From the Tumblr: "Did you always know?"

So, I've started a tumblr account called Render Me Boobless, which is a more focused chest-surgery donation push and general depository for pithy man-boob silliness, as well as a way to thank donors with amusing youtube videos. There's a question/answer function on it I've dubbed "Ask The Transfag," and recently I got a bite. The anonymous asker asked, simply, "Did you always know?" Here's my answer:

Kind of a personal question, but let's just imagine for a moment that you plan to donate plenty of money to the surgery fund to the right of this post, and that I'm willing to shill my unusual psychological development for a few dozen dollars you're my therapist. This is always a question (the question?), and it has variable answers. I was a pretty androgynous child in a lot of ways--yes, I was a Girl Scout and dressed as a fairy princess for Halloween (exactly), but I also loved Legos and action figures and usually preferred shorts to skirts (though I had a pretty serious spandex obsession.) While I definitely--and outwardly--fell into the spectrum of how young girls are expected to behave and appear, I don't think I had the same concept of myself as a girl that other girls had. In playground games of Girls Chase Boys I would generally run alongside the boys cheering them on in getting away from the girls (#storyofmylife.) But I didn't realize in a meaningful way that gender variance existed or was something with a name until later, and didn't start identifying with it until I was 10 or 11, and even then in a fairly rudimentary way. I didn't consider transition or living as male as something that interested me until high school, and I didn't give it serious logistical thought until maybe three or four years ago. So there's really not just the question of "did I always know," but of what it was that I knew, and when.

But perhaps more importantly, how relevant is the answer to this question? I hear the question of how long I've "known" with pretty great frequency, more or less at a dead tie with surgery questions. I think it stems from a fear--and even just a benign, fascinated-unsettled fear--that perhaps anyone can transition, that someone can look entirely normally-gendered one day and then POOF (so to speak), one can wake up a trans person, Orlando-style. Knowing when trans people realize that they are different (and, ideally hearing the "ever since I was a small child" answer) calms this fear. It keeps trans experience neatly separate, and keeps it from infecting the stable and conventional gender identities of others.

Did you always know you weren't trans?

Dancing with Bro-dawgs

On Friday I went to a half-ironic toga party (in plainclothes) with a certain number of ordinary-bro types in attendance, and they not only read me as male but danced on me really hard. And I mean really. I always like going to parties where I don't know anyone and dancing like a maniac. Who needs beer? Which isn't to say that I didn't get semi-wild, but not nearly as wild as I could have, and the dancing was truly the focus.

I had the interesting experience, at that same party, of outing myself as queer but not trans. I was talking to a nice amiable straight dude I'd just met who was complaining about girl troubles, and I started some sentence, "Well, I'm mostly gay, but..." I'm pretty used to the track a conversation typically derails onto when I mention I'm trans ("OMG surgery/parents/childhood/sex life/i have this trans friend/rupaul's drag race/i wouldn't have guessed!!!!!11!1), but the "I'm a queer (implicitly cisgendered) dude" track was new. First he asked me how I knew I was gay, which was easy enough, but then he proceeded to tell me all about sexually experimenting with boys as a freshman, which was both hilarious and titillating. Moral of the story: it was novel to be a different sort of novelty.

It's strange and amazing to be at the point where my appearance doesn't automatically out me as trans. And, now that it's not a given that my gender is up for grabs, I find myself being a little stingier with it. I'm becoming of the mind that my gender (and my gender history) is more or less my business (I say as I write on the internet), and that if I'm going to be outed I should be the one doing the outing.

I'm not totally sure how I feel about this impulse. Before I began to pass in a steady way, I assumed I'd want to be out and proud, as it were, as trans forever, both because it feels (or felt) like a big part of who I am, and for the political reasons of visibility and making breeders uncomfortable. It's not like I would ever be in the closet about being queer, or insist that I be the sole arbiter and teller of that information. How weird would it be if I told one of my friends, "Hey man, don't tell anyone that I'm gay." Real weird.

