Feeling Like a Woman

This morning as I got to the building my office is in, a guy was a few feet in front of me and stopped to hold the door open for me. It stood out for me because this still doesn't happen often for me. Most of the time guys just hold the door open for me if I'm right behind them, not far enough behind that they'd have to stop and wait.

Though it may not get people to hold the door for me, I feel more like a woman lately. This is something I've just started to feel in the last few weeks. For a long time, I still felt like a man dressing as a woman. Now, I'm starting to just feel like a woman. It doesn't feel like a special event anymore to dress as a woman; it just feels natural. Instead of feeling like a woman, I should probably say I feel like myself.

When I speak to undergrad clsses, I'm often asked a version of the question "What is different between being a man and woman?" It took me a while to find an answer to this question. At first, I would talk about how I didn't want to give in to stereotypes, saying that I didn't want to say being a woman let me wear clothes I like more or to be more emotional. Then I realized why it was so hard for me to answer this question: I don't know if I ever really knew what it meant to be a "real" man. It's not that I was a man and now I'm a woman; I've always been a woman. It's just that the outside now matches the inside! This answer always surprises people becuase I think they expect me to say that I don't know what it means to be a woman.

Whether that makes me a woman or not, I know that I'm happy with who I am!

Share

Blisters on My Toes

This past Tuesday I had the opportunity to talk with two Women's Studies classes about my experiences as a transgender woman. I was really looking forward to the opprutnity to speak with the classes because it was my first chance to speak with classes outside of the Communication department. I wanted to look my best so I wore my yellow blouse and black-and-white polka-dot skirt, the same outfit I wore for my Radio Interview, with a cute pairt of high-heeled black lattice sandals. While I thought I looked pretty good, if I do say so myself, I didn't plan on standing up for nearly four hours straight! Needless to say, my feet were killing me by the end of the second class and I woke up the next morning with huge blisters on my big toes.

I was very happy the gladiator sandals. pictured to the left, I ordered online from Payless arrived at my local store the next day. The sandals are really comfortable and saved my toes from more pain. I had been wanting a new pair of black low-healed shoes because I was wearing the same pair quite a bit, and I'm very happy with my purchase. I was also very happy with my experience ordering direct-to-store with Payless; I still like to try on clothes and shoes before buying them but I think I'll be ordering online again in the future when a style of shoes I like isn't available in my local store.

Wardrobe Discussion

I'm visiting my family for the weekend and as I was chatting with my mom this evening, we began to talk about my degree progress and how things will probably go for the next couple of years. We discussed how comps and the dissertation will generally go and also talked about the possibility of applying for jobs in the Fall. For the last couple of years, I have been suffering repeated sinus infections, which seem to be much more intense and frequent where I currently live than any other place I've lived before, so improving health would be one of many benefits of getting a job and moving somewhere else sooner rather than later. My mom then said that when the time comes for applying for jobs, she feels that I need a new wardrobe. A male wardrobe. I couldn't bring myself to tell my mom that I don't plan on wearing male clothes for my interviews.

I feel that situations like this will only continue to increase in the future and I'm uncertain how to deal with them. Do I allow my parents to pay for new clothes for me that I don't intend to wear in order to not upset our relationship? I'm torn about decisions like this because I want to enjoy my relationship with my family for as long as I can but I also don't plan to stop living as a woman. I've been trying to balance my relationship with my family and my need to be who I am, and everything has been going very well. But I'm not sure I want my parents spending money on expensive clothes like dress shirts and suits that I don't intend to wear.

Fortunately, the "wardrobe situation" won't be an issue for a while so I have some time to consider my options.

Seeing Myself as the Woman I Am

Although I have been dressing as a woman for nearly 5 months now, it has taken a while for me to see myself as a woman, not as a man dressed as a woman.

Now when I see myself, I do see a woman. Sometimes I even catch myself wondering how other people can see me as a man.

My longer hair does help some but that's not all it is. I think it's mainly overcoming the years of being told that crossdressing is wrong or that I would never look good as a woman and being able to see myself as the woman I am. It's not about trying to copy someone else but learning to appreciate the things that make me a woman.

Another thing that happened recently that boosted my confidence came after speaking in front of a class of 250 undergrads. After my talk, I was discussing it with the professor and she said she noticed that I was saying "I feel," which to her is a very feminine way of speaking, instead of "I think," which to her is more masculine. She asked if I had made a conscious decision to do that and I said no because it's something I hadn't even realized I was doing, it's just the way I talk. I often get asked during the Q&A portions of my talks what I feel is most different about being a woman or what I like more about being a woman over being a man. It's always difficult for me to answer these types of questions because I don't feel that I act all that differently; I feel in many ways that I've always been a feminine person, it just seems to match better now that I'm living as a woman instead of as a man. I may not have ever really known/understood what it meant to be a man.

