Reading
Last night, I bought a book that had been recommended to me a few months ago... well, not directly recommended to me, but suggested as a good read to people on a forum I was following, who felt like they had privilege over transpeople. Now don't get me wrong; I don't feel like I'm in that category. But since I am coming at it from an outside perspective, I thought I would pick it up and read it.
I stayed up all night reading it. It was a 263 page book, and it took me just under four hours. It might not have taken me that long, had I not stopped to think about what I was reading every once in a while and comparing myself to the narrator of the book. And it totally engrossed me, so much so that I'm still crying over the ending, ten minutes after laying down to sleep and realising that sleep is going to elude me, at least until I can get words on paper as to how I felt about the book.
The book is called Almost Perfect, and the link I provided there unthinkingly is to the Nook version, which is the version I bought, as I own one of those wonderful e-readers. The dead tree version can be found here, if you're interested in reading it and happen to be Stateside with access to a brick-and-mortar B&N or want it to be shipped. (Protip: I think the Nookbook link has the first chapter as a sample; don't take that drivel about Brenda as the way the entire book is going to be. Stick with it through... I think it was Chapter 4 or 5 when Sage takes centre stage? Anyway, if you're going to read it, do us both a favour and stick with it at least that long before you decide to put it down and have nothing else to do with it.)
The summary on the website starts well, but it doesn't do the entire book justice. The entire thing is a roller-coaster ride of emotions, all the way through the very end which I won't reveal unless you ask me nicely for fear of spoiling it. But throughout the entire book, in a lot of ways I saw myself as Logan, the narrator of the story. Logan was born and raised in Podunk (actually, the city in the book was named Moberly iirc, but that's neither here nor there), Missouri, in a conservative town where the Good Ole Boys were born, raised, went to school, went off to college, then came back home to raise a family and die. You know the type of town I'm talking about, I'm sure. Elizabethtown was a bit like that -- quite a bit bigger, and you didn't know the personal business of every single resident, but there are still a LARGE number of parallels I can draw between Moberly and Elizabethtown. Moberly is described as being right smack dab in the middle of the so-called Bible Belt, based on where the author locates it in proximity to larger cities. In a lot of ways, Elizabethtown is part of the Bible Belt, too, one of those towns where you can't drive five miles without coming across a church of one flavour or another (as long as it was Southern Baptist or Catholic). So based on that, you can imagine that I, like Logan, grew up in a fairly conservative household.
So what changed between the story that Logan told in that book, and my own story?
I like to tell myself that I've always been open-minded to different things, but that's not entirely true. When I was in high school and first started learning about (what I at the time called) Wicca, I was a young lost girl searching for communion with someone (or someones) I could call a friend, and learning about this was new and interesting even though it ran counter to everything I had been raised to believe. At first I pretended to believe in it to fit in; later I truly did start to believe. Then I found out that one of my new friends was gay, and I'm ashamed to say that in addition to being curious about it, I was also a little mortified, until I admitted to myself that I harboured slight feelings of attraction for one of the girls who hung out with us -- and then I was told that there was such a thing as bisexuality, and I figured that was what I had to be.
I'm embarrassed to say I blindly followed my mother's political ideologies until I moved to Bowling Green and started watching and reading the news on my own, and started developing my own opinions -- this really hit home for me before the 2008 election, when I was sure that because my mom and I had always seen eye-to-eye on politics in the past, that she would find funny the little crack I made about someone with a McCain/Palin sticker on their Suburban who happened to be driving like an idiot; and then when I made it, my mom replied that she planned to vote for McCain and Palin in November, because she genuinely thought they would bring change this country needed.
Every time something like this happened to me, it forced me to be a little more aware of myself and my surroundings, and be a little more open-minded. I then started working at Afni, where after a couple of years they put up a ridiculous sign (and only on the women's bathroom door) that basically said "Only those who are legally and fully of this gender may enter here. If you don't fit that and don't feel comfortable using the men's room right over there, there's a unisex bathroom in the training area you may access." The company's HR department felt it necessary to put that sign up when it was revealed that at least two people in the call centre were not only dressing as women on a daily basis, but that they felt obliged to use the ladies' room to take care of their necessaries, and this creeped some of the "real women" in the centre out knowing that a "guy" could come in there at any time.
I think that was the first time I really realised anything about transgenderism, and that only because I knew one of the two people who had been effectively banned from using the ladies' room -- and I was close friends with them. (I use that pronoun because they had essentially two different personas in the same body -- one, who was sweet and caring and only used a modification of her birth name to kind of help her out a little, instead of completely changing her name; and the other, which I think started out as a stage personality for the first's drag shows, but then took on a life of her own.) So I was enraged that the company I worked for decided it would be okay to discriminate against them to appease other people in the centre.
Shortly before I quit Afni, I started frequenting RPoL chat (and I've been a thorn in Nerwen's side ever since XD), and while there met some of the best friends I've ever had, who also opened my eyes to several other issues, like what exactly is involved with being born in the wrong body and steps needed to fix it, and issues that people in that situation have to deal with every single day. Of course, the rest is history from there; I won't rehash yet again how that led me to meeting the most important person in my world and falling utterly head-over-heels in love before I admitted it to myself.
Instead, I'll circumnavigate to my original point: What is it that made me different than Logan? What made me more receptive to the ideas that he rejected? Is it just because I had more Life Experience behind me when I met my fiancee? If I'd met Tatyana earlier in my life, would I have acted the same way toward her that Logan did toward Sage? I want to say no, that I have always been a better person than that... but have I? I desperately wish I could answer that question truthfully to myself, but one answer feels like I'm lying to myself and the thought of the other makes me tear up again.
