Trying to Pass, or Why I Was Over 30 Before I Let Myself Be Trans

I’ve been “officially” questioning my gender for about 3 months, but I already owned exclusively men’s clothing and had had a men’s haircut for years. I never tried to pass for male, though. That’s all changed, now. I’ve begun binding daily, given myself a new haircut, attempted to adopt more of a masculine posture and mannerisms, and tentatively tried to practice speaking in a lower register. And, all this work has resulted in my being taken for male about as many times in the past three months as I have since I first started wearing men’s clothes over five years ago- which is to say, it’s happened three or four times.

Three or four times in three months is nothing to sneer at. It suggests that my appearance is more masculine, and less clearly butch lesbian, than it was previously. I’m 5’2″ with significant hips and no testosterone; one cannot expect miracles. So I believe I’m moving in the right direction with my presentation. But, at the same time, trying to pass has been one of the most anxiety-provoking, discouraging experiences of my life (well, my life as I have been living it in the past six or seven years or so- the homeless shelter was significantly more anxiety provoking and discouraging, as was the eating disorder treatment program). I absolutely hate the feeling of trying and failing.

For the past six or seven years I’ve tried desperately trying to avoid the possibility that I might be transgender. In large part, this was because I had no idea that passing as male was a likely outcome of testosterone for most female-bodied people. The FTMs I’d seen, met, or heard about had all been either pre T, avoiding T, or unable to take T for various reasons (most were young, in high school or college, and new to IDing as male). These guys didn’t look like men, they looked like butch lesbians. The one guy I met who really did look like a dude was intersex and had easily passed for male even before transition, which significantly clouded the issue.

Now, let me take a moment to say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with looking like a butch lesbian. I happen to think butch lesbians are totally hot- in most cases, because I’m into women, I think butch lesbians are a hell of a lot hotter than passing trans men are. But the trans guys I was most aware of didn’t look more like men than the butch women did, and I couldn’t imagine anything more humiliating than having other people think that I was trying to look like a man, but doing a shitty job at it.

I’ve never been much good with failure. I was an obese teenager in high school, then I started trying to lose weight, and 12 months later I was a full-on anorexic. That’s the sort of hyper-focused, competitive, uncompromising mentality that I seem to have been saddled with, for good or ill. It can be a huge boon, at times- for instance, it allowed me to start a career as a professional journalist despite having earned my BA in psychology and then spending my post-college years in eating disorder treatment centers and homeless shelter- but it was also pretty directly responsible for landing my post-college self in eating disorder treatment centers and homeless shelters. And, it’s why I wouldn’t, couldn’t let myself be trans. Because when I thought of trans people I imagined these sad sacks who were trying desperately to convince people that they were something that everyone could see they weren’t, and that simply could not be me.

So, I avoided everything to do with trans people. I avoided learning about transition, I avoided ever thinking about my gender identity, and I assiduously avoided saying anything to indicate that, deep down, I suspected I was probably more like a trans guy than a butch woman. (I also convinced myself that all butch women felt the way I felt, which is something I continue to struggle with).

Eventually, this attitude caught up with me. Maybe it never would have if I hadn’t styled myself an LGBT journalist, but I found that it was nearly impossible to avoid learning anything about the trans community while pursuing that particular profession. To my total shock, I found out that testosterone gave most of those who took it solid results, allowing them to fully pass as male even if they looked pretty damn female beforehand. All of a sudden, the main obstacle to my considering transition for myself was lifted!

I’m not sure there was anything that could have stopped what happened next from happening. I’ve fought against it, but the truth is that I really can’t stand looking female. As long as I believed that it was something to be endured, I did so as stoically as possible. I was even happy, and part of that happiness was a stubborn insistence on not having any drama about my body image or my gender identity. But, once I knew that passing really was an option, and that I wouldn’t always have to look female regardless of what I called myself, that’s changed. Even if it’s a hard road that’ll take years for me to complete, I can’t help wanting those physical changes. I’ve been trying to come up with another reason to keep stoically enduring, but it’s hard going. I want people to look at me and see a man. I’m not sure I can ever be comfortable without that, knowing that it would be possible.

What’s the Difference Between a Butch Woman and an FTM, Again?

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about my process of gender questioning is finding out that there simply is no clear line between genderqueer and trans, or even between butch women and trans men.

