this side of things.

Tonight I went to an event where I ran into a lot of casual acquaintances from my undergrad days. Yes, from before I transitioned, or from when it was so early on that it didn’t matter much. There was one guy whose face I knew, and who was friends with some of my friends, but I never really knew him well. K ran into him and, trying to be the good hostess, asked if we knew each other. I could tell that he recognized me somehow, but he didn’t know my name, nor did he recognize it. “when were you there?…..yeah, that’s when I was there,” he said.

“oh, I mostly kept to myself.”

These days, being a transsexual is not this huge piece of my life. It doesn’t come up all that often unless I bring it up, and besides really old, close friends and family, only a few people in my life even know about my history…..so it feels kind of uncomfortable to be in a big crowd where it’s common knowledge. It feels dangerous, like it will slip out at any moment, like my old name will be shouted at me from across a room, like getting shot in the back.

I remember in my senior year of high school, when one of my teachers was telling us how going away to college would be this amazing experience where we would meet people who would broaden our horizons. Then I got to college, and the people were pretty much the same as they had been in the suburbs. Eventually I did meet some people who really challenged my assumptions, and realized that even the ones who seemed like standard-issue college kids were much more complex. But at first, I couldn’t help feeling a little ripped off.

One morning at breakfast, I realized why. All of those speeches about the wacky people we’d meet a college….they were talking about me. I was the wacky person…the butch dyke with chains and spikes and odd taste in music and hairy legs and a militant brand of queer feminism. Those conversations about how we had to be open-minded and accepting once we got to college…it was me that people had to learn to accept. I was everyone else’s learning experience.

I was a textbook, a transparency slide of notes. I was a diagram. A plastic dissection model. I was shriveled and floating in formaldehyde.

I spent a lot of my freshman year feeling very conspicuous.  That is not a good feeling for an introvert. I wanted to have friends, but whenever anyone straight tried to be nice to me, I felt like I was being used. “Hey, so I have this GAY FRIEND at college!” or “OMG there’s this weird dyke on my floor. I’m so worldly and stuff!”

Who cares about the frog’s feelings when you start cutting it up and peeling back the skin, anyway?

This year, I should be having a class reunion, and I’m torn about what to do. Realistically, there are not that many people in my graduating class that I want to see anyway. But given that I have a good career and a generally happy life, I feel compelled to see what jerks are married to dipshits and have boring, useless jobs. I may have been a freak as a teenager, but I’m proud of everything I’ve done so far, and damnit, I want to rub it in the faces of the people who lined the hallways to make a gauntlet of “dyke!!!” on my way to lunch. I earned it. I put up with four years of homophobic taunting, and I am sure as hell going to roll my eyes at the people who just came out. I have no qualms about that.

And then I think, nobody’s going to recognize me anyway, and if they do, do I really want to have that conversation? The other piece is that every graduating class has at least one transsexual. There has to be a person so that all the “normal” folks can go home and say, “damn, guess who got a sex change?!” The sitcom version is going to need a punchline, and the dry, bitter prose needs a snappy one-liner. Plus, I want to meet the token class transsexual!

Oh wait.

There isn’t going to be a token class transsexual for me to hang out with, because I’m it. There’s a lot of pressure there, really. I have to come up with some good zingers, a scandalous story to go along with the “guess who got a sex change?!?!” over the dinner tables the next night. I don’t really want to be the topic of anyone’s conversation, but I accept it as an inevitable part of being a transsexual. People are going to be interested, disgusted, whatever. But to go into a situation knowing that you’re bound to end up as a freaky footnote, well. Maybe I should start getting used to it.

there was a time when i would go to any length to keep my chest from sticking out farther than my stomach. i bought compression shirts, ace bandages, waist trimmers. i wore layer upon layer. i learned to slouch. with all of those things combined with my insatiable sweet tooth, i managed to hide my chest behind my clothing, and mask it with a soft belly.

