There’s a specific social phenomenon that happens every time I cut my hair. I didn’t know it was a pattern until the last time I cut my hair (myself) from tit- to neck-length, almost back to the fuckass bob I had two summers ago, and an acquaintance at a cafe complimented my “French page boy” hair cut.
“Page boy?”
“Well, not page boy. Page girl? Like Joan of Arc!”
It’s always medieval royalty. French page boy. Timothee Chalamet from The King (2019). And worst of all Lord Farquaad. I don’t like this. Don’t do it. Misgendering is often subtle. It’s almost never as obvious to spot (and correct) as the wrong pronouns. Comparing a trans person to someone, even a character, of their assigned gender is risky. Thinking a trans person’s haircut is goofy is transphobic.
Only I can call my haircut fuckass.
Usually, people perceive me as male because they lack the imagination to view me as the gender my presentation (and pronouns) presume me to be. “Trans woman” is relatively new as a social archetype. Of course it’s always existed. But its current (public) form in the U.S. is only about forty years old. The English-Language identities of Gay Man and Lesbian were invented in Victorian England, and they’ve existed in the U.S. for about as long. But the trans woman is new, and I’ll say it: I’m clocky. “Trans woman” is so clearly what’s going on with me. Trans woman specifically, or transfem in general. After three years on HRT, three years of growing my hair out and perfecting my bangs, three years of tits and ass, any well-informed person could take one look at me and understand I fit into the social shape of “trans woman” that, however limited and limiting, forms the consensus of my safety. (The label’s dangers are a different essay.)
Look at me. Look at my mouth. Here are my teeth.
Let’s go from here.
It’s actually so much work to perceive a trans woman as male. When people lack the imagination to see that my gender differs from my sex, they search for anything in the culture to explain my appearance. The first thing they find is European aristocracy. Somewhere in the summer of 2023, a year and a half into HRT, people stopped comparing me to Black Sabbath. But the Lord Farquaad comparisons remain. (That summer the shape of my body, and the more mysterious shape of my social presentation, became unclockable as “metalhead” or “hippie.” I believe Black Sabbath came up those times because they’re the only band that was actually both.) When I correct these people, their leap to female is also short. Of course I love Joan of Arc. Look at me. But look at me. Perceive me as female first, then get creative with your roasts. If you get this first step right, a whole meadow of social possibilities blossoms up between us.
It’s actually so rewarding to get to know a trans person. Getting to know their unique understanding and experience of gender, of their experience living in and with their body, is a lifelong conversation. Take that baby step of manually perceiving me as female, and watch that manual perception slacken as you actually get to know me. It opens up a depth in friendship that can’t be found (automatically) in cis friendships. You might learn something about being a person you couldn’t learn from the comfort of your (assumed) congruence between your gender and your sex. And if you meet me and treat me like a person, you’re already ahead of most strangers and neighbors.
Simon and Garfunkel. Hey, let your honesty shine, shine, shine now, doh-n-doh-de-doh-n-doh, like it shines on me.
Here I am.
I spent almost every weekend that summer in Brooklyn with my girlfriend. She was housesitting her best friends’ grandparents’ three-story brownstone, a scholar and an archivist. We’d spend the whole weekend in bed, talking, sweating, crying, exploring each other's worlds until we were so hungry we’d throw our clothes on and split a sandwich from the deli down the street at the dining table over midnight coffee. Sometimes we’d think ahead and get groceries for breakfast on EBT. We’d wake up in the afternoon and make avocado toast with honey and kimchi. We’d make coffee smoothies with leftover ice cream. We’d lay in bed and sweat all day.
On those walks to the deli, or on the occasional outing to a cafe, gallery, or free concert, if a clerk sir’d me, I’d think “What are you, a fucking idiot?” and if a middle aged man catcalled me on the street or subway I’d think, “What are you, a fucking idiot?” Sometimes you have to crack little jokes with yourself to mentally exit a situation you have no control over. I workshopped that fucking idiot one-liner in my head as I avoided eye contact with the man on the 2 who’d only been looking at me since I got on. Two women were sitting between us and moved to the other side of the car as he pulled his shirt off by the collar. I couldn’t help feeling they abandoned me in our womanhood when it wasn’t their stop. Once a man was on the phone outside his shop and he muffled his business call in his chest to say, “Hey let me talk to you for a sec. Hey where you going?” Some men will bark at anything. Of course I kept walking. But after a few weekends in NYC I understood these men perceived me as female, or something like it. It felt strangely correct—invasive, dangerous, but technically correct. It’s exactly how you’d expect creepy men to act if they saw you as your gender, which for me is mostly female.
