Teaspoon Politics

This piece originally appeared in February 2013 in the LGBT+ student magazine No Definition. The full issue, with the theme of "Politics", is available in PDF format here.

“All I ever do is try to empty the sea with this teaspoon; all I can do is keep trying to empty the sea with this teaspoon.” – Melissa McEwan, founder of shakesville.com[1]

I never used to have much interest in being “political”. For me, “politics” just meant an argument that you dusted off once every four years at election time, neatly compartmentalised off from “real” life, boring and safely ignorable.

But politics doesn’t just mean which party you vote for. It has another, much broader definition. Coming from the Greek “polis” (city), it encompasses all aspects of being a citizen - part of an organised social grouping of individuals, a society. How any given society organises itself can vary enormously, but it will always have to settle on a system for allocating its collective power.

Politics, or power relations, is everywhere. And being queer can have quite some bearing on where we stand within the system of power.

In 1969, the feminist Carol Hanisch famously said “the personal is political”. The implication was that when we sit down and think about it, a lot of the ‘personal problems’ we suffer don’t just spring out of nowhere, but they have their roots in a wider social context - they are influenced by the politics of the day.

Marriage is obviously a political issue, under the more popular definition of the word: some couples have the legal right to get married, other couples (or members of committed relationships involving more than two partners!) do not. But it’s also political in that it affects individuals’ relative levels of social power. Marriage is not just a personal choice, but something which comes with considerable fringe benefits. Obviously there are legal rights associated with it, such as custody and inheritance rights. But these rights have knock-on effects on other aspects of the couple’s lives. They are more financially secure; they have fewer worries in the way of getting on with their lives, advancing their careers, and so on.

A society which doesn’t allow gay couples to access the rights and benefits of marriage is making a statement: it believes gay people should stay at the bottom of the social power hierarchy, and it will make their lives more financially and emotionally difficult than heterosexual couples’, in order to ensure that they stay there. The same principle is at work in a society which forces transsexual people to go through the upheaval of dissolving supportive marriages made in their birth gender in order to access vital treatment, with no guarantee that they can restore these legal ties once their transition is complete. Societies can load the dice such that gay or trans* people have a harder time getting by, and then, when they fail or give up or break down, legislators can argue that they are clearly more fragile, less well-adjusted, than ‘normal’ people – and therefore less able to cope with, and less deserving of, the rights which they are denied.

But once we realise that our personal problems are so bound up in a wider political framework, we might ask ourselves: what can we do to ameliorate them? After all, electoral politics can seem impossible to change. There might be a hundred “political” issues we feel strongly about (whether clearly within the remit of politicians, such as who has the legal right to marry, or more subtle matters of power relations, such as how bisexual people are treated in society and culture at large). But when electoral politics is presented as the only way of making a “political” difference, we feel that we have to delegate our voice in all of these issues to just one person who, out of a mere handful of choices, looks like ey might do the least worst job of handling them. Thus it’s easy to fall into apathy, feeling as though we have no power.

But we have to remember that although very few of us have power in vast quantities, such that we could change our situation at the flick of a switch, we all have some power. Every day, in every situation, we’re negotiating a matrix of power relations – of politics! – where we can exercise an influence, some influence, however small. Where we can take out our teaspoons and bail out a few millilitres from the sea of inequalities in which so many of our LGBT+ companions are uncomfortably submerged.

For me, being openly transsexual is a political act. Power relations are inevitably tilted in favour of the ‘normal’, and when we as trans* people buy into the idea that being trans* – or ‘not normal’ – is something to be ashamed of, disguised, hidden, we reinforce that power relation within the culture. I’m certainly not denying that some situations are actively dangerous if you don’t try to disguise your trans* status. But boldly and shamelessly standing up and being counted at times when you’re expected to stay humbly silent – when acquaintances are making transphobic ‘jokes’, for example – can act as a reclamation of power.

The balance of power demands that we meekly and uncomfortably sit through these situations, because this is the fate we have earned by being ‘not normal’. But when we refuse, it makes people think twice about what they can get away with – about how stable the power they derive from being ‘normal’ actually is. Suddenly it gives a personality to the faceless mass of ‘otherness’ that they or their companions or the media they consume make jokes or comments or accusations about. And bit by bit, thought by thought, person by person, the “accepted” power hierarchy of ‘normal > not-normal’ changes. Teaspoon by teaspoon, the political landscape changes.

And when a society (which starts from a person, which starts from a thought) accepts a minority group as legitimate, full, equal, well-rounded members, that’s when electoral politics are likely to change in their favour. One day, if our society gradually grows to view transsexualism as no big deal, just one of those quirks of human variation, a personal handicap easily resolved by simple procedures, then the pathologizing hoops we have to jump through to access treatment will start to look unsuitable and outdated. It will seem only common sense to allow all trans* people the right to bodily autonomy, rather than only permitting it to those who have been psychologically assessed, who have survived a stressful and potentially life-endangering extended period of living (and therefore dressing, and ideally also finding employment) as their chosen gender, who happen not to transgress their clinicians’ (sometimes simplistic, sometimes binary) ideas of what makes someone a man or a woman or neither. After all, it seems only common sense, these days, to allow gay couples autonomy over who they legally bind their lives with.

This is my manifesto: I will cling fervently to my teaspoon, and I will try to use it whenever I have the strength. I will stand up and be counted. I will never stop believing in the cumulative influence of the infinitesimal power of each action I commit. Because it is we who, if we give up and give in to political apathy, have the most to lose.

[1] Following the initial publication of this piece, I came across criticism of the sometimes problematic behaviour and attitudes of the Shakesville bloggers, including Melissa McEwan. I think the quotation is a useful one regardless of other things McEwan has said, but I understand the criticisms, I do not endorse Shakesville uncritically, and I want to warn readers that clicking through may be triggering.

Body of Evidence

"So then, one last question: What do you want us to do for you?"

The answer in my head was "I want you to help me work that out". But it would have been the wrong answer.

I was there for a diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria, and if you have Gender Dysphoria, then by definition, you must want gender confirmation therapy. You must want to do everything within your power to make your body conform to the right binary gender... no matter what the risks.

There was one question he hadn't asked me. In fact, there was one whole topic he hadn't even touched on. He hadn't asked me how I felt about my body.

