As often happens these days, something I read inspired me to write.
This time it was an autobiographical
piece by Calpernia Addams. What caught my attention was the
opening:
“Transition is never perfect, never easy and never finished. But it
does get better, it does easier and it does recede into the background
as time goes by.”
My problem with this is that it makes statements from a position of authority, Calpernia after all has a lot of “creds” with trans people, that I find not only not to be true, but potentially downright counter to the development of something essential to a successful transition, a decent sense of self esteem.
Almost all women struggle with the beauty trap, the tying of worth of womanhood to appearance , the feeling we’ll never quite be attractive enough no matter how attractive we may or may not be. It was a major feminist issue throughout all the various “waves”. We are too fat, too thin, our thighs are too thick, our nose too big, our breasts not perky enough or too small or too big. Our hips too wide…..you get the picture and if you are female, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you have a transsexual or intersexed history this is further complicated by feeling you will never be female enough, pre-transitioned, that you will never “pass”, that people are laughing at you behind your back. I can tell you from direct observation, the most flawless feminine have the exact same fears. And it is needless most of the time.
By telling women pre transition that it is never perfect, easy or finished Calpernia is doing a major disservice to them. I know we are supposed to warn those coming after us not to pursue this unless you have to and scare off those who should give it more thought, but really, she contradicts herself as well with the whole do it young advise that follows. And as for never finished? Don’t get me wrong, I think Callie and I would become great friends if we were to meet, but someone who’s life is being transsexual is hardly the one to address a “full” transition to womanhood. And it does finish for many, maybe most of us. And it isn’t always hard even if it looks that way to those outside. As for “perfect”…..what in life is?
So time for me to drag out some personal stories to illustrate. I was never going to be a beauty queen, even if I’d transitioned young. I have broad shoulders, large hands and overweight with a large frame. But I had one thing going for me, I always saw myself as female. I even had a morning ritual pre-transition to allow me to “pass” as male. Each morning I stood in front of a mirror and put on a Greek fishing cap as a symbol of putting on “male” for the world that day. Weird eh? Trust me, there is absolutely nothing approaching normal when you are mostly an act to the rest of the world. I grew a beard to provide an unmistakable “male” trigger for the world to see. When I had to see “me” in the mirror when I had the beard, I’d cover the beard with a cloth and the eyes looking back were a woman’s….always. I was also married and had been forced into a promise to keep my “gender weirdness”, as my ex called it, from out daughter when she was born. That is the one major regret of my life, that I made and kept that promise.
The summer between my daughter’s junior and senior year of high school she attended Band Camp and my ex went along as a helper. And I shaved off my beard… and that changed everything. In retrospect, and I am a very introspective person by nature who tries to understand all my own inner motivations and own them, I had apparently come to rely totally on the beard to provide the maleness, let my actual nature free except for saying it out loud and from the time it was gone I never again reliably passed as male regardless of how I was dressed, how “macho” the activity I was engaged in, no matter how aggressively male I tried to be.
And that scared the living crap out me.
This was my big secret, the one thing I could never ever ever let the world see or know about and perfect strangers were seeing me as female, seeing right to my soul….. And even though I had a strong feminist sensibility, even though I emulated the strong women in our family and admired them, for all that I also internalized all those “women as less than” messages I’d received my entire life mixed with the “man in a dress” is the height of absurd humour. So like almost every woman like me I was terrified to dress as the world was already seeing me, female. In that respect pre-transition was not easy. What changed that was exposure to transwomen but not in the fashion you’d think. I started to attend “support meetings” for a trans group and early on one of the “transsexuals” took me under her wing and gave me a list of 50 things women never do. I read it, thought it was joke and laughed. She was very offended at my reaction. You see there wasn’t a single item on that list I didn’t know some woman who did several of them. Right then and there I decided that if I wasn’t insane and really was a woman, then what I did was what women did. A major shift in perception. From that point on “transition” itself was nothing, nothing at all. Oh, I knew I was likely to lose family, friends, career etc. but that wasn’t transition, that wasn’t the shift. I lost all those things and I suppose that made my transition look very difficult to others. But I gained myself Once I owned my own womanhood all the shame went with it. But I seemed to be unique in that.
