Last nights post was written while I was angry, hurt and feeling very alone.
This is the less angry more sober follow up.
[please note, I am speaking specifically to my personal experience as a binary identified trans woman. i am writing this piece in the their person as a tool for distancing myself slightly from the emotional content of this topic. I'm not trying to speak to all trans, or even all trans feminine experience, but I rust that my feelings on this topic will be at least somewhat familiar t many trans people]
Being trans means feeling out of place a lot of the time.
The absence of shared formative years with the genders we identify with often leaves us feeling like perpetual outsiders and makes it hard to feel authentic in our interactions with cis gendered people.
The thing is though, it's often far less true that we fear.
The myth of a shared girlhood of, is just that.
Every time i get the courage to talk to cis women regarding their experiences as girls and young women, I'm constantly surprised (I don't know why at this point) to learn that they too have often felt like fakes and frauds in the presence of peers who seemed to have the whole girl thing down pat.
We've all sat awkwardly to the side at one point or another while the more confidant amongst us stole center stage and then used that platform to make the geeks, nerds and the congenitally shy feel even more awkward.
The only real difference is that for cis women, feeling of inadequacy when it come to "being a girl" aren't routinely used to deny them their identity and sense of self.
I've written before about feeling like a failure as a parent, and especially as a mother. I was genuinely surprised to discover, in conversations I had with other women that this was an incredibly common feeling, especially in the poly community where being a mom, yet not being the birth mother is a more common situation. Even those mothers who did have their own pregnancies reported feeling like a sham and a faker in the face of all the things society tells us a mother should do, feel and be.
I can't help wondering if those people who would deny trans women their identities on the premise of "lacking a shared experience of girl hood" are not, in fact, the same women who felt most ostracized during their own formative years.
If gender is nothing more than socialization, then all those girls who were so "good at it" can have their femininity dismissed as a by product of patriarchy. In the denial of an internal sense of gender identity, womanhood then becomes biological essentialism and their own insecurities over feelings of failure to live up to societies gender roles can be wiped away with righteous anger.
We weren't ostracized, we were fighting fighting gender constructs the whole time.
Ironically, when it comes to shared experience they probably have more in common, in many cases, with those trans women who's identities they would deny.
In the end I do believe (obviously) in an internal sense of gender. I also believe that most of the experiences that we deem masculine or feminine are no more than socialization, and if we could all get over our fear that we're not doing t right, if we started to talk more and share our experiences more, we'd find that man, woman, non-binary, cis or trans. We have far more in common with one another than we have holding us forever apart.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Playing Catch Up
A retreat is being organized for the girls.
It's a spa trip.
Hot tubs, sauna, old pool etc.
I love these things, or at least I'm pretty sure I would if I ever got to go.
With out fail, every time I see a girls only spa day being organized it is actually a cis girls only event.
This is generally not something the organizer is specifically intending, it's just that women's only spas that allow trans women to use their facilities are virtually non existent. If they do there are often weird policies that make us wear swimsuits top and bottom because apparently unless we're post-op, our breasts are offensive to "real" women.
I've spent my whole life being kinda bummed out about being excluded from a whole range of bonding experiences between women.
It's hard to write about this without sounding bitter.
It's hard to write about this because honestly there's a lot of normative experiences I can never make up for and that fact makes me feel permanently othered.
I don't know if sitting around talking with a group of cis women will ever be without the feeling of being a fraud, listening to shared experiences I missed, feeling embarrassed to offer my opinion in case someone should point out that my experience is less valid for coming from a trans woman.
Having my identity's legitimacy be permanently in other peoples hands sucks.
The thing is, I really did miss out on all this stuff and I find that embarrassing.
I feel ashamed for having not been there through my childhood, teens and twenties. I feel that I have no right to offer my opinion on matters of womanhood.
"What if I get it wrong!?" I think, "I mean, it so kind of them to let me join in at all, I'd hate to have my female credentials revoked".
Sitting on the porch chatting with two ladies, one of whom is a friend. The other lady, who I've just met is a doula and the conversation turns to all the thing one can do with a placenta. She stops to inquire whether I'm comfortable with the topic.