As good as I may have been feeling recently, life always wants to remind me that others don't always see me the same way that I see myself. This evening I went to see a friend in a community theater production. When I got to the box office to pay for my ticket, the woman behind the counter said "Can I help you, sir?" That little honorific was all I needed to be reminded once again that not everyone will see me for the woman I feel I am.

Transgender Geek

After nearly a month, I'm finally back for a new post. It's always tough for me to get into the groove of things again at the start of a new semester and often makes it difficult to find time to other things, like post to a blog (at least that's the excuse I'm using for not having posted in so long...).

Anyway, I've been wanting to talk for a while about being a transgender geek. By "transgender geek" I mean a transgender person who also identifies as a geek, not a person who is a geek for trangender things (though I may be one of those too since I love discovering anything new related to trangenderism, including films, TV shows, books, blogs, etc.). I touched on this topic a little bit in an earlier post, Cosplay and Conventions on September 18, 2009, but I want to talk about it a little more in depth.

My life as a geek began at a very young age. I remember as a child watching cartoons like G.I. Joe, Voltron and He-Man but those were just preparation for what I consider my first geek passion: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I loved the cartoon and would spend hours playing with the action figures I had collected. The show also featured prominently in my early transgender identity. I remember watching the show one day and wishing I could grow up to be like April O'Neil, the Turtles sexy reporter friend, but feeling I was more likely to grow up to be like Irma, April's frumpy assistant. Dreaming of being a woman when I grew up did not seem strange to me; I was more interested in what type of woman I would be.

April O'Neil

My geek identity continued to develop along with my transgender identity. I've always tended to be more into viusal texts, the Star Wars films, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Audrey Hepbun films, etc., than other forms of expression. I've always been a slow reader and may have felt a little intimidated by the numerous books that made up long-running scifi and fantasy series. I was also really into videogames in junior high and high school, even receiving a scolding from my mother once for having my nose buried in a videogame magazine which she felt would lead me to "never get a girlfriend" (if she only knew at the time what she would be getting upset at me about in the future...). I still play videogames, I do have a Wii, when I can but videogames are usually the first thing to be put to the side when I get busy.

Not long into my high school life I discovered anime and that has remained my main geek passion for over ten years. After twisting my knee at a summer church camp, I was recuperating at home when I first saw the series Sailor Moon. Though I had seen some anime before, Sailor Moon was the first show that seemed noticably different to me. I loved the monster-of-the-week story that expanded as the series went on, the characters you could identify with and, of course, the cute costumes. The series also stood out to me because it featured a cast of female characters in the "boys only" world of afternoon cartoons.

Sailor Moon is a good example of the difficulty I have in separating my geek and transgender identities. For my developing transgender identity, shows like Sailor Moon proved an important milestone by offering female characters to identify with. My love of anime has grown over the years to include many more great shows and great characters. I also regularly attend anime conventions and participate in cosplay, dressing up as my favorite characters and also in my Gothic Lolita finery.

No one's identity can be defined by only one aspect. I believe people need to continue to explore the different aspects of their identity and the way these different aspects interact. I also don't think transgender people should have to hide certain parts of who they are; we've had to do too much of that in our lives. I'm not ashamed to have been a fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to play videogames or to be an avid anime fan. I also don't think that having these passions make me any less of a woman. I hope that all transgender people can be as open about who they are and have been, not having to hide certain parts of who they are to try to fit some idea of what it means to be a woman or man.

Radio Interview

This afternoon, I was interviewed by the local radio program "Information Underground" about my experiences as a transsexual woman and the impact that has had on my life as a graduate student and instructor. The interview can be heard here Information Underground January 10, 2010. The interview should begin playing immediately and my segment begins at around the 19 minute point.

Above are a couple of pictures of the outfit I wore to the interview. A friend that I had dinner with later joked "You sure look nice for your radio interview."

