  I’m not beating myself up or anything (for not exercising as much as I’d like to), which makes it much easier to get some in when I do have the time and energy, and keeps it as a realistic future habit to establish, when I have a steadier and more sustainable long-term routine.

Part of the self-examination, particularly of my face, is what led me to the conclusion I opened with — that I was never unattractive, I just never knew how good I looked.  I don’t mean this in a condescending or self-aggrandizing way.  I mean that I always had the kind of beauty that just about everyone has, if they take the time to find it, if they make the effort to cultivate it.

If you’re someone who doesn’t look at themselves often, then I suggest you start.  Pretend you’re preparing to audition for a role, if that helps; watch your expressions in the mirror, get used to how you look when you are moving, when you are sitting, when you are lying down on your side or your back or your belly.  Become familiar with the power of your own smile, and recognize the power of your tired or sad expressions, too.  Fall in love with yourself a little bit, and understand that lots of other people will fall in love with you, too — if you let them.

Is Street Harassment on a Bus Still Street Harassment?

I’d had a rather long and exhausting day, and was not in the best of moods.  But it was, at long last, time to get on some buses and make my way home, so I lumbered out of the school like a zombie, with my hood pulled up to make it easier to avoid eye contact with anyone.  I didn’t feel like listening to any music, I just wanted to get on my hour-long express bus after a connection, so I could read a bit and maybe even have a nap.

On the connecting bus, I stepped up, paid, and took a seat near the front, since it’s only a couple stops to where I transfer to the express bus.  On the next stop, an older man who was very loud got on the bus, and sat in the side-facing bench seats in front of the front-facing paired seats I was occupying.

He turned to me and said, “how you doing?”

I made an attempt at a smile, and gave him the time-honored Boba-Fett-in-Return-of-the-Jedi head nod, which I hoped he would accept as indicators that I had heard him, but I did not actually say anything in reply, which I hoped he would understand to mean that I did not feel like talking to anyone.  In response to this, he immediately said, much more loudly, “I SAID, HOW YOU DOING?”

Now, my face reflected mild annoyance and confusion.  I’d answered his greeting, and didn’t really understand why he wasn’t satisfied with that.  “Oh, no English?” he asked.  “I’m used to that.”

He then tried to express his displeasure with how I had responded to him by engaging a proxy, a hapless nearby bus rider.  “You ever seen a 24-carat vagina?” he bellowed.  The other man smiled sheepishly and shook his head, no.  “I ain’t never seen one, neither!” the first man continued, “but they all act like they got one!”

By this point, I was trying not to laugh.  I considered speaking at last, to tell this man that I’d honestly settle for a tin foil vagina right now, but I decided that anything that might agitate him further was probably a bad idea.

Just before the next stop (where I needed to get off), he walked up to the driver and asked to be let off on the near side of the intersection, saying something like, “I ain’t feelin’ the way she disrespectin’ me.”

Which was nice.  I’d been properly gendered, at least.

In the Beginning, There Was Estrogen

Started HRT today.  I also did a consult with a very highly qualified and highly rated electrologist, and set up my first appointment with her after a sample treatment to test tolerance. Oh, and I got a flu shot. That’s not really a transition-related thing, though.

Yesterday Was Pretty Nice

I was out for hours and hours, nobody said anything shitty to me.  The banker who helped me with my name change on my account was as friendly and welcoming as they’d always been with me when I was out as a guy.  He asked where I got my boots, and said his daughter would love a pair of them.

I went to DOL to update my gender on my driver license, and got in and out within five minutes.  It now says, “Sex: F” and doesn’t expire until 2021 or something.

While shopping for makeup, a rep who was in the store placing her product started talking to me about her own work in makeup, and asked how I did my smoky eye look.  I showed her the tutorial I based it on, and she was surprised I’d only been doing it myself for a couple weeks, saying that it was better than most eyeshadow she’d seen on other women who’ve been doing their own makeup since they were children.

When I corrected the esthetician after she misgendered me, she was aghast, and said she didn’t even realize she’d referred to me as “him.”  She apologized profusely, and said that anyone who gave me any shit about being who I really was was just ignorant.

Later, at the mall, as I headed into the women’s restroom, some random woman standing just inside the doorway smiled at me.

Later still, at Wal-mart, the cashier who was helping me find something asked a manager for help, and correctly gendered me without any slip-ups, and without my saying anything.

