2003-02-27 - 1:03 a.m.
Who knows when I last wrote. Months ago, I'm sure, since I had to check a link on someone else's webpage to even remember my Diaryland username. THAT is ridiculous. But here I am tonight, at my house, feeling kind of strange and in the mood for disaffected musings. So posting something here seems like a good idea.
Really, it's just an excuse to air some transpain, as it's come to be known, because I'm sick of moaning to my friends. I'm sure they will be relieved that I'm choosing this time to talk to nobody in particular in my venting process this time round.
The great news is that I've been getting really good reactions, ideas, and suggestions from people who have read the "Monstertrans" zine I made, which is based almost entirely on the article that's posted on makezine.org. I've been having great conversations with people, old friends and new, and some near-strangers about my monstrous gender and the way I like to make sense of it in the world. It felt like a very self-indulgent publication, an entire zine devoted completely to in-depth ramblings of what b-movie monsters have to do with my gender and body. So it feels validating and a little less selfish in its self-indulgence to hear people feel like they related to it. The other good news is that I scheduled chest surgery and I am about to get something off my chest in one month. It's exciting, bizarre, and scary. I can't wait.
The crappy stuff is that I continue to feel, despite my continued self-articulation (it's begun to feel a little obsessive), consistantly, constantly, egregiously misunderstood in this gender project in which I consider myself to be engaged. There are some very, very important exceptions to this, and I don't think I could even think of sustaining it without that support. However, I am utterly shocked at how few people that has turned out to be and at how many people, people I would NEVER expect to misunderstand so deeply, are misunderstanding. Sometimes in a way that just feels benignly not-quite-clicking, and sometimes in a way that feels incredibly malicious. Since I changed my pronoun, things have been immensely more difficult. This feels disappointing and disturbing because it means that all of these people who have trouble with me around my pronoun that did not before were previously not engaging with my transness, serving to reinforce all of my fears that people weren't at all seeing me as trans or as monstrous when I was using "she" and identifying as trans.
The weirdest thing about my pronoun change and my current set of decisions (which may or may not change in the future) of inhabiting a gender position of incoherence and dissonance is that I had NO FUCKING CLUE that it would be so hard. That I would lose so many friends over it, that I would get so much shit and discomfort from so many people, that I would become the container in which people place their own bullshit about fear of gender transgression. Which of course makes me a jar full of bullshit, and that's just no fun at a party. I watched friends go through similar transitions, and I knew full well it would be really, really difficult. I knew some of the fucked up shit I would encounter. I knew I might lose friends, I knew I'd deal with people not getting it on a daily basis. But I never, ever expected it would alienate such close, close friends. I never suspected I would live for the short, short moments between gender policing situations. I definitely didn't anticipate feeling like I NEVER TALK ABOUT ANYTHING BUT MY FUCKING GENDER. I mean, it IS fun and exciting, but COME ON. I am SO BORED of my own goddamn gender right now, cos I never fucking shut up about it. But of course, if I did, I'd find myself where I was before: save for a few, nobody would engage with my transness, everyone would feel comfortable and okay around me again, and that would happen specifically because I could be comfortably assumed, once again, to be one of the ladies. A kinda funny-looking poncy-like one, but one of the ladies nevertheless.
This was going to be totally hard, I was aware. I also had utter confidence that with my patience, and with my utter adoration of talking to people, I was up for it. I have fun with my gender-- I'm dead serious, of course, but I simultaneously think it's a really fun game. So where the fuck did my fun go? And where did my love of talking to people go? And my patience? I feel like I'm suddenly hiding from everyone, not wanting to confront the inevitable situation of gender-policing, or having to come out (for a first or third or twentieth time) as trans, or having to remind people AGAIN that they need to remember that it's important to use the pronouns I want them to use. It's getting so fucking hard that I almost want to go back to the ease of a gender-coherent pronoun. But its precisely the shocking, excrutiating difficulty of it that makes me realize that I CAN'T. If this is THAT HARD for people, there is no way I CANNOT continue it. Because the need for the work to get done is thousands of times more pressing, and more enormous in magnitude than I ever expected it to be.
Today, like every day that I go out in public, I had many a gender-policing moment. I get "ladied" more than most gender-coherent girls I know, and WAY more than most femme-appearing girls I know. It was plentiful today, and that's fine. Without actually being fine, it's fine. But today, I had one of the creepiest kinds of gender-policing moments. A friend of mine was talking to me about my upcoming surgery. I felt fine about it at first... she was excited for me, in fact she is thinking about doing the same thing. I felt like I was inhabiting one of those few moments between the constancy of gender-fascism, and thus my guard was down. She went on to ask me about how long I'd been thinking about it, what the procedure was like, whether this decision was "going along with other decisions," whether I was planning on "transitioning," and further and further. I answered all of her questions, and ended the conversation feeling like I had just taken off all of my clothes and not noticed until I looked down. Suddenly, I realized that her interrogation felt invasive. It felt like I had just confirmed a story she wanted to hear instead of hearing the story about myself I had been trying to tell her. It made me wonder if she gets anything about my gender in the first place. It felt, more generally, like it was part of a narrative about trans-continuum, that if I have changed my pronoun and am seeking surgery, I will naturally want to take the next step and take T, then pass, then never exist in any of my girlishness ever again. That's as fine a way as any to do trans, but it's not my way. Then, she went on to comment on how many people are identifying as trans nowadays, sounding cautious and a little accusatory. I enthused about access to such an identity and community. She looked skeptical. Feeling so constantly misunderstood (I've taken up a camraderie in misunderstood-ness with sharks), it was a particularly unsettling moment to feel misunderstood by someone who seems to be just as much a trans-gender-freak as I.
I'm also sick of feeling so fucking sensitive to all of this. I realize that I'm in the midst of a process, and this is the part of the process where I take note of how hard this is, and I let myself get way too invested in everyone else's assessments of me. I'm striving for that getting-a-thicker-skin part of the process, for the I-don't-need-to-explain-this-to-everyone part, and for the I-don't-need-to-write-a-ten-page-letter-to-someone-who-has-been-jerky-about-this-for-months-on-end part. But I'm not there yet. People are still making me cry, people I hardly even know. I'm still spending half an hour in bars explaining to people who might not remember my name or face the next day why I don't like people to call me "she" or "lady." I'm still letting people believe that it's OK to "be trying," even if they fuck up way more than "trying" would EVER allow for. And I'm really sick of it. But I'm having a hard time letting go.
