trans-egg-mode - Tumblr blog

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Here’s a gem I recently came across from my time as a Mormon missionary in the Philippines, some 20 years ago. I was always a bit embarrassed of this photo, honestly, because I thought my mannerisms were "too feminine," and at this point in my life, I was constantly on guard for fear of someone finding out my Big Secret... which caused me a lot of anxiety and fear.

First of all, there’s nothing wrong with guys that have feminine mannerisms, no matter their sexuality. (that wasn’t me, and I knew it already at that point, but the fear of being seen as gay was still strong)

Secondly, contrary to everything I was told and taught and saw on TV, there’s nothing wrong or freakish or shameful about being trans, and it certainly doesn’t make you unworthy of love.

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Or... it could be that I hated the way I looked and was on the verge of a breakthrough in understanding why.

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#truth

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Skipped a day shaving my face, and I don't feel like clawing my face off. #thankslaser

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It wasn't often I would make jokes like this online, but occasionally I'd drop these sorts of hints.

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Alas, this whole experience probably helped instill in me an intuition that my mom wouldn’t understand, and that the very idea of being transgender was laughable to her.

It took me nearly 30 years to finally tell her.

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Actually, looking back on it now, I’m pretty sure I found those two words (“transvestite” and “transsexual”) in our family encyclopedia, but this is definitely the logic I used to convince myself I wasn’t either of those undesirables.

_Second Serve_ did indeed blow my mind wide open (before that, I don’t think I even really knew what GRS was or how it worked).

Interestingly, though – notice how I couched my rejection of the “transsexual” label: “I didn’t want to change myself into a woman (well, most days, anyway).” Aside from the ignorance embedded in that statement (trans people are their gender, it’s not defined by wanting to be something you aren’t), it also conveniently ignores the fact that at that same point in my teens, I’d often go to bed with multiple rubber bands tightly wrapped around my penis & scrotum, hoping that if I could cut off the circulation tightly enough, they’d shrivel up and need to be surgically removed.

But I didn’t really want to alter my body.

... yeah, right.

That refusal (call it what it was: FEAR) to recognize myself as transsexual became a recurring theme in my life, an undercurrent of anxiety that colored my attitudes and made me police everything I said & did for the next 30 years, lest I slip and show others who I really was.

I can never get that lost time back, but I’ll be damned if I waste any more.

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Not everything I wrote on my old “oh crap, I think I’m trans, now what?” blog was clueless and wrongheaded, and I thought I should point out times when I was showing signs of learning & enlightenment.

I do love this quote, and lived by it for about a year and a half, while I was on hormones and not yet out at work or to friends and neighbors. As time went on, this idea was joined by another one from Pratchett’s oeuvre. On my main blog, about a month after I was completely out and living authentically, I wrote this:

There’s a theme in Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods of breaking through fear & being propelled by whatever’s on the other side. It just occurred to me that I’m there… whatever fear there was of being out, of being myself (and believe me, there was a lot of it!) is slowly being replaced by what I can only call confidence.

So that’s what it feels like.

And it’s a hell of a rush.

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... like I said when I started this blog, I do like some stuff that's often considered stereotypically male: video games (though not the ultra-violent stuff like Call of Duty), and superhero comic books. Of course, these things aren't really limited to the male gender, but you maybe don't see them as often with transwomen.

Um.

I didn’t know very many trans women when I wrote that.

Any at all, really.

I had no idea how widespread nerd culture actually is until I got active here on Tumblr, and made friends with a metric truckload of cis and trans girls that are super into comics and video games. I started following blogs focused on female and queer nerd culture (like @themarysue and @autostraddle), and realized just how blind I was.

Looking back, the only reason I can come up with for why I thought otherwise starts with a P and rhymes with “atriarchy.”

