Categotry Archives: how to tell if you’ve transitioned

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The Rest Is Silence

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, double bound, failings, how to tell if you've transitioned, the tiniest violin in the world

So, hi, ducks.

I’ve been away a bit. Not completely away, I’ve written a thing or two here and there. But I haven’t written much of late.

I have an excuse, for what it’s worth.

The excuse is that I was depressed to the point of…well, of taking rather irrevocable action to solve my depression.

Now, that would be kind of hasty, I think. But I was down so far that I couldn’t really see up anymore.

The thing is, I got laid off at the end of March. The job sucked, so I didn’t miss it, but I sure as heck missed the money. Because coupled with my previous client’s habit of not paying my invoices until I screamed and turned blue, and then being out of work for two months, my savings were pretty thin. And I’d been using my paychecks from the last gig to reduce some of my debt, so that I could live cheaper than I do, in case this kind of thing happened again. Which is a great plan, but it blew up in my face when I got laid off after only ten weeks.

I don’t have to tell you it’s hard out there. It’s hard, even if your day job is a fairly skilled position, and in one of the few segments of the economy that’s making a come back. Even so, it’s hard out there. I would send out resumes and work the phones but only a trickle would come back. I had one or two interviews but no second interviews.

At some point I realized that I was between six and ten weeks from being bankrupt, and losing everything I’ve spent the last fifteen years building.

I have to stop myself there. What I am complaining about is still incredibly privileged. I’d lose my home, but I wouldn’t be homeless–my family can easily put me up, and a friend of mine would do the same. That’s one thing.

Another is…that I’m complaining about the fact that I just wouldn’t be able to live in my expensive (now–it wasn’t when I moved in) neighborhood in Manhattan. I mean, boo fucking hoo, yeah? That would only be something I’d share with all but 1.8 million people in the world. This is not a tragedy.

But all the same, it felt like one. This apartment has been my home for over eight years; it’s where I lived with someone for the first time, where I got my first pets as an adult, the place where I’d come home to a person I loved, the place where I decided to transition and the place where I made that happen. And the neighborhood feels the same to me; I’ve lived within three blocks of this apartment for the last fifteen years.

And too this is the only place I’ve ever wanted to live, and I’ve sacrificed (some) to get here.

And also…it was shocking how quickly it could all get swept away. Three months could do it. That seemed shocking.

There was other stuff too. Between the fall and the last two months, this is the longest I’ve been out of work as an adult. I’ve had a job of some kind since I was seventeen. I’ve always found a way to get some work in the door.

So all that, plus our threadbare economy, had me down. But there was some other stuff. And I think I need to talk about this, because it is a feminist issue, because it is something I can comment on maybe more than other people.

That was the two strikes (at least) I had against me: that I was a woman trying to get a job in technology, and that I was a trans woman trying to get a job in technology.

All that stuff you may have heard about how much harder it is for women just to look professional is true. A stupid example: getting an interview would cost me at least ten bucks, because I’d go and get my nails done, because I can’t put a sheer color on myself and have it look good, and because where I was looking for work, women at my professional level don’t wear colored nail polish.

Okay, that’s a privilege thing, and maybe just my own prejudices. But when you have big hands (and you worry about what people might conclude about that), you do your best to not draw attention to them either from lack of care or for flamboyance.

Anyway. I had other stupid image issues. I haven’t been able to afford a decent hair cut in a while now–and a bad haircut would be held against me far more than it would a man–so I had to either try to blow it out and go long, or pin it up and hope I didn’t look too masculine. I’ll talk more about that in a bit, but: this is an issue for every professional woman, and it’s one of the cruelest of the catch-22s of patriarchy. To wit: professionalism is defined by men’s dress codes. So they tend to make women look more masculine. But you can’t look too masculine! But you don’t want to look too feminine either! It’s the same dynamic as the pointless manicures: don’t get your nails done, and you look too butch and like you can’t be bothered to be professional. But have red nails and you might be too feminine. And so it goes.

These are of course my prejudices. People can and do make either end of the spectrum work. But it’s a much tougher, much more individual struggle than it is for most men. That you’re getting straight from the horse.

