The Goddess of Femininity

For those of you coming late to the party, I’m married to a trans woman who started her Real Life Test about seven weeks ago. 

There are many gates a trans person has to go through in order to transition; to my eye, the Real Life Test (RLT) is about the most asinine.  Essentially, without medical intervention, the trans person is expected to live in their identified gender for a specific period of time (often a year, but gender clinic waiting lists can protract this) before the medical folk get on board. 

While it’s easier to pass as male during the Female-to-Male RLT, it isn’t especially easy and it’s potentially dangerous if you live near roving Neanderthal tribes.  The Male-to-Female RLT is not only difficult and dangerous, but a lesson in humiliation.  So in other words, if you aren’t killed or don’t kill yourself during your RLT, we’ll give you medical treatment. 

My partner, the Bit-ler (Butler-In-Transition) is fortunate that firstly, she can afford to spend a coupla thousand quid on a hair system with a monthly maintenance bill of about £100, (not counting transport costs, since there’s only a handful of places in the UK who ‘install’ this type of system).  She can also afford to attend an endocrinologist privately – not only does she have this B cup I keep rabbiting on about, but her facial hair has really decreased its growth.

(O yes, the MtF is expected to do her RLT with no tits and a fully functioning beard, just as the FtM is expected to do it with breasts and menstrual flow but no beard or upper body strength.)

The Bit-ler’s additionally lucky that she works for an agency that has protocols in place to deal with transitioning employees – she knows she won’t lose her job.  AND . . .  remarkably, her colleagues weren’t content to sit quietly through the announcement of her transition, but after giving her a round of applause, have been proactively supportive of her.  She’ll probably live through her RLT.

And of course, she has me. 

You’d think the MtF’s wife would be a font of feminine wisdom, but the Bit-ler drew the short straw in that department.  I don’t cook.  Doing my hair = pulling it back in a scrunchy.  My fashion sense, according to my son, is various levels of plaid.  As to being quiet and decent, well . . .

And this isn’t helped by the Bit-ler’s periodic channelling of the Femininity Goddess – an Irish Mother Superior/Hyacinth Bucket entity who walks through our house, hands clasped, uttering phrases like, ‘How common, something I would never say, especially with the windows open.’ 

I’m sure the old lady next door has heard the phrase, ‘You fucking whore,’ before we moved in, but anyway . . .

While I’m not great at beauty or fashion tips, I do see in technicolour when the Bit-ler doesn’t act ‘female’ in a social setting.  As we discuss what women typically do in this or that situation, a little voice in the back of my head asks, ‘Why?  Why are women expected to be this way?’  I feel like I’m taking some great beautiful wild thing and trying to tame her.

The Bit-ler always sweeps my hesitation away – No, tell me, tell me what it is women do when they’re hither and yon, or inside places men are never permitted.  She has to know what the expectations are before she can decide to accept or reject them.

As I share this ancient lore, I wonder when I ate that lore-bait, hook, line and sinker, why I’m the type of woman who smiles and laughs and shares and endures. 

Three steps later, I wonder where my life went, that my mornings are spent curling her hair when I can’t be arsed to do my own.  That when I spend time considering why her outfit works or doesn’t, I’m wearing the Jack Skelton T-shirt my son gave me, over unflatteringly skinny jeans with dried mud from the garden and dog walks.  That I police her gender-appropriate social niceties and have given up screaming, ‘Fuck!’  At least when the windows are open.  That I live knowing someday someone will call me a lesbian and maybe treat me badly for it, and I’ll have to deal with that like a seasoned pro instead of someone who hasn’t a clue what lesbians have to suffer in order to live and love.

Wow, eh?

I don’t have answers to my questions, but I’m still willing to do this.  Mostly because I’m amazed at the Bit-ler strapping on her bra and marching out with her lemon-yellow shoulder bag to take on the world.  I’m a bit too selfish to deny myself the adventure, no matter how many outfits I have to pass judgement on.

