This post, ducks, will be a bit different in that it’s going to be personal and I won’t just be using my personal experience as a way to make a larger point. (Well, not much, anyway.)
I went to my first bridal shower on Saturday. At least, my first one as a woman; I seem to recall showing up to my fiancee’s shower back in the Pona Time before I transitioned.
Like a lot of women, I suspect, the prospect filled me with emotions, most along the lines of “do I have to do this?”
Not initially, though.
I found out that my friend Joanna was going to have a shower when I called her from Thailand, a few days before I left for home. My friend/lackey/McDonald’s wallah had returned to the States, and I finally decided to spend a small fortune and use my cell phone to call folks at home. Joanna was one of the first I called; we’ve known each other since high school, albeit with a nine-year interregnum between graduation and accidentally running into each other in a grocery store.
I wasn’t expecting her to have a shower; she isn’t having a bridal party (dashing my last, best hopes of being a bridesmaid; oh well), but her mom wanted to throw her one and she gave in. I was simultaneously glad to hear that she was having one and bracing myself to not be invited.
Except that I was.
I was very touched, because I felt so–well, accepted. Not so much by Joanna, who’s always been supportive and morphed from friend to closet girlfriend with ease. But it meant a lot to me that she was willing to bring me into such an intimate family occasion, especially one as highly gendered as a bridal shower.
That feeling lasted a few weeks. Then the dread set in.
Events like this play merry hell with my insecurities. It’s times like these when I feel most acutely my lack of a girlhood, the huge gaps in my socialization into ordinary female society. Normally, that doesn’t bother me: after all, I’m not exactly unhappy that nobody told me I shouldn’t study military history, or challenge my teachers, or be bad at math. (I took care of the last one all by myself, ducks.) But times like these, so encrusted with (ok, stupid) tradition and drenched in (ok, ridiculous) mores–these leave me feeling exposed.
Or worse, leave me fearing that I’ll be exposed.
I mean, what am I supposed to bring? What’s the etiquette? Will I make a huge faux-pas? Sure, I can (and did) ask my mom about this stuff, but I can’t help but feel a little foolish: for not knowing, for needing to ask, for feeling that I needed to ask.
As it turned out, I had no worries. Most of the people who came already either knew me or knew about me and were all really lovely. A few had no idea (as I didn’t) what the hell the wishing well was for. I had a pretty good time. Except. (You knew there would be an except, right?)
One of the women was somebody I didn’t really know. We talked and as it turns out she knew my background, and we had a…well, sure, pleasant…little talk about some of my trans stuff. But sitting across from us was a woman I had never met before, a nice lady from Oklahoma. And at one point I noticed her listening to me and the other woman talking.
The next time I heard her refer to me, she used male pronouns.
This sort of thing happens occasionally; my official rule is to give people three screwups before I correct them. But this one put me in a fix: either say something, and draw attention to it, or ignore it and let her think that she was right. (But seriously: there weren’t any men invited, I was wearing a dress, I was wearing high heels for fuck’s sake–how do you think I prefer to be addressed?) I let it go that time. But it wasn’t fun.
I rode the train home with several women from the shower. One of them talked about her boyfriend, and we all chimed in with advice and opinions. It was the very stereotypically female-gendered end to a very stereotypically female-gendered day.
My head was in a bit of a whirl. Part of my transition has been to finally put some distance between me as a trans person and me as a woman. That is, after all these years of being trans, of having that as the most important part of my life, I really want to try and just be for a while. I’ve done a gradual retreat from trans-only spaces, including a message board where I had been a long-time commentator.
But. I had been out with these other women, all or almost all of whom knew, and it wasn’t a big deal; they didn’t treat me any different than any of the other women at the party. So maybe I shouldn’t worry about it, maybe I shouldn’t care who knew and who didn’t? Maybe it didn’t matter.
But why did that make me feel so bad? Was I trying to be something I thought I had to be? (That worked out so well the last time I tried it.) Would I be happier not having anything trans in my life anymore? And if so, what about this blog, which gives me great pleasure to work on, even as it draws me back deeper into a world I am ambivalent about.
I still haven’t figured it out yet. I hope I do. Because being stuck in the twilight zone of genders got old years ago.