lots of words
I just wanted to post two papers I wrote for my Gender, Representation, and Resistance class that I liked.
---
Female-to-Male Feminism:
Transmen’s fight for acceptance and visibility in queer and lesbian communities
In any at least semi-educated circle, if the subject of transgendered people and trans issues comes up, it is almost always in reference to the community of male-to-female transsexuals; that is, those born biologically and physically male who transition later on in their lives to become women. A quick search of amazon.com for the word “transgender” demonstrates this prevalence quite easily: seven out of sixteen results on the first page are about or directed towards male-to-females, five are guides or handbooks for dealing with transgender issues in the home and workplace, four more histories or collected memoirs of transgendered people, and zero - that’s right, zero - are solely about or for anyone on the female-to-male side of the transgendered spectrum. Why does this obvious bias in the collective mind of our culture exist? Why is there so little representation of female-to-male transsexuals in the media? Are there simply not as many FTMs as there are MTFs? Are FTMs simply less visible than MTFs? In this essay, we will attempt to find an answer to these and other questions surrounding this issue as it applies to the modern social and cultural world.
One of the first issues I would like to confront is that of the numbers of transsexuals -- both male and female -- in our country. In an article entitled “Transgender Issues” in an issue of the online database CQ Researcher, a recent study “estimates the number of post-operative MTF transsexuals at 40,000 and hypothesizes three to five times that number of pre-op MTFs. The number of FTM transsexuals is widely thought to be lower, but no one really knows.” No one really knows? What kind of a statistic is that? To understand this puzzling statement, we must cite another fact that this article brings to light; that of the medical cost of transitioning. The CQ Researcher states that “male-to-female surgery can cost as much as $50,000; female-to-male surgery can cost $75,000 or more.” This extreme price gap then explains why there is such a discrepancy in the medical records of female-to-male transsexuals. They simply aren’t going through the extremely expensive process of sex reassignment surgery as much as male-to-females are. There are many reasons why this might be, the first being that it is much easier and accepted in our society for a person who is biologically female to wear “male” clothing than it is for a person who is biologically male to walk around in a dress or skirt. Subsequently, the female body is much more open to interpretation than the male -- it is relatively easy enough to bind one’s breast, stick a sock down one’s pants, draw on a little stubble and lower one’s voice than it is to “tuck” the penis, eradicate any signs of facial hair, and lose the deep tenor or baritone tones of a biologically male voice. A slightly feminine or “boyish” man is much less open to suspicion than an overly manly woman. Female-to-male transsexuals may not be having surgery as much as male-to-females not only because of the exorbitant prices, but also because it is much easier for them to pass in society as their inner-identified gender than it is for people with biologically male bodies.
These two simple facts, however, surely cannot be the only reasons that the numbers of female-to-male transsexuals who seek medical help are so much drastically lower than those of male-to-females; a ratio that can be up to 8 MTFs to 1 FTM, according to Jan Wickman’s article “Masculinity and Female Bodies”. To explain this Wickman cites another issue that female-to-male surgery poses other than the price. According to Wickman’s article, “the quality of phalloplasty techniques is considerably inferior to that of MTF surgery.” So then we find that not only are female-to-male transsexuals paying much more than male-to-females for sex reassignment surgery, they are also getting less satisfactory results! “FTM trans-sexual surgeries are not producing passable bodies,” Jean Bobby Noble states in his book Sons of the Movement: FTMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape. “They are producing intersexual, hybrid bodies that are outside of our gender taxonomies and queer lexicons” (Noble, 27). It is no wonder, then, that there are so few female-to-male transsexuals show up in medical records for sex reassignment surgery -- but this still doesn’t account for the fact that FTMs seem much less visible in the common lexicon of society than MTFs do. Although female-to-males may not seek surgery as much as male-to-females do, that doesn’t mean that there are necessarily less of them. But then why do FTMs still fall far short of MTFs in books, movies, conversation, and the media?