But the questions are there.  I wonder if I’ll know sometime in the future, what I’ve put to the side so I can do this now.  I wonder if I’ll regret or be happy that I did. 

Let Me Tell You ‘Bout the Hair

It’s rather astounding, how powerful a woman’s hair is.  Before officially starting her real life test, the Bit-ler went to work with her B cup breasts and her somewhat androgynous women’s clothing.  She was never clocked as female or even gender fluid.  She was male, full stop. 

More than any other transition accoutrement, she needed hair.

Some trans women have their own luxurious locks; others get by with a bit of judicious styling.  The divide on the Bit-ler’s scalp could only be breached by the wigs she had, none of which fully satisfied her, all of which precluded being physically active.  The Bit-ler reconciled herself to a demure life. 

I, on the other hand, did not think beauty was a good swap for giving up my partner in crime, so I researched the whole thing and found out about hair systems that allow you to do sports and take showers and yes, even wear hats!

At this stage, I’m an enthusiastic, supportive hag. 

And so off to Edinburgh the Bit-ler goes to get a hirsute-ish pate.  I’m left in the new house with the fencing guys who’ve promised they can erect a barricade that’ll keep the Doodle in our garden.  A Doodle, I should add, who has already learned how to open the childproof door locks and escape the house.   Repeatedly.  With a big ol’ grin on her doggie face.

The fence guys themselves were civil enough.  The neighbours were a different matter.  We’d left the land of UKIP-pery and Mad Farmers to join the Uppity Nouveaux Riche too busy espousing capitalism to weed their rose beds.  New neighbours sensitive about property boundaries.  A sensitivity that extends into our garden, apparently.

By Day 2 of making bacon butties for the fencers and failed diplomacy with the neighbours – tasks previously the sole responsibility of the Bit-ler, as legislated by law and gender inequity – I’d redefined her trip north for hair as a luxury spa holiday that left me holding the can, an unappreciated Cinderella SOFFA.

Despite my self-pity, the fence got raised, no neighbours murdered in the process.  The Bit-ler came home looking the happiest I’d ever seen her.  It’d all been worth it.

Until the next day.  The Doodle’s early morning escape from our newly fenced garden required a run to the DIY shop.  Only, the Bit-ler had to get ready so she would pass.   Therein followed a long, drawn out prep that included visual demonstrations from myself.  Amazing, how complicated brushing your hair in a mirror really is.  Something second nature to little girls but that takes a while to master if your first attempt is as an adult. 

The next three days, Doodle found new escape routes, so three more trips to the DIY.  Three more preps by the Bit-ler while I twiddled my thumbs.   On that last trip, I was having trouble with the Sat-Nav.  The Bit-ler looked over just as we came into a curve.  The car drifted toward the centre line and she pulled it back before we crossed it.  I lost the plot. 

For me, losing the plot isn’t telling her she’s a feckin eejit who should keep her goddam eyes on the road.  Nope, losing the plot is taking a sample box from psychiatry’s diagnostic manual and giving her an assessment at 120 decibels.  A little knowledge with a lot of sharp edges.

She says nothing.  In her mind, she has to put up with an outburst like that because she considers me long suffering.

‘I wondered when I’d start shouting at you,’ I said.  A declaration of how long suffering I think I am. 

I eventually apologised like the alleged adult that I am.  The Bit-ler eventually agreed she didn’t have to take shit off me because I’m supportive.  But the first shot had been fired in what probably won’t end at a 21 gun salute to our old way of living.  Everything’s changed, from how long it takes to get ready to go, to what people perceive of our relationship.

And all because of her hair.

Whar's Me Cookbooks?

So, Week 2 at the new place and the Bit-ler* can’t find her cookbooks, which means dinners are a little boring.   You see, Bit-ler won’t cook without a recipe, no matter how many times she’s made the dish before.  A woman of science, she is.  A veritable transgender Joe Friday.  Just the facts, ma’am.  Preferably in alphabetical order.

