xoros

I can be pretty hard on myself sometimes. I still berate myself for things I did nearly twenty years ago. Things that perhaps other people involved barely remember now? Who knows! I’m my own worst judge and jury and I have very little mercy for myself. I should forgive myself such things, especially so long ago.. and so relatively minor. I just don’t like hurting people, ever. Maybe I should try not to hurt myself too, that would be fairer!

If’s and buts about the past serve only to trap us there. Constantly reliving and wondering if we could have done it better. Done my life better. The irony is that by doing so I never do get it right, because I only ever go back and focus on what I think I did wrong. Not what I feel I got right. I can’t undo a decision and slowly beating myself to an emotional standstill over a thing is not going to achieve a different outcome. It might make the one I did choose seem like the wrong one, because I can say “Hey I’m kind of not happy about that!” But am I more unhappy because of what I did then, or because of how I view what I did then, now? Shouldn’t I recognise that the now I do inhabit is a good one and that it deserves my attention? Would any other alternate now be a better one?

It’s impossible to say, regardless I am still left with the simple fact that the past is immutable. What’s more, the me that is now, doing the regretting, only exists because of that past. To seek to change it would be to erase my self. And that’s something I do not want to do.

The only healthy thing to do is forgive myself. Not forget, because these are the things that make me me, just as much as any decision I look back in approval on. I forgive others more easily than myself. But it is not actually so hard, is it? To say “I’m sorry my me, it’s ok to be you”?

And it is ok.

I can think of so many ifs. If this had happened, if that, it I had… if I hadn’t…

The thing is, that if any of these ifs had been different then I may very well not be the same person I am now. And I would have a whole lot of other ifs and maybes and whys. So I think given the choice between those unknown ifs and selves, I would rather stick with the way things panned out. After all, the alternate ifs might be no better, or worse, than the ones I have already.

Laughriotgirl of laugh riot has a very interesting post up at the moment exploring how she feels and can express where exactly her sense of gender might be. And just why it is untrue to say that every trans person completely and only absorbs the gendered messages and training of their apparent gender as a child – a common accusation leveled at trans women to cast us as unreconstructed sexists (as if all men were that anyway) and radiating “male energy” and to generally invalidate our lives. Her experience chimes with mine, in that I very clearly remember finding male aimed messages as massively confusing – I knew every one else expected me to pay attention to them, but they didn’t chime with me. I was paying attention just as much to female aimed messages which did feel a good fit to me. As a result I think I probably absorbed alot of both, but what stuck, what was comfy, fitted my internal sense of self. What I acted out, was a mixture, until I was finally able to give up masquerading and just express how I wish to, which is still a mixture as very few people, cis or trans, are walking stereotypes. Anyway, go read it! It’s thoughtful!

A funny thing, but it’s taken me a long time to adjust to the idea that I pass as cis. I mean, it’s been going on for over a year now but I still don’t expect it. It still surprises me. Not only that but I find I feel guilty towards other trans people who do not pass. So oddly I find myself having very mixed feelings about doing so. On the one hand, it does indeed rock, it’s just… incredibly pleasant to know that people see me. That they aren’t staring at me, well unless I’m out with my partner when they sometimes do stare but then they are staring at the lesbians. Which feels different to me. Actually it feels safer, believe it or not.

But on the other hand it leaves me with vague feelings of disquiet, of having undeserved luck, of not being worthy. It’s something I think that I will get used to with time. I have generally found I have these kinds of feeling about just, well, being happy these days, being able to transition, being able to live my truth and life.

I also feel like I don’t ever want to completely lose that feeling of having something special, because it does feel special, to be able to be seen, for my truth to be recognised and seen.

Warning! This post might be controversial. Sorry about that. It’s about me! So I can’t help it!

The fact that I lack any safe space is a source of disillusionment for me. I do not expect people to be false and to go against their own opinions to provide it. It’s important to say that. That would be unfair to them and false safety for me. What exercises me is the fact that I don’t feel I have any unequivocal support for my identity and my lived experience against all comers. I feel I have no community to fight my corner with me when I fire a flare into the darkness for aid. And here I mean wade in and stick up for me, ask questions later, support. In a world where every trans person I know (and the only other person I know personally who might possibly relate to this post and finds themself in a similar  position would definitely like me to point out that she’s genderqueer), has found this, it’s hard to express quite how othered and alone that can feel.