To uncover this mystery, we must go back in time to the beginnings of the gay rights movement in this country. In the CQ Researcher article “Transgender Issues”, it has been stated that “the gay and lesbian rights organizations that emerged in the 1970s had, at best, ambivalent views toward transgender people.” This seems puzzling. Why would gay and lesbian movements not involve transgendered people in their fight for acceptance -- and go so far as to be “ambivalent at best” towards them? It has been suggested that transgendered people may have been seen as a threat to the gay rights movement, as can be seen in the following passage:
Transgender people were present at the creation of the gay liberation movement in the 1960s. But they were largely ignored or even shunned well into the 1990s. Many in the gay rights movement viewed transgender as incompatible with the prevailing conformist politics of men and feminist ideology of lesbians. (Transgender Issues)
Among gay men who were trying to fit in, male-to-females may have seemed to be sullying their image, and among lesbians female-to-males were seen to be conforming to the patriarchal ideas of a masculine society. This lack of transgendered people in the early gay rights movements of the country was not an accident -- “they rather explicitly excluded transgender people from the movement” (Transgender Issues).
It was not uncommon for butch or female-to-male individuals to be excluded or even outright rejected from the lesbian groups during the gay liberation movement -- most often, unfortunately, due to the strict feminist tenets that these groups held on to. “They drove us out, made us feel ashamed of how we looked,” states the main character of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. “They said we were male chauvinist pigs, the enemy.” During these early stages of the lesbian feminist movement, presenting any sort of masculinity was seen as damning to the ideals of feminist separatism that the movement was trying to promote:
The rhetorical attacks leveled at butches and FTMs in the name of lesbian feminism -- suggesting that female masculinity is a sign of “internalized misogyny” or that butch/femme roleplaying “honor(ed) the dictates of a warped, male-managed culture” -- certainly worked to create yet another narrative discourse equating female masculinity or male-identification with moral deviance. (Detloff)
Many radical feminists accused female-to-male transgendered people of being “victims of a false consciousness” and of paying “the ultimate homage to sex-role power” through their cross-gender identification (Schleifer). It has even been stated that “by ‘crossing over this divide’ -- that is, by transitioning and therefore becoming men -- FTM trans-sexual men are now living a kind of privilege not accorded to lesbians and biological women and so, as a result, are somehow betraying their feminist sisters” (Noble, 26).
This idea of betrayal or abandonment of the feminist ideals is definitely part of the reason that female-to-male transsexuals are not as common a part of our societal consciousness than male-to-females are. Whereas communities of gay men generally hold onto their MTF members (probably due to a higher level of acceptance nowadays of the drag scene and its idea of male femininity as an essential part of the gay society) feminist or lesbian communities at times rather bluntly exclude FTMs due to what is seen as their conformism to a masculine and patriarchal society. Being rejected from the lesbian and feminist societies, and then often also from the gay community (where they are often not seen as being “real” men), female-to-male transsexuals have no forum for discussion in which to express the struggles of their daily lives and bring awareness of their existence to the rest of society -- and, effectively, are absorbed into invisibility along the sidelines.
To help counteract this horribly negative rejection from a group that is constantly fighting for acceptance and equal inclusion in society, I would like to suggest that by excluding female-to-male transsexuals from the feminist movement a valuable resource and voice of change is being lost. In Kristen Schilt’s article “Just One of the Guys? How Transmen Make Gender Visible at Work”, a female-to-male transsexual who lives and works fully as a man made the following statement:
I swear they let the guys get away with so much stuff! Lazy ass bastards get away with so much stuff and the women who are working hard, they just get ignored… I am really aware of it. And that is one of the reasons that I feel like I have become much more feminist since transition. I am just so aware of the difference that my experience has shown me. (Schilt)
By excluding female-to-male transsexuals from the feminist movement, feminists are losing an extremely valuable point of view -- that of the “inside man” (no pun intended). If feminist, lesbian, and queer communities would learn to accept and include female-to-male transsexuals and transgendered people in their fight for equality, not only would a valuable step towards the future of civil rights be made, but also the issues of FTMs might become a more common part of society’s lexicon. To me, this sounds like a win-win situation.
