9

Trans/Love

There were two reasons why I was so scared of physical transition, why I vacillated about what it was that I needed, caved in to social pressure, presented myself according to the instructions of others, to the detriment of my mental health and happiness. The first was because I wanted to have a successful career, and I’d never heard of an openly trans classical musician. It seemed an impossibility when I was a teenager. Even now, I only know of a small handful.

The second, more overwhelming concern: that being trans made me unlovable, and that I should keep my body as it was for the sake of someone I couldn’t afford to lose.

Trans people occupy a strange place in society when it comes to desirability, sexual attractiveness, and our supposed value as romantic partners. In pornography, trans women are highly visible or, rather, some trans women are highly visible. The standards for trans women in mainstream porn are no different from other gendered standards in mainstream media: only a narrow band of women are considered worthy. Otherwise we are, for the most part, invisible or branded as undesirable. In 2016 there are some trans celebrities, a very small number of highly visible trans women, trans men, and genderqueer people, who are widely accepted as attractive. They are outliers. Attraction to a trans person is more usually seen as a joke and a failure. If we match normative standards of what it is to be beautiful then we’re deceptive; if we don’t we’re pathetic. All that we are, all that we could bring to a relationship, is swept away in that judgment: unworthy, repugnant, fake.

I worry that my concerns over appearing desirable, with wanting to be wanted, are a sign of shallowness. I worry that those worries are an inevitable symptom of growing up being told that I was ugly on a daily basis, of being mocked and isolated and told that I deserved it because of being ugly. Not feeling at home in my body, it was easy to judge it as a thing apart, and to fear the ways in which it was seen by strangers. I drew graphs, in therapy sessions, of beauty and ugliness, and plotted my own self close to the bottom. I had already read enough feminist theory by that point to know that the beauty myth was harmful, but I also felt, with an iron certainty, that it still applied to me and to my supposed ugliness. I took refuge in what I could do, in how I could think, but it wasn’t enough. It was at this juncture that the outer world taught me a crucial lesson to counter my inner knowledge: that I could be wanted, and desired, if I only presented myself in a certain way. At the age of fourteen I was experimenting with my gendered appearance daily; sometimes in flannel and waistcoats, and sometimes in lipstick and high heels. It was one of those times, dressed in feminine clothes, my hair long, my makeup perfect, that an older gentleman leaned out of a window in the restaurant we were passing, my family and I, and handed me a flower, because, he said, I was pretty. It was a pattern that would repeat again and again. In the clothes that made me feel most like myself—my father’s old suits, shirts and jeans from the men’s section, boots, a scuffed jacket—I was invisible. In dresses and blouses, tight sweaters, and padding in a bra, I was desirable: flirted with by strangers, cruised by older women, given little extras in coffee shops and restaurants, told openly and repeatedly, “You’re so beautiful.” I didn’t feel it—but I so wanted other people to feel it about me.

I think if I had had more time to figure it out on my own, it wouldn’t have been so hard. Despite that year and a half of confusion, my self-knowledge and self-respect were starting to win through. I found pride in presenting myself in a way that felt congruent with my inner self, in learning the exact things that made me feel happy and at home. I still caved in to outside pressure, particularly when I felt I had something to prove: that I wasn’t failing at a standard gendered appearance, I was rejecting it. But then I went to university, fell in love, and lost myself in the struggle between what I needed to be and what I needed to do to stay wanted.

It’s a terrible truism that the majority of us could look back on our early relationships with regret—I have nothing new to add on that score. I was very far from perfect, and I made a lot of wrong turns and mistakes: I was sorry then, and I’m sorry now.

I was not above reproach in my first major relationship, but neither was I dishonest about my gender, and my fears and hopes of transition. My girlfriend was interested, supportive, in some ways; she read the books that had helped me, bought me gifts that reflected the self I wanted to see. But, at so many other times, there were discrepancies and arguments that we glossed over, which I pretended didn’t hurt me. The person she loved wasn’t the person I needed to be. She didn’t like body hair; after months of pressure, I got rid of mine. The approval of the changes I had made for her worked a magic that requests or complaints could not have achieved. I started wearing skirts, because she thought they were sexy. When my hair was long, she was complimentary; when it was shaved or cut short, she withdrew her praise. The day I found a surgeon who was happy to treat me was one of the most exciting of my life; she asked me not to go through with it, because my body as it was made her happy. As she explained, I looked as I wanted to during the day, so why couldn’t I stay as she needed me to be when I was naked with her? I loved her in a very young and naïve way—if there had been no other pressures, I suspect our relationship would have ended then, after two and a half years, filled with some wonderful moments but based on a fundamental incompatibility.