Of course the other part of butch vs femme, masculine vs feminine for me was worrying about being read as trans. If my hair is up, I don’t have to worry about it looking too bad, but will it make my face look too masculine? My pumps are my most neutral dress shoes, but do they make me too tall? Will my voice hold up for an entire interview? Will they know? Will they care? It doesn’t really matter that I live in a place where there are workplace protections for trans people. I’d never be able to prove anything.

I’m not really making that up, not that you would think I am. There was this study by Make the Road New York which is pretty depressing in just how blatant the discrimination is. And yeah, I know, it was retail, right CL? I mean customers public face corporate image! Surely it’s different in other jobs.

Surely you jest. You think if people aren’t comfortable buying jeans from a trans lady that having one be your CTO is going to make people more comfortable?

Or to put it more simply: everywhere I went I hoped they didn’t make me fill out a formal job application. Because then I’d have to give my social security number and Ghu knows what they’d be able to find out; sure, I fixed that and my driver’s license, but even with letters to my credit bureaus, that stuff just lasts forever.

This story has a happy ending. I finally found a small place where I was able to meet with the guys doing the hiring right away and I hit it off with them. And two days later they offered me a job that will pay my bills and even get me out of debt. Which again makes me one privileged cat, one lucky ducky: and I’m very thankful.

But for a long time there I was really scared. And you want to know what one of my signs that I’ve transitioned is? I no longer am confident I’ll always pull things out anymore, not like I used to be. And that’s part of the reality of being a woman and being trans in the world today.

So hey: where have I been in the meantime? Well, Below the Belt is on hiatus, but I’m now a blogger at Change.org! You can read the two pieces I have up so far–about a trans woman and the crappy treatment the DC police gave her, and more about our favorite douchebags, Roman Polanski and Bernard Henri-Lévi!

And over on Tiger Beatdown, where I am somehow now the Senior (non)Contributor, I have this trifle about “The Tudors.” Enjoy!

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How To Tell You’ve Transitioned, Part II

Categories: all about me, how to tell if you've transitioned

I had a kinda frantic day today–spent all day trying to get some SQL to behave correctly, even though the task should have been pretty easy to do. Plus I was late for my therapy appointment–even with catching a cab.

As I was coming up out of the subway, a panhandler asked me for some money; and as I was walking away, he said “You have a nice day ma’am–sir–ma’am.” (I’m assuming he saw either my boobs or my lipstick and that pushed him over the edge.)

I wasn’t particularly happy to hear that, but I wasn’t terrifically surprised either. I was dressed for work, when you work from home: a black tee, jeans, and sneakers. As I was walking away, I thought to myself, you’ve forgotten how to be a girl.

I am much less enlightened in the dark recesses of my mind than I am in print.

But there has been a change in how I present myself over the two years of my fulltime life; there was a time when I always wore eye makeup when I went out, and gave much careful thought to what I was going to wear. Nowadays, not so much; I’ve even gone out without wearing any lipstick, something I’d been avoiding ever since I got read when not wearing it.

A little of this is the weight I’ve put on, and being too broke to buy new clothes and too unmotivated to try and lose weight. But a lot more is simply that I’ve reached a new point of stability with my life; that my acceptance of myself as a woman means that I need fewer and fewer reinforcements via the trappings of femininity. (That, and a year of pounding concrete sidewalks; that gets you out of heels really quick.)

Three years ago, in the middle of my dark winter of discontent when I began to seriously consider the idea of transitioning, I would sometimes ask myself (as a way to not transition) what the difference was between hanging around my apartment in my PJ bottoms and a tee as a man and doing the same as a woman; the idea being that my life would be the same whether or not I transitioned, so why transition? I think I know that answer better now; it’s because now I’m free of the doubts about whether I should transition, the doubts about whether or not I really was a woman, the awful amount of psychic energy I dumped into worrying about that problem. And a lot of those issues are gone now, and overall (when I’m not fighting off major depressive crises), I have a lot more energy to think and do things–case in point, this blog, started a year after I transitioned. Even if I have forgotten how to be “a girl,” however it was that I construed living inside the public tokens of femininity.

Being a woman–a person–is a lot more satisfying anyway.

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How to Tell You’ve Transitioned, Part I

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, how to tell if you've transitioned, privilege stories

How can you tell you’ve transitioned?

…because shopping for clothes becomes a tedious chore rather than a fun excursion.