He hadn't asked me if I felt nauseous, alienated, at seeing my naked female-phenotype form. He hadn't asked me if in glancing at my hands I subconsciously felt as though they must be someone else's - as though my hands, surely, would be bigger, hairier. He hadn't asked me if instinctively I reached for a penis that wasn't there, if I was overcome with fresh horror every month at the reminder of the thing between my legs that my brain just couldn't process.

In short, he didn't ask me - not even in crude, insightless terms like the ones above - he didn't ask me if I have body dysphoria.

On the whole, I don't. Not every trans* person does. For those that do, of course, gender confirmation therapy is a strongly desirable course of action - the bodies they have cause them genuine pain, pain which hormone therapy and surgery are extremely effective at relieving.

But me? Huh, well. Maybe if I had stubble, I'd get ma'amed less often.

I've blogged about this before; I've been wavering about medical transition for years. It always comes down to this: there's very little I think I'd miss about my female-phenotype body if I put it through a second puberty. And at times, that "very little" feels like a cheap price to pay to escape the pain of being constantly misgendered. But at other times, the scales tip the other way. And at those times, it seems frustratingly ridiculous that in order to be seen as my true self, I should have to change something - my body - which I just do not feel has any connection with my sense of self.

So that was the question I wanted to ask. What can I do? What should I do? How best can I navigate living as a man without having to break things that don't need fixing?

But I know what the answer would have been: if I have no desire to change my body to conform to the male phenotype, I have no business living as a man.

Popular conceptions of transsexualism are frequently - overwhelmingly - boiled down to issues of the body. In laypeople's eyes, "being transsexual" just means "wanting a sex change". (It never seems to occur to them to ask why one would want it. Funny, that, since it's by far and away the most interesting aspect of the thing.) Indeed, it's often argued (by people I have no desire to link you to) that transsexualism didn't, couldn't, exist before the development of medical techniques for gender confirmation. And, when you're a trans* person, the path is so neatly laid out in front of you - hormone therapy, chest/genital surgery, starting a new life and going 'stealth' - that you sometimes forget it can be (has been, might one day be) any other way.

Three days after those questions (the one that was asked, and the one that wasn't), I went on a walking tour of Brighton, focusing on its LGBT history. We heard the story of Dr James Barry, a celebrated surgeon in the 19th century, who travelled the world on army postings as a Medical Inspector, and performed one of the first known Caesarean sections in which both mother and baby survived. It was only when he died, and his body was - against his instructions - examined, that he was discovered to have been assigned female at birth. Had his wishes been respected, nobody would ever have realised.

Nobody would ever have realised.

And then there was the story of "Colonel" Victor Barker, whose exploits with the National Fascisti in the 1920s remind us that trans* people can be flawed human beings just like anyone else (and whose Wikipedia page genders him as female), but who played the role of a retired colonel like such a natural that his peers never suspected that he was legally female until it was revealed during a court case. And those are just the famous stories - the ones where the "truth" was uncovered, the ones where the person involved was important or notorious enough for the story to hit the news. Who knows how many other lives have been lived contrary to assigned gender?

What it means to be trans* has changed a lot over the years. For untold centuries before our modern, medicalising era, it could simply mean putting on the right clothes and forging yourself a new life. That's if you were one of the lucky ones, of course - if you had the means and connections to start afresh, and if you 'passed' well enough to go unsuspected (which, I'm well aware, is often far easier for the male-identified than for the female-identified). But it's notable that after Dr Barry's posthumous outing, acquaintances were quick to step up and testify to his smooth skin and high voice. If his female-coded attributes were such a giveaway, how come nobody challenged him when he was alive? It's conceivable that back when gender roles were much more rigid and segregated, the idea of anyone female-assigned putting on trousers and going through medical school was so unthinkable that not even a whole host of 'giveaway' cues would arouse suspicion.

I certainly don't want to idealise the past with that observation, but it's intriguing in the light of the following: Gender confirmation therapy first started to become widespread in the 1970s, a time of unprecedented freedom of expression for both genders, and yet its gatekeepers would only treat those trans* people who rigidly conformed to "traditional" ideas of masculinity or femininity. Trans* women ran the risk of being refused treatment if they didn't attend appointments wearing skirts and makeup, a situation which persisted long after such sartorial expectations became outmoded even for cis women - and woe betide you if, in-role as your chosen gender, you identified as anything other than 100% heterosexual.

The simple fact is, a lot of people who like to consider themselves "normal" have a lot invested in the idea of the gender binary. And for them, the existence of transsexualism is scary: it raises the possibility that they might not be as "normal" as they thought. It makes them feel better if they can claim that only the manliest FAABs and womanliest MAABs ever want to transition; that everybody who transitions is at least upholding good old traditional gender roles in the bedroom; that nobody would ever want to admit to such a shamefully not-normal thing as having a trans* history; that nobody would want to transition to anything other than "male" or "female". For decades, gatekeepers have pandered to such people's gender anxieties when setting up the hoops for transitioners to jump through. And slowly, slowly, many of these requirements have been eroded away, as even the gatekeepers admit that they're starting to look outdated. But it's too late for anyone who, in the seventies, desperately needed relief from eir body dysphoria, and was faced with the choice, for one reason or another, between lying or losing out.

We can't say for certain whether Barry and Barker were "actually" trans men. "Trans man" is a label which, like many others ("lesbian", "genderqueer", "asexual"), belongs to our time - it only makes sense within the context of modern (and Western!) ideas of "man", and of "transness", and of the interplay between them. We don't know their motives, we don't know their true desires, and we don't know how they would have identified, or what steps of transition they would have taken, if they had lived today. All we can say is that they did what they felt they had to in order to forge out a satisfactory life within the society they had to live in.

And that's all that anyone who's lived contrary to their assigned gender has ever done - whether they took hormones or not, whether they had surgery or not, whether or not they [would have] identified with the label "trans*" (or "fa'afafine", or "hijra", or any of the dozens of other non-Western cross-gender identities). If I did undergo medical transition, I'd undoubtedly feel more comfortable within the society I have to live in (and, note, that is definitely not to be sniffed at). But I would always be uncomfortable knowing it's not the society I want to live in. I would always, deep down, rather live in a society where the phenotype of my body mattered as little to other people as it did to me; one where I could politely explain I was a man and that was that. And I would always worry that our society might never reach that stage without reckless self-important idiots people like me choosing the road less travelled, swimming stubbornly against the tide, expending the energy they are lucky enough to have in politely explaining, again and again, until that is that.