In recent years, the visibility of female-to-male transgendered people has been slowly on the rise. The almost superfluous “T” tacked onto the end of the “GLBT” acronym has started to be less ignored and more of a integral part of the organizations that label themselves as such. Steps are definitely being made, albeit slowly. I have hope for the future of the FTM community, and of my place in it. If the queer and feminist movements can accept transgendered people as an integral part of their communities, then we have made the first step into their acceptance into the general community of all society. Someday we won’t hear of “transgendered issues” or “FTM issues”, but simply of “human issues”. It may be a long journey, but we have already started to make progress in the right direction, and if we keep moving forward on this path then we shall surely see that change can come.
Works Cited
Cromwell, Jason. Transmen & FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities. University of Illinois press, Chicago, 1999.
Detloff, Madelyn. “Gender Please, Without the Gender Police: Rethinking Pain in Archetypal Narratives of Butch, Transgender, and FTM Masculinity.” The Haworth Press, 2006.
Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues.
Noble, Jean Bobby. Sons of the Movement: FTMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape. Women’s Press, Toronto, 2006.
Schilt, Kirsten. “Just One of the Guys? How Transmen Make Gender Visible at Work.” Gender & Society, 20;465. Sage Publications, 2006.
Schleifer, David. “Make Me Feel Mighty Real: Gay Female-to-Male Transgenderists Negotiating Sex, Gender, and Sexuality.” Sexualities, 9;57. Sage Publications, 2006.
“Transgender Issues.” The CQ Researcher, vol 16 no 17. The CQ Press, 2008.
Wickman, Jan. “Masculinity and Female Bodies.” NORA, vol 11 no 1. Taylor & Francis, 2003.
---
Reflection: Ma Vie en Rose
In the French film Ma Vie en Rose, we learn about the life of a young transgendered boy and are shown the effects being transgendered has on both his personal development and the life and livelihood of his family and friends. Ma Vie en Rose brings up an interesting point in the consideration of transgendered individuals, especially youth: that of the consequences it can have not only on the life of the transgendered person, but also the effects it can produce in the community in which the transgendered individual resides.
This concept is something especially valid to me at this point in my life as a young transgendered person. My personal struggle is blatantly obvious to me almost every moment of every day; I am in a constant battle with myself and the rest of the world over my appearance, my presentation, my mannerisms, the way I am referred to, and the way in which I occupy public space. The film Ma Vie en Rose, however, brings to my eyes a perspective that I, in my own pain and struggle, often forget about: that of my family and friends. It is sometimes difficult for me to realize that although being transgendered is something I personally have been struggling with (both consciously and subconsciously) within myself for years -- perhaps my entire life -- the idea is something completely new and foreign to the people who I interact with every day. I forget that the time it took me to feel comfortable telling other people about my gender identity is time that I have had to reconcile these new ideas that other people haven’t had yet. Sometimes I’m so ready, so eager, to jump forward in my presentation and ideas of myself that I don’t understand my family’s reluctance. How can they think this is too sudden?, I ask myself. Why do they find this all so shocking and difficult? They want me to slow down, to wait even longer. I’ve already been waiting forever. Now that I have finally discovered myself, I don’t understand the point of hiding that self any longer. But to my friends and family, who haven’t known about my inner struggles as I have, it seems like I’m jumping into things. I’ve had time to reconcile this idea of a ‘new’ me -- they have not.
There was one particular line from the film Ma Vie en Rose that particularly struck a chord with me in relation to this idea. “There are some things that you might have to wait to say until you’re older,” Ludovic’s therapist says to him at one point. I almost cried. I feel like I’ve been waiting forever to say these things, and now that I have finally gained the courage to say them, I’m being told to wait even longer? I understand the struggles and difficulties that the people around me are going through to reconcile their idea of me with this new perspective of me. I understand that it is painful and worrying and that it causes huge upsets in their daily lives, in work, in school, in friendships. And I respect that pain and struggle and want to give them time to adjust, to some extent, but when I hold up my own pain, the inner battles that I face on a daily basis, to theirs, I can’t help but see how much my pain outweighs theirs. I know this sounds selfish and stuck up. I know I may seem to be being rude and uncaring. I know that what I am doing affects other people’s lives almost as much as it affects mine. But as much as I know this must cause pain for them, I can’t reconcile it with my own injuries. They don’t have to carry this huge weight inside of them. They don’t have to fight an inner battle with themselves. They don’t have to effectively change who they are, or at least who the world sees them as, to be able to do the one thing every human being in this world wants to do: simply to live and be and function in this world without having anyone question something as simple as your identity.
