CarnalNation

About a month into my transition, as I was walking down the street, somebody leaned out of a car window and yelled, “Nice fucking pants, faggot!” It was the first time I had been verbally attacked as a queer man.

I should have been irate. I should have yelled, “Screw you, asshole!” and flipped him the bird. Instead, I beamed, because at least he’d noticed I was a guy.

In my early transition I was completely absorbed with thoughts of “passing.” I worried whether I would “make a good man” or “end up passable.” I constantly picked over every aspect of my appearance: I was tall enough to be just barely average height for a male, but my hands were too small, my face too pretty. I fretted over the minutest detail that might “give me away.”

I don’t do that anymore. The fact of the matter is, testosterone did its thing. A deeper voice, more facial and body hair, and greater muscle mass are unmistakable gender cues to other people. I am treated as male ninety nine percent of the time, with that other one percent accounted for by people (mostly family) who know my history and have their own hang-ups about it. I’ve also taken a little reality check. I realize now that many cis men are short, many have small hands, and that I will never be as pretty as Jonathan Rhys Meyers. But most importantly, I’ve stopped caring whether I live up to the cis idea of what a man should be.

The whole notion of “passing” is extremely problematic. In other contexts, “passing” is used to mean “being seen as something one is not,” for instance, a person of color passing as Caucasian. But I don’t just “pass” as a man. I am a man. If someone was to talk about me “passing” as anything, it would make more sense to refer to me passing as a female before I transitioned. Furthermore, all this talk of passing reinforces the idea that trans people are lying, that we are pretending, that we have to try really, really hard just to be ourselves, and that we will never do it as well as cis people can.

What “passing” really means is “looking cis.” Or, to be more precise, looking how cis people are “supposed” to look. A trans woman who passes is short and delicate, just like cis women are “supposed” to be. A trans man who passes is muscular and deep voiced, the way cis men are “supposed” to be. And so forth, and so on. It doesn’t matter that some cis men are never able to grow a full mustache, and that some cis women can. Everyone has an image in their mind of what the “ideal” man or woman looks like, just as everyone has been taught that the ideal human being must look either “male” or “female.”

Cis people who fail to fit in with these ideals suffer, of course. Men and women whose masculinity or femininity doesn’t “measure up” are cruelly censured and often violently attacked. But for a cis man or woman, it’s highly unlikely that their lack of culturally dictated gender cues will cause others to actually deny that they are a man or a woman at all. And this type of total ungendering is exactly what trans people face.

As a trans man, I have to deal with cis people who feel they are entitled to scrutinize every aspect of my presentation. For example, if I were to cross my legs at the knee, the posture would doubtlessly be ridiculed as feminine. However, it’s just as likely that sitting with my legs apart would be interpreted as “trying too hard” to be masculine. For controlling my temper in a difficult situation, people have accused me of being passive and feminine, but when I respond aggressively, I’m told that I’ve obviously got something to prove or, conversely, that I’m hysterical and thereby feminine again. It’s  called a double bind. You just can't win.