I know I've discussed this before but I do like to look nice. It's really just my personal style, not anything to do with my feelings about gender roles or how other women should or should not dress. According to Claudine Griggs (1998) in S/he: Changing Sex and Changing Clothes, "MTFs seem to dress in extremes during their transitions, often wearing stereotypic and/or provocative fashions, overdressing for informal occassions, and wearing clothes that are too youthful for their age . . . Many MTFs seem to delight in ultra-feminine clothes during the early stages of transition" (p. 14-15). Griggs also discusses her own fashion choices during her transition, moving from a June Cleaver-esque "initiation stage" of dresses, heels and makeup to a "rebellion stage" of faded jeans, sweatshirts and drip-dried hair.

I may be in my own "initiation stage" where I'm just so happy to be able to dress how I want, but I feel that too often people try to make to many generalizations about what being transsexual means. Just because one transsexual chooses to dress in a feminine style doesn't mean that every transsexual has to dress in a feminine style; likewise, just because dressing in a feminine style was for one transsexual just a stage in her development as a woman doesn't mean that it will be that way for every transsexual.

I guess only time will tell what it will be for me.

Seeing Male and Female

The chapter "Toward a Theory of Gender" by Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna in The Transgender Studies Reader edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle provides an interesting discussion of how people attribute gender that is useful for transgender women and men. The authors' main argument is that people use a schema when seeing someone as male or female, the schema being that you "[s]ee someone as female only when you cannot see them as male" (p. 176). When reading the gender of others, male is the default gender that is seen, and people try to eliminate all male characteristics before seeing someone as female. The presence of any characteristics designated as male identifies the person as male for most people, even when confronted with contradictory information. The penis is the most powerful indentifying characteristic and is often enough to override other characteristics.

The authors conducted tests to determine how people attribute gender to others. In the first test, participants where allowed to ask 10 questions to determine the gender of an unknown and unseen person, without asking "Is the person male/female?" Questions typically dealt with physical characteristics like height and weight with occasional questions about social perceptions of gender, such as clothes worn and having a job or not. Secondary sex characteristics, such as prescence or lack of breasts and development of biceps, were occasionally asked about but genitals never were, which was seen by participants as tantamount to asking if the person was male/female. The interesting thing about this test was the way people were able to adjust the information they were provided with to fit the gender they perceived for the unknown person, for example thinking that a person over 5'8" would be male and then adjusting that perception to include tall women when presented with the information that the person has protruding breasts and wears skirts.

The second test involved plastic overlays of characteristics, including short/long hair, body hair/no body hair, wide/narrow hips, breasts/no breasts, penis/vagina and gender neutral clothes/lack of clothes, over a neutral face. The test again found that characteristics identified as male or female were not enough to identify the sex of the figure; information was usually made to fit the perception of the figure. Being able to see the genitals of the figure produced interesting results. The presence of a penis was enough to override all other characteristics identified as female (long hair, wide hips, breasts, no body hair) but the presence of a vagina was not enough to override characterstics identified as male (short hair, narrow hips, no breasts, body hair). This supports the authors' argument that male is the default gender seen by people, with the male characteristics needing to not be present to see someone as female. These characterstics are, of course, determined by the culture and not biologically.

The authors argue that the working of this schema is the cause of the difficulty faced by transgender women in "passing" as female; as others examine the transgender woman to determine her gender, the presence of some male characteristics override more obviously female characteristics, like breasts, hairstyle and dress. "The relative ease with which female-to-male transsexuals 'pass' as compared to male-to-female transsexuals underscores this point" (p. 176). Because of the tendency to see male as the default gender, "[i]t is rare to see a person one thinks is a man and then wonder if one has made a 'mistake.' However, it is not uncommon to wonder if someone is 'really' a woman" (p. 176).

While this tendency may seem difficult to overcome, the authors also point out that first impressions of gender are essential; we often work to support our first perceptions of another person's gender and find it difficult to discredit that perception. It is even difficult for other people to see transgender women as men if they have never known them as men. The authors argue that the first impression is crucial for transgender women and men, much more important than trying to maintain the image of the "perfect" woman or man. "If transsexuals understood these features of discrediting they would (1) focus on creating decisive first impressions as male or female and (2) then stop worrying about being the perfect man or woman and concentrate on cultivating the naturalness (i.e., the historicity) of their maleness or femaleness" (p. 177).

I will be interested to test the importance and effectivess of first impressions in the next couple of weeks. While I have taught and attended classes as a woman in the past, this will be the first time I will be starting a semester as Lucy. In the past, I began the semester as a man and made the switch to living as a woman during the course of the semester; it may have been difficult for my students and classmates to overcome their first impressions of me as a man despite the fact that I began living as a woman. I wonder what impact only knowing me as Lucy will have on my reception by and interaction with my students?