Once, twice, six months a lady

On Sunday of this week, the 11^th of September, I realised that I had passed six months of being publicly out as a trans woman. My post to Facebook on the 11^th of March was not the first time I’d told somebody I was transgender, of course; by that time I’d already been undergoing hormonal therapy for about ten months, and had told perhaps thirty or thirty-five people in total. Basically my close friends first, then my family, after having worked on the issue for some time with my psychologist and two doctors. (It goes beyond having “a doctor” these days for me; I seem to have accumulated a medical team instead. A GP who specialises in treating gender-variant people, an ordinary GP who I see for other issues, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a laser technician. Coo.) Six months is not very long, to be fair – I know trans people who have been out forty years or more – but still, this forms a milestone in my own journey, and a milestone that this time last year I was still terrified by and thought I would never have the courage to achieve.

On the whole, I’ve been far more lucky than most in my transition. Focused as my life is upon the academy, and of a fairly large city to boot, the people around me tend to have a fairly broad perspective, and are generally much more liberal (in the small-ell sense; my friends overseas no doubt find it a peculiar irony that the major Australian politically-conservative party are named the Liberals) than might be expected from the members of an “average” community. Moreover, we as anthropologists and archæologists spend our lives investigating the structures of and systems of interaction within societies, and when social roles differ from supposed norms, we tend to be curious and interested rather than horrified and disgusted by variations from those norms: we seek to be descriptive and talk about what is, rather than prescriptive and talk about what should be. For these reasons, I’m infinitely grateful to have happened to exist within the milieu I have when I finally realised that transitioning was something I wished to pursue. Though my transition has easily been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and continues in a variety of ways to be challenging and difficult (the breakup of my last relationship resulted from my partner’s inability to come to terms with my being transgender, despite the fact that I’d told her this fact and about my desire to transition less than a week after we started dating; I won’t lie, I’m still a little bitter), the friends, colleagues, and family around me have inundated me with nothing but support, love, endearment, and admiration. From some people it’s even reached the level of clear excitement, which is a little discombobulating, but equally lovely to experience! No doubt it’s a combination of being happy for me on the one hand, and being touched that I trusted them enough to tell them on the other. I’ve felt similar rushes of what I could only call excited love when my friends have entrusted me with their own stories, their own secrets. It’s an immense honour and a great gift when someone trusts me sufficiently to reveal their hearts to me, a gift far beyond any material object, and if that’s an honour and a gift that others have perceived when I’ve likewise shared with them, then they can rest safely assured that their feeling of being honoured and trusted is equalled only by my gratitude for their trustworthiness.

This rich support surprises me anew every day, and every time that I think about that support is another little nudge forward, another shot of gratitude that helps me moving myself forward even through rough times. (And lately these rough times have comprised the bulk of my waking life. While my gender transition is only relatively tangentially related to them, I also suffer from clinical depression and a social anxiety disorder that currently aren’t stable. Nonetheless, the support that my loved ones are giving to both my gender situation and my mental health struggles is in large part the engine that propels me through each new day. I’ll talk more about those anon as well.) And to be completely fair, apart from a snide comment I overheard on the train last week – in which one numb young shit asked her friend how to spell the derogatory word tranny so she could send it in a text making fun of me to a third and presumably equally small-minded friend; a request that, from my perspective, dripped with the richest of irony by exposing the same lack of education that probably yielded the bigotry it contained – I’ve largely been treated with respect and honour by the people I interact with. There have been issues of misgendering, of course, and standing at a broad-shouldered and fairly barrel-chested 6’1″ I’m not really surprised, even though disappointed and a little hurt every time. Even there, though, it’s usually from people who don’t know me and consequently are much easier to ignore or just get past, and from those who do know me, I never have any issue so long as I can see that an effort is genuinely being made. (Self-recognition and self-correction of a name or pronoun slip go a long way in that regard, though it really doesn’t have to be a big deal. In all honesty, a simple apology, a quick “sorry” with a correction of the slip-up and then just returning to conversation as normal is absolutely fine with me. I don’t want for you to have to be overtaken with embarrassment any more than you want to. We all fuck up from time to time, and Christ knows I’m still very much coming to terms with the change myself!)

And it does help me to think that when I attract stares and odd looks from strangers, even though I feel I’m now living as my most authentic self and portraying to the world the person that I feel I truly am and want to be, they’re staring because of my being transgender. I feel much pride in being a trans woman, and although I do wish often that I wasn’t so stereotypically masculine in my build, it does please me to think that when I attract stares from people, I may be one of the first trans people that they’ve seen “in the wild” (as it were) and can thereby show them that I’m just a person, just another human being with my own interests and desires and hopes and character. Another aspect of dealing with the stares and strange glances is that, in part because of the anxiety disorder I mentioned earlier, I always used to feel that people were staring at me anyway, was always afraid that people were silently standing in judgment of me. Even before I realised I was transgender, even before my transition began, I felt this was the case. It’s one of the reasons I got my first piercings – my left brow and ear, which I got at the same time at least two years before I ever began undergoing hormonal therapy (indeed, before I even came to the realisation I was transgender). And the strange thing is that, paradoxical though it may be in that I feel I truly am what many trans people phrase as living my truth, I weirdly feel better about being stared at now than I used to pre-transition. There’s a line that I think parallels this sense nicely, a line from the epilogue of what for many years has been one of my favourite novels – Tim Willocks’s Bloodstained Kings – in which the main character, Cicero Grimes, finally comes to terms with the deaths of his father and brother and leaves his city home for good:

“He packed his Olds 88 with the things he needed, and a few of the things he wanted, and drove south, deep into Mexico, where the air was dry and the days were long and where he could speak Spanish and be thought of as strange because he was a gringo, and not because strange was how he was.”
—Tim Willocks, Bloodstained Kings

I suppose I view myself in a similar light to Cicero Grimes: I’m quite comfortable now, after my transition, with being the target of stares; with being thought of as strange because I’m a “tranny”, and not because strange is how I am. (And believe me, I really am strange.) It lets me say to myself, “Well, if they’re judging you for being transgender, then they’re just bigoted and they are therefore unimportant.” It allows me in my turn to brush off stares as being the superficial responses they are; as the Klingon proverb says, ghIlab ghewmey tIbuSQo’ pay no attention to glob flies. And who knows? Perhaps those stares will encourage people to learn, to grow, to understand and come to an acceptance of not only me and other transgender people, but everyone in the queer community. These days – particularly with the heated argument across society about the Federal Government’s rotten-to-the-core proposal for a plebiscite on the topic of marriage equality, a plebiscite that I vented my spleen about just a couple of weeks ago – I feel more of that kind of understanding and acceptance can only be a good thing, and if my existence in the community as a trans woman can serve as a means by which to accelerate that acceptance for me and all like me, then let them stare.