This time around, and for a few other installments which will probably come out when I have either the strength or rawness to handle what I'll be writing, I want to cover some stuff that is going to be once again intensely personal, interspersed with anecdotes which should not be construed as data but rather simply observations from my particular view of the community I have somehow collected around me.
That's...that's an incredibly long sentence.
In a way, however, that really encompasses how difficult this is to go through. I think it's essential though.
While I can, let's begin.
~~~//||\\~~~
As I've written in the past, I have known for literal decades that I'm a Julie. Single digits, certainly. I know that I've been depressed for a very very long time...but that's really a subject for another article (one, in fact, that I plan to write in the not distant future, dog willing and the creek don't rise). Being trans comes with its own set of complications, and those complications vary wildly from person to person. And while I certainly have no hard and fast data to strengthen any kind of blanket statement I might make were I a person trying to push an agenda, I think that there is a tendency for trans femme and trans women to have at least some kind of phase during which hyper-masculinity is a coping mechanism.
This is where we start hitting the nitty and the gritty, as well as the very uncomfortable.
In grade school, I was pulled in two wildly different directions. On one hand, I was in gifted and talented. I spent more time talking to teachers than I did kids in my classes. I don't think I talk to any of the people I went to grade school with anymore...I don't think any of them really knew me and those are connections that just don't exist. I had a breakdown in 7th grade when my 4th marking period report card was all As and 1 B.
On the other hand I was a huge baseball fan and I wanted to play baseball. And I was on the team in 7th grade. And I was horrible.
In high school I wanted to play football...and I don't mean proper football, I mean the hyper-masculine sport with shoulder pads and grunting and sweating and tight pants and...umm...that kind of football. I tried out for the team. I'd never have made it.
I quit.
And y'all know that I was way involved in music and theatre. I've written about my senior musical, my trip to Austria for choir, my singing the Mozart Coronation Mass and being in madrigals and chamber choir, my coming back to sing at my choir director's final performance leading the high school choir I sang in (and how that brought me back to music and reignited my love of classical music). I may have talked once or twice about reciting Jabberwocky in a mixed up Scouser/Cockney accent.
Here's what you don't know about my high school years.
You don't know that I spent time in the weight room, doing high weight reps.
You don't know about the time I was playing indoor lacrosse in gym class, when someone hip checked me and I went after him, across the floor, stick checked him into the bleachers, then threw my stick down and went after him, fists flying.
You don't know about the time, at a battle of the bands, that a bunch of Nazi skins showed up cos one of the bands had 2 black people in it (including one who would go on to play in a band y'all might have heard of called TV On The Radio), and of all the people there, two of us squared up to go in on them, with one of them being me.
Why did I do these things?
I am sure you could make some very good, and very accurate guesses.
Here's what else you don't know about my high school years.
I used to hang out with people after school, and I'd leave conversations intentionally to see if anyone would notice I was gone, because I was sure no one actually cared. Most often, I felt I was right. (It was only later, talking to a friend over coffees at Panera, that I learned the truth...they knew I was gone, knew something was terribly wrong, and no one had any idea what to do or say to broach that gap I'd imposed. No one had the language for it, the slightest scintilla of idea how to eve begin, and they were frozen with fear. I was then told, gravely, that none of them ever expected to see me again after graduation, and when I'd walked through the door for the concert, several of them started crying when they saw me.)
You don't know that I was someone who knew everyone and whom no one knew. I could walk up to anyone in my class and ask them about something I knew they were into, or talk to one of them about how they did at their basketball game the previous night. I was...inscrutable. And so it was when, senior year in high school, I caused a near riot when at my prom I was seen doing 'the forbidden dance' (a.k.a. Lambada) with someone, as there was no way I had that in me. Virtually cause célèbre.
What do all of these things have in common?
The answer is impossibly, deceptively simple.
Every one was a somewhat valiant, yet horribly ill conceived attempt at trying to be the man I wasn't.
The stereotype, of course, is that guys don't talk about their emotions. How could I talk about MY emotions when I barely understood them myself, let alone say the terrifying words 'please, I'm not a boy, someone help me?' Easier by far to play the part, suck up, be strong and silent...and kill myself inside.
Easier to lash out at someone in the most masculine way possible for a perceived slight in gym class, allowing 12 years (at that point) of pent up frustration at being bullied and mocked and ridiculed to explode in one hyper-masc display of violence.
Easier to try and impress in gym class by lifting well over twice my body weight, even if it meant I couldn't walk afterwards. If I could be man enough, if I could flex hard enough figuratively or otherwise, I'd be seen as one of them and I could get through each day, week, month, year. I obviously didn't know that one one had that thought at all about me...in fact, too many were worried by what they were seeing, but in my mind, this all made perfect sense.
Fake it till you make it, you know?