But then, as we all know, gender identity and sexual orientation are different beasts, and the ways people react to the revelation of each are beastly in different ways and to different degrees. When someone outs me as trans--and not in all situations, but in certain ones--it puts me in a lousy othered position. But is resisting this othering shitty in its own way? Am I just lapping desperately from the fountain of male privilege now that I've gotten a taste of its Keystone-flavored ambrosia? Maybe a little bit. I'm still struggling with this. What are your thoughts? Is my being stealthy about my gender a matter of self-preservation and autonomy, or is it the wimpy way out of the capital-S-Struggle? Am I just catering to a transphobic society that negates my humanness when I keep my mouth shut, or am I merely being choosy and keeping myself safe?

Manlier and manlier, bicuriouser and bicuriouser.

So tomorrow is eight months on my delicious golden boy serum, and I seem to be doing fairly well with it. Physical changes are continuing to progress, but in a subtler way, perhaps due to my DUI, perhaps simply because it's kind of just more of the same and it's not all as new as it initially was. I'm shaving my sparse stubble basically every day, but it's getting semi-full enough that if I don't shave, I don't look like a total teenage boy, just a sparsely scruffy man. But personally, I like shaving. Beard-inclined types are always telling me something to the effect of, "You want a beard? Take mine! I hate it!" Perhaps it's because I'm such a Russell-come-lately to the facial hair game, but I enjoy it. I've even contemplated getting a straight razor to further my anachronistic foppishness, but it seems a little premature.

In passing, I seem to be now firmly in the passing as (incredibly femme/babyfaced) male mode. The other day as I was unlocking my bike downtown a panhandler asked me, "Excuse me, ma'am...oh, sorry, sir..." which felt good. When I'm showing my ID people have been commenting on how young I look, and a girl at a party thought I was a freshman and seemed a bit shocked to learn my real age. The older convenience store clerks usually say something like, "You'll be glad you're so babyfaced when you get older!" Of course this babyfacedness will probably pass away in the next few years as the T continues to kick in, but I guess I'll relish this while I can.

My reception in queer spaces has been interesting. I was pleased, though, a couple weekends ago when I somehow was lured into doing the gay night bar circuit, that I seemed to be read mostly as male, even if I was wearing blue velvet pants and stilettos. I found myself outside John Henry's with two conventional-gay college boy types who offered me cigarettes as we mutually bemoaned the fag-to-dyke ratio. There was a handful of rather boring twink types who flirted with me, one of whom said I looked like Elijah Wood, which I suppose is true to a degree in this context. At the same time, certain lesbians were up on me on the dance floor, too, though they could have just read me as a fun dance partner.

Some of Ben's Vegas friends came to visit this weekend, and one of them felt particularly (and vocally) frustrated that his gaydar didn't function in Eugene--many of the straight men in our crowd are on the hipster-androgynous side, and the out, or visibly out, queer men are few. Though I don't expect (or necessarily want) a clearly delineated and readily self-evident straight/gay social dynamic, I thought he had a point, and it made me pine slightly for a queerer peer group. For most of my life I've been more or less cool being "the queer (or bi or lez or trans) one" among my friends, and have been of the mind that the non-sex/gender commonalities I share with my friends (scrabble, books, music, beers) are more relevant than the queer ones. But could I maybe have both? Not to complain; things are generally pretty lovely these days. But I can't help but feel, in my recent forays into the Local LGBTQ Community, that this (at least those I've met by and large) isn't my community much more than the comparable straight one is.

And at the same time as I throw myself into, and revel in, being capital F Fabulous, I take a bit of pause. Maybe I do like girls a little bit, and, I've lately realized, despite conventional wisdom, mentioning ex-boyfriends or recent (male) conquests is kind of anti-flirting when it comes to the femaler sex. And yet I'm not exactly comfortable being a straight dude, or being seen as a straight dude--nor, let's be serious, is it really possible.