So I owned my own womanhood. The self acceptance was something else. As a life long Pagan and someone who cherished Crones I had little trouble accepting myself as past the glamour girl nonsense and only had mild regrets I would never be “beautiful” knowing the majority of women my age had dealt with exactly the same issues. I have been blessed or cursed, depending on your viewpoint, to see the world pretty much as it is. I suppose my own self image as female my entire life kept me from developing blinders as to exactly how much variation there is among women in form, I saw a woman when I looked in the mirror. Maybe not a pretty one, but a woman. And I noticed that others in my situation didn’t. It is hard enough for any woman to throw off the beauty trap so I guess it should be no surprise it’s even harder for someone who saw themselves as a male to do so and I wish I knew how to tell those about to transition how to do what I did because I believe that is at the heart of transition and that it has almost nothing to do with clothes, mannerisms, voice etc. All those things help but the simple truth is, the world takes it cues on how to see us by what we reflect from within ourselves.
If you never socialize with other women, you won’t know how. If you insist on seeing a man in the mirror, that’s what others will see. If you put qualifiers on your womanhood, so will the world.
If you truly see yourself as a woman, accept you are the woman you are and that’s good enough, if you can do that then transition is easy, it’s as close to perfect as anyone gets and it most certainly has a finish.
Calpernia is wrong on this.
Owning one’s womanhood. Now it’s time to take that idea into a worldview beyond “cis” and trans and power dynamics.
I’ve always believed that women with trans histories had a lot to bring to the Feminist table and I still do but in the process something else happened as well. The re-emergence of old battles and wounds within Feminism itself tied to the whole concept of “power” and privilege dynamics…and this is actually the essence of patriarchal thinking that places everything and everyone on a vertical relationship rather than the revolutionary Feminist ideas of the European “anarchist” feminists of the thirties and then the fifties and sixties.
This is utterly consistent with my own religious viewpoints as well. That we are all part of the Goddess knowing Herself and therefore we are all equally part of Her. No power dynamics, no hierarchies, no dominance of one group over another. It is not an easy thing to switch one’s essential basis of being to this idea because we all hold on to and cherish our oppressions real or imagined. But you don’t have to. And if you are willing simply to own your own personhood (however you see it), then others cannot take it away from you unless you let them. Don’t think in terms of vertical relationships, think horizontal. Don’t allow others to exercise “power” over you by granting it to them, approach life and others as an equal. Let go of the idea you are oppressed and suddenly it becomes much much more difficult to be oppressed in the first place.
Feminism needs most of all to learn this because the oppression discussions among ourselves are a trap. One that leads to those claiming to be oppressed actually seeking a weird form of power over those they claim are oppressing them via guilt. The whole Jewish Mother syndrome.
Julia Serano taught transwomen to use this with the whole concept of cis-privilege and I have witnessed this used as a weapon against other feminists to the point that accepting trans-woman came at the cost of “confessions” of cis-privilege first. I’m sorry but this is a subtle and perverse form of patriarchy power dynamics thinking. It has bothered me seeing this happen without being able to put my finger on it until recently. And it re-awoken old wounds within feminism on race and class as well. It’s time to stop it. All that is required is to simply accept we are all women, period. To embrace and celebrate our unique strengths as women and that we are all sisters. A very simple idea but the simplest ideas are often the hardest to grasp. Take the simple idea that is at the root of almost all the world’s religions for example, to learn how to shift your thinking from outside the “me” and see the world through the eyes of another. That’s the so called “Golden Rule”. The reason it is an ancient idea is that it is the essence of the Goddess concept. That we are all part of Her and that the most sacred thing we can do is connect and honour other parts of Her in the full understanding we are all part of the Divine, Do this and you no longer need “rules” for proper behaviour.
Own your own womanhood first, accepting it in your sisters then follows naturally. Then we can discard the vertical for the horizontal way of thinking….and suddenly personal histories, race, social standing all become meaningless to divide us and simply ways in which we are each a unique part of a whole.
Can you do this? Can you reject the Patriarchal thinking for the natural Feminine? If enough of us can, we will change the entire world one person at a time. The way to “fight” the Patriarchy is to refuse to embrace it’s essence of hierarchies among ourselves first, not absorb and reflect it’s power dynamics.
Each of us is unique but also each other.