The words of a guy standing in a doorway next to St Margaret's bus station earlier this evening, uttered rather nervously while looking at my chest. He'd said something just before but my earphones had blocked that out, which is of course one reason for wearing them so frequently while I'm out (ha ha).
This kind of incident is actually a rarity. I live an oddly charmed life with virtually no obvious transphobia in it, at least active transphobia, so the question arises of why this happened today. I wasn't feeling at all underconfident, my body language wouldn't have been radiating "kick me" like it did this time last year (incidentally that literally happened once - I walked past a house and a stranger really did come out and kick me at random - this is what my world used to be like), so I'm just going to have to put it down to his problem.
It didn't bother me but it did interest me. I have several takes on it. First of all, he clearly wasn't expecting me to go back and talk to him, whatever it was he said in the first place. It's a shame I missed that, as context would've been enlightening I suspect, and I suspect I also ended up being interpreted as showing bravado when in fact I was just innocently trying to be helpful - maybe he wanted a light or directions or something, was what I was thinking. Clearly that was rather unlikely unless he was shocked by my appearance after having asked something along those lines.
It was disgust combined with fear, I think, with a soupcon of aggression. That fear - it's tempting to suspect that he was closet GID, but I'm not going with that because it's rather facile. That kind of statement is not falsifiable, so I'm just going to drop that. However, maybe I'm a flying squirrel. Allegedly there is a culture somewhere which regards flying squirrels as disgusting because they don't fit into their categories of, presumably bird or mammal, whereas presumably bats and flightless birds do, maybe. There is said to be a theory of disgust that that which cannot be categorised easily is seen as disgusting, and to be honest I would concur with that.
Back in the day before I upended my mental desk tidy with hormonal gloop, I used to find cake disgusting for that very reason. I had a "sweets" pigeonhole and a "bread" pigeonhole, and since cake fits into neither, I found it disgusting. I'm sure not everyone in possession of prodigious Y chromosomes who sozzles their mind with the "wrong" steroid hormones gets this kind of tipping out effect, but it's interesting that it's happened to me and that therefore I no longer find cake disgusting, and also that he found me disgusting because I don't fit into any neat little category. I'm in the gender uncanny valley and my appearance disgusts some people, but I'm at peace with that. I never expected to look any better than a car crash to most people anyway - I went into that with my eyes open and I don't care, partly because I know that I was the happier and more fulfilled person in that exchange by far. Also, when I look in the mirror I no longer want to throw up in revulsion and to myself I look a whole lot more normal than I did in the tracksuit phase (1999-2013), the leggings and T-shirts phase (1991-1999) or the jumpers and jeans phase (1983-1991), and that confidence in my appearance, regardless of how many other people may want to lose their lunch on looking at me, carries me through.
Tomorrow will hold a GP appointment, and the day after will see me complete the deed poll, after which I will officially be called Amanda Esther McIntyre Ure.
I just found this blog, read it, then went to look at your most recent pictures on Google plus and Youtube. Sorry, but you don't resemble a woman in the slightest (yet). You look 98% male, the only feminine things about you are that fact that you have long hair (still, there are many males with long hair as well) and the fact that you wear womans' clothing. I'm not transphobic or homophobic or anything so don't take this as being offensive, but your facial structure is too masculine to ever even begin to look like a woman. If you were to take of photo of yourself and crop everything from the neck down out of the picture, and ask 200 people what gender you were I guarantee you all 200 would say 'male'. Anyway, good luck with your getting to like cake, Amanda.
ReplyDeleteP.S. Maybe if you were to wear a niqab (I'm not racist, it's just a thing many people in Muslim cultures do so please don't be offended), you would probably be considered a woman by almost all people. So, maybe check out some Niqabs the next time you're in the Near-East Asia section of town?
I realise there would be an issue with my facial appearance and so forth, but it's not really the point. I am and always will be a man, of course. The real issue is that there is a hormonal problem in that the levels of endogenous androgens and oestrogens lead to mental health issues left to themselves, and adjusting those by intervention resolve some of those issues. I think I construct gender dysphoria differently than other gender dysphoric male-assigned people, and in fact I came on here just now to blog about that. Briefly, it's impossible to change gender and I see being male for myself, but emphatically not for most other people, as an incurable but manageable physical and mental disability similar to chromosomal abnormalities. I'll just blog in fact, and it'll become clearer.
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