Hi everyone! Sorry I haven't posted much lately; we've recently moved cross-country, and are still unpacking boxes (and probably will be for the next 6 months -- at least it feels that way sometimes!)
Recently a new online friend posted to a thread on the NorthStar Transgender Support mailing list, talking about her experiences growing up trans*, and explicitly mentioned me as someone who might have a slightly different experience, since I identify more genderqueer than transsexual (Wikipedia's page, which I linked to, has a better explanation than I can give succinctly, if you're curious about what that means).
Anyway, I ended up writing back quite a bit (probably more than everyone else on the thread cared to see, actually. Sorry!), and when I was done, I realized that I haven't really blogged too much over here about my realization that my transgender experience is probably a little different than most. So, I'm going to publish an edited version of those comments here. For those of you reading this that are also on the NS mailing list, please forgive the redundancy.
It's funny, but while my experience is in many ways different from a lot of us in the group, in other ways it's very much the same. I have a lot of attitudes and mannerisms that aren't male-typical, and had even more as a teen before they were kind of shamed out of me by people who told me that I shouldn't act this way or that. For instance, I used to be a kind of a "chatty Cathy," which sometimes got me attention from people around us when we were out in public settings, and my Mom was always trying to get me to quiet down. Looking back now, I think that maybe it was just as much about my intonation and speech patterns as it was my volume. (I'll note that since accepting myself for who I am, I'm getting kinda chatty again -- at least in certain circles)
As a kid, I had a lot of female friends, and very few close guy friends. That was fine in elementary school, but by middle school, when my classmates were starting to pair off as couples and get shy around the opposite sex, suddenly it wasn't cool anymore for me to "fraternize with the enemy," so to speak, and I lost some good friends because of it, without ever really comprehending why. My lack of understanding about how to navigate normal male group dynamics made me an outsider in my ward, neighborhood, school -- just about everywhere, as I didn't really "get" any of the other boys, they certainly didn't know what to make of me, and since I was a boy, the girls weren't really interested in letting me hang around.
Nowadays, the things that get to me the most are when D.W. expects me to act as the stereotypical Mormon "head of household", leading in family scripture study, always being the one to call on people to pray at dinner, that sort of thing. It just DOES NOT come naturally to me, and if I balk when she asks me to do something like that, I think she thinks it's just a lack of self-confidence (or worse, a lack of interest), and not the deep-seated incongruity I feel all the time in those situations -- like, why do I always have to be the one in charge? Why do I always have to be the strong, confident one, just because of the configuration of my privates? Sometimes I wish I had someone to put their arms around me, hold me close, and make me feel safe and protected. Being "the patriarch" is emotionally exhausting to me.
This discomfort affects me at work, too -- I have a hard time being assertive, often preferring to be the one forging compromises and trying to make everyone happy. Sometimes I get nervous about that, and hope that it's not a career-limiting trait (more on that in another post)
Looking at that rambling narrative, I notice it's mostly about gender roles, not strictly about my gender identification. But that's a whole different, tangled-up topic that'll take me a while to properly articulate. For now, let me just say this: it's complicated.
Anyway, maybe this will help someone else out there in the vastness of the Internet. I sure wish the same breadth of information were available to me when I was a kid -- I would have figured things out a lot sooner.