Don’t freak out on me, trans guys! I’m not saying that there are no clear examples of trans men who aren’t anything like butch women, or of butch women who are clearly not trans men. Of course there are. But in between there are an awful lot of people who may identify one way or the other but seem, from where I’m sitting, to look awfully damn similar.

Take for example, a friend of mine that I’ll call Hank. Hank identified for a long time as a gay trans guy, but when she started T the psychological effects quickly became intolerable. Currently, Hank identifies as either genderqueer or as a butch woman (or maybe both), and uses female pronouns. When Hank and I talked about our gender identity recently, she told me that she still gets drunk and cries over not being a boy, just like I do, and just like me she feels ashamed afterwards, because getting drunk and crying over not being a boy is about the least masculine thing she can imagine. She still thinks about transitioning, but for now she’s living as a woman.

Okay, so, maybe Hank is just an unlucky trans guy who can’t pass without testosterone and has decided to use female pronouns because the pain of constantly correcting people and being perceived as a woman pretending to be a man is just too hard. That seems reasonable enough, although it’s not how she currently identifies herself.

But, what about my friend Lauren? Lauren IDs as a butch lesbian woman. I recently made a Facebook post about binders, and she responded in a way that indicated that she’d get top surgery if she could afford it. So, I messaged her to ask about her gender identity- and she told me that she semi-regularly gets hugely jealous over trans guys’ transitions, questions her gender identity and considers transitioning, and then ultimately decides against it. Another of my friends’ wives seems to go through a similar process- she’s gone back and forth about transition for years, but as far as I know keeps deciding against it. Both Lauren and my friend’s wife are in a supportive social environment, so I think it’s safe to say that they are butch women who both have frequent periods of thinking that they might be happier as trans men.

Another set of data points are bloggers like Jamie Ray and Kyle Jones who identify as something like butch and genderqueer, and who have taken medical steps to transition. I suppose legally I’m not allowed to gender other people, so don’t take me to queer jail for this, but when I read their blogs I often find myself suspecting that if they’d started questioning their gender earlier, they’d probably just have been trans guys. Can decades of societally imposed femaleness change a person? Isn’t it a bit irrational to think it wouldn’t?

Each time I feel myself getting close to declaring that yes, once and for all, I am a trans guy and I want to transition(!) I run into a butch woman or genderqueer butch and find that they share every one of my reasons for thinking I am trans (and often have even more signs of inner transness in their histories than I do). Of course, there are trans guys who never for a moment identified as butch or lesbian, who knew they were male from childhood and would have killed themselves if they didn’t transition- but I’m not like those guys. And, sure, there are butch women who are completely comfortable with their bodies and have never once questioned their femaleness (although I’ve never actually met one in person)- but I’m not like those women, either. I am, however, a lot like these in-between butch persons.

I guess the logical conclusion- and the one that would make my life a whole lot easier- would be to say that I’m butch also. But, I don’t feel butch. I never felt butch. To me, butch was an objective word that described someone with a female body who wore men’s clothing and was in some way masculine. It was never supposed to be an identity- I’ve never identified with having a gender identity deep down inside that is constant and unrelated to others’ perceptions of me. That’s unreliable data based on the self-reporting of internal mind states. No scientist worth a damn would take that seriously.

I honestly couldn’t care less if I’m a man, a woman, a genderqueer, or a thanksgiving turkey deep down inside myself. But, when I imagine a future of forever looking like a woman to other people I feel terribly trapped, as if I’m in a locked room and the oxygen is slowly being pumped out. I don’t care what my gender identity is. I don’t think I even have one. But, I’d like everyone to look at me and see a guy, not any kind of lady.

Why Would I Need to Become a Guy if I’m Basically a Guy Already?

Yesterday, as often happens, Ask and I started talking to a guy while we were out and about and he quickly focused in on me while pretty much ignoring Ask.

It should go without saying, but this behavior was totally rude. It was also sexist. This bartender acted as though I was the one who he thought he could connect with on a range of topics, the only one whose opinions he found interesting, the only one he figured would get his references. Because I look more masculine.

I’ve always taken more of a male role, socially. In the past I could be a bit of an overcompensating sexist douche, but even without that I feel comfortable being grouped with the guys, relating to guys as equals or competitors, and relating to women with a bit more care, as if I’m in slightly foreign territory. I wouldn’t say I feel more comfortable around men, but I do find it relaxing to be in a group that’s all or mostly men, which can be hard to find when you’re steeped in lesbian culture.

