A quick feminist rage post

Apologies in advance. I probably shouldn't be rage-posting on this blog, but... I'm going to anyways.

So, there's this online crossdressing forum that I'm registered on. I don't visit there very often, but every now and then I'll pop in and see what's going on, read a few threads, leave some comments, that sort of thing.

Today a lady had posted saying she was going on her first date with a man, and her first date as a woman, and was asking for advice. (She added that she'd never been into men before but had a crush on this one and was through with trying to categorize her sexuality: a good attitude to have, I think). As you can imagine there was lots of excitement, thoughts on what to wear, what style of wig to go with, tips on staying safe... all the typical stuff you'd expect from a gaggle of crossdressers.

Several people, however, said things like "let him do most of the talking," and "make sure he pays the bill." Someone actually said "be passive; don't talk, listen."

Cue feminist rage moment.

Seriously? Be passive? Don't talk? What kind of 1950s bullcrap sexism is that? You would think crossdressers, whose very existence challenges binary gender norms, would be the last people in the world to appeal to and reinforce the traditional male\female roles. Gender binarism is precisely the reason why so many of us are forced into the closet, why so many of us can't be ourselves around our friends and families, and why so many of us can't dress the way we want to on a day-to-day basis. It's also part of the reason why trans people in general are stigmatized, mocked, and occasionally killed. And yet here we are, propping up that system ourselves. Way to go, gals.

I was a tad nettled.

"Don't talk, sweetheart. Every man loves a woman with no personality!"

Of course, if she wants to be passive and listen, that's fine. If she wants to clean his house and do his laundry afterward, that's fine too, I don't care. What bothered me is that people were recommending passivity solely because she's going to be a woman on a date with a man.

Anyways, I didn't comment there because I'm not a regular and didn't want to take the thread off topic. But typing this out here has felt good.

That is all :)

I'm not really a "boy" anymore

It hasn't yet been three months since I started this blog, but I've come to feel differently about my gender in that short amount of time.

In my introductory post I referred to myself as a tomgirl, which I defined as "a boy that likes girly things." At the time I sincerely hoped that I could be comfortable as a male so long as I got to twirl about in a skirt every now and then. But now, more and more, I'm beginning to recognize that this is probably not the case. Identifying myself as a boy, even a "boy that likes girly things," just doesn't feel right to me anymore.

At the same time, I'm pretty sure I'm not a girl either. At least, not fully. Or if I am, I'm not ready to face it yet. So I've started thinking of myself as "non-binary, tending toward female." That's a lot more complicated, and takes a lot longer to say, than just "boy" or "girl," but no one ever said gender was simple, right?

(Well, actually people say that all the time, but... they don't know what they're talking about!)

The blog's subtitle still reads "the diary of a tomgirl." I may change that at some point, though I'm pretty sure "the diary of a non-binary person who tends toward female" would only compound the awkwardness of the blog's already impossible name! We'll see what I come up with...

Feeding the gender-dragon

My location on the gender spectrum doesn't really change: I always feel like more of a girl than a boy. However, the strength of that feeling can vary widely. Sometimes my "gendered-ness" is no more than a quiet, nagging whisper: present, but able to be ignored. At those times, presenting as a boy doesn't bother me too much, and I'm able to get on with life. But sometimes, it's a deafening, piercing shout. It drowns out everything else and demands to be heard. And that gets awfully frustrating.

The past four or five days have been really bad. I haven't been able to focus on schoolwork (I had to skip a small assignment) and I've been having trouble paying attention in class. Lately it seems like gender, and my sense of discomfort with my male-ness, is all I can think about.

Sometimes having these gender feelings is like living with a dragon. I have to satisfy the dragon's hunger or it will devour me. So I say to it, "Look gender-dragon, I bought you some frilly pink panties. Now will you leave me alone?" And if it's content with that I can breathe easily for a few days. But soon enough it gets hungry again, and each time it wants more.

The first thing I did when I figured out I was trans was to shave off the scraggily beard I'd been sporting for two years. That in itself brought me a huge sense of relief. Then it was makeup, then clothes, then breastforms, nail polish, shaving my legs.... And it makes me wonder, when will it finally be enough? When I'm out to everyone and can crossdress most of the time I want to? Or will I have to go full-time and change my name? What if it takes electrolysis, HRT and surgery?? Needless to say, I don't want to mess around with those last three if it's at all possible.

