Q: Have I ever been outed?
I feel like I out myself every day just by how I look and how I sound, but...
As for anyone "blowing my cover," I have to say that in general, my friends have been supportive and considerate. Also, as time goes on, my concerns about being read and/or being misgendered lessen slowly.
Where I've had trouble it's been with strangers, a couple of times early in my transition when I was most vulnerable, and once with someone who was an acquaintance but not a friend. Being read is bad enough. I often try to avoid this by telling people I'm trans right up front. Worse than being read is when someone clocks me and then feels the need to announce that they've done so to their friends. This has happened 4 times that I can recall.
They'll have some sort of facial twitch that lets me know I've been read, but then they'll "discreetly" tell their friends about me. One example is when I was in line at a burrito place and the guy who was making my lunch looked up at me, smirked, then looked down at his work, giving the guy working next to him a little nod and said "Es un hombre."
Subtle!
Another time I was out at a coffee shop, intending to sit there and read for a bit. I ordered an iced coffee, and as the guy behind the counter looked startled for a second. This was really early in my transition, so I hadn't learned to recognize that look yet. I found a table and sat down to my book. A few minutes later, I heard a commotion from the back room: two guys were laughing. I knew something was up but I had decided by this time that I wasn't letting people's ignorance stop me, as I had for all my life up until then. As I was walking out a bit later, the guy who had served me my coffee quickly raced back to find his friend, but I didn't wait around for them to gawk at me.
Still another experience along these lines happened at the Whole Foods near my electrologist's office. I'm a former employee of that company (which wasn't very trans friendly when I worked there) and when I walked in, I saw a former coworker, and I could tell that he recognized me. I said "hi" and went on with my shopping. I thought nothing of it, other than that it was good to see him, but the next few times I came into the store his name would be called over the PA almost as soon as I entered the store. He also began posting anonymous comments on my blog, which are still there, somewhere. I knew it was him.
All of these incidents happened early in my transition. They don't seem to happen any more. I think there are two reasons for that. One is that the incongruence between my appearance and my presentation has subsided a great deal. I have curves, I've pretty much killed my beard, the texture of my hair has changed, and my skin has softened. You have to work a little harder to see the evidence of testosterone poisoning. The other reason is the increased visibility of trans people in general. I have to express my gratitude to people like Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, and Jenny Boylan for their efforts on behalf of all of us in the trans community. Their support, their articulate and dignified presence, and their willingness to advocate for all of us has made a huge difference.
I have one more experience to tell you about. It was the first time I was ever outed. I was in the early days of working out my gender issues with the help of a therapist. I had not begun HRT yet, but I was taking my first tottering steps into womanhood. I had just started going out into the world in the clothing of my true gender. It was a step I had to take, even though it was really scary for me. I had always been very worried about the 70 bus. That's where this happened, one of the very first times I rode on it dressed as me. It was a cold day and I had on my new jacket, and that's what started things off. There was a teenaged girl sitting behind me with her boyfriend.
"Hey," she said, loudly, "that's a girl's jacket." I thought for a second about responding, I half turned around but then thought better of it. She shouted at me again, repeating herself. I didn't react. I was scared of a confrontation, and I was on a crowded bus. What would happen if I got into a "situation?" As humiliating as it was, as done as I was with taking crap for being who I am, I just sat there. We got to Central Square, I stepped off of the bus, and that was the end of it. It was a relief and a little bit of a victory.
Showing posts with label haunting memories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label haunting memories. Show all posts
Friday, September 12, 2014
Monday, May 2, 2011
Cost
48,000 American dead and wounded, 650,000 dead in Iraq, uncounted more the world over, all to supposedly get 1 guy who is *allegedly* responsible for 3,000 deaths. Remember that proof of Osama bin Laden's responsibility for those attacks was promised, but has never been provided.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Son: A Reflection on My Identity and Values
(Note: This is a paper I just submitted for an American History course I'm taking. I thought it pertinent enough to include here in the blog. I have no idea how it will be graded, but I like it.)
This past week was my birthday. My mother sent me a card in honor of it, which was nice. I saw it on top of my mail pile and noted it was in a pretty blue envelope. I like blue. It’s one of the colors I feel that I wear well, so when I saw her handwriting on the front, I smiled. I opened the envelope. At the top of the card, in letters about an inch and a half tall, it said,
“SON.”