but i didn’t really care. when people said things like, “oh, i can’t eat that, it’ll go straight to my hips,” i scoffed and rolled my eyes. i considered myself a fat ally, and stuck up for people who made anti-fat comments. i hated the diet industry and all of the ridiculous products it peddled on the basis that making people hate themselves could be profitable. i read articles about dieting second graders, and small children being sent to “fat camp,” and i was disgusted at the cruelty of others.

but i guess it was easy for me, because as a butch dyke, i never felt like any of those rules applied to me. when you have unfortunate kitchen haircuts, hairy legs, and your major fashion accessories are black leather and spiked, it’s hard to feel any kinship with the women in vogue, let alone any sympathy for their struggle to lose two pounds.

when i started identifying as trans, i liked my belly. it made me feel more masculine, especially when compared to the skinny women around me. it marked me as different.

but then i started taking testosterone, and it shifted my body fat all around…namely, to my stomach. but it wasn’t so bad, because it helped me hide my chest. then the day finally came when i had chest surgery, and suddenly realized that i had become my dad: mostly skinny, but with a fat stomach. although i was in love with my new chest, i still couldn’t shake this feeling of self-consciousness at taking my shirt off in public. i figured it was just leftover from the days before surgery.

in the days leading up to surgery, i made lists of things i had always wanted to do, but had been prevented from doing by my chest. swimming, yoga, working out. i began reading men’s health magazine, once i finally had a body that fit into their readership. i read articles about fitness, thumbing through pages of muscular, smooth-chested guys demonstrating the right way to lift weights and do calisthenics. and somehow through it all, i started to notice that the cover of almost every men’s magazine promised that the secret to flat abs was inside its pages. these messages seeped into my brain. “you’re gross.” “you’re out of shape.” “you’re fat.”

this was a shock. men had a body ideal to live up to? men, in all their patriarchal glory? bodily insecurity wasn’t just meant for straight women and transsexuals? men were self-conscious about their back hair, their round bellies, the length and usefulness of their cocks?

mind-blowing, i tell you.

but what really hit me was that i had become vulnerable to those messages. as a punk rock dyke, ex-riot grrl, i thought i was immune. after all, hadn’t i read piles of zines about fighting against mainstream body ideals? hadn’t i had millions of conversations about how damaging those ideals could be? wasn’t i above all of that? and yet, there i was, staring disgustedly into the mirror at myself. there i was, half-assedly counting calories and trying unsuccessfully to lose some weight. i had become exactly what i always scoffed at….another boring american obsessed with looking good.

somehow, i had become vulnerable to the same messages.

today at my job, i was talking with a co-worker about buying my first house and how it seems really scary. i was talking about the various things that make me nervous about it, and at some point, she said, “oh come on, just jump in. i know you must have had to be brave at some point in your life.”

[this is about two things: 1. the attitude that transition takes all this bravery, and 2. what it feels like to be incognito. ]

it’s funny, because i don’t know how many times i told someone, “oh, hey, i’m transitioning,” and they gushed about how brave i must be to do something like that. on one hand, i sort of agree with them. i mean, living as a gender ambiguous person is scary and dangerous. getting up in front of my colleagues and saying, “i am going to become a man,” is hard. putting that letter in the mailbox to my parents is terrifying. putting my relationships, my future, my health, my life on the line for a chance at becoming who i really am is scary as fuck.

but it’s sort of like walking a tightrope. it’s not too hard until you look down.

and anyway, i don’t feel that brave. nobody would say, “gee whiz, that was brave for calling the fire department when your house was on fire.” when faced with a dire situation, the instinct is to do what needs to be done. and yeah, there was a lot at stake. but when the choices are to transition, or to live your life feeling like a stranger and a misfit in your own skin, maybe to the point of someday ending your own life, the decision becomes pretty damned easy.