As my clinician was fond of mentioning, he's been "doing this" - that is, diagnosing people's genders - for 25 years. (I doubt he would have taken the point that so have I.) But in that 25 years, much has changed. And - with any luck - I'm going to be living as trans* for another 25, 50, maybe even 75 years. Do I really want to sacrifice my voice, my surgical virginity, my comfortably post-pubescent hormonal cycle, on the altar of what cis people expect of me now?

Some men have breasts. If I can't get over that, then who will?

Life through a lens

I've spent the past year and a half internalising what behaviour is expected of a man. At first, it was entertaining; it was amusing to rewire my conditioning, to project somebody different. I was, possibly for the first time in my life, "performing gender".

I'm starting to get sick of this performance.

Some demands of masculinity I just refuse to comply with - the conscious, nagging, self-second-guessing ones. For instance, being socialised as female, I never learnt to suppress the instinct to flail and squee. Now that I live as male, I will not police my expressions of happiness and excitement simply for fear of looking effete. (While I was living as female, I never much wanted to flail or squee, so I'm damn well going to do it now.) But others have taken hold of me by stealth: insidious, subconscious.

There should not be a social pecking order for who is expected to move out of the way of whom on a stairwell. I should not think of it as reflecting on my gender if I move or if I stand my ground. I absolutely should not start instinctively assuming that if a woman's coming the other way, the cultural onus is on her to move.

I'm not performing masculinity. I'm performing being a dick.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong. It would be nice to think so. But I know that we all grow up surrounded by gendered expectations, expectations which can't help but have some kind of an effect on how we behave. I know, because I spent my entire youth picking them out, and stubbornly rejecting them.

If I hadn't been raised as a girl, I might never have come to experience myself as a man.

I have always hated being seen as something I'm not, or being seen distorted through the lens of one aspect of myself. I hated that the ways I behaved could be written off as not simply me, my marvellous unique personality, but as "typical for a girl". So I changed how I behaved, determined to defy expectation. I exaggerated everything about myself that was "tomboyish"; I worked on it, I performed it.

I don't know how I would have turned out if I hadn't been born with a vulva. I honestly don't know what's "inherently-male-me" and what's just the byproduct of rebellious reverse conditioning. I was shaped by gendered expectations: so determined not to be seen through the "girl" lens that I pushed myself to its edges, let myself become distorted. Those lenses will get you in the end.

And now it's happening again. There's a tension between my desire to hold on to my true self, and my painful awareness that my masculinity is, culturally, somewhat lacking. I want to prove that you can be a man without being A Man (TM), but I'm constantly tempted to tone my effeminate self down by way of overcompensation. Same shit, different lens.

Everything I do, I can feel the lenses flipping. Say one day I feel like wearing stockings. That makes me a saucy vixen. No, flip the lens. It makes me an outrageous cross-dresser. Better, or worse? Say I break out in road rage while cycling over a dangerous junction. That makes me a pre-menstrual bitch. Flip the lens. That makes me a macho arsehole. Better, or worse? How about now?

How about no?

Can I not just be a person who likes the feel of stockings? (The long answer is no, I can't: I'm a person who, due to long years of conditioning, derives a sense of daring thrill from wearing an item culturally coded as feminine and therefore implicitly degrading. But let's not worry about that right now.) Can I not just be a person who gets pissed off at getting cut up? The thing is, I can't. Society doesn't work that way. And whether I stay like this, with my feminine face and high-pitched voice, or whether I go through second puberty, I'm still going to be read through one lens or the other, all the time, whatever I do. Subtly, innocently, subconsciously, maybe - but everyone I meet will pick a lens.

I wonder, when you get right down to it, whether transition can help me at all. My objection is to being seen as what I'm expected to be, not what I am. But surely it's churlish to expect to be seen always and solely as my true self? It is, after all, a luxury that's afforded to few. Who doesn't have to negotiate being seen as "short", "pretty", "Asian", "wheelchair-bound", "middle-class", "fat" (etc, etc, etc) first and having a personality second? How many of us don't get so used to being seen through the same lens, time and time again, that our interactions get coloured by our expectations of how other people will respond to us?

Some time ago, I learnt the phrase "social dysphoria". As I understand it, this refers to the aspect of gender dysphoria which involves intense dissatisfaction with the gendered way one is treated in social interactions. But I couldn't help wondering where the line is drawn between "social dysphoria" as a manifestation of trans*-ness, and simply as a reasonable reaction to REALLY FUCKING STUPID social conventions. Are women who dislike being subjected to sexual innuendo in the workplace suffering from "social dysphoria"? Are people of colour who dislike being randomly stopped and searched suffering from "social dysphoria"? Are disabled people who dislike being ignored and talked past suffering from "social dysphoria"? Is the solution for everyone to "transition" to being white, male, heterosexual, neurotypical, able-bodied? Or - here's a novel idea - is the solution maybe for society to sort its fucking shit out?

I don't feel as though "female" is what I am. But my identity has been shaped by the pressures of being "female". And everyone's identity is, to some extent, shaped by "who they are" - by how they react to the lenses through which they're seen. Do they try to fight it, or fit it? Do they try to become as "normal" as they can, or do they wear their difference like armour? Do they play up to the stereotype, seeing its advantages or hoping for a quiet life, or do they do their darnedest to smash it? And how can they possibly be sure what's "the real me" in amongst all that?

I look back on myself, and see a childhood and pubescence littered with smashed lenses. I forged myself in the heat of blind fury against all I was "expected" to be. Perhaps, for me, with my nebulous sense of "subconscious sex", turning out as cis or trans* wasn't a matter of my "innate gender", but of whether I buckled down or whether I rebelled. And boy, am I a stubborn fucker.

Defence mechanisms. Attack mechanisms. Safety mechanisms. All these conditioned, mechanised behaviours overriding spontaneous expressions of our "true selves" - until they become our true selves. This is how the lenses burn us. And only after eighteen months living full-time as male am I starting to see my scar tissue. To wonder what's really underneath. To question whether my transition is an act of empowering rebellion, or yet another step along a path of twisted conformity, bending under the unbearable pressure of social expectations.

Given that my first Gender Identity Clinic appointment is in a week and a half, it's not the best timing.