Balancing this with the fact that none of this was at all comfortable for me was, of course, pretty fracturing. How do you reconcile the fact that you're much more comfortable in rehearsal for the school musical, wearing a gown and singing soprano, than you are trying to press 500 pounds? How do you reconcile the fact that you sit at home at night, listening to WYSP or WNEW late at night, wanting to femme up your clothes and wear makeup to school, with the fact that when you get on the gym floor to play hockey you're looking at who exactly you're going to target and take out of the game? All the while knowing that you're doing that simply because if you act a certain way people will see you a certain way which means you actually will be that certain way?
As I type this, it sounds ludicrous.
This is how complex my high school years were.
~~~//||\\~~~
As I was nearing graduation from high school, I made what now seems like an absolutely off the wall, out of left field, completely irrational decision.
I decided I wanted to join the Army.
Now, I can hear you through your looks of incredulity.
But it gets better.
Because, you see, not only did I want to join the Army, I wanted to be...a grunt.
Go ahead. Please laugh. I'll wait.
In fact, I'll go make a sandwich so you have time to get it out of your system.
*goes and makes sandwich*
All done?
Good.
But really, think about it in conjunction with everything else you've read above. In the context of that, it makes perfect sense. The one way I could prove once and for all to everyone, and thus to myself, that I was actually 100% man and not at all the woman I knew I was but really I couldn't be because men were men and women were women (except we know that isn't true in the sense that I'm saying I believed it was at the time) was to join the military and do the dirtiest, most physically demanding thing I could think of.
As you can imagine...it didn't happen.
The day before I was due to sign the papers, I chickened out.
In retrospect, this was probably a wise choice on multiple levels. Not long after this tensions rose to critical levels in the Middle East, and soon we were amassing troops in and near Iraq for what would be Operation Desert Storm. I doubt I'd have even made it through basic, to be honest...I'd either have failed a mental health exam (I'd already had one failed suicide attempt, a fact the recruiter knew about and told me to not mention on my application), or a physical (I was already showing signs of what I now know to be osteoarthritis on my right side)...or I'd have burned out. Or I'd have lost it and shot someone. Or I'd have killed myself.
But it was the choice I thought was the best way for me to prove once and for all that I was a man.
And obviously...I'm not.
Here's a neat thing...I know (not just me following them, but them following me and having conversations type people) at least 4 or 5 trans women on Twitter who were active military. And I really don't know what their motivations were for going into the military, but if they were to tell me that one of their deciding factors was similar to mine, I'd not be the least bit surprised.
I know several who were heavily involved in sport...and still are in many cases, including one who was a wrestler (and I don't mean freestyle or Graeco-Roman).
I am not saying their experiences are the same as mine...I am a strong adherent to the proposition that the plural of anecdote is not data...but the coincidental preponderance of points of information is something of interest to me.
Keep in mind this is not to say that doing any of these things are BAD. Sport is awesome. I love my football as much if not more than I ever have. And while I have no interest in lifting weights or checking someone into the boards, I like getting out and about when my body allows me to. Trans men and women in the military have done, and will continue to do, amazing things, even if I do not support the military-industrial complex or the government that used said same as an iron fist to colonise and propagate fascist/cap systems of government around the globe.
Oh...there's my inner anarchist coming out.
Apologies.
The point is, I think a lot of us go to the other extreme when we're fighting ourselves. Much as so many trans women are accused wrongly of embracing femme stereotypes once they are out (when in fact so many do as a way of trying to shield themselves from the likewise wrong assertion that they're aren't REAL women or woman ENOUGH), I think it is not only natural but almost normal for those of us struggling with identity issues to over-compensate in an effort to try and right what we think is a listing shop. It's not until we're able to more clearly understand the dichotomy of those two sides that we're able to get them into some kind of equilibrium.
Remember that when I'm writing this, I'm doing so from a very extremely binary female point of view. I am happily binary, with a full understanding that the spectrum of trans identity is far from a 0-1, black-white system. What I express and describe can only be my experiences, and I'm only speaking for those experiences and not for the community as any kind of holistic entity. A non-binary trans woman (be they gender queer, gender fluid, transfemme, or any of hundreds of other possibilities) will not only have different experiences but different ways of feeling how those experiences impacted them in their quest to become who they are internally.
~~~//||\\~~~
I want to thank you, as always, for reading along. The past week or so has been very difficult for me, and as a result I've really been facing some very difficult things and trying to make sense of them. Right now, that makes it a bit...I don't want to say easier, because it's anything but easy...but perhaps more readily possible...for me to look at some of these things and try to evaluate where they fit into my personal history and how they continue to cause tremors to this day, or how they have affected my internal landscapes and structures.
I'll see you next time for more Trans 101.
Transmission ends.
(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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