OK. Not fair, I get that–I know plenty of women of all stripes and origins who enjoy clothes shopping, including me, on occasion. But still…as compared to the times when I constructed myself as a crossdresser, shopping for clothes doesn’t have the same kick.

On the face of it, this seems strange. I mean, I no longer have to use the exasperating and even sometime ridiculous accoutrements to round out my figure, give me the appearance of having breasts, add to my hips so that my skirts wouldn’t fall down. I’ve got a body that actually fits the mold women’s clothing is intended for…and that is a relief and a pleasure, often.

On the other hand, maybe my body’s part of the issue–I’ve gained about 25 pounds in the last six months, and while that’s not an earth-shattering, cry myself to sleep issue, I am a little unhappy about how I look in my clothes lately.

Which got hammered home yesterday when I went out to buy some clothes for the first time in months (business has been slow and I haven’t had the cash to spend on clothes–though maybe I’d kill both my issues there if I stopped ordering out all the time.) But I’m travelling tomorrow and wanted to have some new clothes for the trip, especially some casual dresses, which would be light to pack. I didn’t find any that I liked, although I did get some new jeans that will actually fit.

I hate shopping for jeans. There are times I just can’t even work up the energy to go try them on, even though I think I look good in a lot of different styles of jeans. But I just hate doing it.

Maybe that’s another sign I’ve transitioned.

My relationship with my clothing has always been…interesting. I’m not like a lot of trans women–I don’t deny having had a long period of time identifying as a crossdresser; I think I was a crossdresser, albeit one with a greater interest in transitioning than I let on, even to myself. Back in those days, clothes held an allure, a mystique, an air of the forbidden about them. To crossdress was to engage all my hidden desires and frailities at once; the feeling of being at home while crossdressed was exhilerating and terrifying, and my clothes were fraught with a lot of meaning.

Which isn’t to say that clothes aren’t fraught with meaning for anyone–compare the different uniforms we wear every day, from bike messenger with one pants leg rolled to corporate honcho in a bespoke suit. Clothes are shorthand for our identities, they send out messages about us–sometimes ones that we don’t want to send.

For example, when I was in India, I bought two saris. I bought them because I loved India and the culture and the people, because I wanted to bring home a souvenir, because I think saris are beautiful dresses. I even asked a friend of mine (not Indian) if I could wear one of them to her wedding, and she enthusiastically agreed.

All this was before my “second awakening,” though. After I began to engage identity politics further, I saw that my wearing a sari just couldn’t be an isolated action–that I couldn’t avoid all the centuries of past interactions between Western and Indian people, and that ultimately I wouldn’t be able to get past the fact that if I wore a sari, I’d be a cool multiculti chick–whereas an Indian woman who wore a sari in America would seem to be “fresh off the boat,” unassimilated, perhaps ingnorant of American culture or even English. And that while some Indian people wouldn’t have a problem with me wearing a sari, others would, and it wouldn’t be easy to just discount their opinion simply because it was a beautiful dress and I liked it a lot.

I did end up wearing the sari, because my friend insisted, and she was the bride. I was fortunate; the only couple I met at the wedding who were from the region didn’t mind at all. Still I changed out of the sari and into a dress after the ceremony. And I’m not upset that I felt I had to do it, and certainly not upset at any Indian people who might take offense at me wearing a sari. I’m upset at the four centuries of Westerners who plundered India, who exoticized it, who used and abused the people there. They’re the ones who’ve “ruined” it for me–not their victims.

So yeah, clothes mean a lot more than just something to keep the wind out.

But you knew that already, didn’t you? Any woman who has been verbally (or all too often, physically) assaulted because her neckline or hemline had crossed the invisible threshold between “prude” and “slut,” who’s been told she’s “asking for it” because of what she’s wearing, who’s been told that her outfit was part of the reason she was attacked (as if women in pants and long sleeves are never raped) knows this. Hell, even I knew that back when I was a crossdresser, although sadly like many of the CDs I knew, I don’t think I really fully engaged with all the implications of what that meant. (There are things that being full-time does to you.)

Wearing clothes has a context for me now that it didn’t have back when I kept mostly to safe spaces–it has the context any woman has to deal with, from issues of personal safety to the whole construct of female beauty and its impossible-to-attain ideals. So yeah, some of the fun has leached out of it. And that’s how I can tell I’ve transitioned.