Passing By
I’ve been thinking about “passing” again, it came up in a comment conversation I had recently and is an issue of some kind in every trans person’s life. It is, in short, the attempt to be seen as, to pass as, the gender that you identify as without anyone questioning or doubting it. It’s a tricky business. Not all cis people even “pass” as their gender all the time. It’s a very slippery concept as it raises questions for a trans person of whether to pursue it or not, and if so how much does that entail conforming to ideas of gender that might not actually be a true reflection of one’s personality. It’s complicated by being completely relative – it relies on the stereotypes and gender expectations of hetero cis culture which vary in time and in place. The problem is that sterotypes tend to be mass generalisations that often reflect conservative opinion as well as being a one size fits all solution that fits very few people very well. Above all the hardest thing about passing is that in reality one has no control over what others perceive. They see what they see and interpret it according to their own opinions.
So what is it about the attempt to pass that is so attractive? Quite simply it’s the lure of just being a face in the crowd. Not being obviously trans, not being someone people stare at and get confused by. Not being visible. It’s something that hetero cis people take completely for granted all the time. It is their judgement that passing appeals to, their approval that yes, you look “normal” that is being sought. It’s also the desire to be accorded the courtesy of being addressed as the gender you are, like they are.
Society is so very keyed on gender. Many people will claim otherwise but when one obviously steps out of the categories set up and policed around what body sex you have you really see just how much this is true. One can be dressed, behaving and seeming very much like one gender, but if you noticeably “fail” physically in a way that people pick up on to meet their gender expectations they will usually make a judgement based on what physical sex they think you are and more likely than not revert to seeing you as gendered to match that over any other signals you are giving. They withdraw the courtesy of allowing you to define who you are and impose their interpretation on you instead. There are many reasons for this, to do with sexism, homophobia and transphobia that are outside the subject I want to talk about right now.
So, passing is about trying to meet the expectations of cis people in order that they agree with your definition of yourself. To me it feels like giving control of who you are to them. It’s can be a thankless business too. Fail to meet the expectations of enough people, enough of the time and it falls apart. So why chase that? To just be one of the crowd. To not have to live your life constantly coming out. Constantly having to justify and explain yourself to people who might be hostile to you doing so.
Sometimes I think their must be another way. Neither living in such a way as to be visibly out all the time nor spending one’s life constantly worrying if one is doing it right. I want to be the person that decides if I am being myself “correctly”. I want to be the one who decides how being me looks, sounds, seems. Is that too much to hope for? Isn’t that just like everyone else too? In the absence of societies that allow everyone to define who they are I’m still working on how to do this. I try not to worry too much about whether I look “right”, I try and resist behaving in ways that are not natural to me, even if it might mean I don’t pass. Like many things about being trans* it’s annoying that something that cis people take for granted becomes a tightrope walk of trying to just be, of trying not to police oneself both in terms of matching other’s expectations and in allowing oneself to do things that do match, because that’s me and it just happens to fit some stereotype or other.
So fuck passing. I just want to pass as myself. If others agree then good, and on the whole they mostly seem to, where I live at any rate. If they don’t, then they don’t. I’ll take mostly as a trade off for getting to be who I want to be in the way I want to be, I’ll take that in return for not living with fear of failing to live up to their expectations.
I’ll do my best to anyway.
May 4th, 2009 at 9:35 am
what others think, say,or do is not my concern. what i think, say, and do is my concern.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:37 am
Lovely, well-considered post. I think there’s another layer to the onion, however
I very much hear your desire for autonomy–to desire to pass is to inevitably give control over oneself to others, at least in part, and others may be ignorant, biased or cruel. The problem is that I don’t see identity in psychological terms as an internal, individual matter, but as deeply social. Humans are naturally social beings, and who we are is constantly shaped through interaction. This is especially true for nonconscious identity–things like posture, gesture, worldview, and tastes–what sociologists call habitus. Through interaction with others, things that are central to my identity, but very resistant to conscious control, are impacted. This means that having others interact with me as a boi makes my boiself manifest, and having them interact with me from a position of reading me as female winds up undermining my identity. So much as I would like not to care about how others perceive me, “passing” matters to my transition. . . Given that I generally do not pass, this is a current sorrow for me. Working on that.
May 7th, 2009 at 5:08 am
Thank you Luminis. I understand and agree with what a lot of what you say. Indeed some of the pressures I feel from outside and in are about not just who I am but how I am in my manner of being, moving and seeming. I feel that I could tie myself in knots trying to unravel it all so all I can do is just try and be naturally me, whatever that is. Try not to second guess myself or how others will react. I think this has changed over time too as I have, for want of a better description, grown into myself and begun to feel comfortable and more at ease. I have no doubt that this has been shaped by those around me. In fact sometimes I notice that some of my ways of being are shared with and probably originate with my partner. I feel that some of them have been there much longer than I realised too and are unmasked by my letting my body language be natural instead of denial constrained.
I also think that I have had some help in where I find myself, I’ve been given social reinforcement from those immediately around me since I came out and that has made a safe space for me to become, to learn how to manifest from within sometimes perhaps? I think I see my social identity as an intersection of something coming from within me and how that interacts with the community around me. I do have a very strong sense of my worldview as a self generated and defined thing as I have always had one at odds with the majority around me. Although it does absorb and consider what I learn by interacting – now more than it did when I was younger and much much more closed in on myself.
What Cliff said above is an aim. I think it is an ideal rather than something I can achieve fully. I happen to know he’s talking from a buddhist perspective and I think that there are ideas there that help me. Such as letting go of fear of not passing, and of letting myself just be instead of forcing it. Of trying not to be too self concious, try too hard to be me and trusting myself to just… be me if possible.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:12 am
[...] passing, there was a post about the subject over at the blog Xoros, titled Passing By. It’s pretty brief, but worth a read. From the [...]