Male Privilege for Speakers of Other Languages

It's difficult, questioning one's gender. So many different things are thrown haphazardly together under the label "gender" that it's hard to disentangle the parts that are really you. Is it in the way you behave? Does a long-held disdain for pretty clothes and dollies prove that you're "really a boy" - or does it only prove that you're scared to be seen to like anything "girly"? Does the fact that you are softly-spoken and sensitive mean that you could never become a "real man" - or does it just mean that you were never taught to choke back your vulnerabilities as a child? By the time you start to realise that so much of your "outer" gender was carefully, unconsciously constructed while you grew up, you can no longer tell which aspects of your character would have been different if you'd been encouraged to behave in different ways. You can no longer be sure where your "outer" gender ends and your "inner" gender begins.

So you conduct experiments. I've gradually been teaching myself male privilege. Since I began experimentally identifying as transmasculine, I've been experimentally adopting more masculine-coded behaviours. It's partly to see if I'll pass better, and partly to see if it feels more natural, and partly to find out just how easy it is to re-train oneself in all of these "innately" binary characteristics. And I'm inclined to conclude that outer gender - the way you behave and express yourself when you are conscious of other people's gendered expectations - is not innate, but learnt... and with practice, you can learn a new one. Having been taught "female" as a native gender, I'm slowly becoming fluent in "male".

The thing that's changed the most is my confidence - or, more specifically, my ability to act as though I am confident. I always struggled with a lack of confidence growing up, which was deeply linked to a fear of failure or criticism. Finally finding safe and supportive spaces went a long way towards mitigating these tendencies. But I still worried about what people thought about me, even within my safe spaces, surrounded by friends who loved me for who I was, whatever my flaws. I was still scared to behave in certain ways, selfish or careless or impulsive ways, in case people thought less of me.

It wasn't until I started consciously trying on some male behaviours that I found the freedom, the confidence, to do that - to be selfish, to say thoughtless things, to make jokes that might fall flat, and to not care. Obviously, these are character traits that aren't very positive if you take them to an extreme. But they're all about daring. If you dare to be selfish at the times when you really just can't cope with being selfless any more, you might save yourself from a breakdown. If you dare to make a questionable joke, it might fall flat, or on the other hand, it might get the biggest laugh of the evening through its sheer edginess. If you dare to do something impulsive, it might go badly wrong, or it might be a genius move. And, of course, it's about daring to be a flawed human being. We are all flawed, we are all selfish sometimes, we all say rude things or behave thoughtlessly sometimes, and yet the people who matter love us all the same. Not all of us have the confidence to believe that's true.

Who dares wins. And, in our culture, it's boys who are taught, gradually, incrementally, cumulatively, to dare. The proof is found in sociolinguistic evidence that male-assigned people tend to interrupt more than female-assigned people; in the overwhelming gender disparity in fields such as comedy or politics where the risk of being shot down is high; in the way that seminars about "unblocking creativity" and "finding your voice" are attended overwhelmingly by female-assigned people.

Some might see that as "proof that men and women are different" - proof that inner gender is binary in just the same way as outer gender. But would that make sense, given that I could never have found the confidence to risk behaving like a bit of a dickhead when I was presenting as female? Or that I, who used to be incredibly emotionally over-reactive, have drastically reduced the regularity with which I cry about things, simply by wondering what it's like to have internalised the mantra "boys don't cry" and seeing what happens if I don't allow myself to let go? (Compare the trans women who have the opposite experience, and find that, long before any hormone therapy, they are a lot more able to let themselves cry.) I've even had to stop myself on occasion from being borderline misogynistic: I could get away with idly objectifying female-presenting strangers, or steamrollering female-identified friends in lively discussions, just because it's expected of men and allowed for, and that's a temptation that's difficult to fight.

Try consciously learning to speak a foreign outer gender for a few months. See whether you manage to re-condition yourself; see whether that "proof" that inner gender is naturally binary still holds up. And if you don't manage it, ask: what's stopping you? Who's stopping you? The deeply-ingrained fear of social opprobrium is a very powerful force. People who don't live up to gender norms - men who don't dare, men who don't "banter", men who don't push themselves forward - are subjected to it. People who live up to the wrong gender norms - men who cry, women who interrupt - are subjected to it even more forcefully. And if you're a man who's crying, you're not just a person who's been overcome by a strong feeling (it might be justified, or it might be a bit over-dramatic, but it's generally acceptable) - you're a pussy. If you're a woman who frequently interrupts, you're not just a person who's a bit irritating (the interruptions might be amusing, they might just be asinine, but they're generally tolerated) - you're a ball-breaker.

Perhaps I would eventually have learnt to be confident, learnt to dare, if I had stayed thinking of myself as female. But it's easier to dare when you don't risk as much. It's easier to dare when you're expected to dare, and it's easier to cry when you're expected to cry. Both behaviours are healthy, but not all healthy behaviours are equally permissible to all people. And that's the injustice that I'm thinking about when I declare that I'm a feminist. That's the depressing reality that makes me want to "smash the binary". People can keep their inner genders, be as binary or non-binary as they want, be men or women or neither or both or manly or effeminate or butch or feminine or sensitive or selfish - but outer gender has to go.

Gender in theory and in practice

Drafted on 26/3/12


My GP is an exceedingly nice guy, and he's not - can't be expected to be - a trans* expert. He performed the last(?) of his gatekeeping duties for me this morning with endearing humility, constantly apologising for being so "challenging" as he asked me probing questions. As he explained, in future referrals, people were going to be similarly challenging, trying to make sure that I wasn't making a bad decision.

Although I can just about get my head round a world in which this has to happen (so what if I made a "bad decision"? why would it matter if I stopped taking testosterone after a few months then spent the rest of my life as a slightly hirsute woman with a low voice and clitoromegaly?), I was somewhat perturbed by the thought that, in order to access treatment, I would have to have my identity, my confidence in myself, constantly "challenged", and to constantly defend it. No wonder the referral process is so emotionally draining for the more fragile of us (and bear in mind that our experiences are likely to have made us fragile).

But what disturbed me more was the idea that the healthcare "professionals" who stand in our way might have such a simplistic, unprofessional idea of gender as was displayed in his questioning. I have been thinking about my gender for over half my life, off and on; as remarked an FTM acquaintance of mine (who on the face of it is the most masculine-conforming obvious candidate for the treatment), you have to deconstruct the binary before you can work out where you stand within it (and then, if appropriate, you put it back together with yourself firmly in the "other" bit). I have read blogs, books, resources, theory; I have answered for myself to my own satisfaction nearly all of the questions that feel relevant connected to the decision to "change sex".

