I'm working on an autobiographical thingy. The backbone of the summer will be the proto-blog online diary I did in 1994, reformatted for modern technology and annotated/commented upon from the perspective of an additional 13 years, which is running on Wednesdays and Sundays for now. Sometimes there is background information needed to elucidate understanding. This is one of those.
It's also my 150th diary at Daily Kos...
From Outside the Gender Prison:
Life in the Passing Lane
[first appeared in Triangle Rising Newsmagazine, Little Rock, AR, June, 1997]
I have interacted with lots of transsexual people, as you might imagine. Time and again I get asked about the issue of "passing" and I always preface my opinions about it with the fact that I haven't a clue what passing could mean to a person. Oh, I know the meaning associated with the term when it is applied to a gender-variant person: a person is passing if s/he has been so absorbed into target gender role that nobody knows (outside of perhaps a few confidants) that s/he originally didn't live that role.
Passing was never an option for me since (a) I transitioned while working at a state-supported university, a position in which it felt like just about everyone knew all my business and (b) I'm 6'4" and I was under the influence of testosterone for 30-something years from the time I entered puberty until I switched to estrogen, leaving me with quite a deep voice and lots of visible clues as to my birth sex. So any opinions I might have about passing will probably be construed in some quarters as being tinged with the flavor of sour grapes.
But one thing I have done in the past five [now 15--ed] years is to get to know who I truly am. The me-who-is-now can't imagine being anything other than totally open about who I was and who I am and how I got from there to here. After all, the whole purpose was, in my reality, to stop living a role that I felt was not me, to become the person who I really believed I was. To exit the closet of being transsexual but living as a male only to enter another closet wherein I was perceived as purely female would, in my view, still leave me in a closet...still locked up in that old gender prison.
That's not to say that I don't understand the allure. I surely do. It sometimes gets tiring having to defend my existence. It gets old having to contend with other people's pre-conceived notions of who I am, notions largely based on hearsay or media portrayals of transsexual people (you just don't know how annoying it is that the majority of transsexual people seen on television are there courtesy of Jerry Springer).
Being transsexual is a paramount example of a catch-22. If we pass for our target gender, then we are perceived as trying to "fool" people about who we are, while if we don't pass we are subjected to the abuse of a society desperately clinging to a bipolar model of gender. People who have never met me in other than my current mode of life, upon learning that I was born male, will often begin referring to me with male pronouns (even gay and lesbian folks do this, while seemingly having no problem at all with referring to drag queens with female pronouns...a situation which I can't for the life of me figure out).
Transsexual people who pass (or strive to) run the constant risk of being "discovered." What happens next can be loss of friendships, the end of an intimate relationship, the loss of a job, or even physical or emotional assault. They are accused of having lied about who they are. But transsexual people who don't opt for life in the passing lane, who are open about who they are, run the risks of being ostracized from their community, of never finding someone to love them, of never getting hired in the first place, of being denied housing or service in restaurants and stores, and of being the subject of all sorts of slanderous rumors, and are also targets for physical, verbal, and emotional assault.
It's not easy for people to understand that from our point of view, our previous lives were the fiction and that we are now living our truths. It seems people would prefer it if we kept living the fiction. It's a strange society that prefers lies so that it can avoid adapting to the truth.
I like to tell my transsexual sisters and brothers to come on out...that out in the open is a the way life was meant to be lived.
Maybe someday I'll be able be able to say that without worrying about their physical safety and psychological well-being.
© 1997 Robyn Elaine Serven
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Just a note: This is my 150th diary at Daily Kos, the majority of which (90) are editions of Teacher's Lounge. The rest have been somewhat helter-skelter, but most have concerned gender variance and/or are autobiographical in nature (but there was also diaries on civility, AIDS, hate, rape, and prison, among others). There is, actually, an overall structure to the whole of the work-in-progress, although it is not flat enough to represent well in a list. But here's sort of a map, anyway, in case anyone besides me is interested.
Items which are not links are not currently available online. And some diaries are online, but not included, because they may need rewriting or otherwise don't have a place in which they yet fit.
Who the hell I am
Beginnings Getting RealJourneyVigil
Searching for Filisa
Public Service Announcement
Going Home
Aftermath
Spirituality: Truth
Nonviolence
Nothingness and Being
Learning to Count Past Two
Declaration of Gender Liberty
From Outside the Gender Prison The Gender Prison
Role Models
Women-only space (jump to Integration)
Life in the Passing Lane (hey, that's this one!)
Pride
The Substance of Style
Choices
Building a Better Society
The Question of Religion
Controlling Shame
Dear Distressed: Let Me Get This StraightA Political Hunting Accident
Ellen
Special Rights I am a human being
Communicating with the Faithful
A Supreme Response
Aint I a Human?
Integration Deceit
Lesbian Separatism
A Review (of Hausmann)
A View from Outside the Gender Community (review of Califia)
...And a View of the Gender Community from the Inside (response to Califia)
A Need for Dialogue
Jonesboro
Oreo PFLAG:Kurt
Death
Recent:
From the Heart
Who Am I?
Role Models
I am a Human Being
State of the Onion
Lonely Times
The mountaintop
The Unfather
The comment piece, Slices.
Over 100 poems which were debuted here at Daily Kos, with accompanying graphics. |