- How did you know you wanted to be a girl? – what influenced your decision to transition?
That’s a tough one to answer. How did you know you wanted to be a girl, anonymous questioner? (Or wanted to be a boy?)
For me, it wasn’t so much that I wanted to be a girl that I knew I wasn’t a boy. I imagined being a girl was better, I hoped it was right for me, and I wished I were a girl. But I wasn’t positive that it would be until I did it. Maybe a good analogy would be the question, “How do you know you’re hungry?” Well, because you’re hungry! It’s a state of being, something you know you are or you aren’t. I didn’t know I wanted to be a girl because I liked dresses or makeup or dolls. I knew it because it was true.
- What do your family and friends think? Did anyone give you moral support in making your decision?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am spoiled, blessed, privileged, and thankful that my friends, family, and coworkers have been so supportive during my transition. I’ve had people (family, mostly) react in a confused way, but I’ve never had anyone who was important to me act in a negative or intentionally hurtful way.
My experience, however, is the exception. It’s (unfortunately) not the rule. But I’d like to work toward a world where my experience – of the people important to me being supportive and enthusiastic of my transition – is the norm.
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'»
It recently occurred to me that within the next few weeks – January 5, to be exact – I will have been living as Rebecca full-time for a year.
I’m not sure what to make of this.
Continue reading 'Anniversaries'»
The first night of tech for Trans Form was last night, and I’m kind of a mess.
(For those of you who aren’t theatre people, tech refers to technical rehearsals, where lights/sound/etc are set. It comes before dress rehearsals and/or previews, the final rehearsals before a show opens.)
The show is going fine, although I’m planning to head out of work early tonight and finish up some sound and video work. And yet, I’m really scared about it opening on Friday. Not simply stressing out, but scared. And, after thinking about what parts of the show terrify me, I realized I’m not just dealing with stage fright (although there’s some of that) but with some deeper internalized transphobia.
Continue reading 'Internalized transphobia'»
dreams, emotion, memory, theatre, trans, transitioning
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emotion, fear, memory, shaving, stress, theatre, transitioning, transphobia
I just finished re-reading Boylan’s I’m Looking Through You, and it’s brought up something that’s really been on my mind lately. From page 256 of the hardcover:
Shell looked thoughtful. “I don’t know, Jenny. About ninety percent of the time, you seem like the happiest person I know. And then, every once in a while, I”ll catch you looking out a window like that. I don’t get it. How come you’re so sad, if you’re happy?”
[snip]
“I don’t know, Shell. I said. I mulled it over. “I get tired sometimes, of being different.”
[snip]
I wiped my eyes. “It’s like, I went through this whole amazing change, and at last I feel content, at last I feel whole. But what about that kid I used ot be? What about all those memories? That’s the one thing they can’t give you in surgery: a new history.”
I’ve been having a really hard time with that: how do I reconcile who I am now, who I want to be, with who I was?
The weight of that history, of the twenty-plus years I was living as male, feels like it’s overwhelming the ten months I’ve been living full-time as Rebecca.
Already ten months? Only ten months?
Continue reading 'Reconciling regret'»
I was a boy, growing up.
At least, people saw me that way: I had a boy’s name, boy’s clothing, wore swimming trunks to the pool or the beach, had a Bar Mitzvah (however grudgingly), changed in the boys’ locker room before gym, wore a suit and tie to important family occasions, participated in Indian Guides (however briefly), had my hair in a buzz cut every summer for years, played on the boys’ teams after school, lived in the boys’ section of the dorm at college, was never taught how to put on makeup…
Looking through old photo albums, or at the pictures on the walls at my parents’ houses, it’s clear – boy, boy, boy.
Continue reading 'I was a boy, I was a girl'»
I was recently talking with my mom about a woman she’s become friendly with as part of a group she goes to for parents with trans kids. We’ll call her Susan. (I have no idea what her real name is, but I get tired of saying “this woman” over and over again.) Susan has two children: a son – lets say Ben – and a child – lets go with the gender-neutral Casey – who keeps insisting that she’s a girl, even though she was assigned ‘boy’ at birth. Both of her kids are pretty young, definitely not yet in highschool, and Susan has been trying to understand Casey but having a hard time. She was apparently retelling a conversation she’d had recently with her children, in which she had asked Casey, “But why do you like the color pink, playing with dolls, wearing dresses, and don’t want to be called a boy?”
Casey replied, “I just think I want to be a girl.”
Now, from what I’ve heard from my mom, Susan has been trying hard to help Casey be happy, but she is still having a hard time accepting that the child she thought was a son might really be a daughter. Indeed, Susan was holding this response, and specifically the words “I think I want,” as evidence to my mom that Casey wasn’t sure what she wanted. That there was still hope Casey would change her mind and realize she was really a boy.
My mom, in turn, was asking me what I thought.
Obviously I’m not inside Casey’s head. And, as someone who is a decade and a half older than Casey, it’s hard for me to say that anyone can know what they want when they’re 10. But I distinctly remember using the same language in my mind, and even when I came out to my parents. And the use of “I think I want” wasn’t because of any uncertainty of my desire, it was because of my fear of failure.
Continue reading '“I think I want to be a girl”'»
coming out, family, gender, memory, trans, transitioning
| desire, kids, language, memory, specificity, transitioning
I know I just said that I’m not going to “pretend (explicitly or via omission) that I’m not trans” as part of a response to a post from Being T about photos and their place in the author’s life as a trans woman. But I’m currently going through old home videos because I was hoping to use some of them at some point in the solo performance project I’m working on.
And they just make me want to cry.
They make me feel like I’ve wasted 23 years of my life, and lost something I can never recover.
They make me remember that I’ll never experience childhood as R, grow up as R, go to highschool as R, go to college as R, graduate as R, and on and on and on.
They make me hate who I am now, for dallying and postponing and delaying and waiting.
Continue reading 'The Past'»
For my 16th birthday I was given a copy of Sandman: A Game of You. This is part of the larger Sandman series of graphic novels which, if you haven’t read, you should do so as soon as possible. Really. (The first volume or two are perhaps the weakest of the series, but once you get through that it’s just masterful storytelling.) One of the main characters is Wanda, a pre-op trans woman. I can’t imagine this was the first trans character I’d seen in fiction, but she stays with me as my first memory of seeing a strong trans character in fiction; one of the first experiences I had saying “She’s like me!” when relating to a fictional character about my trans identity.
I remember flying through the book, eager to see what would happen next and impatient when the action shifted from Wanda. (Something I’ve managed to surpress in later rereadings. Fortunate, as the book as a whole is wonderful as well.) I stayed up later than I should, in those high school days where going to bed after midnight or one or two and getting up before seven all week long just seemed routine. But I couldn’t imagine waiting until tomorrow to see how the story turned out.
A spoiler warning. Those who haven’t read the book, think they might, and want every moment to be a surprise, should stop reading this post now. (I don’t know if the information ahead will fundamentally change your first read, but I’ve had friends give spoiler warnings about the information on dust jackets, so I know some people take these things very seriously.)
Continue reading 'Wanda'»
The shadows were long across the bed, the dark deep purple of the sky just after the sun sets. Her neck fit my lips perfectly and when our eyes met I started to cry. “Why are you crying?” she asked, and the not-knowing made me cry all the more. Her neck tasted of her and of the salt of my tears. At last I was able to say, “I’m stronger when I’m with you. I’m happier when I’m with you. I’m better when I’m with you. And I don’t want to be without you.”
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