Ask wonders, reasonably enough, why I would need to actually be perceived as a guy, to change my name, my pronouns, and my appearance, if people already naturally treat me as a guy in large part. She hasn’t exactly accused me of wanting even more male privilege, but I think that’s part of it.

I don’t particularly feel like I want male privilege, but I do feel like I’d be more comfortable if other people easily and unquestioningly perceived me as male rather than as a “sort-of-like-a” male or “honorary” male. These past few days I’ve been looking more into genderqueer and non-binary identities, and I feel very conflicted about them. On the one hand, I don’t see myself as having always been a boy, and I think my decades of lived experience as a female are at least as important to my identity as my newfound feelings of wanting to be a guy could be. But, on the other hand, I think I’d rather be a man who is, perhaps, a little genderqueer rather than a genderqueer woman, a butch genderqueer, or a nonbinary or androgynous person. I’d rather be seen as male and then complicate it rather than the opposite.

A Week Off

I’m taking a week off from having gender issues. Well, as much as that’s possible. I’m not going to visit reddit or any other FTM sites/resources, I’m not going to correct my wife when she uses my full (very girly) first name, or talk about anything to do with gender for a week. I’m going to do my best to put the whole thing out of my mind, not think about passing, not try to appear more masculine, etc.

In part, I’m doing this because the stress on Ask and our relationship has gotten really bad. In part, I’m doing it to see what happens. Perhaps I’ve been pushing things in a certain direction and if I stop doing so I’ll find I don’t really need anything to change. After all, I remember being happy and confident as a butch lesbian woman, so perhaps if I just stop being so weird about everything I can get that back.

A week’s not a terribly long time, but hopefully I’ll learn something one way or another or at the very least give Ask a break from the all the stress and worry. She’s really the love of my life and I want us to be happy and normal and comfortable with one another again. My gender issues have been getting in the way of that, and it’s time for a break.

Dreamed That I Was Trans

I had one of those nights last night, when sleep came fitfully. As often happens on those sorts of nights I remembered my dreams (on normal nights I sleep too deeply to remember them).

In one of my dreams there was a lot of nonsense going on about trying to find my way through brick row houses to an alleyway or side road on the other side, but the interesting thing was that at one point when I identified myself to someone I explained that I was FtM, and only looked like a girl because I hadn’t started T yet. I was very confident about that, without any of the doubts and caveats I’ve had in real life, and it felt much better to just say that clearly and not be questioning it.

In the second dream I was also trans, but in that one I was standing in a line with my wife and some other people, and someone who was calling people up gendered me as male, after a slight hesitation. It felt great, so much so that I was disappointed to wake up and realized that I hadn’t actually passed, I only dreamed I did.

I’d like to get myself to a point where I consistently see myself as a trans guy who would transition if he could, which was the way I saw myself in the first dream. Even if I decide I can’t/don’t want to transition, thinking about myself in that way has felt way more right than any of the other options for a while now. I don’t particularly feel that I’m between genders or that my gender shifts — although it can feel more or less urgent it doesn’t really feel like it changes.

The Dysphoric Ebb and Flow

I haven’t posted in a while, in large part because my feelings of dysphoria have subsided a lot lately. I think my feelings about my own gender have always tended to fluctuate between neutral/agender and male. I can’t remember ever actually feeling like a woman (and definitely have never liked to have anything visibly female about my body), but for long periods of time I seem to feel pretty neutral about things like what gender people see me as, which pronouns they use for me, and how important it feels that my body align with my expectations for it. Being seen and treated as a masculine woman during those times doesn’t bother me, even if it doesn’t fit with how I think about myself. When I first began officially questioning my gender I was knocked into the longest, most intense period of dysphoria I’ve ever experienced, but in the past week or so it’s died down so significantly I’m nearly my old self again.

Now, all that said, would I still kinda sorta prefer to be a dude? Sure. Do I still kinda sorta dislike my hips? Yeah. Am I still binding my breasts? Definitely- every day. Does passing as male still feel urgent and important? No, not really.

