Great post over at Tranarchism, entitled “A Day In The Life Of An Angry Transsexual“:
At lunch break, one of my coworkers talks about his roommates. “You live with two girls?” someone asks. “Sort of,” he replies. “One of them is like a transgender. It’s like her boyfriend or something.”
Somebody else starts laughing, “Oh that’s nasty. Oh that’s wrong. Does he wear a wig and everything?”
I am speechless, baffled by what is going on around me. Everyone here knows that I am trans. Do they think of me that way too? Or am I one of the ‘good ones?’ Do they just forget that I’m transgender? Or are trans men OK in their book, and only trans women repulsive? I mentally circle this last, most likely explanation in red. But that still doesn’t really explain why they think they can talk that way in front of me. Whatever the reason, I am ashamed to say, they keep right on thinking that, because I cannot find my voice to say anything.
Asher uses the term “microagression” to describe these little instances. No one specific thing is big enough to get all upset over, but combined (day after day after day after…) they leave psychic residue in your soul.
In some ways, Asher’s post reminds me of my privilege: I – in the vast majority of my daily existence – am not surrounded by people who would pull that shit.
At the same time, particularly after coming back from DC and being surrounded by all sorts of awesome trans folks, gender non-conforming folks, and we-have-our-shit-together allies, I’m reminded of how cis and straight my Chicago social group is. I’ve said this before, but now am trying more seriously to change it:
- I’m moving my circus class so I can start attending Genderqueer Chicago
- Been messaging with lots of folks on OKCupid
- Looking into Gender Just’s activities
- Planning to go to a few other weekly/monthly events in the queer community, to see how they feel
The NCTE conference was a pressure cooker of an event, a pre-built community that I’ll have to actually discover for myself in Chicago. But I’m going to try.
Just over a year ago, in a post called Reconciling Regret, I wrote about the conversations I used to have between myself and “Rebecca,” my mental construct of the female version of myself:
My conversations would usually start when I was feeling particularly stupid, or sad, or masculine. She’d start, this Rebecca that I imagined myself as in some alternate universe, speaking to me across the barrier which separated our realities: “You’re never going to be happy if you keep on like this.”
“Rebecca” would often continue to berate me and, when I didn’t talk to my parents (or talk to my therapist, find a doctor, find hormones, or whatever standards I/she set for myself) she’d turn the talk to suicide:
“Then why don’t you just kill yourself?” This line was always particularly seductive. Why not kill myself? Clearly, nothing was ever going to change. Friends would be happy, family would be happy, I wouldn’t. Maybe for brief moments, sunlight shining through the clouds, but never for long.
“Go away.”
“Just do it. Kill yourself, and it’ll be over. You’re never going to be me.”
A version of one of these conversations is in the script for Trans Form, and today at rehearsal Kristen (my director) and I worked on it. It was hard to do. Really hard.
Continue reading 'Going to Hard Places'»
Something has been bouncing around in my head. From Picture Frames, a post from Cedar’s blog Taking Up Too Much Space, written in response to my show Trans Form :
What I realized, when I heard [in Trans Form] about the photo albums, and the pictures on the walls of her [Rebecca's] parents’ house, was that these were the memorabilia of an occupation, held onto and commemorated by its collaborators (witting or unwitting). Yes they represent a historical “truth,” a “past” one does not want to “deny”–but so do guns and chains and whips and bombs, and you don’t see them in the family photographs. Well, not if you were on the receiving end, anyway.
That concept, viewing photos or keepsakes of my past as “the memorabilia of an occupation,” finally clicked with me today.
This past weekend, my dad and I were talking about my depression. I was saying that I regretted not transitioning earlier, and he was saying he was sorry for not doing something when I was younger. Seeing something, noticing my unhappiness and its cause. And he said that, with the more tangible problems my older siblings had, it was easy to see me – with good grades, friends, a voracious apatite for books, no small skill at playing piano – as the ‘normal’ child. The child who didn’t need ‘fixing.’
And I realized, as Cedar indicated, that where we find ourselves today is not simply a result of the “truth” of history. It’s a result of how that history is viewed.
Continue reading 'Escaping an angry photograph'»
So all that anger I’ve been talking about? Turns out my mom has been thinking about it, too.
I went to my mom’s on Sunday night for dinner, and was trying to figure out if I wanted to bring up the anger toward her that I’ve been thinking about. I knew I wanted to bring it up eventually, but it had been a difficult weekend and I wasn’t sure I had the energy to go there.
After dinner, though, my mom said that she’d been thinking a lot about the example she and my dad set for me. See, I never saw them fight. And, in recent talks with my mom, apparently they never really did fight. Part of the reason I have trouble with anger, I’m coming to realize, is because I have no framework for it in my life. My experience has been: everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine, my parents are getting divorced.
And, apparently, that wasn’t because my parents were going to great lengths to hide their anger from me. They just suppressed and repressed it to the point where they barely were able to acknowledge it themselves, let alone express it to each other or show it to my brother and I.
Which leaves me really not knowing how to deal with anger. I don’t know how to express it, and I don’t know how to handle anger directed at me.
Continue reading 'My mom is awesome'»
The mentor from the solo performance project I’m involved in was back this week, and we (myself, the other two metnees, and the mentor) met again this week on Monday, Tuesday, and again today, as a sort of we’re-getting-close point between the July program and the November performance.
The week was incredibly helpful for me and let me push the sections I’ve been working on to toward where they need to be. Seeing everyone else’s work was also really helpful – I said to one of the other artists on the way out that I think we’ve all brought each other up to a higher level.
One of the hard things that I’ve been dealing with is how to process anger in the piece. The first section of this program, in July, surprised me in the anger I found around the transition. I don’t like thinking of myself as angry, or as having difficulty with the transition. I want to think about the transition as solely a positive thing.
So I’m trying to figure out how to deal with it when its not.
(But I’m not ending this post on a downer: the solo piece is still going really well!)
-R
I’m sitting at home. I got to the bowling alley (at 8:50, inevitably) with a message on my voicemail saying that people were going to EU’s before bowling, at which point I sent MG a text saying “I am going home” and, well, went home.
MG is now calling me (five times so far) and I, like the mature and reasonable adult that I am, am ignoring her calls.
I hate getting this angry over petty things.
I hate feeling stressed about an hour in one direction or the other.
I hate feeling obligated to do things I don’t want to do.
I hate my body, and the way my body makes me feel, and what it is.
I can look back over the last twenty-plus years and rarely have I asked, “Why me?” but right now I can’t find the energy to care about liking myself for who I am or getting behind the positive things going on in my life or all of the other self-actualizing things I should be doing.]
But I sure as hell can sit here and hate myself, and wish I wasn’t living at my mom’s anymore (less than three weeks left!) so that I didn’t have to deal with her on top of everything else.
So there.
-R
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