(*Butler in Transition)

45 minute stew that took me 2 hours to cook.

My mind works differently.  The few times Bit-ler’s relied on me to cook, I substituted ingredients willy-nilly, mostly because I didn’t recognise coconut milk or suet when I saw them in the pantry. 

My ease with improv makes me the one more likely to be the front guard to our adventures.  There aren’t always cheering crowds handing out water bottles to women who run the road to excitement.  As one of my neighbours once said to me, there shouldn’t be female pirates. 

A lurking Neanderthal?
(Monster by Diana Afanador)

But it’s often on the pedestrian path where we meet the Neanderthal.  Like the guy hired to replace the carpet Gargoyle Possum ruined  in the old place.  Carpet Guy did a visual calculation of the area, then started yelling at me for buying the wrong size carpet.  I said, ‘Shut it!’ and called in the Bit-ler who was still presenting as male.  Carpet Guy didn’t yell at her. 

Most girls learn by high school that having a locum phallus provides a social shorthand to dealing with patriarchal assholery.  But trans-women aren’t most girls.  Bit-ler has lived her life with male privilege, as well as being in a profession that automatically grants her authority, even in social situations.  So while I’m losing my penile wild card against knuckle-draggers, her status will cascade into lesser-dom, as soon as she gets the hair right.  And suddenly, her achievements don’t count, her worth won’t be assumed.

About ten years ago in the first year of his transition, my FtM son, El Punko was accosted by a drunk who wanted one of his cigarettes.  El Punko refused, the drunk got aggressive and chased El Punko into a shop.  Chances are, someone would’ve stepped in if the Punk were still presenting as female, but the bystanders who saw it, expected the young man to handle it himself.  El Punko dealt with his first school yard bully at age 20, not really a situation his mother could address by a visit to the head master.

Look behind you!
(Monster by Diana Afanador)

Bit-ler will be taking this on much later in life.  Although I know this is the way of the world, I don’t want her to learn it first hand, not after all she’s gone through to get a B-cup and a full head of hair.  Without a penis, even a borrowed one, we can’t expect the troglodytes to be civil. 

I don’t think there’s a cookbook in any of our boxes for this.

Best Laid Plans of Mice & Transitions

It seemed a reasonable idea.  Bit-ler (Butler-in-Transition) would do the handover of our old house as male, start in our new house as female.  There’d be a slight bleed through of maleness in the new house, but once two women were living there full time, the unnamed man would exit stage left.

Gargoyle Possum

We hadn’t factored in Gargoyle Possum.

A geriatric stray cat we naively rescued, blind in one eye, hair like a worn horse blanket.  He met our kindness with claws and teeth, a copious bladder flow & rampant sexual acts despite being neutered.  His propensity for vomiting on the table got him a trip to the vet who diagnosed a brain tumour.  Prognosis, eighteen months.  We were heartlessly relieved.

 

Like many stories of this sort, everyone adjusted, including the Gargoyle.  Once he stopped using us for blood-sport, he showed himself playful & incredibly intelligent, uniquely Possumy.  Cat piss & table vomit grew routine.  His eighteen months came & went.  He continued his nightly hump of the duvet. 

Garegoyle's favourite sleeping spot.

A few days before the move, he started that quiet withdrawal of a dying animal.  Though we’d taken him into our tribe as well as our house, we’d known from the beginning where he was headed.  Our reaction wasn’t coordinated or planned, but in the middle of digging up plants and packing boxes & taking down beds, we each sat with him, keeping the distance he requested, giving the witness he deserved.

I was 50 minutes away at the old house when it happened.  Bit-ler was inside the new house, at the mercy of agents documenting the number of nails in the walls.  El Punko & his equally old cat, the Toothless Wonder, were outside with the Gargoyle on the new front lawn, movers grunting past as if life never ended.    