Inside-out

One of the many mysterious powers of the transsexual is that once they realize that they, themselves, are essentially inside-out, and express their inner selves, they compel others around them to also turn inside-out, and express their inner selves.  This effect is amplified in a logarithmic fashion inversely proportional to one’s distance from the transsexual.  Once within a radius of about ten feet or less, this power is absolute and unavoidable.  This phenomenon has come to be known by scientists as the Inversion Vortex.

For many people, this compulsion is not a terrible thing to come under.  If they are capable of empathy and forethought, they tend to do very well, in that no discernible difference is revealed by the transsexual’s aura.  They may, for example, refer to a transsexual woman by her former name or gender, but then quickly realize they’ve made a mistake, and correct it, prompting no further thought on the error by anyone.  This can make the aura difficult to detect, as it does not seem to affect everybody, by virtue of the fact that if one is the same outside as they are inside, no change can be detected.

However, one who hides malice in his heart might feel himself compelled to say — under his breath, but certainly deliberately loudly enough to be heard by others — when standing on a corner in Pike Place Market early in the morning as a transsexual woman walks by, “is that a boy or a girl?” while grumbling.  For all the wonderful things such a man has surely done in his life before the point when he stood on a corner on the transsexual woman’s path, when it comes down to it, inside, he enjoys the feeling of superiority he gets by pointing out someone else’s comparatively fluid gender to his own more socially acceptable static gender.  Calling attention to it gives him a great rush of joy.  His inner self, revealed.

Another man, well-meaning enough, but lacking in social skills, might approach a transsexual woman and tell her that she needs a new razor, because her legs look like they’ve been hit by poison ivy.  Naturally, such a Champion of Great Legs would only be trying to help, as he would of course clarify by saying “no offense” immediately afterwards, but one might suspect he would not have taken it upon himself to police the state of the legs of a natural born woman, as that is a rather uncommon thing for men to do.  His inner self, revealed.

Still another person, who had seen the transsexual woman around prior to her revelation, when she still presented as male and went by a male name and male pronouns, might approach her assertively, yet with some hesitance, and say something like, “I don’t want to offend you or anything… but what should I call you now?”  When thanked for asking, and given the answer, this sort of person, still disoriented from being turned inside-out by the transsexual’s irresistible power of transposition, might say it was nice to meet her, and then relate an anecdote of how his brother-in-law went through the same thing — he used to be Melissa, but now he’s Gabe.  Still compelled by the transsexual, this kind of man might even go so far as to say he thinks it’s awesome what she is doing, being true to herself, before finally breaking free of the vortex, and continuing on his way.  His inner self, revealed.

And finally, yet another person might feel drawn to the nexus of this power, like a rat following the piper, to sit near the transsexual woman while she waits for her bus to take her home.  This last kind might pretend at striking up some small talk before blurting out something like, “are you a man?”  What purpose this kind of question might possibly serve should elude you.  What should not elude you is that in this case, too, yet another hapless citizen has fallen under the transsexual’s spell.  Her inner self, revealed.

What can you do to avoid being turned inside-out by the transsexual’s spell, and embarrassing yourself publicly as you loudly and proudly proclaim your intolerance, ignorance, and general lack of empathy?  The surest way, of course, is to simply develop your own capacities for tolerance and empathy, while also educating yourself on what transsexualism is.  If you are already tolerant and empathetic, even if you are ignorant of the details of transsexualism broadly, or the specifics of any one transsexual’s case, you will probably not be unduly impacted even when you are within range of an Inversion Vortex.  This approach is called the “immunization method.”

However, if your tolerance and empathy capacities are limited for whatever reason, your best course of action is to simply avoid the transsexual and the locus of their power — for they, too, are its victims.  Like the X-man Cyclops, the power of the transsexual is always on, and they cannot stop it, not even with awesome ruby-quartz glasses that look hella sexy.  Do whatever you can to remain at least 100 yards away from anyone who might be a transsexual, or, though slightly less dangerous, anyone who may be different from you in any way, at all times.  This is the only way you can keep yourself safe, so please, be careful!

Dressing Out of Type

Last Tuesday was the last time I dressed outwardly male, or “in type,” as I say.  For about a month leading up to that time, following my revelation, I’d been dressing outwardly male, but over feminine undergarments (socks, panties, camisole).  Prior to that, of course, I had no idea I was a girl, so I dressed outwardly male — not liking myself or caring about myself, that meant I wore clothes socially prescribed for men, but with no real criteria beyond that.  Basically, I’d grab the first shirt in my drawer, the top pair of underwear, top socks, etc. and not really concern myself at all about how I looked.

