Every news interview goes down about the same way. The transgender guest is asked to explain what transgender is, tell some story about being a kid and wanting dolls or dresses and being denied, a sloppy attempt at finding out whether or not the trans person has a pee pee or a hallway, and finish with everyone smiling about how brave the trans person is for existing.
It's a simple attempt at trying to explain a complex thing.
Much of the confusion has to do with trying to conflate two different concepts: transitioning and being transgender. Being transgender is what it says on the tin, it's a state of being. It's one of the reasons why the LGBT acronym keeps expanding. How you choose to identify yourself is an act of self discovery. It can take a long time and be very confusing, and is what most of the talk show interviews try to address.
Then there's transitioning, which is what most of the laws are trying to address. The legal sphere and the talk show sphere don't overlap all that much. Things like bathroom protections and civil rights bills are there to protect those choosing to transition, so that employers can't fire them, so that they aren't thrown out of bathrooms.
This is all to say that being transgender and transitioning are hard to understand things that are very difficult for the individuals going through them.
But there's something else implied in the words beginning in trans-. These are temporary states that are supposed to end.
In the community that's called living "stealth". Pre-transition for me, that was always the goal. I'll reach the point where I've achieved girl and all these icky trans- stuff will just melt away. Except it didn't work like that. Even as I lived the stealth life, I felt super visible in my invisibility. Everyone knows and they just aren't saying anything to be polite but they must have like secret meetings without me to discus what I plague I am and how disgusted they are. I was apparently very important in the play going on in my head.
Which is why I chose to do this:
It seemed like a good idea at the time, to just put it out there once to reset the game. To have it be something out there which is a suitable topic for conversation. And it went shockingly well.Fun fact: I'm a transgender soccer writer choosing to come out on Twitter cause I'm bored at Ralph's. Let's see how this goes...— Josie Becker (@JosieBeckerFC) January 6, 2015
What cause me to revisit this moment was this past weekend's episode of This American Life. On it, Lindy West told her story of coming out as fat. She talked about fatness as this state where you feel both invisible and incredibly exposed. This was a state I understood.
In a way, the transgender experience is sort of the inverse of the experience of being fat in current American society. When you're fat, everyone offers unsolicited advice on how to unlock the thin person they believe lives inside you. There are groups of all sorts to help you accomplish this, some are paid for, some are Christian themed, but the message is always the same: your lifestyle is unacceptable and needs to change.
When you come to realize your transgender it's typically the opposite. You've noticed a person inside you dying to get out. And the reaction from many around you is to try and find a way to keep you in your old body. There are negotiations, the people in your immediate circle will suggest alternatives to transitioning (my dad thought I could just take up drag on the weekends and just never mention it to anyone in the family). There are even Christian themed groups to get you to stop.
The second woman on the program talked about her experience with extreme weight loss. Her doctor prescribed her diet pills. Speed. She shed over 100 pounds of weight, and suddenly a new world was opened up to her. People she'd known before wouldn't recognize her. But staying thin became an obsession to the point that she now goes to Mexico to get more pills since her insurance will no longer cover it.
She talks with anger and sadness to her husband about how he never would have talked to the fat version of her. He tries to tell her that the thin her is the real her, that it unlocked a confidence in her. She isn't so sure.
Girl me is 100% the better me. There's a confidence in me that was never there before, a feeling of comfort in my own skin. But it's come at a price. As miserable as I was, the realist in me knows I could have found someone that would have fallen in love with the old me. It never would have worked, and I'd have ended up complicating or maybe even ruining several lives. But in the conventional sense, I'd have checked off all the boxes.
In some ways there are similarities to being prescribed hormones or diet pills. You go to a doctor and say, I want a different body. And the doctor says sure, here's a sledgehammer go wild. No one has any idea exactly what's going to happen to your body, but it's going to change rapidly. And you're going to have to adjust to the changes.
After the weight loss patient on This American Life lost all her weight, she had to have surgery to remove some of the excess skin. There was quite literally a seam up her crotch like a rag doll, and one time that seam burst. The image of trying to pack this leaking wound with gauze like a teddy bear that's lost its fluff was incredible.
I never had any complications from surgery, but it was something that just presented itself as necessary after a few years of swings from that estrogen sledgehammer. If I wanted to change my passport, my birth certificate, it was necessary. If I wanted to play team sports again, it was necessary. If I ever wanted someone to be intimate with girl me, it was necessary.
And believe me, I had to stuff myself after surgery, with a medical grade piece of plastic to keep my vagina open. Like before I went to bed I had to plug myself in or I could wake up to my Cinderella dream gone forever.
After all that, everything is still extremely complicated. On This American Life she talked about throwing out photos of the fat version of her, even the ones her parents owned. I never had the courage to toss out my parents' photos. I don't know if I have the right to tell them old me never existed. But seeing them makes me extremely uncomfortable.
Maybe someday someone will love me. Maybe there's a straight man out there who's comfortable with all the baggage I come with. Someone who never would have been interested in the old me. Ditto if I settle down with a lesbian. You wouldn't have loved the old me. Which I guess is fine since I didn't love that person either. But then, mentally, I have twelve years of material to chose from. Girl me is a teenager, which would explain the way I dress sometimes.
Mentally, physically, socially, you never really stop transitioning. Which makes the term way more permanent than its etymology implies. Girl me needs a daily pill to stay alive. I can be the life of the party when I feel secure, but when I don't I try my best to be invisible while feeling like a bright light is on me.
If there's anything this post is trying to say, it's that there are several ways of being that mainstream society has deemed icky. Being one of those icky people really sucks. Cause you don't know who finds you icky and who doesn't. And because you know that there are some out there who find you icky, sometimes you just assume that everyone thinks that way. It's a defense mechanism. People can be very mean to transgender people.
It's also to say that girl me saved my life. Even knowing the weight of everything I gave up, how much I feel my career and love life have been set back, every once in awhile it'll hit me just how happy I am. When it does, you might see me dance a little bit, or break out into song, or just grin from ear to ear.
Because I'm alive. And that's something 16 year old me would have put 50/50 odds on.
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