It is cruel sometimes how little the outside can reflect the major renovations that are occurring inside your mind. Like a heritage listed building that is forced to keep its original façade, but everything behind it is completely new. You go around feeling like the work has been done and the foundations have been laid, but strangers keep using your old address. What is it going to take for others to see me how I see myself?
It has been eighteen months since my surgery and over three years since i started identifying as non-binary. I don’t know exactly when I ‘came out’. There isn’t really a marker, but the feeling has been around for a long time. I remember starting to tell people at work. The nerves building as i waited to introduce myself. It was all new and kind of exciting in a way. Like a new outfit, here i am! Taadaa, look at me! But like all new outfits, they get old. Lose their shine. People get used to them. You get used to yourself.
There isn’t nerves anymore when I introduce myself. Now it is more of a low lying dread. A guessing game. Not to be judgemental, but, I’m getting pretty good at picking who is going misgender me straight away. Even before they know it most of the time. I have to. Prepare myself for the stab. Doesn’t matter though, you still feel it every time. Strangers you cop on the chin. Loved ones get you in the ribs.
I need to do more. I need more armour. More protection. I’m not even scaring them off guessing my gender. It just rolls off their tongue without a moment's hesitation “hi ladies, what can I get you?”. There isn’t a chest flat enough and a bulge big enough to combat this it seems.
But what does it matter? I know who I am, and I am who I am despite what people say. That’s what I tell myself after being gender stung for the seventeenth time that day. People will change. They have changed. Gosh, a few years ago my football club told me I was being too sensitive, bringing politics into it asking if we could be more inclusive and recognise pronouns “people just wanna play footy” the coach said. “We can maybe try within the team, but we can’t ask visitors of the club to use gender neutral terms, it is too much”. Now they actively support trans players, share gender inclusive policies and every guest uses the term “players” when addressing the team.
People can change, but outside that bubble with its constant exposure and insight, they aren’t even close. I presented on a panel this week. I told the facilitator upon introduction, at sound check, and in a reminder email on the day “please be aware of my pronouns, please don’t use she/her”. I clocked him, he was definitely one of them, so I was extra careful. Alas, I was introduced one time only, there was a script and he still managed to misgender me. And thus did the seventy-five people in the session that proceeded.
I need to do more. They are only small mistakes, honest mistakes, but they build up over the years and those microaggressions, they wear you down. Now I look at myself more and more, trying to pull the two worlds together. Make the line a little clearer. Get the inside, out.
It isn’t enough to have my breasts removed and my chest reconstructed. It isn’t enough to carefully select every item of clothing so it flatters my masculine side. To keep my hair cut short. To push myself harder at the gym to bulk out my frame. To constantly monitor how I hold myself. Lower my voice as much as possible. All these things, years and years of conscious effort, they’re brushed carelessly aside with a split second assumption. Another butch lesbian, they think.
I need more markers. More questioning. More help to balance things out.
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