Hello and welcome back to Trans 101 with Julie. I am your clumsy fingered hostess with the toastses (mmm, toast) Julie.
I want to talk today about one of the most popular misconceptions that gets bandied about when someone comes out publicly (or even privately) as transgender. That misconception, to lay things out at the beginning, is this:
“But you've changed!”
The thing is, we really haven't.
At least, not in a bad way at all.
What you are seeing is someone who has finally given up one of the biggest things holding them back, and now they finally maybe feel free enough to talk about some of the things they've kept drawn close to the vest for years and years.
You may also be seeing someone who is letting go of things they claimed they liked as a kind of safety net they used in order to blend in and stealth through life.
To use myself as an example:
People who are very very close to me were not the least bit surprised when I told them I was transgender. Depending on the person, they saw me struggle with it for years or decades, or watched me go through failed and furtive attempts to ratchet the door open, only to come up short each time. Others saw my willingness to throw myself headlong into things like RHPS or stage stuff, specifically roles that may or may not have involved playing a woman (or a man playing a woman) on stage, and realised there were things I was hiding.
And here on my wall...yes. I talk about clothes and makeup from time to time. Remember that for me this is puberty point two. I am finally having to teach myself how to navigate things I was never socialised with as a teen, even tho I sorely wanted to be. It doesn't mean I've changes...it means I've grown.
I will always post about FC Bayern and proper football, because there is nothing on this world or any other that will diminish my love for the beautiful game. I didn't fall for soccer because I was trying to hide behind it...I fell in love with it cos when I was tiny Pele signed with the NY Cosmos, and I learned about football off a cereal box back. Likewise, I still love baseball, always will, and I blame Burger King and their Yankees baseball cards for that.
Well, and Nolan Ryan.
But, like...in HS I tried doing the football thing, and I couldn't do it. Nothing was worth putting myself through that hell. If that meant I'd get tagged a choir queer, so be it. I still have issues with American football because of that.
And I will always love the music I love...it's a running joke that I'll post all the classical stuff on my wall (Classical Music Julie, anyone?) and then someone will get on Skype or Discord with me and they'll hear a wall of white noise, blast beats, and black metal scream. When I say I love all kinds of music, I really do mean it.
And all those interests are inherent. They're ME.
But me also likes dresses. And learning what my aesthetic is. And makeup. Me is going through physical changes that are amazing to witness, if not always the easiest things to deal with. I do tend to NOT talk about those because I do know people have their limits, but each day I move further and further away from the shell/husk I used to be and closer and closer to me. I am, to quote/paraphrase Janet Mock, redefining my reality and surpassing certainty.
I know girls who are madly into muscle cars...to the point that their Youtube channels are chock a block filled with vids about their Mustangs or whatever. One of my friends is a mad off-road biker. I know someone who played league football in the UK, someone else who builds Gundam models, and another who cosplays as 2B from Nier: Automata. One of my close friends is a business owner, another is a well known blogger and published author on gender studies, several other are ex-military...
The point is, I am betting in almost every case these are things they have been into for years if not decades.
But when we come out, when we start talking about things we never have before, those new things often seem to overshadow all the other things we've always liked...those other things becomes like background noise and the new stuff seems amplified. We've...we've changed. Even if we haven't really.
One other thing to keep in mind is this:
Often we do go to the extreme end of the binary, as much as a coping mechanism as anything else. We're so afraid of not being seen as real trans people that we go over the top in expressing or presenting in an overtly binary fashion. There's mingled unmitigated joy at the fact that this whole new world shining glimmering splendid is before us, and we dive in head first. But it's also armour, a way to protect ourselves from the slings and arrows hurled at us.
“But LOOK! I am so femme!”
“LOOK! I'm a real girl!”
“LOOK!”
We learn, some quicker than others, that those end up being tells that we can't risk. We learn to reel it back, to actually embrace the resplendence in divergence that is the entirety of the femme experience.
It's not personality changing.
It's called the growth game.
I'm two years-ish in in a public sense. Y'all have seen so many of my growing pains, and there's certainly a billion more slips and pitfalls and pratfalls ahead of me as I learn my way through. I'm becoming myself, more surely every day, and more fully in every way. Will I cast off things? Most likely and I might not even know what they are, because they'll literally be things I don't even think about as I go along. We all do that, trans, cis, enby, agender, doesn't matter.
That's called living.
Anything else is stasis and homogeneity.
And if you think I've changed...maybe instead you should look at how your perception of me may have changed as a result of new data.
Each one of us going through transition, no matter how that is (CHT, surgery, nothing at all if they medically can't) is essentially going through a second puberty...only we're doing it without the benefit of a cadre of others going through it with us in close proximity. Do you have any idea how difficult puberty was for me, seeing body hair and feeling bits...descend...and waking up with this stuff stuck to my sheets...and then getting to school and seeing the other girls in my class talking about outfits and stuff, and knowing that as much as those were conversations I was desperate to have, at this time they were decidedly off limits to me?
So everything is new, and exciting, and terrifying.
We talk about make up as much because we're discovering it as it is because we hope that if we do, the women around us who grew up learning about it will be able to give us tips and hints and pointers. We talk about clothing, and post pix, because as much as we may be proud of how we pulled off a certain look, sometimes we can get amazing advice on how to put things together better, or without being too over the top, or where we could push things a little. For so many of us, this is a foreign language we're having to learn by the collective butts of our britches, and without the benefit of a life lived with these things, we have to play catch up exceptionally fast and with great furiousness.
And potentially with far less Vin Diesel than we'd like.
And yes, to the outside these things can seem like evidence that we've changed.
But they're really not.
They're excitement mingles with fear crossed with a sincere desire for help as we try to pack 20 years of childhood and puberty and adolescence into a 3 or 4 year period in the hopes that we don't get clocked and get clocked...or worse.
Trust me...we're still in there. We're still us. We're just...us plus.
We're ourselves, upgraded.
Julie point two :-P
(You had to know, at some point, I'd have to work in a Doctor Who reference into one of these essays. Anything less would be...less. Less...Julie. Less...of a certain je nais se quois, a certain savoir faire, a certain...Jacques Chirac.)
Thanks once again for hanging out with me. I hope this helps you get some idea of the things we're dealing with and trying to pick up as we go through a major change in our lives for the first time for the second time. As always, I encourage questions, comments, insights, anything you might have, ad there's plenty of room below to add your bits, bobs, and allsorts. Take care of yourselves, eat good food, hug your loved ones, and stay alive.
See you here next time.
(This is posted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license with the intent that you may share it if you have found it informative, helpful, or enlightening. You may use extracts, properly attributed, as part of your work as long is it is openly shared under similar license.)
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