What’s the reason for this you might ask? Go on, I’ll imagine someone asking if it helps. I’ll tell you, I don’t want srs. Call me crazy, call me inconceivable but that’s how I wish to live my life and gender. This is my life, my body and my gender identity. There is no one size fits all way of doing it, although anyone who wants to dispute the need and right of trans people who do desire physical transition can totally rely on my fighting on their side!

You know, I have found a few trans women who are in the same place. They are like me, their outlet is blogging. Reading some one else’s blog is something yes, it makes me feel like I’m not a one off for a start!  But it isn’t the same as a community or personal friends. It is oft repeated and sometimes accepted that 90% of trans women never have srs for all sorts of reasons*. I can find no source for this by the way, but I’ve read it in print and online several times, it took me ages to find the first time round when I just needed to know I wasn’t the only woman who thought this way. In fact, it’s such a shady figure that even when I did find it the comments have always been that all that 90% wanted srs but couldn’t. OK, well, I put my hand up. I probably could have it, but I don’t want it. So, is that 89.99 recuring percent now? With me all in my own category? Or since I exist… you never know so might others! How shocking! Surely you’re out there? But where!?

We’re the dark matter of trans. Invisible and disputed, a theory for some people to speculate on and project their own ideas and pet conceits on to. We have to fight even harder and on even more fronts to have our identities accepted, not just as women, but as transsexuals in the first place, to have the very fact we too have gender dysphoria and are valid women accepted. I think we must be giving up on communities as even amongst trans women our existence, motivations and even identities can be subject to question and suspicion. I know this, I’ve looked all over for you others! Did we just miss each other in those forums? Were you just around the corner when I wandered into virtual world trans spaces? We should make an appointment next time!

We are othered by the othered and cast adrift to fend for ourselves, probably because we make it even messier and more confusing and therefore even harder for the cis majority to accept everyone else. Gender fuck? I sex fuck, sexuality fuck and then get dirty with notions of genderqueer and binary too for afters and I’m still a binary lesbian woman. For my next trick I’ll time travel, or perhaps just be really awkward, I can manage that one sleeping ! My life, body and gender are a grey area for everyone to try and map and claim for their side. Or one of  the other sides, depending whether they want me in their team or not .

Wait a moment though, I’m not a team capture the flag game! So, I find the only sensible response is to plant a fuck off huge sign “Here be a dragon, and she’s fucking pissed off  about it :V”

Thank you for listening .
With love.

*EDIT This includes people who can’t for health reasons, for financial reasons, limits to do with their lives as well as those of us who are able to find a way to balance our dysphoria without. Thought this was important to make really, really clear!

Sometimes there is nothing to say.

Sometimes there are thoughts but I don’t know how to say them.

Sometimes there is no one to hear them, or understand them.

Sometimes I just need to be a listener for myself.

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.

I have an up and down relationship with sleep. I like sleep, I love sleeping in, but sometimes I find it really hard to shut my mind down and go to sleep. I’ve had this forever, as long as I can remember. I can remember reading books under the bedcovers with a torch, when I was seven, to pass the time while I couldn’t sleep. I used to escape into books and daydreams to hide from the things keeping me awake, to pass the time waiting for sleep.

I have this feeling, I don’t want to post rationalise and I do not want to reinterpret my own history to add meaning that was not there at the time, but I have the sense, a kind of shadow memory of wordless feelings, that the thing that started it going was my sense of wrongness. My sense of “Huh… wait, I’m meant to be a boy? Er….?” which was vague and ill formed but… there indefinably. My escaping involved a lot of projecting myself into the heroines in my books, of not wanting to sleep in order to stay in the fantasy as long as I could.

As I got older, insomnia became not regular, but something that happened often enough to be a part of my life. Particularly when I am more stressed. Particularly when I am trying to work through some trans feeling related emotions. I spent so long supressing these feelings that I find it very hard sometimes to access them. I just get this… this… emotional pressure that keeps my mind ticking over without knowing why. Sometimes I can force the issue, sometimes I just have to wait for it to stop being shy and come forward.

I guess it didn’t help that training as an architect is kind of reinforcing for insomniacs. It’s structured to force you to work long and late, there is a culture of pulling all nighters to meet deadlines. Insomnia as useful learning skill! I can be extremely productive sometimes during a bout of it, getting large amounts of work done in order to pass the time waiting for sleep – although I doubt this actually helps me find sleep and mostly serves to distract from the discomfort of knowing there is something stopping you from sleeping.

I’m having a sleepless phase at the moment. Partly I think to do with money worries, partly I have some stuff I’m working through and it is uncomfy thinking and it’s slow.

I’ll be glad when I get back to some normal (ish) sleeping.