The card itself was, of course, also blue. There was a drawing of a very happy looking puppy dog (complete with wagging tail.) Beneath the emphatic gender identifier, it said, “Here’s a card you’re sure to like—It doesn’t lecture, advise, argue, pry, or disapprove…” and when opened, shows the puppy again, holding a banner in its teeth. Above the pup it reads, “It just sits in your hand and says” and on the banner: “Happy Birthday, with lots of love!” and it was signed, simply, “Mom.”
My mother has been here to visit me from Texas, where she now lives, earlier this month, and we spent a pretty enjoyable ten days together. There was a bit of tension around my newly revised public persona as a woman, but in general we had a good visit. Along the way, she gave me some advice about posture, went shopping with me for clothes, and did not object to me being en femme pretty much the whole time she was here. At one point, she made her position clear: “I’m still not sold on this, though you seem to be. As far as I’m concerned, you are still my son.”
Fair enough, but the card still felt a little like having salt rubbed in an open wound.
I have always been taught to be honest. Even when it seems like it will put me at a disadvantage, I have the tendency to tell the truth, because I believe that in the end, honesty is its own reward. Concerning my lifelong desire to be female, however, I would have to say that I haven’t lived up to that ideal very well, at least until recently.
I think, historically, that the culture I come from tends to compartmentalize in this manner. It shows up in our history and our thinking in both large and small ways. It shows up in crashing, dramatic contradictions in our behavior; how is it that we are able to make weight loss aids a huge industry in our culture and yet have the highest incidence of obesity in the world? How is it that we can, many of us, follow a religion ostensibly based on love and the golden rule, and yet be involved in two wars of choice, having built our country on two major genocides, and currently spend more money on the machines and methods of war than the rest of the world combined? All the while we wonder why we are feared and despised in the world. We can do this because we don’t consistently apply our philosophies across the board. It seems we can’t be trusted.
My own family history, like that of many American families, is illuminated in certain specific areas, and shrouded in mystery in others. I have seen a family tree for a particular branch of my family that goes back ten generations, to a man who was born in Monmouth, Wales in 1695, and who was killed in North Carolina in an Indian attack late in life, shortly before the Revolutionary war. My grandfather on my mother’s side liked to claim he was a quarter Cherokee, but when asked which of his grandparents was full blood, he would back down from his claim. I have heard other members of this branch of the family suggest that he was telling the truth, though no one has been able to confirm the source of our supposed Cherokee blood. For my own reasons, I would like to know this information, because I would like to find that person on the rolls of Cherokee Nation and become an enrolled member of the tribe. I have asked my mom about this and she doesn’t know where I can find this information, though she did think that probably the direction to go was in through my grandfather’s mother. She also emphatically stated, “I’m white!”
On my father’s side of the family, the line back through to the past is really not clear to me. My grandfather on that side is not someone I ever met, and my grandmother raised 5 children alone in depression-era Los Angeles. The apocryphal family story is that for at least part of that time, she worked as a bootlegger’s mule, carrying whiskey in flasks attached to her legs underneath her skirt. I don’t know what else she did; there is much in that half of my family that is not talked about. What I do know is that my father was born in Cedar City, Utah and that at that time the family was Mormon. I don’t know why they left the church, but it seems to have been a less than amicable parting of the ways. I also have heard that supposedly my grandfather was chronically hospitalized with shell shock, which I believe he sustained in the First World War. It’s all very mysterious, somehow, there’s so much about how my Dad grew up that I don’t know. There’s also an aunt of mine whom I’ve never met, who is estranged from the family.
The dominant family attachment for me, therefore, has always been my mother’s side. Her mother was raised in southern Texas near Corpus Christi. Her family was a staunchly Southern Baptist family of tenant farmers who worked in the cotton fields. My grandfather on that side of the family had been raised in the Ozark Mountains, loved to play baseball and had a large repertoire of “old songs” that he knew and at one time loved to sing, though by the time I knew him, he had stopped singing entirely. I never heard him sing a note. It’s so strange to me that he cut himself off from these things that I find so interesting: his heritage, his singing. He and my grandmother struggled very hard to raise my mom and her brothers, having moved to the mountains in Colorado and lived on starvation rations for most of the Great Depression, my grandmother and her kids living in a one room cabin with a dirt floor, my grandfather travelling everywhere he could to find work, often riding the rails hobo style looking for migrant farm work. I suspect struggling as hard as they did to make a life probably caused certain things to seem unimportant.