My mother recently has been asking me what I’m going to do about being transgendered. I’ve just recently changed my name legally, and that feels better than you can possibly imagine, but inside myself I know it’s not enough. My family is having a hard enough time with just that -- “I’m still going to call you Sarah,” my father says, and I respond with “I know it’ll take a while, I don’t expect you to just suddenly switch your mental idea of me to Harper,” but inside me something breaks from the pain his statement fills me with. I know he doesn’t mean it that way, but to me it sounds like a refusal. A refusal to try and see me for who I am inside, a refusal to try and accept my choices in life. My mother seems to think that changing my name will be enough to hold back my pain for a long time. I haven’t even asked them to change their use of pronouns with me, and every “sister” and “daughter” feels like a spike thrown at my heart.
I shouldn’t complain so much. I’m blessed with a family who sees me for who I am inside despite my outward appearance or place in society, and who allows me to express myself to them and who loves me unconditionally. I forget too often that these ideas are all new to them, that they still need time to adjust. And even though I sometimes feel like I’m going to explode from all of the things flying around inside of me, I can take a deep breath and wait just a little bit longer. I’m blessed with in my family, in my friends, in so many things. The world isn’t quite ready for me yet. It’s a slow, painful process, but I don’t want to estrange everyone I know and love by going through it all too fast and suddenly. My family and friends are an essential part of who I am, and if I realize that I also have to remember to realize that as such they are an essential part of this process of becoming myself that I am beginning to go through. I am not alone. I am not alone. There are so many transgendered people who are unable to say something like that and truly mean it. I’m not going to lose that, not for anything.
---
Female-to-Male Feminism:
Transmen’s fight for acceptance and visibility in queer and lesbian communities
In any at least semi-educated circle, if the subject of transgendered people and trans issues comes up, it is almost always in reference to the community of male-to-female transsexuals; that is, those born biologically and physically male who transition later on in their lives to become women. A quick search of amazon.com for the word “transgender” demonstrates this prevalence quite easily: seven out of sixteen results on the first page are about or directed towards male-to-females, five are guides or handbooks for dealing with transgender issues in the home and workplace, four more histories or collected memoirs of transgendered people, and zero - that’s right, zero - are solely about or for anyone on the female-to-male side of the transgendered spectrum. Why does this obvious bias in the collective mind of our culture exist? Why is there so little representation of female-to-male transsexuals in the media? Are there simply not as many FTMs as there are MTFs? Are FTMs simply less visible than MTFs? In this essay, we will attempt to find an answer to these and other questions surrounding this issue as it applies to the modern social and cultural world.
One of the first issues I would like to confront is that of the numbers of transsexuals -- both male and female -- in our country. In an article entitled “Transgender Issues” in an issue of the online database CQ Researcher, a recent study “estimates the number of post-operative MTF transsexuals at 40,000 and hypothesizes three to five times that number of pre-op MTFs. The number of FTM transsexuals is widely thought to be lower, but no one really knows.” No one really knows? What kind of a statistic is that? To understand this puzzling statement, we must cite another fact that this article brings to light; that of the medical cost of transitioning. The CQ Researcher states that “male-to-female surgery can cost as much as $50,000; female-to-male surgery can cost $75,000 or more.” This extreme price gap then explains why there is such a discrepancy in the medical records of female-to-male transsexuals. They simply aren’t going through the extremely expensive process of sex reassignment surgery as much as male-to-females are. There are many reasons why this might be, the first being that it is much easier and accepted in our society for a person who is biologically female to wear “male” clothing than it is for a person who is biologically male to walk around in a dress or skirt. Subsequently, the female body is much more open to interpretation than the male -- it is relatively easy enough to bind one’s breast, stick a sock down one’s pants, draw on a little stubble and lower one’s voice than it is to “tuck” the penis, eradicate any signs of facial hair, and lose the deep tenor or baritone tones of a biologically male voice. A slightly feminine or “boyish” man is much less open to suspicion than an overly manly woman. Female-to-male transsexuals may not be having surgery as much as male-to-females not only because of the exorbitant prices, but also because it is much easier for them to pass in society as their inner-identified gender than it is for people with biologically male bodies.