….

the other piece of this is that it’s very weird to have these conversations with people who don’t know my history. being perceived as a (sometimes) straight, white, middle-class male is an interesting experience. there’s the assumption of all this privilege, and the assumption that i don’t know anything about sexism or homophobia or whatever….the assumption that i have never had to question anything about my own existence, or consider the way i have been treated by people. and it’s hard to have those things assumed when they are so far from the truth.

i will talk about this more another time.

i have this love-hate relationship with “trans 101″ type of workshops. you know the kind. they show up at lesbian and gay conferences, lefty college kid conferences, those kinds of things.

the formula usually goes something like this:

• college lefties decide that they are lacking in ally cred, so they decide to throw in something trans.
• panel of trans people is assembled.
• attendees are treated to lots of jargon and unnecessary personal details
• if i am in attendance, i leave feeling (at best) bored, or (at worst) like i have been stripped naked and put on display

i do want people to be educated. i want them to learn and become compassionate. i want them to ask questions and come away with a more enlightened view of the world.

unfortunately, i do not always trust my fellow trans people to provide them with experiences that lead to that. sometimes presenters lay on the lingo pretty thick, until people come away with a clusterfucked understanding of the the differences between cross dressers, transvestites, transsexuals, transgender, drag, genderqueer, and happy gender unicorns, but have no idea how to talk about those folks without being an ass.

or there are the presenters who seem to think that opening up their lives like a medical textbook is going to make people not want to kill us. they go into intimate details about hormone treatments and effects, physical traits that ftms and mtfs tend to have (targets for a rousing game of “spot the tranny”), they show their surgical scars (nevermind that there are plenty of people who share the same scars, and don’t want to be recognized as trans every time they go swimming), or they give a thorough description of genital surgery techniques.

but this stuff is not going to make anyone more respectful or less likely to go into a jerry springer rage when someone’s trans status is disclosed. all it does is help people to identify trans folks who may want to stay under the radar, and teach the general public that they are entitled to know the complete, painful, and personal history of every inch of my body. it tells them that, while they would never think of asking an acquaintance about the length of their penis, the functionality of their vagina, these questions are open seasons if you meet a “tranny.” and quite frankly, anyone who needs to know this (i.e. the handful-at-most of potential transsexuals in the audience) will find this information elsewhere.

sometimes it just feels like being stripped naked and put in a cage at the zoo.

this is not to say that i am opposed to educating the general public about trans issues. obviously if any progress will be made, people need to understand certain things. in my opinion, those things would be:

• basic etiquette: including proper pronoun and name usage, what questions are (in)appropriate or (im)polite, and how it is absolutely unacceptable to disclose someone else’s information (like transition or surgical status, old name, or the fact that someone is trans at all)
• challenges and issues facing trans people: like legal status regarding housing, employment, and hate crimes, violence against trans people, and such.
• personal stories: and be very clear when i say “personal.” no one trans person speaks for all of us.

people definitely do NOT need to know about the following in a “trans 101″ panel:

• specific physical details: including, but not limited to, surgical options and results (i.e. “how do they put a dick on a woman?!?!”), what kind of scars are left, specific effects of hormones, and physical traits that might aid one in the “spotting of a tranny.” anyone who needs to know this stuff can find it out in so many other places, and it is more than the general public needs to know. not to mention it compromises the safety of other trans people.
• legal loopholes: a.k.a. how we can use the flawed legal system to do what we need to do for our own safety and peace of mind.

at the risk of sounding too secretive and curmudgeonly, i do want people to become educated. i just don’t think that offering up people’s naked bodies as specimens for verbal dissection is a useful way to do that.

i recently saw an ex of mine from six years ago…the last relationship i was in. we’re good friends now, and can talk easily about how things were back then. when we were together, i was very, very early in transition. like, only going by my first trans name and male pronouns to a few close friends and people online. everyone else knew me as a dyke. our relationship was good because she was bi, and usually dated girly non-trans guys anyway, so i never worried that she saw me as a woman or as less than a man. she was supportive of my body issues, and never called me the wrong name.

