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Who's
a Tranny? Me?
By
Anna Mills
It’s Tuesday night at the new LGBTQ community center, and I’m hovering by the window that looks out over the Castro, waiting for them to bring out another plate of sushi, and smiling at regular guys who were probably born female and stunning women who were almost definitely born male.
What am I doing at a transgender reception? Aren’t I a fairly ordinary dyke who should be supporting this movement from a distance? I’m a female who’s always been a female, who enjoys her breasts and her wide hips. There was a time in my lesbian coming out when a military buzz cut made little kids ask if I was a boy or a girl, but that time is past – I wear tight shirts and I’ve softened again.
I don’t have a trans partner like some of the other guests. Not that my partners are conventionally gendered. I did have an affair with a lovely girl in a male body who wore slinky dresses to the English teashop. My first girlfriend used to strike everyone as butch with her shaved head and arms folded menacingly; now she giggles as she buys a yellow sundress. For a while I had a thing for dykes on the verge of masculine epiphanies involving pronouns and hormones. When I started dating men again, I chose one with self-proclaimed “feminine energy,” and secretly called him “Princess.”
But I didn’t show up at a transgender reception for my genderqueer partners. I showed up for myself. I always felt uneasy as a girl. I never had a clue about women’s grooming – I couldn’t paint toenails, apply “product” to hair, or pluck eyebrows. When my feet got large and my breasts failed to appear in junior high, I took it as a sign of otherness. I felt like an imposter wearing a mini-skirt to the school dance. I spent my adolescence admiring the mysterious femininity of the girls around me and cultivating a sour conviction that I would never be sexy like them. It’s true that those are typical teenage-girl neuroses. Discomfort with femininity could be dissatisfaction with sexism. For me, it was also uneasiness about gender. Coming out as a dyke allowed me to become “not that kind of girl.” I cut off my long hair in a series of visits to a barber who unfortunately reassured me that I would “still be feminine.”
I couldn’t pull off butch. The SF Lesbian Avengers dressed me up and gelled my hair and paraded me around. Someone observed that I looked like I was wearing my girlfriend’s jacket. The experience reminded me of high school, when girls gave me a makeover and ooh-ed and ah-ed over my green eyeshadow and waved hair. Either way, I was in drag.
I remembered playing the “knavish sprite” Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in high school. I ran around backstage, feeling that Puck wasn’t a boy or a girl. In San Francisco, I heard about a self-identified “glitterboy”, and even though I didn’t know quite what a glitterboy was, it dawned on me that you got to define your own gender. “I’m an elf!” I exclaimed to my friends. I wore a silver ear clasp that made me feel even more elfin. “I’m a girly boy-girl,” I ventured. “I’m a boy-girl. And with tight shirts, I’m a girly one.” I read about an intersex person, Raven Kaldera, who identified with the Middle Eastern myth of a “wild, laughing hermaphrodite named Agdistis who ran about the mountains screwing who s/he pleased. The gods decided that s/he was too dangerous because s/he knew both the male and the female mysteries and could command too much power.”
Yes, that what was what I was or wanted to be, a shapeshifter like Puck – a person delighted with the play of language and roles in gender, a person who never settles into one or the other. What do I see in the mirror? I have a funny look to me. The nose is too long, the hair is too short and bushy for a girl. Not that that makes any sense. Sometimes I see an odd creature; two eyes staring back at me from an uncertain, naked body.
Do I fit in the transgender community? Nobody expects me here. The trans woman chatting with me over the sushi plate delicately fishes for my motives. One person asks straight out, “What brings you here?” Another inquires, “So when did you transition?” and I’m not sure if she’s joking or admiring my male-to-female success. Even my longtime trans men friends are surprised to see me.
But I’m still drinking it in, feeling subversively at home. I don’t want to draw attention away from the violence and ostracism that trans people face daily. I do benefit from a truckload of gendernormal privilege that could possibly skew my priorities. I’m not at much risk for harassment on the street, and I can be introduced to parents or show up at a job interview without a lot of thought. I’m happy with my body, and I don’t usually mind being seen as a woman. But I would love to be part of a genderqueer movement that reaches out to and recruits from the mainstream. Is my androgyny so odd? How many people might discover equally quirky genders if they examined themselves with a little playfulness and honesty? What if everyone got a taste of gender fluidity? There’s a little deviance in everyone’s closet. Time to bring it out for the gender parade.
Copyright © 2004 Anna Mills
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