On Passing (2019/11/22)
As with a lot of trans people, a lot of my early experience with regard to coming to terms with my gender centered on narrow and (in my specific case) misplaced ideas of "passing".
"Passing" is often from what I've seen (and in my own experience) a conflation of two different concepts:
- Wanting to be seen as a member of one's gender
- Wanting to avoid being seen as transgender
It's easy to see how these things get mashed together. I wanted to be seen as a woman, and was scared that I wouldn't be. (I'm not always, and may never always be. But that's true of cisgender women, too, who are also not immune from being mistaken for men.) But it never occurred to me that being RECOGNIZED as a woman did not necessarily entail blending in with everyone who was given that label at birth.
"Passing" is a really dangerous—even deadly—concept. It teaches us that we should work as hard as we can to mold ourselves to very narrow standards, and that to be seen as transgender—to BE transgender—is a crime. And it implies that when we are hurt for being who we are, that part of the blame lies on our own shoulders, for being visibly trans, for not "passing". If we could just try a little harder, maybe people wouldn't hurt us... maybe it's our fault for sticking out, being different, forcing people to come face-to-face with diversity. And it reifies the idea that we are doing performance: that we are knock-offs, imitating "the real thing", careful forgeries whose most important goal in life is to be mistaken for originals.
Fuck that noise. We don't owe anyone anything. Who we are is not an imposition. And we aren't lesser versions of anything or anyone.
I will be ecstatic if, one day, my life gets to a point where I am read as a woman basically all of the time. But it is not crucial that I be read as not transgender. My pride button is not coming off of my purse until I'm forced to transfer it to a new one. I am who I am.
I know that for some people, being read as cisgender IS important, and honestly? It can be a HUGE issue of safety—and literal survival for those who live in areas where they're likely to be murdered for being transgender. But if I have the privilege of living somewhere where I can be relatively safe broadcasting my lived experience to the world and demanding that it be seen and respected, if I can help to NORMALIZE the existence of transgender people as well as providing representation for those not yet out, then I damn well will.