Once the Dean of Student Affairs took me to the security desk so they could be advised that I was actually female, and would thus use the women’s restroom (to preempt any complaints to security about me being in there resulting in my being grabbed on my way out of the restroom, or anything), I started dressing outwardly female the next day; last Wednesday.  That meant my routine went from showers the night before, and getting up at 5:30a in order to do cat maintenance and leave by 6a, to getting up at 4a, taking a shower, and doing a lot of other things in the morning that I never would’ve done before (eating, doing a stretch routine, shaving my face, doing makeup).

Once Friday came around, my first day off of each week, since classes run Monday through Thursday for me, I just lounged around the house in sleep pants and a sweater.  However, I knew I needed to go into town to get to the bus terminal and buy an ORCA card, as well as to stop by my friend’s house to pick up a package.  I also had some boots to return to Target.  Originally, I was going to just be lazy, give my skin a break, and not shave or do any makeup — just go out in outwardly male dress, run my errands, and go home.  But as the time neared when I’d have to leave home, the thought upset me enough that I went ahead and got ready as a girl, after all.

While I was out running around, I felt my typical self-confidence and happiness, my New Normal base state of contentment (at worst).  I was annoyed with Target for a hassle with my return, and I got the usual funny looks from one or two guys at the bus terminal, but other than that, I had no real obstacles, and my attitude remained upbeat.  The only thing close to a down-side was that I was, as they say, all dressed up with nowhere to go, after I’d finished up at Target.

Today, on a Sunday, I was cleaning up around the house and I found an old oil filter in the box that I’d bought in April, but never used.  It had the receipt in the box, and since money is especially tight right now, I went ahead and called the store to see if I could still return it.  They said I could, so I decided to just go there today and get it taken care of.  However, I thought, if I get ready as a girl, it will be a couple hours before I can even leave, probably.  At the very least, I’d have to shave my face and put on makeup and fix my hair.  Today, I was planning to shave my legs again, so they’ve been untouched since about Wednesday of last week, too, and I didn’t really want to have to get into the shower or bath twice.

Anyway, I decided to just go out dressed outwardly male, since it was one quick errand and nothing else.  I pulled on some old boxer-briefs, plain white athletic socks, jeans, and a t-shirt.  I didn’t want to dismantle my whole wallet or bring my purse, obviously, so I just grabbed my license and my phone, and then left.  Along the way, I noticed that my mannerisms and physicality were still naturally rather feminine, which pleased me.

I did feel out of my skin, though, which struck me as somewhat odd.  While I’d been dressing outwardly male but with feminine undergarments, I was sort of mildly irritated that I felt like I had to do that still, and eager to get on with dressing outwardly female, which I vastly preferred, but I didn’t have that kind of strong visceral reaction of feeling wrong.  The odd part about the feeling was that I’d really only dressed female and gone out that way for a full regular day of being in public three times — the preceding Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

One of those days was just for a couple hours, not even to school; just running some errands.  For me to go from mild irritation at the idea of being dressed outwardly male all the way to it feeling completely wrong after just two and a half days of dressing outwardly female seemed like a pretty big shift in a very short span of time.  But then, I suppose all of this has been running along rather quickly.

Once I got to the store, the guy handling my return asked if I had the original debit card.  I didn’t bring anything with me like that, since I’d never had any place that took a payment on debit argue at all about giving a refund in cash, with a receipt.  I explained that I didn’t have my debit card on me, and that I didn’t think I had that particular card anymore anyway.  He said he couldn’t just give me cash back, but then gave me cash — about half of what the receipt said the thing had been bought for.  I’m guessing he processed it as a return without receipt, giving me the lowest price in the last 90 days or whatever.  I was annoyed that he didn’t even tell me he was going to do that, and ask if I was okay with that.

On my way out of the store, I started to feel pretty frustrated and upset.  Basically over a difference of about $5.  But really it was more, I think, about my state of appearance and dress.  The upset felt as close to my old constant state of depression as I’d felt since the depression evaporated over a month ago.  I felt wrong just being out like that to begin with, and then I ran into a minor obstacle, so I got disproportionately upset.  Once I realized that, of course, I kind of laughed at myself and just drove home.

But on the way home, I thought to myself, I’m never going out dressed like this again.  And once I got there, I got out of those clothes immediately, and back into my women’s sleep pants.