It’s weird. Sometimes I’d be driving back to Western MA from NYC Sunday night and daydream about the summer I was 13, catfishing older men on Omegle and Kik and Whatsapp using pictures of women in my neighborhood. I could never map my fixation of earning the approval of middle aged men—high school teachers, admins of Facebook groups, divorced or single fathers in my neighborhood—onto my father’s emotional absence, drinking and smoking at his best friend’s house for four hours before he came home after work every night. Or the weeks- or month-long stayouts he’d go on for his minimum wage construction job. Or all the times I thought we were bonding over TV and he’d rock himself off the couch toward his best friend’s house at the start of a commercial break with the same full-body fluidity he’d dive into his friend’s pool with. Truth is, it wasn’t Dad at all. Freud, the ultimate daddy after God, offered the idea that all approval flows from the father and of course forgot to account for transgender lesbians. Ten years later I realized I was a girl (and gay) and started swallowing estrogen twice a day. My brain changed, a socialization feedback loop started taking place at supernaturally-queer Hampshire College in Amherst MA where everyone treated my declared gender as a fact from day one, and (a semester and summer of flower, wheat, caps and stems later) I realized I needed to please these men’s gaze like I needed to please those men online, or on my street, not for their desire, but for my gender. Remember that lumberjack who came by nights to renovate the house across the street that had been abandoned my whole life until then? I wanted him to coax me into his house on my walk home from the schoolbus, lock me in his basement, and make his doctor turn me into a girl. I daydreamed that for four years, 10 to 14. That’s middle school right? I came so close to texting these men my address and asking them to sneak in through my side window in the dead of night. I knew some men would do it. As puberty blossomed in me I felt I was spoiling. Like a bottle of piss. I’d missed my chance. These men wouldn’t fuck me as a man. I was something else as a fat kid with a bowl cut. I’d think all this as the highways thinned out into the interstate and all I was left with for the night were headlights growing in my mirrors as they passed me. And it’s like why. Who was I. Something deep and old was breaking open in me those weekends, I could feel it.
So far, too close.
The social reality of transition parallels a trans person’s inner narrative. As puberty deepened in me and I became a man, I just could not imagine any kind of adult masculinity I could participate in. So I grew my hair out to my nipples and wore the same black and blue drug rug every day. I didn’t shave for a whole year and my pubic beard was trans: you wouldn’t wear that on your face if you didn’t have to fight for it. (Thank you Tommy for that one-liner.) I dropped out of gender. Christmas in 8th grade my boomer butch cousin bought me a huge green army jacket so I looked like John Lennon. Two years later I grew into it. I wore it to school for the first time the Monday after I watched all of Freaks and Geeks in one sitting. I thought I was Lindsay Wier, brilliant and depressed because of some loss she was unequipped to explain to herself. The halls called me school shooter. But when I got to college and took my first, tentative steps towards transitioning, thrifting clothes and trying them on stoned in my dorm room mirror, light flooded my chest’s deepest chamber. I could be anything. I could present any way I wanted. I could invent myself from scratch. And I have.
The first step in understanding me depends on understanding that decision. And it is a decision to transition. But not to be trans. In those two and a half years before I started HRT, when I described myself as a “nonbinary person with transfeminine tendencies,” I’d wear the most neutral clothes I could find—sweaters, corduroy—and dress completely femme once, maybe twice a month, to a party I’d get blackout drunk at. But that first summer on HRT, the summer my tits started coming in, I started dressing like a 14 year old boy all over again. Because the person trapped in me was literally coming out. You could see it. Between my hormones and my clothes, you could see just what I was going for. What I am. Trans woman. Gay. If not, more.