My own parent’s lives were easier, as the country became prosperous after the Second War. My father had served in the Army Air Corps and following the war had become fairly successful as a car salesman at a Cadillac dealership in LA. My mother was pretty and smart and 12 years younger than my dad. She had left Colorado to escape her mother who had the frustrating habit of chasing off every man she became interested in. After meeting my father through mutual friends, she married him within three months in the fall of 1958. My father began an auto body repair business, which quickly failed. I was born in California within a year of the wedding. My next younger brother was born almost exactly two years later in Colorado, after my parents’ financial collapse and subsequent move to live with my mother’s parents.
My grandmother, predictably, hated my father. That never changed.
My own childhood was angst-y for my own reasons. I was female-identified right from the start; my best friends in my toddler and preschool years were little girls. When I started kindergarten, I remember an exchange from, I think, my first day. I had tried to start up a conversation with a girl who was a classmate of mine. I remember her yelling at me, saying, “You’re a boy! I don’t talk to boys!” and my troubles proceeded from there. I never had friends in school. I got beat up a lot. I always felt different from everyone else. To be clear, I generally identified as male, but I was never happy about it, and whenever something would happen that placed me in a female context somehow, I would secretly feel this intense joy, like the real me had somehow escaped into the sun. I can provide many examples of this from throughout my life, but I won’t do so here in the interest of space. I would have these revelations over and over again, and because I didn’t know what to do with them, and because I was ashamed of them, I would push that part of myself back into the darkness and forget. Even with my efforts to forget this part of myself, I always felt lonely and alienated. I had this strong feeling that there was no one like me. Further, I often had the experience of being with my extended family, feeling separate from them, thinking, “If you really knew me, if you knew who I was, you would hate me.”
I survived it all and grew up (sort of; I feel I am still very much a work in progress!) In my twenties I became a punk rock musician. I became a Buddhist. I am politically very much a leftist. For a long time I thought I must be gay, though I knew I was attracted to women. This is common among transsexuals who haven’t figured themselves out yet.
It’s another way to compartmentalize. I think that this inconsistency is something that happens when you live by an impossible moral code, and I think that Americans do this as a matter of course. I think we find it very difficult to accept each other and ourselves the way we truly are. I think we are an incredibly inwardly blind society.
When I first came out to my mother, her immediate response was that she could point to any number of instances in my life that would make sense with the notion that I think of myself as female. I felt really good about that first conversation, though at the same time I had some doubt that she would stick to that level of approval, and it turns out that I was right to have my reservations. She has clearly retrenched along the lines demarcated at the beginning of this paper, though my perception of things is that she is having trouble with it because of her Christian worldview. If it were only a matter of whether or not I were happy, I think she would be having less of a problem with my transition from male to female. She never talks about it from the Christian perspective, but I perceive her as living in a very Christian place and social world, and so I think, though she won’t talk to me about this from a moral or religious point of view, it is in her mind that what I am doing is morally wrong. I know that she will never frame her feelings in that way for me.
If I am to have any hope of resolving this matter in a happy way with her, I am going to have to be consistent, firm, loving, and honest.
I think I can do that.
This past week was my birthday. My mother sent me a card in honor of it, which was nice. I saw it on top of my mail pile and noted it was in a pretty blue envelope. I like blue. It’s one of the colors I feel that I wear well, so when I saw her handwriting on the front, I smiled. I opened the envelope. At the top of the card, in letters about an inch and a half tall, it said,
“SON.”
The card itself was, of course, also blue. There was a drawing of a very happy looking puppy dog (complete with wagging tail.) Beneath the emphatic gender identifier, it said, “Here’s a card you’re sure to like—It doesn’t lecture, advise, argue, pry, or disapprove…” and when opened, shows the puppy again, holding a banner in its teeth. Above the pup it reads, “It just sits in your hand and says” and on the banner: “Happy Birthday, with lots of love!” and it was signed, simply, “Mom.”
My mother has been here to visit me from Texas, where she now lives, earlier this month, and we spent a pretty enjoyable ten days together. There was a bit of tension around my newly revised public persona as a woman, but in general we had a good visit. Along the way, she gave me some advice about posture, went shopping with me for clothes, and did not object to me being en femme pretty much the whole time she was here. At one point, she made her position clear: “I’m still not sold on this, though you seem to be. As far as I’m concerned, you are still my son.”
Fair enough, but the card still felt a little like having salt rubbed in an open wound.