I do not count among them the question "so if you're not planning to have surgery, what would happen if you started a relationship with someone?"

I am a very lucky person. I have an "alternative" worldview and I live in an "alternative" world which supports, celebrates and nourishes it. Very rarely does the "real" world intrude, the one where people aren't broad-minded and over-intellectualising, the one where people eschew critical thinking in favour of shocked instinctive reactions when faced with a "she-man". I've brainwashed reeducated myself more than sufficiently in matters of queer, [a]sex-positive and feminist theory to conclude "instinctively" that all relationships are different, all people are different, all genitalia are different, and there are a million and one ways of having sex, or not having sex, or having a relationship with a person primarily and eir genitalia second. The "professionals" who gatekeep gender have, in many cases and within the confines of what their job description demands of them, thought about these things only so far as concluding that they don't want to accidentally create freaks.

Perhaps it's unreasonable of me to raise an eyebrow at the question; I'm sure there are plenty of candidates for medical transition who don't want to be turned into freaks, or who honestly haven't thought about these things, or who would respond with an "unhealthy" plan for how they'd deal with such matters. But I would really hope that, rather than just being rejected for referral (which might seem to the "professionals" like the "safer" way of dealing with "confused" people, but in actual fact might lead to much greater distress and confusion than an ill-advised partial transition), such people would be given access further down the line to appropriate counselling. And by "appropriate", I mean "grounded in queer-positive theory": giving them the tools to accept that their genital configuration (whatever it is currently, whatever they would like it to be, and whatever it's likely to actually end up as) doesn't make them "freaks", doesn't mean they won't be able to have successful relationships, and doesn't make it "wrong" for them to obtain whatever sexual pleasure is available to them.

Easier said than done, perhaps, if said people are surrounded by that tiresome "real" world in which acquaintances disapprove of their actions. But even if they come to an understanding of themselves, their genders and their bodies which the "normal" people around them will never take the time to understand, it might be the key to their own self-acceptance and self-confidence - things which, if they've reached a point of suspecting themselves to be trans*, might otherwise remain a lifelong problem for them.

I freely admit that I'm an idealist, and perhaps naive with it. But that's because, in some respects, I live in an ideal world. By lucky chance, I've landed in a life situation where, as yet, my trans* status has not once caused me to be harassed, lose a friend or family member, or encounter friction or prejudice at work or in other social groups. I hear about less fortunate people, am "challenged" by my GP to consider how I'd feel if transition led me to encounter one of these negative scenarios, and I'm determined to prove that trans* life doesn't have to be like that. Maybe it won't happen; maybe I will get knocked back by a homophobic (or acephobic, but I've had relationships with men, so in their eyes, who's counting?) consultant, maybe work colleagues will start to swallow their acceptance once they realise it comes with facial hair. But that's the "real" world, and I never liked the sound of it much. I've already proven that, with a measure of good fortune and some boldness in seeking out progressive people, a trans* person can build eir own little world in which ey can live out eir gender happily.

Who really lives in the "real" world, anyway? We must pander to its demands and live under its conditions, and we can desire to change it or try to change it, but all of our happiness and security, all of our meaningful encounters, all of our little everyday triumphs and despairs that together mount up to "living", come from our Own Little Worlds. And the best we can possibly hope for, regardless of what the "real" world thinks of us, is to seek out or build or stumble upon a little world which feels right. I like mine. And if one day someone wants, really wants, to come and live in my corner of it with me, I guarantee that ey will not care about the shape of my genitals.

Bad Gender Days

Inevitably there are days when a trans* person will feel disheartened, downcast, that all the odds are stacked against em; because it is an uphill struggle to be seen for what you are, instead of what you look like.

I don't have many of those days. (I'm sure I'd have even fewer were it not for all the progesterone that insists on coursing my bloodstream four-weekly.) But sometimes, things break through the wall of blissfully oblivious, physically detached, narcissistic self-belief that makes trans*-ness so easy for me.


I've always been open with my parents about my gender issues, so much so that I probably can't blame them if they see my current convictions as just an extension of my uninformed 13-year-old delusions. They've been aware for a full year that I definitively don't identify as female, and they've been vaguely muddling through trying to accommodate this. But it's very difficult, when someone declares emself to be non-binary, not to subconsciously interpret this as "ey's still [gender assigned at birth] but just sort of not really". So, to forcibly bring the reality of my identity home to them, to prove I was serious, and to prepare them for what might one day happen, I started talking about name changes, testosterone therapy, chest surgery.


They were upset. Upset at the idea. They've never been actually upset by one of my gender-pronouncements before. They talked about not wanting me to change (I said "I've changed so much already, what with puberty, going away to university, meeting new people, you know..." - they said "do you have to change more?"). They said they just wanted things to be the same with me as they always had.

Now in my head, things are the same as they always have been. I have always been this person; the gender I present as doesn't change my personality. But the only reason I was happy to present as female for so many years was because of this obliviousness to how other people see me, and to the power of the 'filter' of male or female which people use when they view everybody. Have my parents been seeing me through a female filter? - overlaying characteristics onto my personality which just aren't there? Would they really feel they didn't know me, feel I'd changed, feel I wouldn't be the same person, if I began to look more masculine on the outside?


Have they ever really known me at all? Has anyone?


It breaks my heart to be misunderstood, and since I'm such a queer fish and so frequently misunderstood, it swells my heart inordinately to find myself among people who 'get' me. And the more I come to understand 'gender', these strange meaningless filters other people employ, the more I feel trapped and depressed by these filters. On top of all those other bizarrenesses of character which severely lengthen the odds that anyone I meet will understand me (and sure I'm used to that by now, it doesn't worry me, I have enough awesome friends for it not to matter), now suddenly I have to add this 'female' filter which everyone who meets me will automatically employ, which will mean they haven't a hope of ever really knowing me.

I thought my parents understood me. For a decade and a half, they were the only people who came anywhere close to understanding me. Now it turns out perhaps they were using the filter all along. Perhaps they never really knew me. I don't know this person they see, this woman who they think I am, who they think they know.

Wasn't it obvious all along that I'm not a woman? It was to me...

