Happy Thanksgiving

The day before Thanksgiving four years ago was the last time I went anywhere as a guy. I wore a fedora, black and white wing tip shoes, a vintage skinny tie and I don't remember whether it was my dark gray suit or my black one--guess it doesn't really matter, they looked the same.

I had started living socially (aka: "part time) as a woman for my twenty-eighth birthday two months earlier. It had been my plan to live that way for an entire year and transition to living "full-time" for my twenty-ninth birthday. By Thanksgiving weekend that year I was "passing" in most situations (even though I wouldn't start hormones for another month) and surprisingly I had found that it was easier and much less stressful for me than "passing" as a man. I was looking forward to my four day weekend and not having to worry about doing the man thing.

Actually, my ability to "pass" as a man was really suffering. Clients were noticing. It isn't that I'd changed much physically or that my mannerisms were effeminate, but something else. My last client that day was a woman nearing seventy who had seventeen cats. She loved me. She told me I had a really sensitive soul. We talked for about two hours--I never got acclimated to the smell in her house.

I ate Thanksgiving dinner by myself at Shoney's. My parents were out of town, but honestly having just come out to them I didn't want to spend the day with them anyway. All weekend long, no matter where I went people called me "she, miss, and ma'am." No one gave me any second looks. When my alarm went off on Monday morning for me to go into the office (as a man), I just couldn't do it. At that point there was no turning back. I haven't gone anywhere as a man since.

I guess I could bind my breasts and cut my hair if I ever wanted to be read as male again, but honestly that isn't something I could do. I really don't have that ability anymore. I guess that's why telling me I'm doing such a good job at being a woman is so insulting to me...it isn't really like I have anything else to choose from.

And still people think this isn't my authentic self...in subtle ways. Every time I'm talking to a lesbian and I see she is attracted to me and then immediately I see that it scares her and she dismisses it--just how many people would never even consider dating a woman like me. The TERFs who call me a rapist, people who care about me mis-gendering me because they don't/won't understand that things like that can get me killed, the fact that as a trans* woman I have a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered, the fact that if I am murdered my killer will likely only serve three years (if that or any) because "trans panic" is still a viable defense and lawyers will say I tricked my killer into thinking I was a woman, or the occasional gay guy who thinks I'm like them, or for that matter how incredibly unbelievable it is for so many people that I am exclusively attracted to woman--I've been told I'm lying about that so many times. Or how people see maleness in my proportions and size even though something like 60% of all women share my proportions and that I am hardly outside the average size range or American women (actually I'm thankful for those two facts)

Really, as important as I think it is to be out as a trans* person I really feel how being one really negatively affects the quality of my life.

Still, I'm thankful. I'm thankful in so many ways that I couldn't even begin to explain, like the feeling the softness of my breasts when I wake up, and not feeling like a clown every time I have to dress up, and not dealing with the [masculine] gendered assumptions people used to make about me from the moment they met me, or for that matter people don't tell me I'm a "really weird girl" like they used to tell me I was a "really weird guy," and knowing my instincts are "normal."

Everyday I wish I was born cis-gendered. I wish I could have the childhood, and teens, and early twenties years that I missed out on, or even that I didn't remember thinking my life was a horrible weird nightmare just praying I could wake up and it would be over.

It is over. And every morning the first thing I think when I wake up is "Thank god! thank god! thank god I'm a woman."