Soft features

I'm trans. I was assigned a certain gender at birth, and am again and again by the majority of people who so much as glance at me on the street, but it's never fit very well. Now, since the beginning I've been aware that I'm not trans enough. You see, once upon a time John Money decided that trans people are okay as long as they fit certain criteria that make them worthy of medical and social recognition. They need to be binary for one thing--identifying as male when assigned female, or female when assigned male--and they need to be 100% normative for their self-identified gender. Doctors put up bars and hoops for trans people to jump through to warrant medical transition, and legislators used many of the same for legal transition. Only those trans people who need it most--those for whom living without transition would be worse than death, for example--would be willing and able to jump through all those hoops. Plus (and I don't know if this was doctors or others), being trans must be biological. If it's about society, you should get rid of that internalized sexism. If it's a choice, you're making the wrong choice. Otherwise doctors wouldn't put all these hoops in the way, and society wouldn't hate you. Therefore the only people who are legitimate trans people are binary-identified people who suffer intensely and constantly from distress at the sex of their bodies, not anything related to social perceptions of gender, yet want to meet the gender norms assigned to the sex they want for their bodies.

As a genderqueer who isn't trans enough, I desperately want to be more trans. I don't have anything like a stable gender identity, but maybe if I pretend that my genderfluidity never or vanishingly rarely passes through my assigned gender, I'll be closer to "enough". Maybe if I feel more gender dysphoria, maybe if it gets closer to unbearable, I'll be okay. I'll finally be worthy enough that this really important part of me can be recognized. I'll see my true self reflected in other's words. Other trans people will accept me, and I'll stop feeling adrift, invisible.

 It turns out that the real answer was having people I respect tell me, flat-out, that no one should have their gender identity denied. Suddenly there wasn't an "enough" anymore, no more power dynamic, just me. As me. So I'm trans. Not trans enough, just trans.

I still have a weird/uncertain place in the trans community, but I trust that my own communities of the non-binary and non-transitioning will sort that out over time. More saliently, I still have the question about what it means to be trans. And while I want to avoid defining trans identity through dysphoria and suffering, because that rhetoric is a way of erasing people like me and has caused me more suffering than gender dysphoria itself, I do sometimes experience distress when people gender me--or when I look at my body. This post is about looking in the mirror.

It took me years to name it, that rare-but-memorable disoriented despair I'd fall into when looking at my face. The last time I had it, without yet knowing its name, I got on Facebook and messaged with a friend about it, panicked. I probably said something similar to some of the following:

My face looks wrong. It's so innocent-looking. People can't see my spikes and hard edges. They'll see me as soft and pure. Even angelic. I'm not supposed to look like this!

 My friend didn't understand me, of course, but afterward I realized I was talking about sex characteristics. That "angelic" face was a result of bones not thickened by testosterone, pores not widened, and a softening layer of estrogen-invoked fat. Years ago I'd already sighed gratitude for the millimeter of sharpness losing babyfat gave to my face, reducing that dysphoria, but it wasn't enough.

I'll tell you a secret: I say I only rarely get dysphoria, but it's not uncommon for me to get this easily brush-offable buzzing sense of unreality when I see the femininity of my face. I'm often reminded of male anime characters whose angelic faces get them read as female by other characters. I'm reminded of the androgyny of angels, flat chests and soft, pretty faces.

See how complex cultural ideas are inseparable from a supposed "biological" reaction to unexpected anatomy? How can I know I was "born this way", that I'm actually biologically different from cis people, if Japanese cartoons and Catholic angels are the basic unit of my dysphoria?

I couldn't stop asking that question until I got lost answering it. Because gender goes much, much deeper in our culture than portrayals of fictional characters.

I want "strong" features, but instead my body is too "soft." And so I messaged my friend in a panic because people could see me as "soft," see my life as "smooth," but couldn't see how "hard" and "sharp-edged" I was. Couldn't see the "strong" emotional and social forces within me. Each word I just put in quotes is one where I'd use exactly the same word for my physical features and an emotional/social/moral trait I was upset about people seeing or not being able to see in me, because of their physical counterparts. I can't break "soft" down into physical and non-physical components. Our very language for describing personality is rooted in sexist metaphors.

Want more? When we say "strong female lead," we don't normally mean she swings kettlebells. But "strong" also means the physical, muscular strength that testosterone nourishes. And further, someone's muscular strength--and the "strength" of their jaw line and other bone structure--is part of how we are trained to categorize them as "male" or "female"when we meet them. So four things--personality, physical traits, sex, and gender--are indistinguishable in much of our core vocabulary. I was stunned when I first saw this. I know now that I will probably never be able to untangle the biological from the cultural roots of my gender dysphoria. I was born into a culture that doesn't make a distinction, programmed from birth not to see one.

I'm guessing the ancestors who made our language mined their own bodies for metaphors. And after all, it isn't entirely sexist: Softness in the body can come from leisure as well as estrogen, hardness from intensity and experience as well as testosterone. But hormones are often a dominant factor, and certainly our culture has long seen women as "softer" and men as "harder". These words--metaphors--are sexist. Our perceptions of who is what sex are sexist, based in an evaluation of someone's conformity to sexist stereotypes. That's why people who don't fit the assigned words mocked as belonging to or being like "the opposite" sex. Our language doesn't know the difference between the associated traits, physical or metaphorical, and the actual gender.

Knowing this has changed how I look at my own body. I look around at presumably cis men at work and realize that some have rounded foreheads and soft faces, or narrow "weak" jaws and shallow brows. My rejection of my own face is a feedback loop, a cycle fed by unrealistic ideals of what someone who's not female should look like, and ridiculous but culturally-ingrained assumptions about a connection between appearance and personality or experience, and an expectation that I should look androgynous if I identify as such, or that I should want to look different than I do since I am trans, with a belief again from the dominant cis-normative culture that other people should be able to look at my physical features and tell who I am. Maybe there's some differences in the sexual development of my brain in there that helps kick it all off, but all the cultural stuff around gender is more than messed up enough for me to not want to be part of it.  And you know what? Either way I'm a legitimate trans person.