These two simple facts, however, surely cannot be the only reasons that the numbers of female-to-male transsexuals who seek medical help are so much drastically lower than those of male-to-females; a ratio that can be up to 8 MTFs to 1 FTM, according to Jan Wickman’s article “Masculinity and Female Bodies”. To explain this Wickman cites another issue that female-to-male surgery poses other than the price. According to Wickman’s article, “the quality of phalloplasty techniques is considerably inferior to that of MTF surgery.” So then we find that not only are female-to-male transsexuals paying much more than male-to-females for sex reassignment surgery, they are also getting less satisfactory results! “FTM trans-sexual surgeries are not producing passable bodies,” Jean Bobby Noble states in his book Sons of the Movement: FTMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape. “They are producing intersexual, hybrid bodies that are outside of our gender taxonomies and queer lexicons” (Noble, 27). It is no wonder, then, that there are so few female-to-male transsexuals show up in medical records for sex reassignment surgery -- but this still doesn’t account for the fact that FTMs seem much less visible in the common lexicon of society than MTFs do. Although female-to-males may not seek surgery as much as male-to-females do, that doesn’t mean that there are necessarily less of them. But then why do FTMs still fall far short of MTFs in books, movies, conversation, and the media?
To uncover this mystery, we must go back in time to the beginnings of the gay rights movement in this country. In the CQ Researcher article “Transgender Issues”, it has been stated that “the gay and lesbian rights organizations that emerged in the 1970s had, at best, ambivalent views toward transgender people.” This seems puzzling. Why would gay and lesbian movements not involve transgendered people in their fight for acceptance -- and go so far as to be “ambivalent at best” towards them? It has been suggested that transgendered people may have been seen as a threat to the gay rights movement, as can be seen in the following passage:
Transgender people were present at the creation of the gay liberation movement in the 1960s. But they were largely ignored or even shunned well into the 1990s. Many in the gay rights movement viewed transgender as incompatible with the prevailing conformist politics of men and feminist ideology of lesbians. (Transgender Issues)
Among gay men who were trying to fit in, male-to-females may have seemed to be sullying their image, and among lesbians female-to-males were seen to be conforming to the patriarchal ideas of a masculine society. This lack of transgendered people in the early gay rights movements of the country was not an accident -- “they rather explicitly excluded transgender people from the movement” (Transgender Issues).
It was not uncommon for butch or female-to-male individuals to be excluded or even outright rejected from the lesbian groups during the gay liberation movement -- most often, unfortunately, due to the strict feminist tenets that these groups held on to. “They drove us out, made us feel ashamed of how we looked,” states the main character of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. “They said we were male chauvinist pigs, the enemy.” During these early stages of the lesbian feminist movement, presenting any sort of masculinity was seen as damning to the ideals of feminist separatism that the movement was trying to promote:
The rhetorical attacks leveled at butches and FTMs in the name of lesbian feminism -- suggesting that female masculinity is a sign of “internalized misogyny” or that butch/femme roleplaying “honor(ed) the dictates of a warped, male-managed culture” -- certainly worked to create yet another narrative discourse equating female masculinity or male-identification with moral deviance. (Detloff)
Many radical feminists accused female-to-male transgendered people of being “victims of a false consciousness” and of paying “the ultimate homage to sex-role power” through their cross-gender identification (Schleifer). It has even been stated that “by ‘crossing over this divide’ -- that is, by transitioning and therefore becoming men -- FTM trans-sexual men are now living a kind of privilege not accorded to lesbians and biological women and so, as a result, are somehow betraying their feminist sisters” (Noble, 26).