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As I got older, my voice got deeper and deeper, more and more like my dad's gravelly bass. For many years, I just kind of went along with that, and whenever we participated in our ward choirs, I always sang bass... Turns out, with a bit of an adjustment in my posture and a small mental shift in terms of where my voice is singing from... I CAN sing tenor! The very highest notes are still a bit of a challenge until my voice has warmed up, but with proper support, I can actually sing tenor... and it's been so freeing! Based on this success, I've started trying to figure out how to adapt my vocal ability to my speaking voice too. There are tons of video tutorials on YouTube that talk about how to do this, some more useful than others. One of the big clues that really helped me was to speak from the throat instead of from the abdomen; it's really pretty amazing how much of a difference in makes just relocating the sound resonance from your chest to your head! I've been trying this on and off lately, even sometimes at work and when talking to my kids and wife, and so far nobody's said anything to me about it, because it's still my voice, just pitched a little higher. Wow.

So it turns out that with practice, I can actually hit a perfectly passable feminine pitch and register. I’m still working on it, but this doesn’t stress me out like it used to.

It unnerves my wife though. 😜

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I eventually got better at not looking creepy. 👀

Tumblr taught me the phrase that I still use to this day to describe this behavior: “Life goals / wife goals.” (I understand that it’s not at all uncommon among queer women ^_^).

I totally still do this, but now that I’m read as a woman, I don’t get the evil eye anymore. And if I actually smile and compliment them on their shoes/hair/whatever, more often than not, they smile back. And lately, perhaps inconceivable to egg-me, other women sometimes do the same thing to me.

Funny how a little thing like changing my gender affects the way other people treat me. 😜

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At least I was self-aware enough to realize this back then, even before I was really willing to admit to myself that my “feminine side” was in reality my “authentic side.”

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I think we in the transgender community do a disservice to each other by trying to "categorize" different types of transgenderism (i.e. crossdresser, transsexual, genderqueer, etc). To my mind, it seems like we're accepting the scientific premise that gender is a continuum, and yet we're not quite able to let go of the emotional need for tidy little boxes or labels for people. I think of myself as a transgendered man, and crossdressing is part of the way I express that, but it's not an end unto itself — that's just more like a means of connecting with my feminine side.

“Is Gender Binary?” -- oooohhhhhhh, Arcee. Arcee, Arcee, Arcee. There’s so much wrong with this sentence I barely know where to start.

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... because apparently these are “boy things?” Yeesh, Eggy, you were dense.

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Um...? Has it ever occurred to you that trans lesbians are a thing?

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So what? Yeah, those things all suck when you’re trying to escape public scrutiny. But they don’t mean you’re not trans, honey. They just mean you’re a tall girl who needs to shave a little more often than most.

HRT might help a little, too. I lost about an inch of height and went down half a shoe size, because of redistribution of fat. My body hair is way slower and finer now, too.

Oh, and tall cisgender girls have similar struggles:

Next excuse!

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I grew up Mormon, and in many ways, it made me a better person. But in Mormon culture, there’s a long tradition of collapsing gender and gender roles into a single thing, and enshrining it as doctrine. Men and boys are literally taught that they are to be manly and masculine, that they’re born to lead, and that their highest aspiration in life should be to marry a girl and raise righteous kids together. And they’re told that those kids will suffer tremendous spiritual damage if they don’t have a priesthood (read: male) role model in their home.

Growing up steeped in that environment, I had an extremely limited understanding of modern gender theory, which was compounded by the gender-essentialist nature of Mormon doctrine (men are manly providers and foreordained to be priesthood leaders, while women are feminine nurturers who support and follow them). I’d been taught all my life that God made me exactly the way He wanted me, so I never questioned the fact that my spirit – my essential nature – was male. But because I always felt more like a nurturer and follower, because I was taught to feel that identifying with feminine things was sinful, and because I absolutely hated almost every societal expectation placed on men, that cultural baggage was nearly unbearable. I spent literally years of my life – decades, even – trying to make some sense of this contradiction between how I felt inside, and what everyone from parents and Sunday school teachers to peers and prophets told me I should be.

So here’s there thing, 2012 Rye: being trans and being Mormon aren’t necessarily irreconcilable, but they’re pretty darn close to it, thanks to culture and tradition.

Plus, in your very near future, when you discover that the dominant historical narrative underpinning the church is full of lies and half-truths, you’ll be more than a little pissed about all the years you spent trying to fight and deny your transness.