What happened instead is hard to write down. My words feel insufficient compared to what I want to say, to the memories I’m trying to describe. I would like to keep what is private, private, and know also that my experience is so typical that it needs to be shared. My brother was diagnosed with a rare and serious form of brain cancer; he was eighteen, I was twenty-one. The odds of survival were not good, with treatments that were unlikely to serve as long-term solutions, but he was young and strong, and determined to try whatever his oncologists suggested. We couldn’t hope for a permanent remission, but we could buy time until a treatment that guaranteed remission could be found. We entered those rounds of surgery, chemo, and radiotherapy familiar to so many. I clung to my partner, wrote up my degree work in waiting rooms and on trains to and from hospital, and did my best by my brother. The treatments failed, then succeeded, and then the failures began to outweigh the successes. My girlfriend—partner—reaffirmed her commitment to me, to my family, and I leaned on her for every ounce of support I could get. She grew more and more uncomfortable with any elements of my appearance that would reflect my transness, my actual gender—and I fell in line. I find it hard, now, to understand just how quickly I acquiesced, how I could be so deeply invested in my transgender self and still be prepared to go against it. I remember one moment of absolute clarity, getting ready for her, facing myself in a full-length mirror. My body was prepped and shaped in all ways to a standard that she would find attractive, from my weight to my pubic hair—and I looked at myself in the mirror, and thought, “How could anyone fail to love that?” I no longer felt any connection to my own body as mine. It was just something designed and presented as a bargaining chip, a tool with which to secure another person’s desire and care.

I learned a valuable lesson from that relationship, one I thought I had known but obviously had failed to understand and internalize: if someone loves a certain image of you—an image which misses your true self—then the actuality of who you are will never be enough. No matter how much of myself I cut away to try to reflect back what she wanted to see, I was always found wanting. My brother died just over a year after that memory, and the relationship crumbled soon after that. Bereavement is staggeringly hard, and I was going through with the surgery after all.

CONTRARY TO THE dire warnings I’d been given—that no one would want me, no one would love me, with my body as it should be and my self recognizable and honest—I found the numbers of romantic offers I had actually increased. Some were from genuinely wonderful people; I made friends, I went on dates, I kissed a few people I shouldn’t have and learned a lot about myself.

Some of that interest, though, was like an inverted parody of what I had been used to in my teens. Where previously my transness had been undesirable, now it was valuable, but only through a certain reading.

There are some people who say that we shouldn’t criticize those cis people who fetishize us: that to do so is to shame someone for something natural and normal. That some attention is better than none at all. What I know is that that particular kind of attention made my skin crawl, and left me feeling almost as misread as the people who had wanted me to hide who I was. There were so many innuendos, assumptions, questions about my genitals. I was told that I was the “best of both worlds,” told that my masculinity was so much more attractive than a cis man’s, because I was “special,” because I was different, because I was exotic and strange. Cis people asked me to be their “first.” They grabbed me, and pressured me, and one particular man with a crush insisted on touching my chest so as to publicly announce whether I felt “real” or not. They fixated on their own ideas of what being trans meant to the exclusion of the reality of the trans person in front of them. It was another way of being objectified, of being reduced to a shell and a foreign narrative. I had just begun to come into a sense of comfort in my body, a deliberate attempt to learn how to care for myself, and I found that being alone was preferable to being wanted for what I am not.

What I’ve learned about love and desire and ways of seeing is not limited to interactions between cis and trans people. Neither is it indicative of all such interactions; cis and trans are blunt words for societal categories and prescriptions, and there are many, many people who stretch beyond their bounds in all areas of life. But I think there are common patterns, trends, that come from a meeting between a person naturalized in the belief that they are natural, and a person who has learned that what is natural for them is wrong, strange, and subject to the approval of others. From so many of the people I have met and known, desired and been desired by, I have learned that a trans person’s needs, reality, and physicality are supposed to be secondary to those of a cis person. I’ve learned it from the chasers who pursued me with specific ideas about how and when I should fuck them, regardless of how little interest I expressed. It was taught to me by a boyfriend who flipped between loving me and pushing me away, accepting my androgyny and sighing, “You would have made a beautiful woman.” It’s the message I received from men and women, gay and straight, who have admitted their attraction and followed it with “you confuse me”—not that these people are confused, but that I am responsible for their confusion.

What I have also learned, in time, is that there is nothing inevitable about this pattern, and no excuses for it. That was a lesson that came slowly: through meeting other trans people, caring for other trans people, being taught through the care of others to care for myself—through losing my brother and my partner at the same time and realizing that it was possible to go on alone. Through being loved conditionally, and learning that it’s never enough. And, finally, through being loved unconditionally, and realizing the utter difference between the two.

It’s the difference between making love to the person you love with yourself presented as a character in an artificial scene you hope will please them—withdrawing from your own body into a dislocated fantasy—and fucking so truthfully, in a way that is so totally in the moment, that the body is full to overflowing with a sense of total peace. It’s the distance between a desperation to be found beautiful and the knowledge that the whole of who I am is beautiful to my partner, and “beautiful” in a way that goes deeper than my appearance. It’s the change between pursuing the approval of the loved one as someone desired—known but also distant—and finding your best friend standing at your side.

It might seem a small thing to be angry about, compared with the overt hatred, workplace discrimination, denial of health care and education, but it’s an anger that hits deep. I cannot believe that, for so long, despite my best efforts to believe in my self, I so fully capitulated to the idea that the full expression of my true self was unworthy of care.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There is no reason for it to be so.

If we are to be treated with respect in the wider world, we must trust in the respect of those closest to us. The micro and the macro are inseparable. Trans people are worthy of love.