And yet, there’s clearly still something lurking there, beneath the surface. I can read 10 posts in a row on the ftm subreddit and feel nothing, and then the eleventh will talk about the changes some guy’s had so far on T and I’ll burn with jealousy and have this sinking feeling that my chance to change that way may never come. But, who really knows? Perhaps this jealousy towards FTMs will pass as well, the way some of the other stuff has passed. Or maybe not. It’s a time-will-tell sort of thing, I guess. Hopefully time will tell me something clearer than the jumble of conflicting thoughts and feelings I’ve already experienced.

My Identity Isn’t My Gender… Or Is It?

I am a writer- and not just a blogger here, I mean write as a profession. Writing for a living is something lots of people dream about, but fewer are lucky enough to actually get to do it. It’s something I’ve worked very hard at, and I take it incredibly seriously. So, when I think about my identity, the first and most important thing that pops into my head is “writer”. That identity comes along with a constellation of words and phrases I associate with my own writer-ness, words like ambitious, logical, intellectually fearless, combative, bombastic, surprising. I don’t write to express myself, I write to be part of an intellectual conversation that existed before I was born and will go on long after I’m dead and buried. Writing is who I am. It’s my identity.

Now, between you and me, reader- I can also be a bit of a sexist. I don’t like it about myself, it’s something I’ve worked hard to curb and I am always trying to improve in my own attitudes- but it continues to be part of the way I view the world and I am sorry for that. I’m explaining this in order to soften the blow of what I am about to say, which is that when I picture someone who “writes to express themselves” I picture a female writer, and when I picture someone who is “ambitious, logical, intellectually fearless, combative, bombastic, surprising” I picture a male writer.

I’ve always looked up to male writers more than female ones. No, strike that. I’ve admired a great many writers, male and female, but when I think about the sort of writer I want to be, and the kind I’ve tried to model myself after, it’s never a woman I’m picturing. I think Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut are both great literary sci fi authors- but I want to be Kurt Vonnegut. I think Sarah Koenig and Ira Glass are both great NPR storytellers- but I want to be Ira.

Unlike many trans guys, I’ve never felt excited about being taken for a boy or man in childhood or in adulthood. It hasn’t happened often, but the couple times it has I remember feeling only mortal terror, not happiness. But, online and in my writing, it’s always been a source of pride that others mistake me for male when they don’t know my gender, and that almost all of the friends I’ve made online have been men who treated me like one of them. I’ve always lived my life online, through my writing, commenting, and chat persona, and many times I’ve joked that I wish I could just be uploaded into the web and become a disembodied intelligence- do away with having a body or a gender entirely. But now, I’m wondering if it might be a little more complex than that. If I were a disembodied writerly intelligence, I think I’d be a male one.

I Don’t Want to be Pretty

I remember being in middle school and praying to God to make me pretty.

This was a hard for me. The other kids seemed to like me fine in elementary school, but right around the age of 12 I’d become a social pariah. I just couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to dress or how I was expected to act, and I went from being in the middle of the pack, socially, to being at the very bottom. None of my former friends would talk to me, and everyone else picked on me mercilessly, and when I tried to figure out what might be wrong it seemed to me as though the problem must be that I wasn’t pretty.

Looking back at pictures from the time, I see a perfectly normal looking female kid, albeit one who didn’t know how to style her hair correctly or wear the sorts of clothes the other girls were wearing. But, at the time, I believed that prettiness was something bestowed on some people and withheld from others, and that this alone decided whether people liked you. I wanted to just “be pretty” overnight and fit in with the other kids again, but not to learn how to style my hair (which I resisted angrily whenever anyone suggested it), or to learn which clothes to wear (which I rejected as shallow and beneath me), or to paint my nails or shave my legs or wear makeup or any of the things the other girls were so obsessed with talking about. I wanted to disappear in sci fi books and be just pretty enough to disappear and not be teased by anyone.

I don’t associate this word, pretty, with fun, or lighthearted girliness, or positive attention. I do associate it with a strict, unyielding, unattainable commandment to fit in and be something I’m not. The idea of being found pretty by a guy has always made me feel a little sick. But being pretty to other girls was something I once tried for (after all, I wanted to get laid). More recently it’s been a relief to accept I’d rather not be looked at that way, by anyone.

Our culture forces women and prettiness together in a coercive, demeaning way that reduces women’s humanity and places any and all of their real achievements below the question of their physical attractiveness. As so often happens, this makes it difficult to distinguish a dislike of being seen as female in a sexist environment from not wanting to be seen as female regardless. I’m suspicion of the association I made between prettiness, being a girl, and achieving normality/invisibility (and by my total lack of interest in taking action to make myself look more like normal girls did), because it suggests that for me it was always more than a simple resistance to sexism and heterosexuality, but who can tell? Dislike of sexism and dislike of being female seem discouragingly hard to disentangle.