A Few Mostly Funny Bits

So the performance at OUT/LOUD went really well, I think. At about the third song or so I had gained some acceptable level of confidence (the power of playing a harmonica and having people actually cheer for you) and the rest was basically a party. I was also very pleased to meet and hang out with Katz of Athens Boys Choir, whose song Fagette was instrumental in affirming my identity as a fem transman, and perhaps most importantly is hilarious and contains the line, "I'm a pansexual, got my hands on the manual, a smooth Jew, a bar mitzvah party animal."

After the show I went to Ben's Judith Butler-themed birthday party, though I mostly just hung out in the garage and drank champagne with the usual types, plus Samuel, arguably my favorite person to frequently sport a skirt and a full beard. Amusing passing anecdote: One of the OUT/LOUD volunteers, whom I've known as a party acquaintance since maybe September, or in any case before I started hormones, said to me, "It was funny, one of my friends said she thought you were a transman!" I did a total double take, and said, "I AM a trans man," to which the rest of the kids chuckled semi-awkwardly and she kind of blushed. I asked her, perhaps a little too forcefully, "What did you think I was?" She kind of shyly sputtered out, "I just thought you were really femme!" It's strange to me to be consistently read as a man, even by people who should, perhaps, "know better." Even though it's what I want (in a lot of ways it one of the main points of transitioning, to get others to see you as the right gender) it takes some getting used to.

I'd also like to look at the statement, "My friend thought you were a transman!" Does this strike anyone else as a strange thing to say to someone? There's some judgment in it: "My friend noticed that you're short and barrel-chested and have a relatively high voice, so she made this assumption about your medical history!" or, "My friend heard from someone that you're trans, but I've known you for a while and haven't picked up on it myself, and it would be such an outlandish thing if you were!" Would you say to someone, "I noticed the way you were limping, and I thought you might have actually had a disability!" or "I heard you were of Puerto Rican descent, how nuts is that?" (I know race/ability/gender aren't all the same thing, but for the sake of an example.) What if I'd been a butch woman? What if I had just been a very femme ordinary dude? Would I have been justified if I'd been insulted? "Looking like a tranny", most notably on the mtf side, is a pretty common insult, even among otherwise sensible people, and even among certain circles of trans people who are wanting, for whatever reason, to be stealth. So, not to pick on this specific person and what she said, but there's more to "I thought you were trans" than meets the eye, so to speak.

At the same time, I can't say I'm not a bit pleased that this girl didn't think I was trans. I guess I just kind of assume that everyone knows I'm trans at all times, at least within my social circle, that they refer to me as, "Yeah, Russell, you know, the trans one?", that I kind of have a sign around my neck about it. I know this happens to a degree, and I don't exactly have a problem with it: I'd rather it not be the main thing people know about me, but I don't not want people to know. But I just feel a little proud, I guess, of my friends for keeping it under their trucker caps to a degree.

"IUD, SIS, stay in school, cuz it's the best"

Sorry to be remiss about blogging. There have been all sorts of happenings and distractions that needn't be aired in as silly a blog as this.

I've had a few humorous passing/not anecdotes in the past couple weeks, but they're mostly slipping my mind at the moment. I got "Hello sir...ma'am?" on the phone at work, which I ignored.

There's been a whole bonanza (I really wanted to write "banana") of furor, at least by my Emily Dickinsonish standards, about the whole Pegasissy at OUT/LOUD thing. I can't say it's not strange having pictures of my face all over town, or having a stranger tell me how great I am when I'm standing in line for a hot dog at the fashion show (which did happen.)

These times are strange times, and I'd like to place at least some of the strangeness on hormones. I recently acquired an IUD, which I've started calling a DUI in front of acquaintances with whom I'm not in the mood to discuss my uterus. As in, "I got a DUI last Monday and I felt like garbage for the next two days, and I still feel a little shaken about it." Which I do.