Gargoyle opening his fan mail.

Gargoyle’s final grand mal seizure was a savage farewell to El Punko, but Gargoyle never minced around.  And though he was gone, his lungs kept breathing, his heart kept beating. 

We needed a vet.  

No phone reception.  No internet.  Bit-ler went to a neighbour for help.  

Gargoyle left us via lethal injection.  His legacy, outing the Bit-ler. 

The helpful neighbours have made several overtures to us, always when the Bit-ler is somewhere else.  And they always refer to the Bit-ler as male.  El Punko & I struggle to stay gender neutral.  Bit-ler laughs at our stories.

 

Life doesn't bend to best laid plans.  We’re left flying by the seat of our pants, no idea how our arrival as the local trans-family will be received.  At the moment, not caring.  It cost the Bit-ler too much to get here.  A few begrudgers won’t stop us.  And the thing about this transition business is, it surprises you, where your allies turn up.

Gargoyle Possum at play.

Thank you, Gargoyle Possum, for living long enough to teach us that.  Best of luck to you in your new humping grounds.

Beware the Silly Hat in Public Bathrooms

The Itinerant Magpie, aka Aleksei Drakos, guest blogs this week on what it's like to be a scary transman.  You can find his blog at http://saschk.blogspot.co.uk/

New Orleans, 2010.  We’ve been on the road since 4 AM, driving from Savannah to Austin.  Where better to make a pitstop for good eats than Savannah’s free-spirited older sister?  We wander around the Quarter for a bit before ducking into a little bodega just down-at-the- heel enough, you know the food is gonna be spectacular.  We’ve got that delirious frivolity that too little sleep and too much time on the road brings; it lasts right up to the moment we get ready to leave, with a stop at the restroom.

It’s tiny.  One urinal.  One sink.  One stall with a set of saloon doors that barely covers my torso.  All I can think is:  Shit.  What do I do?

“Don’t worry,” Cap says.  “I’ll protect you from any Bubba that walks in.”

And suddenly it’s okay, not just because I know I won’t have to deal with some awkward (and maybe dangerous) encounter with a Good Ol’ Boy, but because with that statement, Cap lets me know he gets it.  He’s a straight, cis-male, but I’m his friend and he gets why something as simple as using a public restroom can be stressful and terrifying for a transgendered person. And he’s got my back.

Some US states are trying to restrict bathroom use by transgendered people.  A small but very loud segment of the cis-world is in a furore over the threat transwomen pose in female bathrooms, despite lack of evidence that the threat is real.  On the other hand, there are plenty of police reports on file that document how using a public toilet resulted in violence for a transperson.

I get it.

Transpeople are super scary.

I mean.  Just look at me.


Absolute menace to society.

You should never trust a person in a silly hat.

When I started my transition at 18, I didn’t feel optimistic about it.  Treatment was expensive, far away, and I had no idea where to start.  The first psychologist I told about it, didn’t know the difference between being transgendered and being bisexual.  She explained that the only reason I felt this way was because I’d been raised by a single mother and felt the need to fill the male role in the household.

Needless to say, I was not impressed by her assessment.

When I moved to Ireland, I expected more of the same.  What I found was completely different.  I was put in touch with a psychologist in Dublin (coincidentally, also an American) who specialised in transfolk.  He was linked with an endocrinologist and a trans support group, as well.  For the first time in my life, I had access to an entire community of people just like me.  (At the time, these guys were the only ones treating GID, so literally every transperson in the country had access to each other.)  It was great.  I started HRT. I completed my Real-Life Test.  I had my chest surgery done.  My alien identification card proclaimed me male (this required some persistence and flat out saying to the agent: “Do you want to check what’s in my pants, or will you take my word that I know what gender I am?”  He took my word for it).

When it came time to return to the US, my doctors gave me all the letters and documentation I needed, and assured me things would go just as smoothly Stateside. I’d already gotten through the hard part, after all. Everything that came next was just maintenance.