but still, things were weird because the only ftm relationship models i had seen were that of the emotionally damaged, struggling pre-transition transsexual (always an androgynous hipster liberal arts major type), and his oh-so-nurturing femme soffa. the trans guy was always conflicted about everything, and the femme was always there to make him feel manly and to make herself look like the best trans ally on the block. she gave him his t shots and emptied his surgical drains, and affectionately called him a trannyboy.

this was not the relationship we had. i was her nerdy little boyfriend, a few inches shorter and with narrower shoulders and less upper body strength. i cried more and wrote long sappy love letters and knew less about cars and sports. yet i still kept framing our relationship in terms of the ftm-femme/soffa model, and it never fit….in a good way. i felt loved and validated as a guy without being shoved into the box of being this ultra butch, yet sensitive and emotionally scarred trannyboy in need of a nurturing and hip femme to love me like it was her life’s work.

then we broke up. three years later, i was injecting my own testosterone and going to my name change hearing essentially alone, without anyone to throw me a “t party” or make me a manly gift basket the way some of these women do. there was nobody to notice every new hair, every drop of my voice.

a year after that, i was emptying my own surgical drains, and friends were coming over now and then to make me dinner or hang out with me in my helpless post-op state. there was no nurturing femme there to bring me snacks and water and feed me pain pills. after i was healed, there was nobody to help me rediscover the new contours of my chest, or to revel with me in the delight at being able to take my shirt off with someone and not have a panic attack.

there was nobody to finally show me what skin-on-skin embraces feel like.

and while i’m glad that my transition has been my own, with no horrible memories down the road of heinous exes being involved in a huge life event, there is a part of me that feels a little sad every time i read an online transition journal and hear all about how some guy’s partner nursed them back to health after surgery or whatever. i’m glad i missed out on being patronized and treated like an invalid, but sometimes i get a little lonely.

……

in the entire time since i have transitioned, i have been completely and utterly single. i know part of it is that i’m too picky, which i have always been. part of it is that i put up a thick wall to keep out anyone i might be interested in, or who might be interested in me. i have convinced myself that being perpetually lonely is better than phone calls that suddenly stop coming, than being told, “i don’t date women,” or putting my body on the line, only to be let down.

i have chosen chronic aches over a baseball bat to the face.

on a certain level, it makes me feel like this whole thing has been a failure. transition has been so good for me in so many ways, and the best thing i can say about it is that i don’t think about gender every hour of every day any more. but then there are all the times i hear people’s fears about transition…that they will become some freak who is totally unlovable and gross and who will never be touched with as much as a ten foot pole. i tell them it’s not true, that transition will not turn them into some hideous pariah, destined to live alone in a shack with a cat and a vibrator. transition will make them feel more at home in their bodies, and more confident about approaching people, more able to enjoy sex without being constantly stressed.

then i look around my apartment and realize that, with the exception of the cat, the worst case relationship scenario is my life. i haven’t done anything resembling sex with another person in over 6 years. i don’t even know what it would feel like in this body that is completely physically and emotionally dissimilar from what it was the last time i was in bed with another person.

it makes me so sad, like i am that example of the lonely, pathetic transsexual that i tell people doesn’t exist.

i am such a liar.

……

of course, there are the “transsensuals,” the people (usually queer women) who love trans people (usually “trannies”) so much that they have defined their whole orientations around us. forget for a moment that what they usually mean is “gender ambiguous, skinny, white, female-assigned hipsters with piercings and tattoos who spew gender theory every time they open their mouths.” forget that they don’t want someone who really looks, sounds, and smells like a man. the real question is, why am i lonely when there are self-described “tranny chasers” running amok?!?!?! what’s wrong with me?!?!?!

oh, right, that dignity thing.