I'm not, but it's for a very different reason than she might think.
The thing is, she has no idea I'm trans.
She's inquiring to make sure that a conversation about simmering, dehydrating and encapsulating placentas isn't going to gross me out.
I'm thinking "I have no right to be here, being a part of this conversation, pretending like I could ever really share in this."
My friend comments later on it. She's sympathetic, saying that it hadn't occurred to her how hard that sort of thing must be, to have to second guess the meaning behind so many things.
She's right.
It is hard.
Maybe a decade from now this will be easier and I'l feel less of an outsider, less of a fraud.
Meanwhile the post has gone up.
Spa night. Sorry, no boys allowed.
"What about trans girls?" I ask
"well, it's a cool place, pretty much anything goes. Just no peen" I'm told.
Wow, great. So I'm cool, I just have to leave my genitals at home. Thanks, there's another shared experience I don't get to have.
N.B.
It is of course a proven fact that the penis is dangerous. Unlike firearms, which need a human to use them in a harmful way, the penis itself is fundamentally a threat to all women. Living with one is just a nightmare. The constant fear that at any moment it might sexually assault someone is a constant concern for me and the single most pressing reason why I must have my vaginoplasty done as soon as possible. It's only been by the grace of god that the damn thing hasn't hurt anyone yet...
/snark.
It's a spa trip.
Hot tubs, sauna, old pool etc.
I love these things, or at least I'm pretty sure I would if I ever got to go.
With out fail, every time I see a girls only spa day being organized it is actually a cis girls only event.
This is generally not something the organizer is specifically intending, it's just that women's only spas that allow trans women to use their facilities are virtually non existent. If they do there are often weird policies that make us wear swimsuits top and bottom because apparently unless we're post-op, our breasts are offensive to "real" women.
I've spent my whole life being kinda bummed out about being excluded from a whole range of bonding experiences between women.
It's hard to write about this without sounding bitter.
It's hard to write about this because honestly there's a lot of normative experiences I can never make up for and that fact makes me feel permanently othered.
I don't know if sitting around talking with a group of cis women will ever be without the feeling of being a fraud, listening to shared experiences I missed, feeling embarrassed to offer my opinion in case someone should point out that my experience is less valid for coming from a trans woman.
Having my identity's legitimacy be permanently in other peoples hands sucks.
The thing is, I really did miss out on all this stuff and I find that embarrassing.
I feel ashamed for having not been there through my childhood, teens and twenties. I feel that I have no right to offer my opinion on matters of womanhood.
"What if I get it wrong!?" I think, "I mean, it so kind of them to let me join in at all, I'd hate to have my female credentials revoked".
Sitting on the porch chatting with two ladies, one of whom is a friend. The other lady, who I've just met is a doula and the conversation turns to all the thing one can do with a placenta. She stops to inquire whether I'm comfortable with the topic.
I'm not, but it's for a very different reason than she might think.
The thing is, she has no idea I'm trans.
She's inquiring to make sure that a conversation about simmering, dehydrating and encapsulating placentas isn't going to gross me out.
I'm thinking "I have no right to be here, being a part of this conversation, pretending like I could ever really share in this."
My friend comments later on it. She's sympathetic, saying that it hadn't occurred to her how hard that sort of thing must be, to have to second guess the meaning behind so many things.
She's right.
It is hard.
Maybe a decade from now this will be easier and I'l feel less of an outsider, less of a fraud.
Meanwhile the post has gone up.
Spa night. Sorry, no boys allowed.
"What about trans girls?" I ask
"well, it's a cool place, pretty much anything goes. Just no peen" I'm told.
Wow, great. So I'm cool, I just have to leave my genitals at home. Thanks, there's another shared experience I don't get to have.
N.B.
It is of course a proven fact that the penis is dangerous. Unlike firearms, which need a human to use them in a harmful way, the penis itself is fundamentally a threat to all women. Living with one is just a nightmare. The constant fear that at any moment it might sexually assault someone is a constant concern for me and the single most pressing reason why I must have my vaginoplasty done as soon as possible. It's only been by the grace of god that the damn thing hasn't hurt anyone yet...
/snark.
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