And to get past this filter, my only choice, it seems, is to modify my body. Yes, my only choice. I'm out as male at work and I use a male name and I bind and present as best I can, and everyone seems very accepting. But then there's the colleague who I've only ever heard refer to me, three times, using female pronouns (even though she apologized once, at my prompting, and claimed she "usually remembers"). There's the new guy, who was introduced to me under my male name, who should only have ever heard me being referred to as "he", who only ever saw me binding and doing my best to stealth during his first week and a half in the office (he was my litmus test)... who nevertheless defaulted consistently to "she" (then let himself unfussily be corrected, so he knew all right, he'd been told) over the course of the first afternoon I heard him talk about me.

I thought that, with the right priming, a person would just assume another person's gender to be whatever they'd originally been introduced as. Turns out I was wrong. Turns out the filter is stronger than that. Turns out that trying to assert my identity as a non-hormones non-op is going to be the most uphill of uphill struggles (apart, possibly, from trying to jump the necessary medical hoops to get 'treatment').

Do they all just think I'm deluded? Do they all just "she" me behind my back? Do they see me, not as the unfortunate chap stuck with a female appearance, but as the crazy woman who thinks she's a bloke? And if I went on testosterone, would I still look too feminine not just to be read as a mad bearded lady? - and even if I could successfully stealth, I wouldn't want to because I am proud of being trans* and I'm all for visibility, so would people's filters just revert to "freaky deluded lesbian" as soon as I outed myself?

Yup. Some days it feels like an uphill struggle.


This is what it is like, my cis friends. I write this blog not just to angst and rant (although those are definite fringe benefits), but to tell you what it's actually like to be trans*. It can't just be reduced to "man trapped in woman's body, man undergoes exciting sexy surgery to become not trapped in woman's body"; it's a head thing, it's all in the head. And what's worse, it's all in other people's heads. Thanks a bunch, Other People. You and your stupid filters are forcing me and all the other not-very-physically-dysphoric trans* people to undergo dangerous and difficult-to-access medical procedures just so that we have half a chance of being seen for who we are. 

You know what would be much, much easier? If you just changed the way you thought. And what's more, it would swell my heart inordinately.

Victor/Victoria

Update post. My work email name has been changed! I did The Explanation! Everyone is being very supportive! (Well, that or silent, and the truth of that will out once the obligatory official PC supportiveness dies down, but I'm optimistic that these are nice people.) I bumped into my boss in the men's and I think he was slightly taken aback! It's all good.

But my name hasn't been changed in lots of our other electronic systems, which is far more potentially confusing than the simple fact of transitioning my name from female to male. Two days in to the change and I've already run up against this problem: a person I was emailing under my male name (let's say that's "Ganymede") is now going to get an automatically generated paper compliments slip from me under my female name (let's say that's "Rosalind").

Professionally awkward though this is, I secretly quite like it. Heaven only knows what these external correspondents will think when interacting with "Ganymede/Rosalind". Which will they assume is my "proper" name? Will they twig the gender mismatch or just assume that my male name is a "valid" female shortening of my female name - or even that "Rosalind" is a "valid" male given name? Or will they just ignore it? Way to inadvertently genderfuck your external colleagues, Employer. :D It's like there's two of me, one for each binary gender role, which quite entertains me (confirming my vague worries that I might be genderfluid... I'm not prejudiced, it'd just be damn awkward).

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Anyway, one way or the other (or both, or the ones in between >_>) I'm pretty happy with all of this now that the stressful first day is out of the way. I am generally very happy, with life in general and with my gender identity in particular! I have come out at work and it's exactly as small a deal as it ought to be! Happy, healthy, sane, supported and FtM. That story would be a really good example for scared closeted trans* teens, wouldn't it?

Because the flip side of increased visibility = increased tolerance among "normal" people (for trans* as for any minority) is increased visibility = increased comprehension and hope among the "invisible" members of that minority. When I was in my early teens and flirting flippantly with the idea that something about me wasn't "normal" gender-wise, I educated myself the only way I could: through the chinks of trans* visibility that got through the cracks in mass media. And in the realm of FtM transgenderism, that meant only one thing: Brandon Teena.

Brandon's story, dramatised in the film Boys Don't Cry (which I devoured with rapt interest when Channel 4 screened it in the early noughties, followed by a documentary called The Brandon Teena Story), is an awful, poignant one which deserves to be told: transsexual boy growing up in unenlightened American Mid-West goes stealth, gets girlfriend, attempts to quietly live life, is uncovered as biologically female by "friends" then brutally raped and murdered. But it's not the story to tell to a questioning young female-assigned person growing up in a rather more enlightened region, in a rather more enlightened decade, with a high probability when ey becomes an adult of moving to an even more enlightened university town in an even more enlightened decade, where eir work colleagues barely bat an eyelid at eir transgenderism.

I remember watching that film and making a worried mental note (in my flippant adolescent way) never to move to Falls City ("they hang faggots there", as Brandon's brother anxiously reminds him). I had to make that mental note to remind myself that, although my life might well end up paralleling Brandon's in some ways, our circumstances were far from identical and my life was unlikely to end the way his did. But as a confused, naive maybe-FtM, he was the only role model I had, and these caveats were hard to keep in mind.

I'd like it if Channel 4 were to screen something like The Ganymede/Rosalind Story: transgender sort-of-boy growing up in accepting urban Britain goes to university as female, gradually and openly comes out, is completely supported by friends and colleagues, remains non-hormones and non-op, doesn't feel the need to worry about going stealth or binding and packing 24/7 or suppressing his penchant for dressing up in fishnet stockings from time to time, is comfortable with having a gender identity which is vaguely masculine but is far from neatly fitting the binary, has thus far not undergone a single incident of anti-trans* abuse. (Would that MtFs were so lucky, of course. And with the side note that I have not once been abused/harassed/etc for being trans* since coming out as trans*, but during my early teens presenting as nothing other than a kind of weird tomboyish female, I got mocked with "You're a boy!" - it works along the same lines as "You're gay!", that is, it doesn't work - all the time. Adults are largely very nice about these things, but children are gits.)

But, y'know, where would be the story in that? No exciting shots of the transsexual squishing and stuffing his body into shapes it wasn't designed for, no cute time-lapse sequences of his facial hair coming through or his muscles developing or his body fat being redistributed, no dramatic moments as he shuffles warily into a male-only space and is accosted by a suspicious passer-by... No point in screening something that won't pull in the ratings just to reassure poor scared gender-variant kids who are desperate to see Someone Like Them.