After a relatively pleasant seven months of being able to forget entirely that I'm in possession of a uterus, I was reminded quite solidly of it last week. So there's that dysphoria, and the strange misplaced instinctual sadness at being rendered physically incapable (if temporarily) of making a baby--not that I want one in the least, but even when you're hitting snooze on your biological clock it still wakes you up before you drift back to sleep--plus the perennial, lonely "Why am I going through all of this when I'm only sharing my bed with the cat and a pile of books?" Of course, there are good reasons. Though the Mirena has low levels of levornorgestrel (=ladymones) and on the one hand sounds counter-intuitive for my purposes, it wards off endometriosis and certain types of cancer, and doubly ensures that I don't bleed, and generally keeps my baby bag not seen and not heard. Even if I'm not putting it to the test at the moment, it lasts for 5-7 years, and I'd rather know I'm all set in the not accidentally getting knocked up department than have to wait a month to set another appointment once anything does come up.

But it's still jarring to have to think about these things, and to have that tiny extra boost of lady hormones in my system. I've been doing that thing I hate where I have really strong, devastating emotions that I know aren't especially useful or reasonable, but there's nothing I can do to make them disperse in a timely way. But perhaps this is less about being a trans man and more about being a human being. Let me quote Blink-182 when I say, "Well I guess this is growing up."

I know this is getting long, but I need to do a little meta-blogging: I'd like to address how personal this blog can be, and justify it a bit. The reason I'm doing this, besides to amuse my friends and bolster my cult of personality, is to rep and describe my trans experience, or rather a trans experience. We all know that there's a disproportionate number of images like this and this of trans people, and not enough like this. Even kind understanding open types who want to see trans people as something not strange and off-putting may not know where to turn. I don't like to spend every moment Being a Transsexual, and this blog is a way to do my part in educating the masses in a pleasantly compartmentalized way. Which is another reason for the over-sharing. By describing my shots and my uterus and my physical changes and hormonal roller coaster in depth, I'm hoping that the curious details of transitioning will all become common (at least within this small readership) knowledge, and you, dear reader, won't be tempted to ask an unsuspecting trans person how big their clitoris is, or how long they've felt this way, or whether they like to be penetrated, next time you meet such a person at a dinner party. Because, frankly, unless you would feel comfortable having similar questions asked of you, you probably shouldn't be tossing them around. Just throwing that out there.

Tranny for Money

Last night I performed as the local act with the Tranny Roadshow, a "trans person performance art extravaganza" that was coming through town. I played four songs: a Mag Fields cover that seemed especially pertinent, the always-a-hit Unicorn song, the Presidents song, and Party and Bullshit. It was the debut of Pegasissy with "male vocals," which was interesting and a little more frightening than I had anticipated. I found myself getting really nervous before the show, and involuntarily so. I'd practiced the Mag Fields song plenty, and was really excited to be singing it in the real live Stephin Merritt key, but I was nervous and I basically lost those few notes at the bottom. But people seemed to like it. I got a really good response for the Biggie cover, where I change all the n*ggas to faggots (or breeders, in the case of "when breeders wanna flex, who got the gat?) and bitches to butches and honeys to homos, but after that my set was over.

I realized that this is was the first time that I'd performed at a specifically trans event, or, really, any kind of explicitly queer event, or even (correct me if I'm wrong) with other overtly queer people, now that I think about it. I think I was a little disarmed by it. Everyone in the audience was there to see trans people perform, and EVERYONE IN THE ROOM KNEW I WAS TRANS, which I don't know, was a little frightening, or embarrassing. As I've said before, it's not because I'm ashamed of being trans or anything. It's nerve wracking enough to play a show in front of 150 people, but, I realized, the situation is kind of made psychically worse when the audience has a special interest in what your genitals look like, and is probably scrutinizing your chest for lumps.