I have always been taught to be honest. Even when it seems like it will put me at a disadvantage, I have the tendency to tell the truth, because I believe that in the end, honesty is its own reward. Concerning my lifelong desire to be female, however, I would have to say that I haven’t lived up to that ideal very well, at least until recently.
I think, historically, that the culture I come from tends to compartmentalize in this manner. It shows up in our history and our thinking in both large and small ways. It shows up in crashing, dramatic contradictions in our behavior; how is it that we are able to make weight loss aids a huge industry in our culture and yet have the highest incidence of obesity in the world? How is it that we can, many of us, follow a religion ostensibly based on love and the golden rule, and yet be involved in two wars of choice, having built our country on two major genocides, and currently spend more money on the machines and methods of war than the rest of the world combined? All the while we wonder why we are feared and despised in the world. We can do this because we don’t consistently apply our philosophies across the board. It seems we can’t be trusted.
My own family history, like that of many American families, is illuminated in certain specific areas, and shrouded in mystery in others. I have seen a family tree for a particular branch of my family that goes back ten generations, to a man who was born in Monmouth, Wales in 1695, and who was killed in North Carolina in an Indian attack late in life, shortly before the Revolutionary war. My grandfather on my mother’s side liked to claim he was a quarter Cherokee, but when asked which of his grandparents was full blood, he would back down from his claim. I have heard other members of this branch of the family suggest that he was telling the truth, though no one has been able to confirm the source of our supposed Cherokee blood. For my own reasons, I would like to know this information, because I would like to find that person on the rolls of Cherokee Nation and become an enrolled member of the tribe. I have asked my mom about this and she doesn’t know where I can find this information, though she did think that probably the direction to go was in through my grandfather’s mother. She also emphatically stated, “I’m white!”
On my father’s side of the family, the line back through to the past is really not clear to me. My grandfather on that side is not someone I ever met, and my grandmother raised 5 children alone in depression-era Los Angeles. The apocryphal family story is that for at least part of that time, she worked as a bootlegger’s mule, carrying whiskey in flasks attached to her legs underneath her skirt. I don’t know what else she did; there is much in that half of my family that is not talked about. What I do know is that my father was born in Cedar City, Utah and that at that time the family was Mormon. I don’t know why they left the church, but it seems to have been a less than amicable parting of the ways. I also have heard that supposedly my grandfather was chronically hospitalized with shell shock, which I believe he sustained in the First World War. It’s all very mysterious, somehow, there’s so much about how my Dad grew up that I don’t know. There’s also an aunt of mine whom I’ve never met, who is estranged from the family.
The dominant family attachment for me, therefore, has always been my mother’s side. Her mother was raised in southern Texas near Corpus Christi. Her family was a staunchly Southern Baptist family of tenant farmers who worked in the cotton fields. My grandfather on that side of the family had been raised in the Ozark Mountains, loved to play baseball and had a large repertoire of “old songs” that he knew and at one time loved to sing, though by the time I knew him, he had stopped singing entirely. I never heard him sing a note. It’s so strange to me that he cut himself off from these things that I find so interesting: his heritage, his singing. He and my grandmother struggled very hard to raise my mom and her brothers, having moved to the mountains in Colorado and lived on starvation rations for most of the Great Depression, my grandmother and her kids living in a one room cabin with a dirt floor, my grandfather travelling everywhere he could to find work, often riding the rails hobo style looking for migrant farm work. I suspect struggling as hard as they did to make a life probably caused certain things to seem unimportant.
My own parent’s lives were easier, as the country became prosperous after the Second War. My father had served in the Army Air Corps and following the war had become fairly successful as a car salesman at a Cadillac dealership in LA. My mother was pretty and smart and 12 years younger than my dad. She had left Colorado to escape her mother who had the frustrating habit of chasing off every man she became interested in. After meeting my father through mutual friends, she married him within three months in the fall of 1958. My father began an auto body repair business, which quickly failed. I was born in California within a year of the wedding. My next younger brother was born almost exactly two years later in Colorado, after my parents’ financial collapse and subsequent move to live with my mother’s parents.
My grandmother, predictably, hated my father. That never changed.