despite being chronically alone, i refuse to buy this idea that anyone who will sleep with me is some kind of fucking saint. fetishizing one of the hardest things in my life is not attractive, and being willing to consider me as a boyfriend does not make you mother teresa. this has been a painful, scary, and emotionally taxing process. it’s been rewarding too, and has taught me a lot, and given me a community and an outlook on life that i would not have normally had. and while i would probably not choose to have been born a non-trans guy if given the chance, this has left so many wounds in me that it makes me sick to think someone would be attracted to me just for this reason.

ugh.

i don’t want to be just “another place to stick it.” i don’t want to be the accessory on the arm of some gender theorist, or the stone for some oh-so-nurturing femme to try and crack. i don’t want to be someone’s activist work, their queer cred, or their fucking charity. despite all this, i still think i am not that bad of a person. i mean, i’m not totally hideous. i have a career where i am doing something useful for society. i’m not a terrible person. there are other reasons to like me besides that “extra place to stick it.” that should not be the neon sign that attracts people to me, but it feels like maybe that’s the only way.

sometimes this really sucks.

today was gorgeous, so i went to the park to sit and people-watch. i got a bench next to this little huddle of hipsters who were hanging out and having a loud conversation. it was fairly predictable. you know the sort, full of ironic raves about ugly haircuts and bad movies from the 80s and how [my second favorite pizza place] is no good because it’s not like REAL new york style pizza.

then they got on the topic of wieners (which began as a hot dog conversation), and one of them suddenly asked, “what do they do for female to male transsexuals? like how do they get a wiener?” they each threw out possible options, such as removing skin from other parts of the body, or transplants, or silly and unlikely procedures like “they go down to the sex emporium and sew one on.”

it never ceases to entertain me when people have loud conversations like that in public, because they cannot possibly imagine that there might be an Actual Transsexual within earshot. because obviously, they would know if there were.

predictably, the conversation moved on to thomas beatie, “the pregnant man.” everyone and their mom and their mom’s mom knows about “the pregnant man” now. thanks oprah, people magazine, and basically the entire mass media. when hipsters in the park can discuss transsexual male pregnancies the way they discuss obscure bands, then something weird is happening.

now don’t get me wrong. i believe in reproductive rights, including those of men who want to use the uterus they were born with. i don’t think it makes him any less of a man to do it, either. i’m sure there are loads of non-trans guys who would jump at the chance to carry a child if their partner couldn’t. as someone who can’t even imagine wanting to do that, i know that he (ironically) has to have a serious pair of balls to go through pregnancy as a man.

however, i think his decision to make a fucking media circus out of this is no good. his 15 minutes is putting the trans community under greater legal scrutiny, and i cannot see anything good coming of it. now that pregnant men is a topic for casual conversation, folks are bound to take a closer look at the requirements for getting that little “m” on a driver’s license or social security record. i may not want to use my uterus, but i definitely don’t want the state telling me i have to give it up in order to be documented as who i really am. unfortunately, thanks to one guy’s exploiting of his situation in order to get on the teevee, that could be a real possibility.

but maybe i’m being crotchety and paranoid. after all, as a dyke, i was always fighting against the “we’re just like you” rhetoric that is the mantra of the hrc, so why should i be upset that the only ftm trans people who are anything close to household names are buck angel, the porn star, and thomas beatie, the pregnant man?

i am just fed up with the one-sided attention that the trans community gets in the media. i’m angry that daytime talk shows exploit us just to entertain the masses. i’m angry that trans people allow themselves to be paraded around in the media in search of their fifteen minutes, and use “education” as an excuse. and i’m furious at those who take advantage of folks’ need for validation, and use it to exploit them on national television.

age at which i read stone butch blues: 16.