The moral of the story is, I suppose, thank gods for the internet... and thank gods that I, happy flippant Genderqueer Lite, coped reasonably well growing up in my assigned gender without the peer group it could have provided. I only hope the same can be said for other proto-Brandons of my generation.

And not a Ferrero Rocher in sight

[Disclaimer: This came out a lot longer and less pithy than I was hoping. But as ever, if I don't post it now, I'll never get round to editing it.]

[Also, OVERGENERALISATIONS GALORE AHOY... *shrug]

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I've been given a date. T(ransition) minus three days. Um, just my screen name at work, that is.

After a week of silence from HR and IT (and a gentle nudge from me) came a pleasantly matter-of-fact email from the Chief Administrative Honcho to say that by the time I arrived in work on Monday, my display name for email, IM and all manner of other onliney worky systems would have been subtly but unmistakably masculinized. This very visible change will then give me an excuse to send The Email, start The Explanations - in short, start being a trans-bassador.

I've hesitated about this for a long time, just as I have over all other aspects of social transition, largely because I am very aware of the fact that I'm a political genderqueer, and it's all very well waving your politically genderqueer flag around when your politically genderqueer actions might impact negatively on "proper" genderqueers for whom coming out can literally, in all sorts of ways, be a matter of life and death.

Oh, I'm a proper genderqueer too, put down those pitchforks, but for me, being misgendered isn't a searing dysphoric agony, it's just a simmering annoyance, and I think I could live with being she'd the whole way through my career (I think...) - I just choose not to. And that's because I believe passionately that public perceptions about trans* people (and about gender in general) need to change, and the most effective way I've found so far to be an activist for such issues is just by politely EXISTING in people's faces.

I want my colleagues to knowingly know someone who is trans*, and not just trans* either, but FtM. I want HR to have to think about what to do when they have a trans* employee. I want to increase visibility, a ripple effect, so that all these new people who now know someone who is trans* have a whole bunch of friends who will now know someone who knows someone who is trans*. (It's along the same lines as "Repost this if you know someone who has a mental illness", but slightly more memorable.) And I want to be - for the sake of all the "proper" genderqueers for whom this Really Fucking Matters, am terrified of not being - a damn good trans-bassador, a competent employee and entertaining conversationalist and General All-Round Nice Colleague, so that everyone who now knows someone will be able to say, "Oh, I know a transsexual from work, she's very nice. I mean he. Um."

(I also want to blow the mind of our daft oestrogen-sloshing choir-mistress, who every week manages to inadvertently hurt me with some epic sexist generalisation on the assumption that the room is a female-only space, or some comment along the lines of me being a "tenor lady" or "pretend man".)

It's often said (for which read: I read it in a blog once, forgot to note my source, then came up with too many variations of it in a Google search to be able to find it again) that true equality means not having to be an ambassador. Whereas first- and second-generation Asian immigrants to Britain around the 70s felt a pressure to be Super Extra Nice, hard-working, polite, inoffensive, for fear that one bad school report or angry outburst would get their whole ethnic group labelled as "lazy" or "violent", it's to be hoped that British Asians today don't have to tread so carefully, can display all the good and less-good sides of their personality without fear that their behaviour will be reduced to a function of their ethnicity.

Therefore, it's revealing in my case to consider how far from equality trans* people still are - but it's a lot more revealing to look at gender as a whole and realise just how often we are all treated as ambassadors.

Purely by virtue of the fact that I'm generally assumed to have a vulva, I've been forced to be an ambassador for femaleness my entire life. And you have also had to be an ambassador for whichever gender people assume you are all through your life. If, as a baby, I cried easily, people would react with "Ah, she's a girl, she's sensitive". When, as a child, I watched Thomas the Tank Engine, people would look sidelong and say "That's a very boyish programme for her to be watching". When, in school, we had to get changed after swimming, the teachers in the single-sex changing rooms would try to get us out of there faster by exhorting us to "Beat the boys! You're better than the boys - prove it by getting changed quicker than them!" (And thus the entire reputation of my forcibly-assigned gender would rest on my desire not to wander home in damp underclothes and a misbuttoned, half-tucked-in shirt - I, as an individual, was Slow, thus The Girls were, collectively, Slower than The Boys, thus Girls are Slow, thus Boys are Better. There probably isn't a word for this particular kind of logical fallacy, because it's so incredibly stupid that if we created one the Ancient Greeks would explode.)

And the thing about this unprovoked ambassadorship is that not only is it inescapable, it's also inflexible. Genderqueer Lite as I am, my other option would have been to take the ambassadorship and run with it - to be a shining Unusual Female Role Model, to prove to the world that even people who look like they probably have vulvas can wear ties, geek out about steam trains, dislike shopping, put up flat-pack furniture, ride a bicycle like a reckless testosterone-fuelled idiot, and a whole host of other trivial and not-so-trivial assumption-breakers. The thing is... people just don't pay attention. They write you off as an exception, no matter how many of you there are, no matter even if you're the majority within your assigned gender, or worse, they chastise you as a Bad Ambassador. "That's not very ladylike", "Boys don't cry", "Don't be such a girl", "Take a blind bit of notice of my double standards"... on and on they go. Watch as your unique un-{gender}-like personality quirks are glossed over by your lazy, [un]consciously sexist peer group! Marvel as any even vaguely gender-conformist tendencies you have are blown up out of all proportion!

Be a good ambassador, Mr or Miss (or Mrs, but definitely not Ms or Mx) Reader, and if you're not, everyone will act as though you are anyway.

Shortly after I began work here, I was told of a notoriously undiligent predecessor, the most notable of whose actions were a) to fall off a table and break his wrist during drunken celebration of handing in his notice, and b) to be male. The department head who later interviewed me had apparently reacted to his complete inability to be arsed by exclaiming "I'm never going to recruit another boy again!" It takes the edge off the irony to know that it was most probably she who had recruited our department's "token bloke" (>_>) a few weeks before I arrived... but even so... Heaven help all the potential employees who looked like they probably had testicles, for whom this workshy, drunkenly-wrist-breaking character had acted as an ambassador in the department head's eyes.

Oh wait, it's not called being an ambassador, is it? It's called insidious, unconscious, incessant, all-pervasive, pure and simple prejudice.

