I, Transphobe
“A LOT OF trans people get emotionally all over the place when they take hormones,” someone said to me recently.
Inside, I sighed. I’ve heard this before; I imagine all trans people have. “He was being a crazy dick for a while,” a friend said to me, years ago, about a trans guy she knew. “But he was fine the other day. He must’ve finally gotten his hormones figured out.”
Shortly before I started transitioning, my best friend told me that all trans guys are moody and aggressive. Another friend told me that trans men are the worst of “regular” men and lesbians combined. Only one of these friends, who were both cis women, had an actual friendship with a man of trans experience.
He did sound like a dick. But he doesn’t have anything to do with me, as no trans person’s behavior has anything to do with any other’s. Lots of people are dicks, of course, or moody or aggressive. But all perceived-negative attributes of any trans person is blamed on their transness.
All oppressed people experience this kind of stereotyping, of course. The kind of people who say it to me, though—progressives—know better than to say it about, say, “The Chinese.” It’s still perfectly reasonable for most people I encounter, mostly good damn people—and fucking HBO ↓—to make wild, negative generalizations about The Trans.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
“Do you know a lot of trans people?” I asked the guy who said we were emotionally all over the place, even though I know he doesn’t. This guy knows me, and really cares about me, and made this declaration even knowing that I’m trans! “Who’ve taken hormones? And become emotionally all over the place?”
He backpedaled, saying that he meets all kinds of people. And that all kinds of people are all kinds of people, like, all people are different at certain times, and it just depends because anyone can be any kind of way…it was the sort of barely cohesive answer of someone who’s panicking because they realized they said a fucked-up thing. Did I point out to him that his explanation had nothing to do with his original statement, and invite him to examine the latter? Or say to him straight out, straight up, that he’d just said a really transphobic thing, especially since he didn’t acknowledge that and/or apologize?
Dear Reader, I did not. Because I was afraid. That instead of hearing me he would escalate the conversation into a conflict and/or destroy our relationship. It happened with three of my closest friends since I transitioned, and I didn’t have the resource to go through it with this acquaintance I want to keep.
“Your shoulders are stooped forward because of scar tissue from your top surgery,” a bodyworker said to me three years ago. She had not yet worked on me, nor any other trans person. She did know that I’d had my top-surgery scars worked on for hours upon hours, over years, by a scar-tissue-remediation specialist—who is trans—but apparently didn’t believe me when I explained there wasn’t any left. She didn’t know that when I was an adolescent, long before any sort of breast tissue had even been grown, let alone removed, a general practitioner remarked to my mother that I had “terrible posture,” my head bent halfway to my knees as I sat on the exam table, beat down by being abused and closeted and abused for what I was closeting.
“I recognized the sad crescent-moon of your shoulders,” a friend said to me in my thirties, about how she picked me out of a crowd, breaking my heart.
“This,” I told the bodyworker, “is by far the best my posture has ever been.” The decades spent desperately trying to protect my heart and organs, and crouching in shame and fear and the anti-transness of the whole world was eventually exacerbated further by my chest muscles gripping my shoulders forward as I unconsciously tried to keep my tits from moving any time I moved, shooting dysphoria down my spine. I’d been slowly, painstakingly, persistently chipping away at my shoulders’ conditioned bend for years. My top surgery was the single greatest leap forward; I was proud of how much more open I could get my chest to be.
“A lot of transmasculine people have stooped shoulders,” I told the bodyworker. They have reasons like my reasons, or they have reasons of their own. They are all surviving global hate, a force we contend with every. single. day. And: a lot of people have stooped shoulders, for a whole fucking world of fucking reasons! For anyone, especially a bodyworker, who works tension out of people’s postures all day long, to blame my medical transition shows the strength of the anti-trans brew we all consume all the time.
I have terrible news: You’re a transphobe. In equally—probably even more—terrible news: I am too.