This idea of betrayal or abandonment of the feminist ideals is definitely part of the reason that female-to-male transsexuals are not as common a part of our societal consciousness than male-to-females are. Whereas communities of gay men generally hold onto their MTF members (probably due to a higher level of acceptance nowadays of the drag scene and its idea of male femininity as an essential part of the gay society) feminist or lesbian communities at times rather bluntly exclude FTMs due to what is seen as their conformism to a masculine and patriarchal society. Being rejected from the lesbian and feminist societies, and then often also from the gay community (where they are often not seen as being “real” men), female-to-male transsexuals have no forum for discussion in which to express the struggles of their daily lives and bring awareness of their existence to the rest of society -- and, effectively, are absorbed into invisibility along the sidelines.
To help counteract this horribly negative rejection from a group that is constantly fighting for acceptance and equal inclusion in society, I would like to suggest that by excluding female-to-male transsexuals from the feminist movement a valuable resource and voice of change is being lost. In Kristen Schilt’s article “Just One of the Guys? How Transmen Make Gender Visible at Work”, a female-to-male transsexual who lives and works fully as a man made the following statement:
I swear they let the guys get away with so much stuff! Lazy ass bastards get away with so much stuff and the women who are working hard, they just get ignored… I am really aware of it. And that is one of the reasons that I feel like I have become much more feminist since transition. I am just so aware of the difference that my experience has shown me. (Schilt)
By excluding female-to-male transsexuals from the feminist movement, feminists are losing an extremely valuable point of view -- that of the “inside man” (no pun intended). If feminist, lesbian, and queer communities would learn to accept and include female-to-male transsexuals and transgendered people in their fight for equality, not only would a valuable step towards the future of civil rights be made, but also the issues of FTMs might become a more common part of society’s lexicon. To me, this sounds like a win-win situation.
In recent years, the visibility of female-to-male transgendered people has been slowly on the rise. The almost superfluous “T” tacked onto the end of the “GLBT” acronym has started to be less ignored and more of a integral part of the organizations that label themselves as such. Steps are definitely being made, albeit slowly. I have hope for the future of the FTM community, and of my place in it. If the queer and feminist movements can accept transgendered people as an integral part of their communities, then we have made the first step into their acceptance into the general community of all society. Someday we won’t hear of “transgendered issues” or “FTM issues”, but simply of “human issues”. It may be a long journey, but we have already started to make progress in the right direction, and if we keep moving forward on this path then we shall surely see that change can come.
Works Cited
Cromwell, Jason. Transmen & FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities. University of Illinois press, Chicago, 1999.
Detloff, Madelyn. “Gender Please, Without the Gender Police: Rethinking Pain in Archetypal Narratives of Butch, Transgender, and FTM Masculinity.” The Haworth Press, 2006.
Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues.
Noble, Jean Bobby. Sons of the Movement: FTMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape. Women’s Press, Toronto, 2006.
Schilt, Kirsten. “Just One of the Guys? How Transmen Make Gender Visible at Work.” Gender & Society, 20;465. Sage Publications, 2006.
Schleifer, David. “Make Me Feel Mighty Real: Gay Female-to-Male Transgenderists Negotiating Sex, Gender, and Sexuality.” Sexualities, 9;57. Sage Publications, 2006.
“Transgender Issues.” The CQ Researcher, vol 16 no 17. The CQ Press, 2008.
Wickman, Jan. “Masculinity and Female Bodies.” NORA, vol 11 no 1. Taylor & Francis, 2003.
---
Reflection: Ma Vie en Rose
In the French film Ma Vie en Rose, we learn about the life of a young transgendered boy and are shown the effects being transgendered has on both his personal development and the life and livelihood of his family and friends. Ma Vie en Rose brings up an interesting point in the consideration of transgendered individuals, especially youth: that of the consequences it can have not only on the life of the transgendered person, but also the effects it can produce in the community in which the transgendered individual resides.