You would think.  But Ireland is part of the EU and transpeople are protected in the EU.

Once back in the States, I couldn't get health insurance because I'd already been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and therefore had a pre-existing condition, which meant the $500 a month (easily half my monthly income) for the HRT prescription came totally out of pocket, not to mention doctor appointments, regular blood tests, and trying to track down an endocrinologist who would see me without insurance (who didn't know what he was doing, wouldn't listen when I told him the dosage was wrong - it ultimately took 2 years to get me back on an even keel).

Then changing my birth certificate.  Quick lesson for the non-Americans out there: which state you’re born in matters.  A lot.  Most laws are set by individual states, and they can vary hugely. Having lived outside the US as much as I have, I can see how weird that is - being part of the same country but having vastly different definitions of what is legal and what is not.

I was born in Pennsylvania (PA) and lived there a whopping total of 3 years, so amending my birth certificate falls under PA laws.   My doctors prepared a series of emphatic reports stating that it was required for my safety, that my documentation match my gender (changing the F to and M, if you’re having trouble keeping up).  PA decided only a "fully functioning" man is entitled to an amendment.  In real terms, that means having a surgery that was expensive, dangerous, not easily accessible in my area (I'd have to travel to the west coast or Europe) and involved massive visible scarring (skin grafts from the arms) without even ending in a good result.  

Yes, someone in a records office makes medical decisions for transfolk.

My driver’s license had been issued in West Virginia.  I hoped crossing the state line would give a different outcome.  I spent ten minutes arguing with the woman at the counter in a DMV office before they whisked me and my stack of documents to a private room when I showed no sign of backing down. I explained everything to the supervisor.  I showed her my letters.  I showed her Harry Benjamin’s Standards of Care.

She refused.  I wanted to cry.  I walked out with a driver’s license that labelled me female.  I dreaded every time I had to show that ID to someone, because I never knew what they were going to do to this short, weird-looking boy who turned out to “really” be a girl.  WV, if you aren’t aware, is not the most progressive state.

A year later, I sat in a Georgia DMV office, watching the numbers flash closer and closer to my ticket as I clutched my stack of letters and mentally ran through everything I would say when I got called up.  I didn’t expect to succeed, but I was going to try anyway.

God bless the two women who helped me.  They read all my papers.  They checked all the forms.  They pulled out the book of laws and regulations and looked through it until they found the loophole that meant they could change the gender on my license without my birth certificate.  I have no idea who those two women are and I’ll never see them again, but they were the first officials in the US who made me feel like a real person who deserved to be listened to.

My birth certificate still labels me as female; I just don’t use it. Given all the same documentation, the federal government had no problem stamping my passport with an M.  In most cases, because you can’t get a passport without a birth certificate, I get by with my passport and my license (after getting the first one, I didn’t have any further problems getting male ID).  On a funny note, my current license is issued by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and says that I’m male.  But they won’t change my birth certificate.

At this stage, I fly under the radar 99% of the time.  Every new doctor or therapist I see goes through the confusion of thinking I’m starting the transition to female when I bring up that I’m transgendered.  Actually, that happens with everyone I tell.  In that way, I’m lucky. No one knows unless I tell them.  But that doesn’t mean it’s any easier.

West Virginia refuses to take ID photos of transwomen unless they look like men.  Facebook is deleting profiles of gender-variant people over names (meanwhile, my two absolutely fictional alter-egos remain undisturbed).  Texas wants DNA verification of your gender before you’ll be let into public bathrooms.  

Right now, I live in the UK, also an EU member, so my rights and safety are protected by law.  At some point, though, I'm going to have to go back and fight my way through the US system again.  There is no place like home, but for American transfolk, home is not a place of safety and acceptance.  I don't understand the point of being a super power when you stigmatised  and demonise your own citizens for being born different.  But then, I'm a scary transman in a silly hat.