I also got asked to play at Out/Loud, the UO's queer womyn music fest. It's kind of a last minute thing, but I guess I made such an impression that they just *have* to have me. I'm playing right before Bitch, of Bitch and Animal. I'm sure all my middle school dyke friends circa 2000 would shit their pants. I'm also playing at a queer neighborhood happening called A Gay In The Park in June,

I feel kind of odd about the timing of all this. Was I not queer enough before I transitioned? Do they just need a transfag to round out the bill? Not that I'm complaining; it will be totally wild to play in front of an actual audience on an actual stage (note to self: bring a flask and/or a couple of valium.) There's also the whole "Queer Womyn" thing. Apparently Out/Loud is for "queer women and allies of queer women's music," and I suppose I am the latter, though it hasn't been my scene in years. I've never really felt comfortable in queer women's spaces. When I was first coming out a bisexual with long hair and goth makeup, none of my older dyke friends were really taking me seriously. I remember a group of butch 17 year olds actually saying to me, "You'll never be a real dyke." Not that I am a real dyke, but maybe I'm still nursing the bruise of that first exclusion and dismissal. It's just funny to finally be enthusiastically invited into the queer womyn club now that I'm a man.

Pure Hilarity and Fashion Blogging

So at work I somewhat frequently, maybe every few weeks, have strange homeless men come the door and try to talk to me for no real reason. They always kind of look at the signs around the doorway and say something like, "Yeah, peace and justice, I'm all about that!" Sometimes they want someone to listen to their stories, or their conspiracy theories, but mostly they just want someone to pay attention to them. This is all well and good, but it's not my job. I'm a goddamn office manager.

Today seemed like it would be one of those days. The guy called me "babe" when I opened the door, though I thought I was beyond that. Ugh, I thought, here we go again. He asked me about some flier on the bulletin board, and as I was explaining he must have rethought his "babe" position, and asked me "So, you're a woman, right? You're a girl?" I said no. He said, "You're a man?" I said, yep. He said my hair made me look like a woman and it was confusing, and I shrugged and said I guess so, though I think my new haircut is more masculine if anything, if pretty faggy. Then he said, kind of slowly backing away, "I mean, I believe whatever it is you do, consensually, is your own business, I mean hopefully not your business, but your own affair." Then he gave me a little Asian-style bow, said, "Best to you, brother," and left. There's a certain power in being able to frighten grown men with your gender.

Further on a personal note, I'm single again, which means I'm learning, yet again, how to flirt with people, or rather with whom I should reasonably flirt. Strangers at bars are becoming more likely to think I'm actually for realz a man, which is in most ways good and in some ways bad. My solution so far is to flood all concerned parties with whiskey until all gender is incomprehensible.
Also, I had the thought to add some style/fashion element to this blog, or at least to draw attention to Trans Style Icons. I'm going to call this segment "X_dressing", as in "cross-dressing," though the Style Icons won't necessarily be cross-dressing, just being trans people with wicked style.

I think there's an assumption that trans people, and especially trans men, are bad dressers. It's true that we face certain unique challenges. When I, and a lot of people, first came out, I felt pressure to wear undeniably masculine clothes to give myself an undeniably masculine image. This translated into unflattering pants, too many t-shirts at once to disguise my chest, and, I'm a bit sorry to say, trucker hats. For transmen with girlish figures (and statures) it can be hard to find men's clothes in the right size--I'm usually exiled to the little boy's section, which is good if I'm wanting to buy t-shirts with motocross racers on them, but bad if I want quality dress shirts, or anything not Mom-approved. And so, any trans man who moves beyond the valley of the over-sized dress shirts and chinos deserves special recognition in my book, or in my blog.

And so here is my love for Dean Spade of the Sylvia Riviera Law Project and Seattle University and what he does with clothes. Look at that cardigan. And those shoes. And the shoes-tie-glasses hat trick. The portly butch in the background is taking notice. Are you?

It's a persistent challenge, especially without the aid of standard male hormone levels, to put together a look that gets you read as both male and a total fox. Dean Spade does this, and does this consistently (to say nothing of his amazing activism and for low-income/POC trans people.) If we could all be such babes.