Part One Here
I am rapidly learning that to be trans is to be an activist. Honestly, I want nothing more than to be a normal woman, leading a normal-ish life. Yet as I step out of that closet of so many decades, I am discovering a lot of people in this country really don’t like transgender people for inexplicable (to me) reasons. I can yearn for anonymity all I want, but we live in a world where my basic right to go to the bathroom is in question.
Like it or not, my very visibility is a political statement. I have to own that. I’m new to being out of the closet, and I feel awkward thinking of myself as an activist/example compared to those who’ve been carrying that load for years. But the alternative is crawling back into that closet, and I’m past lying about who and what I am.
And let’s not talk about the threat of assault. The woman in my life had a serious talk with me after I went out in my metrosexual ensemble avec purse along the streets of Austin (Austin!), only to find myself seriously uncomfortable as I approached a group of staring white males outside a bar. I retreated to my hotel, and she gave me the “Welcome to womanhood” speech. I recognize fully that I simply don’t have the instincts that cis women and seasoned trans women have acquired. It sucks, but it’s reality.
In the meantime, I’ve signed up for self defense classes. Pepper spray may make its way into the increasing mess that is the interior of Awesome Purse.
As I’ve said before, I don’t pretend to have any new political insights. This is just me babbling about my life, and I appreciate the kind words so many of you had for this soul baring exercise of mine. I will direct you to some excellent recent diaries about the new spat of anti-trans legislation:
www.dailykos.com/...
www.dailykos.com/...
www.dailykos.com/…
www.dailykos.com/…
As I read about the Right Wing’s attack on trans children, I can’t help but think back to a deeply closeted trans girl I knew once, growing up in the 80s in Illinois, too frightened to tell anyone about her Dark Secret. She cross dressed in private, dreaming of that normal life I spoke of, then alternating back to bouts of self-hatred, wishing she could somehow work out enough, maybe join the military, something to turn her into that boy everyone expected her to be.
Obvious spoiler: that young girl was me. I still remember one night, staring at myself in the mirror, wearing an improvised skirt, small balloons under my shirt to emulate a teen girl’s breasts (I’ve always been a stickler for realism), scarf around my head to hide my boyish haircut, cradling my favorite stuffed toy, a sea otter, pretending he was the child I’d never have. In all immodesty, I was a pretty young thing. The ravages of testosterone had yet to do their damage, for all that they had already ruined my voice. I remember smiling and reaching out, like Alice touching the Looking Glass.
The glass was impenetrable and cold to my touch.
My mother found me in my underwear, curled up asleep on the floor of my bedroom. I think I’d been crying. It’s been almost forty years; some details are fuzzy. My mother was and is an tremendously compassionate woman. I remember growing up hearing her singing along to Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman”, much to my abusive father’s chagrin. She stuck with a terrible marriage for the sake of my kid sister and me, which makes me feel guilty to this day. But her first priority was protecting her children. And that night she bundled me back into bed. The next day, she found me a psychologist.
The psychologist was a decent sort, if memory serves. I fell into the usual sullen teen mode. I mean seriously, was I going to tell this stranger about the Dark Secret which would only bring ridicule and ostracism? But I wasn’t the first sullen teen he’d worked with, and soon enough he got me to open up, if only indirectly. I remember a lot of “If this were to happen, how would you feel?” thought experiments.
I started to feel better and less ashamed of myself. I was thinking about opening up to him, and even possibly my family. Then the visits abruptly stopped. I struggled through the end of high school, then onto Naval ROTC which was…difficult. I had a great deal of difficulty thriving in the toxic male culture, to say the least. My saving graces were a love and talent for aviation and a basic level of empathy that earned me few but true friends, some of whom I stay in touch with to this day. I had the grades and test scores to take me to flight school where I did well enough: not that I really fit into the culture, for all my attempts to play the necessary part. There was a joke in my squadron that they didn’t have to worry about women and gays in the military, they already had me.
But I got by. And I was married to an awesome woman, who I spoke of in my last diary. Love has a way of healing so many things.
My father was ever so proud of his son living out his vicarious military dreams (his father was an Army colonel, he was a 4F). He told me that he’d been worried about me as a teen. “That psychologist your mother found had some weird ideas. He told me you could ‘go either way’. So I fired him.”
I didn't need the GOP to keep me from getting the counseling I needed. I had my father.
I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d had better help and maybe even treatment back then. To be fair, though, it just wasn’t available in the eighties and early nineties. And if I had stepped out of that closet, I never would have had the aviation career I’ve had. It was the era of the disastrous Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. Options were limited.
But kids today do have a chance for help, if only we can keep them from being abused by legislators trying to score points with a bigoted and narrow minded base. I don’t have any answers, I’m just poking my head out of that closet into the maelstrom. I’ll leave the planning to those with years of activism experience under their belts. But I’m once again a soldier, whether I like it or not. I’ll lend my voice and donations to the fight.
I’ll do it for that girl in the mirror.
Continued in Chapter Three: Promises