I stayed up all night reading it. It was a 263 page book, and it took me just under four hours. It might not have taken me that long, had I not stopped to think about what I was reading every once in a while and comparing myself to the narrator of the book. And it totally engrossed me, so much so that I'm still crying over the ending, ten minutes after laying down to sleep and realising that sleep is going to elude me, at least until I can get words on paper as to how I felt about the book.
The book is called Almost Perfect, and the link I provided there unthinkingly is to the Nook version, which is the version I bought, as I own one of those wonderful e-readers. The dead tree version can be found here, if you're interested in reading it and happen to be Stateside with access to a brick-and-mortar B&N or want it to be shipped. (Protip: I think the Nookbook link has the first chapter as a sample; don't take that drivel about Brenda as the way the entire book is going to be. Stick with it through... I think it was Chapter 4 or 5 when Sage takes centre stage? Anyway, if you're going to read it, do us both a favour and stick with it at least that long before you decide to put it down and have nothing else to do with it.)
The summary on the website starts well, but it doesn't do the entire book justice. The entire thing is a roller-coaster ride of emotions, all the way through the very end which I won't reveal unless you ask me nicely for fear of spoiling it. But throughout the entire book, in a lot of ways I saw myself as Logan, the narrator of the story. Logan was born and raised in Podunk (actually, the city in the book was named Moberly iirc, but that's neither here nor there), Missouri, in a conservative town where the Good Ole Boys were born, raised, went to school, went off to college, then came back home to raise a family and die. You know the type of town I'm talking about, I'm sure. Elizabethtown was a bit like that -- quite a bit bigger, and you didn't know the personal business of every single resident, but there are still a LARGE number of parallels I can draw between Moberly and Elizabethtown. Moberly is described as being right smack dab in the middle of the so-called Bible Belt, based on where the author locates it in proximity to larger cities. In a lot of ways, Elizabethtown is part of the Bible Belt, too, one of those towns where you can't drive five miles without coming across a church of one flavour or another (as long as it was Southern Baptist or Catholic). So based on that, you can imagine that I, like Logan, grew up in a fairly conservative household.
So what changed between the story that Logan told in that book, and my own story?
I like to tell myself that I've always been open-minded to different things, but that's not entirely true. When I was in high school and first started learning about (what I at the time called) Wicca, I was a young lost girl searching for communion with someone (or someones) I could call a friend, and learning about this was new and interesting even though it ran counter to everything I had been raised to believe. At first I pretended to believe in it to fit in; later I truly did start to believe. Then I found out that one of my new friends was gay, and I'm ashamed to say that in addition to being curious about it, I was also a little mortified, until I admitted to myself that I harboured slight feelings of attraction for one of the girls who hung out with us -- and then I was told that there was such a thing as bisexuality, and I figured that was what I had to be.
I'm embarrassed to say I blindly followed my mother's political ideologies until I moved to Bowling Green and started watching and reading the news on my own, and started developing my own opinions -- this really hit home for me before the 2008 election, when I was sure that because my mom and I had always seen eye-to-eye on politics in the past, that she would find funny the little crack I made about someone with a McCain/Palin sticker on their Suburban who happened to be driving like an idiot; and then when I made it, my mom replied that she planned to vote for McCain and Palin in November, because she genuinely thought they would bring change this country needed.
Every time something like this happened to me, it forced me to be a little more aware of myself and my surroundings, and be a little more open-minded. I then started working at Afni, where after a couple of years they put up a ridiculous sign (and only on the women's bathroom door) that basically said "Only those who are legally and fully of this gender may enter here. If you don't fit that and don't feel comfortable using the men's room right over there, there's a unisex bathroom in the training area you may access." The company's HR department felt it necessary to put that sign up when it was revealed that at least two people in the call centre were not only dressing as women on a daily basis, but that they felt obliged to use the ladies' room to take care of their necessaries, and this creeped some of the "real women" in the centre out knowing that a "guy" could come in there at any time.
I think that was the first time I really realised anything about transgenderism, and that only because I knew one of the two people who had been effectively banned from using the ladies' room -- and I was close friends with them. (I use that pronoun because they had essentially two different personas in the same body -- one, who was sweet and caring and only used a modification of her birth name to kind of help her out a little, instead of completely changing her name; and the other, which I think started out as a stage personality for the first's drag shows, but then took on a life of her own.) So I was enraged that the company I worked for decided it would be okay to discriminate against them to appease other people in the centre.
Shortly before I quit Afni, I started frequenting RPoL chat (and I've been a thorn in Nerwen's side ever since XD), and while there met some of the best friends I've ever had, who also opened my eyes to several other issues, like what exactly is involved with being born in the wrong body and steps needed to fix it, and issues that people in that situation have to deal with every single day. Of course, the rest is history from there; I won't rehash yet again how that led me to meeting the most important person in my world and falling utterly head-over-heels in love before I admitted it to myself.
Instead, I'll circumnavigate to my original point: What is it that made me different than Logan? What made me more receptive to the ideas that he rejected? Is it just because I had more Life Experience behind me when I met my fiancee? If I'd met Tatyana earlier in my life, would I have acted the same way toward her that Logan did toward Sage? I want to say no, that I have always been a better person than that... but have I? I desperately wish I could answer that question truthfully to myself, but one answer feels like I'm lying to myself and the thought of the other makes me tear up again.