This concept is something especially valid to me at this point in my life as a young transgendered person. My personal struggle is blatantly obvious to me almost every moment of every day; I am in a constant battle with myself and the rest of the world over my appearance, my presentation, my mannerisms, the way I am referred to, and the way in which I occupy public space. The film Ma Vie en Rose, however, brings to my eyes a perspective that I, in my own pain and struggle, often forget about: that of my family and friends. It is sometimes difficult for me to realize that although being transgendered is something I personally have been struggling with (both consciously and subconsciously) within myself for years -- perhaps my entire life -- the idea is something completely new and foreign to the people who I interact with every day. I forget that the time it took me to feel comfortable telling other people about my gender identity is time that I have had to reconcile these new ideas that other people haven’t had yet. Sometimes I’m so ready, so eager, to jump forward in my presentation and ideas of myself that I don’t understand my family’s reluctance. How can they think this is too sudden?, I ask myself. Why do they find this all so shocking and difficult? They want me to slow down, to wait even longer. I’ve already been waiting forever. Now that I have finally discovered myself, I don’t understand the point of hiding that self any longer. But to my friends and family, who haven’t known about my inner struggles as I have, it seems like I’m jumping into things. I’ve had time to reconcile this idea of a ‘new’ me -- they have not.
There was one particular line from the film Ma Vie en Rose that particularly struck a chord with me in relation to this idea. “There are some things that you might have to wait to say until you’re older,” Ludovic’s therapist says to him at one point. I almost cried. I feel like I’ve been waiting forever to say these things, and now that I have finally gained the courage to say them, I’m being told to wait even longer? I understand the struggles and difficulties that the people around me are going through to reconcile their idea of me with this new perspective of me. I understand that it is painful and worrying and that it causes huge upsets in their daily lives, in work, in school, in friendships. And I respect that pain and struggle and want to give them time to adjust, to some extent, but when I hold up my own pain, the inner battles that I face on a daily basis, to theirs, I can’t help but see how much my pain outweighs theirs. I know this sounds selfish and stuck up. I know I may seem to be being rude and uncaring. I know that what I am doing affects other people’s lives almost as much as it affects mine. But as much as I know this must cause pain for them, I can’t reconcile it with my own injuries. They don’t have to carry this huge weight inside of them. They don’t have to fight an inner battle with themselves. They don’t have to effectively change who they are, or at least who the world sees them as, to be able to do the one thing every human being in this world wants to do: simply to live and be and function in this world without having anyone question something as simple as your identity.
My mother recently has been asking me what I’m going to do about being transgendered. I’ve just recently changed my name legally, and that feels better than you can possibly imagine, but inside myself I know it’s not enough. My family is having a hard enough time with just that -- “I’m still going to call you Sarah,” my father says, and I respond with “I know it’ll take a while, I don’t expect you to just suddenly switch your mental idea of me to Harper,” but inside me something breaks from the pain his statement fills me with. I know he doesn’t mean it that way, but to me it sounds like a refusal. A refusal to try and see me for who I am inside, a refusal to try and accept my choices in life. My mother seems to think that changing my name will be enough to hold back my pain for a long time. I haven’t even asked them to change their use of pronouns with me, and every “sister” and “daughter” feels like a spike thrown at my heart.
I shouldn’t complain so much. I’m blessed with a family who sees me for who I am inside despite my outward appearance or place in society, and who allows me to express myself to them and who loves me unconditionally. I forget too often that these ideas are all new to them, that they still need time to adjust. And even though I sometimes feel like I’m going to explode from all of the things flying around inside of me, I can take a deep breath and wait just a little bit longer. I’m blessed with in my family, in my friends, in so many things. The world isn’t quite ready for me yet. It’s a slow, painful process, but I don’t want to estrange everyone I know and love by going through it all too fast and suddenly. My family and friends are an essential part of who I am, and if I realize that I also have to remember to realize that as such they are an essential part of this process of becoming myself that I am beginning to go through. I am not alone. I am not alone. There are so many transgendered people who are unable to say something like that and truly mean it. I’m not going to lose that, not for anything.