age at which i began to realize how much it applied to me: 19

age at which i had socially transitioned and started medically transitioning: 24

i have always been an introvert, but in that five year span of time between realizing what i needed, and building up the courage to go after it fully, i managed to develop a great deal of social anxiety. when i took psych 100, we had to sign up to take surveys for grad student experiments, and once i got flagged as being prone to anxiety issues. well, duh. but i never sought out any kind of treatment because, fuck, of course i had anxiety issues; it’s fucking hard being a man that the world sees as a genderfucked dyke.
routine stuff like going to the bank or buying groceries became this complex ballet of gender. the “what the fuck is that?” on the bus, or the “sir-ma’am-sir,” or worse, the way people would dodge ungracefully around pronouns. i learned to do my errands at the times when i was least likely to have to stand in line (which was basically just a stage for people to notice the fact that i didn’t fit in anywhere). to this day, i still have this mental cutoff point at which it is too late to go grocery shopping. if i need groceries past, say, 10:30 or so on a weekend, well, i better wait til sunday morning. i don’t need to do that anymore, but it’s burned into my routine.

there was a time, in between when i came out to my close friends as trans, and when i came out to everyone els, when i could not bring myself to choke out my old name. i was afraid to use my (first gender-neutral) boy name, so meeting new people was a whole new terrifying proposition. i’d shake hands and tell people i didn’t have a name, or that my name was assface (or something similar). then i was that weird he-she who said it didn’t have a name.

which was just as well, because i was terrified of making any new friends. just one more person to have to come out to, and not worth the trouble.

but then again, i would hang around old friends and feel completely isolated in a group, to the point where i would just stop talking and then just go home and freak out about how they were probably all talking about what i weirdo i was.

i could barely bring myself to order a pizza. i would sit alone in my apartment on friday nights, aching for company to the point where i felt sick to my stomach, and holding the phone in my hand, terrified at the prospect of dialing a number because i knew that everyone else had these awesome plans, and were just going to turn me down, which would feel even worse. what kind of loser sits at home on a friday night anyway? and can’t even make a simple phone call? i told myself that if they really wanted me to hang out with them, they would have called me. i convinced myself that nobody wanted to hang out with me that much, that if they were really that interested in being my friend, they would call me. i try to talk myself out of that, and i’m getting better, but i still wrestle that particular bear a lot, and sometimes it wins. summer is the worst.

but there was a time when i had to give myself a pep talk just to get on the bus. i had to meticulously plan my errands to avoid contact with people, and to not get myself stuck someplace. going alone to a restaurant where i didn’t know the ordering system was enough to ruin my day.

and what’s left to do when you’re too nervous to go out and connect with people? stay inside and worry about dying alone, of course. oh, and suffer stabbing guilt because i worried that i didn’t appreciate my family enough.

it’s exhausting just to write this.

i tried to join the uu church in hopes of meeting some cool people, but i went by this horrible gender-neutral name, and when someone called me “she,” i knew i couldn’t go back. i tried it once after i had been on t for awhile, and a few people i had met before just kind of stared at me in tentative recognition. then my therapist showed up and greeted me by saying, “wow, the t is really working! your face is really broken out!”

it took so much out of me just to go there, and that was the last time i went.

but there was also that time that i went and the sermon was about something that touched a raw wound and sent me into a bathroom stall to bawl in the middle of the service. i don’t even remember what it was, but i remember that desperate pain in that bathroom stall, like i needed someone just to get it, or to just care that i was sitting on a toilet and choking back sobs, but i was stuck in this building full of strangers who thought i was some genderless weirdo. i got my shit together and (after great deliberation) called k to see if she wanted to go to lunch with me after church, but i got her voice mail and didn’t hear from her until two days later, at which point she seemed exasperated that i had asked her at the last minute, because she was so busy.

this is not what i meant to write about. oops.

i guess the point was that i used to be so afraid of meeting people and going out alone, because i was afraid of getting he-she’d, or mispronouned, or ID’d, or whatever, and it was so fucking nerve-wracking that i usually just stayed inside, to my own detriment. somewhere in there, i feel like i turned into this irreparably lonely person who can’t make friends or meet someone i might be interested in…because, fuck, i’d have to eventually disclose to them, and they’d just reject me or get sick of me or leave, and then i’d be back on my own, forever single and living alone and too allergic for a real pet.