My own childhood was angst-y for my own reasons. I was female-identified right from the start; my best friends in my toddler and preschool years were little girls. When I started kindergarten, I remember an exchange from, I think, my first day. I had tried to start up a conversation with a girl who was a classmate of mine. I remember her yelling at me, saying, “You’re a boy! I don’t talk to boys!” and my troubles proceeded from there. I never had friends in school. I got beat up a lot. I always felt different from everyone else. To be clear, I generally identified as male, but I was never happy about it, and whenever something would happen that placed me in a female context somehow, I would secretly feel this intense joy, like the real me had somehow escaped into the sun. I can provide many examples of this from throughout my life, but I won’t do so here in the interest of space. I would have these revelations over and over again, and because I didn’t know what to do with them, and because I was ashamed of them, I would push that part of myself back into the darkness and forget. Even with my efforts to forget this part of myself, I always felt lonely and alienated. I had this strong feeling that there was no one like me. Further, I often had the experience of being with my extended family, feeling separate from them, thinking, “If you really knew me, if you knew who I was, you would hate me.”
I survived it all and grew up (sort of; I feel I am still very much a work in progress!) In my twenties I became a punk rock musician. I became a Buddhist. I am politically very much a leftist. For a long time I thought I must be gay, though I knew I was attracted to women. This is common among transsexuals who haven’t figured themselves out yet.
It’s another way to compartmentalize. I think that this inconsistency is something that happens when you live by an impossible moral code, and I think that Americans do this as a matter of course. I think we find it very difficult to accept each other and ourselves the way we truly are. I think we are an incredibly inwardly blind society.
When I first came out to my mother, her immediate response was that she could point to any number of instances in my life that would make sense with the notion that I think of myself as female. I felt really good about that first conversation, though at the same time I had some doubt that she would stick to that level of approval, and it turns out that I was right to have my reservations. She has clearly retrenched along the lines demarcated at the beginning of this paper, though my perception of things is that she is having trouble with it because of her Christian worldview. If it were only a matter of whether or not I were happy, I think she would be having less of a problem with my transition from male to female. She never talks about it from the Christian perspective, but I perceive her as living in a very Christian place and social world, and so I think, though she won’t talk to me about this from a moral or religious point of view, it is in her mind that what I am doing is morally wrong. I know that she will never frame her feelings in that way for me.
If I am to have any hope of resolving this matter in a happy way with her, I am going to have to be consistent, firm, loving, and honest.
I think I can do that.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
A Random Memory
I worked at a call center a few years ago. Many of my fellow workers were a lot younger than me, in their early twenties.
There was one girl in particular, someone I liked a lot. She was smart and funny and fashionable. She was obsessed, like many of the kids I worked with, with celebrity culture. A particular favorite of hers was Paris Hilton. I think Paris was very important to her. One time, we were on a break (probably once when the phone system was down) we somehow got onto the subject of Paris, and as I have no respect for the Hilton woman, I said, "Don't you understand that Paris is short for Parasite?" which was really funny to me, but which hurt (I will call her) Samantha's feelings. She never spoke to me again. It's true, we didn't work together but another couple of weeks, but I think she was truly offended by what I said, and we never said a word to each other after that.
I've always regretted being so acerbic in that situation. If Samantha ever randomly happens to read this and recognizes herself in this little story, please understand that I'm really sorry. I was mean.
What I wish I'd gone on to say is -- "I think you are a hundred times cooler than her. You are braver and tougher and, actually, far more beautiful than Paris HIlton could ever be. Any time PH gets into trouble, she's always got daddy's millions to fall back on. You're out here in the middle of the night calling people and struggling to make it and doing OK. Sam, you rock." That's how I feel and I so wish I hadn't left it where I left it w/ her.
There was one girl in particular, someone I liked a lot. She was smart and funny and fashionable. She was obsessed, like many of the kids I worked with, with celebrity culture. A particular favorite of hers was Paris Hilton. I think Paris was very important to her. One time, we were on a break (probably once when the phone system was down) we somehow got onto the subject of Paris, and as I have no respect for the Hilton woman, I said, "Don't you understand that Paris is short for Parasite?" which was really funny to me, but which hurt (I will call her) Samantha's feelings. She never spoke to me again. It's true, we didn't work together but another couple of weeks, but I think she was truly offended by what I said, and we never said a word to each other after that.
I've always regretted being so acerbic in that situation. If Samantha ever randomly happens to read this and recognizes herself in this little story, please understand that I'm really sorry. I was mean.
What I wish I'd gone on to say is -- "I think you are a hundred times cooler than her. You are braver and tougher and, actually, far more beautiful than Paris HIlton could ever be. Any time PH gets into trouble, she's always got daddy's millions to fall back on. You're out here in the middle of the night calling people and struggling to make it and doing OK. Sam, you rock." That's how I feel and I so wish I hadn't left it where I left it w/ her.
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