Roar!
(artwork by John Bauer)

I don't know why I have these feelings, but I do know some things I can do to help. As much as I detest it, I should probably get in the habit of shaving every day: that really does seems to make a difference. The same thing goes for wearing makeup, too. I think it's bullshit that our society has decided 20 minutes in front of a mirror each morning is an indispensable part of "feeling like a woman," but whatever: if it helps to assuage my gender stress, it's probably something I should do.

Earlier this month I read the book She's not the Man I Married by Helen Boyd, which, as you can probably tell, is about how her husband's trans-ness has affected their lives. (And come to think of it, that book also uses a dragon as a metaphor for gender, though in a different context). I quite liked it, but I have to admit, at least part of the reason I enjoyed it so much was simply that it allowed me to live vicariously through Helen's husband, Betty, who has been much more able than I to explore and express her own femininity. That's probably not the healthiest way to read a book.

The other reason I liked it was that Helen writes from a very feminist perspective. Before I knew I was trans, I thought I was such a good little feminist because I had no interest in fulfilling a traditional male gender role. I thought to myself, "If I, as a man, would rather stay at home and cook and clean and raise the kids, then I should marry a career-woman." And that was that. But when I learned I was transgender, I started to wonder: what if the reason I want to cook and clean and raise the kids is not that I'm an open-minded man, but simply that I'm a woman?? I was appalled. Had I suddenly gone from defying traditional gender roles to reinforcing them? After that there existed some tension in my mind between feminism and trans-ness. The trans-inclusive feminism in Helen's book helped me to see that being trans doesn't make you a misogynist, and being a feminist doesn't make you a transphobe.

Being seen and affirmed

Because I've started telling people, I am partially out of the closet. But because I have yet to leave the house as a girl, I suppose I'm still mostly in. Last week I did that thing that seems to be one of the hallmarks of a closeted crossdresser: I got myself all girled up and started snapping photos in my room! Sure, it's a bit silly, but I had a lot of fun with it, so who cares?

Afterwards I posted a few of the better ones on a crossdressing forum that I occasionally visit. The ladies there are far, far too kind: they all had very lovely things to say and pretty soon I was blushing. I guess compliments make me happy, who knew?

But of course it was about more than just compliments: it was the first time I'd ever really been seen as a girl by anyone, even if it was only over the internet; and their response was an affirmation of who I am. It's surprising how much being seen and affirmed can matter to someone.

Me being a tomboy. Someone else referred to this as "criss-crossdressing."

I've started school now and it seems to be going well, though it's a little strange being so much older than most of the other students.

There's a "queer social group" on campus called OUTreach. Yesterday was their first meeting of the term, and I forced myself to go. I didn't want to. I knew it would be icebreakers and I hate that sort of thing. Though I love people, I am unfortunately very shy, awkward and anxious when it comes to meeting new ones. But I went anyways.

And it was good. While I was biking over there I kept thinking, man, I'm gonna be the only person there who's not gay. I also kept thinking man, I'm gonna be the only "boy" with painted nails, since I had applied some sparkly blue polish earlier. And while I was right about the nails, there were a couple of other people there who had queer gender identities rather than (or in addition to) queer orientations. So that was cool. Hopefully in the future I will be able to get to know them better: I really need to have people in my life whom I can talk to about this stuff, and who can understand some of what I'm going through.

Overall I'm glad I went. Afterwards though, I couldn't stop thinking about how much I would rather have gone as a girl!

I don't always...

I don't always wear girly sleepwear to bed, but when I do, it's an absolute joy waking up the next morning. There's nothing like starting off your day in the right gender! ^_^

The only downside (and it's a pretty big one) is that it makes having to change into boy clothes right away that much more miserable. Lately I've come to realize that my crossdressing is not simply about the fact that I like dressing as a girl; it's also about the fact that I hate dressing as a boy.

(happy sigh) :D

This past week has been good in some ways and frustrating in others. I'm starting school next week, but I decided to quit my job last week (ie, a week early) so as to have some free time in between. During that time I was able to dress a lot more freely than I usually am, since my roommates were, for the most part, at work during the day. This was wonderful, but it forced me to revisit a bunch of questions that, in many ways, I'd rather not have to deal with: would I dress full time if I could? would I transition if it wasn't so scary? am I, in fact, a girl in the wrong body??