Positives and Negatives

So far, this weekend has been far more social than most of my weekends are, and that’s without the Superbowl party we’re going to tonight. What happened was that my wife and some of the other students in her department were tasked with showing a new prospective student around, so from Friday evening through all yesterday I was out and about with a group of other people. While I’m usually not one for quite that much uninterrupted socializing, it did make some things I like and don’t like about seeing myself as trans come in to focus.

First, the positives. The grad student, who was male, really seemed to gravitate to me. I’ve noticed this happens a lot when there’s one other guy around in a group of women. They’ll talk more to me than to the women, we’ll subtly try to one-up or impress one another, and we’ll walk or stand nearer to one another while the girls do their thing. (Ask is not the biggest fan of this behavior, btw, so be ready to hear more about it).

I like the feeling of being friendly with guys and being recognized as more like one of them. I’m not sure how to describe why, exactly. It’s not that I think women can’t talk about comic books and video games and sci fi, or that I think women and men should be separated, or that I don’t like hanging around with women- but there’s just a feeling of comfort, for me, about the way that guys relate to one another. On the one hand, it’s more surface-level than the way (most) women relate to one another- less likely to break out into a conversation about people or relationships or personal revelations. And on the other hand, there’s a natural level of competition between men which means there’s less need to worry about insulting someone or having them worry about whether they just insulted you. I like that about “male” mode of relation. It feels comfortable.

I’m probably expressing this badly. Ask may very well read this and be annoyed with me. But it feels like a cop out to say “Oh, there’s some mystical dysphoria that’s healed by being viewed as more of a guy or hanging out with guys, and you couldn’t understand it unless you were a trans guy”. So I’m trying to explain exactly what it is I like, and I know I’m probably falling back on stereotypes, but it’s damn hard to talk about the differences between men and women without doing so.

Anyway. On to negatives. I really dislike how questioning my gender has made me more self-conscious. I spent more time noticing men’s bodies than I have in my entire life, and also noticing butch women, and how different they look from men. Also. When my new buddy held doors open for me (which he did way too often), I was uncomfortably aware of the fact that while I saw us as two guys hanging out, he just saw me as a somewhat more masculine woman. That’s not something that used to bother me, and I don’t like being aware of it. I also hate that I’m spending extra time in the restroom making sure my binder is doing the best job possible, or fussing over my clothes to minimize my hips, or realizing how different my body looks from men’s bodies. And, I hate comparing my hand gestures and my intonations and the way I’m standing to the way men do it, and worrying when I do it “wrong” (i.e., more feminine). The very concept of having a “right” way to stand or a “right” way to speak is problematic.

Too much self-consciousness takes me out of my environment and separates me from the moment. It makes me inauthentic, perhaps even narcissistic. These are the sorts of tendencies I’d rather suppress in myself than bring more to the forefront. The fact that this gender identity confusion stuff makes doing so more difficult is a real problem. I’m not a fan of gender issues.

I Don’t Want to “Choose” a Gender

When I was a butch lesbian, things were a lot simpler. I didn’t “identify” as a butch lesbian, I just thought it was the neutral, agreed upon term for what I was. A person with my body parts was a woman. A woman who was sexually and romantically interested in other women, exclusively, was a lesbian. A lesbian who wore men’s clothing and had masculine aspects to her personality was a butch lesbian. Bingo, presto: I was a Butch Lesbian.

I didn’t particularly want (or not want) to be a butch lesbian. I didn’t particularly try (or not try) to be a butch lesbian. I was somewhat annoyed by all the trans people and queer theory people who were trying to make my life more complicated by talking about how a person identified and what pronouns they preferred and all of that. I didn’t prefer pronouns, I was born with them. I didn’t identify as anything, I was what I was and whatever words there were to describe that sort of person were acceptable.

Right now, I’m really hating the fact that I stopped just pushing away my doubts and actually allowed myself to wonder if I was more like trans guys than butch lesbians. I want my gender to be a fixed, certain thing. I don’t want to think about it, or talk about it, or have issues around it. I just want it to be there, like my hair or eye color.