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.