We haven't arrived at gender equality yet, because true equality would mean it not being such a fucking big deal to everyone what we looked like we probably had in our pants. And maybe if one of these unconsciously-prejudiced subscribers to a rigid gender binary knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who is fucking about with that binary, it might just briefly make them stop and think.

Invisibly transgender

I don't have secrets; I just have facts I don't know how to tell people.

I don't want to be in the closet at work, but I don't know how to come out. I present as male as I can/dare/desire: with my short back and sides, my standard uniform of not-very-tailored shirt and trousers. I sing tenor in the work choir. I don't know how to make it any more obvious (side note: to my chagrin, nobody here wears ties). I've got a binder on its way, but even if I wore it regularly under my baggy shirts I don't expect people would notice.

I've been thinking about testosterone. Well, naturally, I've been thinking about it for a while. The length of time I've been thinking about it is a function of how utterly uncertain I am that I'd want it. I don't suffer from physical gender dysphoria - I don't feel discomfort at having a female body. (Not that I feel any great connection to my body or its femaleness either; the most obvious {symptom? cause?} of this is probably my asexuality.) I wouldn't say no to the physical perks of having male hormones coursing round my system, but the fact that I can live with it as it is implies firstly that I wouldn't be a "worthy" recipient of any state-supplied hormone treatment (here I'm probably falling into the fallacious trap of thinking I'm "not trans enough"), secondly that it wouldn't be worth my while struggling through the torturous hoops of The System for gender reassignment candidates (fault of The System, clearly), but thirdly that I shouldn't take the risks, both superficial and real, inherent in this kind of body modification.

The problem is, I've ignored my genderedness for most of my life, without realising how blindingly obvious it is to the people around me. In my head, my breasts are discreet and insignificant, my voice is unfemininely deep, and now that I've found a decent haircut my face is no longer girlish. But it's only as I become aware of how overwhelming these cues of enlarged mammaries, high-pitched voice and delicate features are in other people's heads that I want to change them. A binder's a start. A broken voice would be good, too, and the potential for sideburns...

In short, I realised, I want to be visibly transgender. Because at the moment, all I can be is verbally transgender - and I just don't know where to start on that. Every few days a window of opportunity comes round ("gosh, the department's so female-dominated!" "I wish more men would come to choir." "Funny that you don't like shoe-shopping - it's most women's dream, isn't it?") - and every time it comes round, I hesitate, unsure how to phrase my by-the-way, and miss it. Then I spend the next hour fuming, at the generalisation and at myself.

The thing to do, I suppose, is change my name (even though I like the one I have). Change my name, or change my body - or spend weeks, months, years politely correcting every person I interact with. I've already started signing myself with a male name in postal correspondence, and getting letters addressed as such in the shared pigeonhole (though there was the one where the author had clearly debated over which title to use, begun with "Mr" and then corrected it with atrociously messy scribblings to "Ms [Male name] [Surname]" - go figure...). At some point, maybe very soon, maybe once my binder arrives, I will work out the most sensible way of petitioning {HR? the IT department? my line manager?} to change my name in all the public online systems, then explaining the significance of the change to my colleagues. Because of course they'll make the assumption of least resistance ("oh, that's how you spell the short form of your name - funny way of spelling it") unless I explain.

I wish I didn't have to worry about those windows of opportunity, those constant little assumptions that renew the crushing burden of needing to explain myself. I don't know how much body modification it would take before that stopped.

Draft: Socialisation

This is a half-arsed rapidly written unedited thing, posted because if I waited until I'd rewritten it properly I'd probably never post anything at all. COMMENTS PLS. Any and all comments, however half-arsed. You're a clever person, tell me something clever. :)

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I was socialised as a boy.

I decided I wanted to be a boy, and like any other boy, I picked up on the messages from society telling me how I should and shouldn't behave.

But unlike any other boy, I wasn't punished for my failures to conform to this behaviour; all I was was weird, an unknown quantity, ploughing my own furrow, marching to the beat of my own drum. Which was ironic, since it wasn't my own drum at all, it was a drum stolen from every single masculine normative influence I could see.

Was I also socialised as a girl? Maybe I was told what to do, told girls shouldn't do X or should do Y, punished by my peer group for failing to conform to X and Y. I'm not sure I really paid attention. I was already Weird, and any peer-group punishment seemed to fall under that umbrella. Besides, I didn't have much truck with My Peer Group of Girls as an en-masse entity, or much respect for what they wanted me to conform to.

But, rebellious as I was (and stubborn as I always have been), I was very quick to ignore the "direct" socialising forces of "Don't do X" (haha, so much for you, I'm going to do X now!). And, naive as I still struggle not to be, I lapped up with earnest the "indirect" socialising forces of "Boys are strong and make jokes and don't care about their appearance and are in awe of the clever, sophisticated girls they like, etc., etc.! Look at this masculine role model! Blindly copy the way he sits, talks, walks, acts!"

I'm only now beginning to unpack all these layers. For a little while I believed "Okay, I'm female, but I'm not a Proper Girl" (my mind poisoned by pathetic models of femininity). For another little while I declared "I think I'm what happens when a child isn't socialised as either gender" (because my parents, bless them, were never particularly bound (and didn't bind me) by gender roles - aside from the occasional despairing exhortation, once I hit my teens, for me to start shaving my legs, or the occasional exasperated exclamation of "Woman!" by my father as though it were an insult, or my mother's sudden mild retrospective panic at letting me watch Thomas the Tank Engine for hours on end as a small child when I recently declared I thought I might be a boy).

But it's becoming clear to me that gender socialisation is truly inescapable. There are so many influences, and people are bound to pick up on them, at least some of them, even if they're not the "right" or "intended" ones, even if people pay attention to them only in order to rebelliously reject them (and in so doing, fall into the trap of accepting other ones, influences on how a Tomboy or a Rebel - or a Boy - should behave).

I don't know where this leaves me; I don't feel as though I've had a Woman's Experience, because I only ever submitted partially and confusedly to the pressures that dog life as a female, but equally, I clearly haven't had a Man's Experience, because my (I think fairly respectable) efforts at bowing to the pressures of being male were not interpreted as such and thus not reinforced or criticised in the same way.

But much as I've liked to claim in the past that I'm far too sensible to bother conforming to stupid old gender roles, and much as I think that I might honest-to-goodness be genderless, have no internal concept of being masculine or feminine in my identity at all, I guess I feel as though I've had a gendered experience.