When I first accepted my trans-ness and started trying to figure out what it means for me, I asked those sort of questions a lot. They caused me a great deal of stress and not a few tears, but I eventually reached the conclusion that I'm fairly happy having a boy body and transitioning is probably not right for me. Today I'm less certain about either of those things.

The freedom I had this week also forced me to face the fact that I will have to come out to my roommates at some point. It will drive me insane if I have to keep locking myself up in my room any time I need to dress and someone else happens to be home. My roommates are good guys and they're totally not homophobic or anything, so I think they'd be okay with it, but even still, coming out is always hard.

Science, religion, and why I'm going to school

Guess what I'll be starting in a week? My first year of university! At age 25 I suppose it's better late than never. Sure, it's been eight years since I graduated from high school, but that's just how long it took me to figure out what I wanted to study!

Actually, seven years ago I thought I wanted to study Christian theology: (as I've mentioned before, I had a very religious upbringing). So, I started attending a theological college and ended up staying for almost four years. That was about how long it took me to figure out I didn't actually believe in most of traditional Christianity. I also began to doubt that there was (or even could be) any sound epistemic basis for believing in the authority of scripture.

During the years that followed, I very, very gradually came to believe that the scientific method provides a more certain means of acquiring knowledge than faith does. This was not an easy process: I became profoundly depressed, for example, when I realized I couldn't be certain whether there was an afterlife. (That might sound silly, but when you've believed since childhood that you will literally live forever, and then find out you might only get eighty or ninety years, it hits you pretty hard). But eventually I concluded that, as Cat Faber puts it in The Word of God, "humans wrote the bible; God wrote the world." And that if I wanted to search for truth, I'd do better to study the natural world than scripture. And as I spent more and more of my free time devouring science articles on Wikipedia, I fell absolutely in the love with the awesome, beautiful universe in which we live. And so, here I am today, about to start a four year degree with a major in astrophysics! Yay!!

Astrophysics, dude.

For much of my life the bible was a huge factor in determining what I thought, did and tried to feel; and for a long time this hindered me from recognizing and accepting my trans-ness. It wasn't until I began to see the bible as, not an unquestionable divine authority, but merely a good book, that I felt free enough to try to understand the gender issues I'd been struggling with. This is partly because the bible, as you might expect, specifically condemns transvestism (in Deutoronomy 22:5). But more important than that was an entire understanding of gender that I internalized from reading Genesis 1:27, which says, "God created humans in his image; in the image of God he made them male and female." Like many conservative Christians, I took this to mean that male-ness and female-ness are not mere social constructs, nor some accident of biology, but direct manifestations of the very nature of God himself. Thus I felt like any queering of gender norms was a very serious transgression. And though I very rarely "gave in," I felt guilty any time I even wanted to wear heels or dresses or makeup. And I almost always wanted to.

Needless to say, I am deeply grateful to have changed my way of thinking!


[EDIT: Just to clarify the terminology for the rest of the world: in Canada, a university is an academic institution, whereas a college provides vocational training. They're not the same thing.]

Choosing a girl name

When I first began to realize I might be a crossdresser, I started reading a lot of stuff about it on the internet. I soon noticed that almost all of the MtF crossdressers in the online community had a nom de femme, and that that was the name they usually went by. I thought to myself, "That makes sense, why not?" At the time I didn't really feel like I needed a girl name, but it seemed like a cool part of the culture of crossdressing. In addition to that, it just seemed practical: if I was hoping to one day pass as a woman, I'd want a ready answer if someone asked me my name.

So I made a list of girl names that I liked: Hannah, Tiffany, Caroline, Amber, and Hillary. Then I noticed that if I chose Tiffany as a first name and Amber as a middle name, I could keep the same initials I have as a guy. So thats's what I went with at first.

But Tiffany never really felt like me. I'm not sure why, but that name always felt more like an alter-ego, or like some woman I was aspiring to be, rather than the person who I just am. Some crossdressers talk about their other gender as though they have a split personality, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's not what I wanted for me. I started to question whether I should have a girl name at all. In the end I decided I would choose something closer to my boy name. Since my boy name is Tyler, the obvious choice was Taylor. I chose Ashley as a middle name because it sounded like my boy middle name. But when I realized I didn't actually like the name Taylor (at least not for me), I switched them around. So now I'm Ashley.

To be honest, I'm still not sure if a girl name is something I need. But then, so far I've only used it on the internet. Perhaps once I've been caled Ashley in the real world, once that name has been spoken aloud, perhaps then it will seem real to me.