My gender changes when people are mad at me. Go figure. No, I am not some sort of human mood
ring. I’m a middle-aged bureaucrat,
albeit a gender-confused one. In fact I
am not even really confused - it’s other people that find my gender
confusing. Not everyone. Not the people that I meet on the street,
because there’s nothing ambiguous about my appearance. I look like a woman. A butch dyke, perhaps, but definitely
female.
The people close to me get confused, though. They know that I don’t think of myself as a
woman, and that I prefer to be called ‘he’.
I don’t tell this to everyone that I meet, because it invariably
involves a ‘conversation’ that I don’t want to have. I don’t want to have that conversation with
anyone, but I figure it’s not even worth having with most people - that they
won’t understand and may not sympathise.
I could be wrong about this. But there is some risk involved in testing
that assumption, so I wear the repugnant pronouns. Yesterday, for example, someone called me
‘missy’. It was at the pub and it was
someone I know slightly and it was all very light-hearted and a discourse about
non-normative gender identification was just not going to fly.
But I do have that conversation with my close friends. They are the people who matter and it matters
to me that I can tell them who I am and that they care. If they don’t then they are not my
friends. I’m lucky that most of my friends are queer or
trans and they are jiggy with that sort of thing.
It’s more complicated with girlfriends. I don’t have many, and that’s probably part
of the reason. I’m not really trans, not
really lesbian, not really queer, not really butch – just a bit of all of them,
so it’s a niche market. Actually there’s
no market: it’s more of a private-sale-by-arrangement situation. I’ve been
around queer communities where butches get called ‘he’ all the time but that is
not the case in Australia - here the average lesbian finds it pretty weird and
threatening. Even the radical queer
ones tend to find it a bit odd. They get
confused by my failure to transition, I think.
Because that’s what trans folk do – that’s what being trans is all about.
And trans folk who have transitioned definitely
expect me to. They are still waiting.
Some women that I’ve been with have struggled. They always insist that they are fine with
it, but using the ‘he’ word seems to be difficult for them. Using
it consistently or correctly in different contexts is even harder. This has created conflict at times, because I
get a bit testy about it. ‘It doesn’t
reflect on how I think of you,’ they say.
‘It’s just a habit, a linguistic rule that I’m used to.’ Surely
it can’t be that hard, I say, to make an exception to a linguistic rule. The unspoken response is: you’re the one who’s making it hard. ‘You don’t expect people at work to call you
“he”,’ they say. ‘I can’t, and that’s
why it’s important that you do it.’ Sometimes
they say, ‘It would be easier if you
looked like a man,’ which takes us back to the start of the
conversation. And so it goes.
On the other hand, some of the women I’ve been with have
been great. They listen and they don’t
have a problem with it and they are incredibly supportive and affirming. One woman I was with used to get so upset
when she used the wrong pronoun that I ended up comforting her. She didn’t even know
why she said that, she said, because she didn’t think of me as female at
all. I was like, ‘Er...really?’ Because I
don’t think I am very manly. But this
woman thought that I am, that my innate masculinity was so obvious that she
couldn’t think of me as anything but
a man.
That all changed, though.
I don’t know what changed her thinking about my innate masculinity, but
it coincided precisely with us breaking up. When that happened, I stopped being a man. Whenever she talks about me now, she always
refers to me as ‘she’ and as a woman. We don’t talk, so I haven’t had a chance
to ask about it. It’s possible that she
does this deliberately, to hurt me, but I doubt it. I mean, I’m sure that if
she thought about it she would know that I hate it, but I suspect my feelings
are not a priority for her.
I don’t know why my gender changed. Maybe she feels like she doesn’t need to keep
up the pretence anymore. Maybe she felt
like she was doing me a favour and she doesn’t feel like doing it anymore. Maybe she thought of me as female all along, while
saying the exact opposite. Maybe she
only said that stuff to please me. Maybe
she doesn’t believe in all those things that she said she believes in.
I don’t know. But I
do know that she’s not the only one who has changed my gender according to
their mood. This has made me quite sceptical
about the things that people say about my gender, even the positive affirming
things. And quite depressed about my gender.
It seems so untenable, to look one way and feel another.
Then, by chance, I was chatting to an old friend who is a
trans guy. He transitioned years ago and
has a beard and everything and I had almost forgotten that I ever knew him by a
different name. He was in a relationship
with a lovely woman for years and they had two kids. That relationship ended a
year or so ago. Very sad. Very
acrimonious. Recently, his six year old
daughter told him, ‘When mumma gets mad she calls you a girl.’
So it’s not about me, I thought. And it’s not about how I look. Because if it can
happen to him, it can happen to any trans person. Indeed, it could happen to anyone.
It’s just that we don’t do that in our culture - we don’t get people’s
gender wrong. Because it’s degrading. Gender is part of what it means to be
human. Getting gender right is a human
right. It only happens to trans people,
because they don’t have the same rights as everyone else. Their human rights are optional.
‘It has happened to me before, years ago’ my friend
said. ‘Back then I got very threatened
and angry about it. But this time around
I just find it kinda sad. And I feel a
sense of pity toward my ex-partner, because it demeans her to do that. More than
it demeans me.’
No comments:
Post a Comment