but i remind myself that i have gotten better, even if i still have lots of things to keep fighting back. testosterone has evened out the mood swings that catapulted my anxiety into overdrive, and i feel more confident about going out in public. my identification and my body fit who i am, and i’m used to hanging out alone a lot.

i still have a lot of work to do.

the scars that this has left on my skin are nothing compared to the ones on my psyche.

like how the muscles in the back of my neck tense slightly when i walk past a group of laughing people, bracing myself for the inevitable volley of dyke-faggot-he/she-what-the-fuck-is-it that i just know is headed my way.

i mean, i still remember walking down the hall in 6th grade, wearing these ridiculous purple sweatpants in the hope of looking more feminine in spite of my shaggy boy’s hair, when a kid grabbed my arm and said, “hey, are you a faggot?” before running off laughing.

6th fucking grade.

then there’s the way that my stomach clenches just a little every time i head toward a public restroom. it’s been years since i’ve been confronted in the bathroom, but i still have a mental database of safe toilets stored in my head, and i still let it plan my errands.

i’m too tired to finish this right now.

when i was a kid, i really hated to dress up. my mother and grandmother tried their damnedest to get me in a dress with a smile on my face, but “dress” and “smile” were mutually exclusive. i remember that the few times i was sent to school in a skirt, i spent the entire day in humiliated tears. church was a thing to be dreaded and weaseled out of, because nobody but me seemed to get that god wouldn’t care if i wore pants. i spent my childhood in fear of dress codes.

my senior year of high school, i inherited my dad’s old tuxedo to be used for concerts at school. the uniform was tuxedo shirt and cummerbund, and somehow i managed not to inform my parents that girls had a weird ribbon thing in lieu of a bow tie. oops. i felt like i had hit the jackpot. i would lock the door to my bedroom and put it on…wispy dress pants with a satin stripe up the leg, tucking the shirt into the too-high pants, clicking the cummerbund into place, hooking the pre-tied bow tie around my neck, and sliding into the too-big jacket. i was a puny james bond, and i loved every second of it. in that moment, i realized what the big deal was about dressing up. putting on nice clothes really could make a person feel attractive and special.

in college, finally free to be the butchest dyke i could be, i bought a couple of $2 suits at the local thrift store…pinstriped and ill-fitting, musty and ugly, but being the weird punk rock kid, that was part of the appeal. a few hideous ties later, i felt like the slickest kid in any queer bar i went to. those mothball-smelling jackets with the enormous shoulder pads were my armor against the constant refrain of “is that a man or a woman? what the fuck are you, anyway?” that had been haunting me since the age of 10. the pinstripes were my new badge of honor. i was a weirdo butch dyke, and everyone else could go fuck themselves if they didn’t like it.

fast-forward a few years.

slowly, my suits went from queer-as-fuck uniform, to something for special occasions, to actual dress up clothes. i was going from butch dyke, to drag king, to genderqueer, to transman, and the pinstripes and shoulder pads followed me. people quit being shocked that i was wearing a suit as it became more obvious that that was the only appropriate thing for me to wear on dressy occasions.

then one morning, i was on the bus, headed downtown for a job interview, wearing my first real suit. i’d gone to a suit store and been measured. the pants had been tailored to fit me. it was a decent color. it cost more than $5 and didn’t smell like old man. it was what i had wanted all those years ago when i had to make some heinous and ill-fitting compromises in the racks of the thrift stores.

it was not that exciting.

i was on the bus with plenty of other white guys in suits, all going to work. nobody was leering at me. nobody was pointing and snickering. nobody was questioning my gender with a sneer. nobody was noticing me at all.

my suits had quit being a hard-won badge of honor, a dress code anomaly.

they became an expectation.

they became a cloak of invisibility.

a delightfully cranky version of trans 101.