SimplySxy

Author: Kyle Jones

  • Travelling while Trans

    Travelling while Trans

    “What are you going to do about the bathrooms?”

    I recently travelled to Florida for spring vacation with my family. Florida is one of those states where a law has been proposed concerning the use of public restrooms, specifically targeting trans people. The idea of overzealous bathroom police has a lot of people pissed off and afraid and when a friend heard me talking about my vacation destination, he was concerned for my safety.

    Truth is, I hadn’t thought about it yet. I was too busy catching up on work so I could hand-off to my co-workers. Once the topic had been brought up, however, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Along with those concerns about men’s restrooms, I started having flashbacks about uncomfortable and invasive past encounters with the TSA. My anxiety level increased as departure day approached, even though I was also looking forward to several days in warm weather without work responsibilities.

    Travel can cause anxiety for a lot of people, no doubt about it. Concerns about having enough time to get through security, making sure your pockets are empty and your laptop is out, fears about flying, concerns about connecting flights… it goes on and on. For transgender and gender nonconforming people like me, there are added issues. Will security give me a hard time for having an ‘F’ on my ID while looking male? Should I take my packer out before going through security, so that it’s not perceived to be an anomaly during the full body scan? If they choose to scan me as male, will my chest and binder be seen as an attempt to conceal something? Will I be pulled aside for a pat-down, increasing my wife’s stress that we’ll miss our flight? Am I going to be harassed in the airport restroom?

    As it turned out, all of that anxiety and preloaded adrenaline was for nothing. I spent a week in central Florida and passed as male everywhere I went, with the exception of my wife’s family who are still getting used to my changes. I heard my former name and pronouns more from them than I had in months, but everywhere else I was seen and accepted as a man. The peak moment of passing as male in Florida happened while we were visiting Gatorland. We were sitting in the stands for a ‘close encounters’ show where they have audience members help them with mystery animals held in wooden boxes. The first mystery animal was a tarantula, held by a reluctant woman volunteered by her family. The second animal was a rattlesnake and the handlers wisely decided to keep that one to themselves. For the last critter, something large judging by the box it was in, they wanted four audience members, two men and two women.

    With two women and one man standing in front of the audience, they were pointing to someone on our side of the stands to be the second man. I looked up behind me and heard the guy say, “No, not behind you.” I looked forward again and raised my eyebrows, surprised and delighted. Turns out my daughter had been pointing to me behind my back. That’s how I became the second male volunteer to go down to the stage and help hold a very large Burmese Python.

    My experiences in Florida, along with my experiences here at home, reinforced something I’d been thinking already: the people who will be hurt most by bathroom gender policing such as that proposed by Florida’s HB 583 or California’s “Personal Privacy Protection Act” initiative will be those who don’t pass well as male or female, depending on the restroom they are trying to access.

    These attempts at bathroom policing are promoted as necessary safety precautions intended to reduce the potential for bathroom sexual assault. What they actually do is set up the very real possibility of assaults by self-assigned gender police against transgender people and other people whose appearance doesn’t conform to expectations based on their gender. Basically, these laws would validate and encourage transphobic bullying, increasing the violence and victimization of a sector of the population that already faces a high incidence of violent assault and risk for suicide and self-harming behaviors.

    These laws aren’t protective, they are attempts to vilify an already oppressed group of people through lies and fear-mongering. The specter of the male who cross-dresses in order to access women’s rooms and assault those using them is a boogie man without factual basis. According to an article on Mic.com on that topic, no statistical evidence was found of a single incidence backing up those fears. Lack of factual basis doesn’t prevent people from whipping themselves into paranoid frenzies, however, and it’s a familiar tactic used by social conservatives to hold back socially liberal causes aimed at equal access and respect for all.

    A brilliant social media campaign by some trans men and women used pictures of them in restrooms corresponding to their birth sex to illustrate a point: if laws are put in place decreeing that we must all use the bathrooms corresponding to the gender assigned us at birth, women’s rooms are going to start being occupied by men and men’s rooms by women. And I don’t think that’s what Joe and Betty Middle America want.

    You may be thinking, “Hey, that initiative in California and those laws being proposed in other states, they’re not going to stand, they’ll get struck down, for sure.” You’re probably right and I contend that they are a serious problem regardless. Every time a religious leader, politician, school board member or other community leader proposes or supports transphobic laws and attitudes, these are the messages heard by my community: you’re not wanted, we wish you would go away, we don’t want to see you, we wish you were dead. People who are eager to justify their feelings of discomfort about trans people hear: trans people are the enemy, it’s ok to harass and bully them, they don’t belong in our community, we should do whatever we can to get rid of them. Even when these laws go no where, they have an extremely negative and tangible effect. They are evidence that a lot of people are eager to be hostile and punitive against people who are transgender or gender nonconforming in other ways..

    As I continue my transition, I will benefit more and more from passing privilege, seen as a man and accorded the benefits typically given to men in this society. For me personally, passing privilege is going to mean my life gets easier in a lot of ways. Eventually, I imagine I’ll be more confident and less fearful about going to new places and being around people I don’t know. Though that’s good for me, I know my privilege isn’t shared by all. Though I might be able to avoid transphobic violence, I’m not going to be satisfied with having secured my safety until that safety is shared by all. I don’t get harassed now the way I did when I was seen as a butch dyke but I still carry those experiences, along with experiences of misogyny, sexism and homophobia. I am committed to using my passing privilege to help others who don’t have those advantages.

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  • Gendering Outside the Lines (Part 2)

    Gendering Outside the Lines (Part 2)

    Read Part I here

    Some of the terms I used in my introduction to describe my gender identity and gender discovery journey are likely unfamiliar to you. Here’s a quick vocab lesson to go with my first post:

    Assigned Female at Birth (AFAB), also Assigned Male at Birth (AMAB): these terms acknowledge that the gender that ends up on your birth certificate is determined based on external examination of your genitals and assigned by someone other than the person being born. That assigned gender may or may not correspond to the gender identity that person eventually recognizes for themselves. So, in my case, when I was born, everyone in the room (other than me) took a look and decided I was female.

    Transmasculine is a term used to describe people who are AFAB and identify as masculine in some way and/or are masculine in appearance. Genderqueer is a term some people use to describe identities that are not male or female, but perhaps a combination of them or transcending them entirely. I use genderqueer as a shortcut to describe my gender identity which is a combination of male and female, though I do not specifically identify as either.

    Because I’m genderqueer, you can also say that I don’t identify with the gender binary. Another term you might have seen is ‘trans*’. This is a term some people use to broadly describe people who identify as transgender, transsexual or other gender non-conforming identities. I sometimes describe myself as a trans* genderqueer butch. Be aware that in some circles, this is a controversial term, however it is one I use to describe myself and other nonbinary identified people.

    ‘Non-binary’ is another term we should explore and we’ll do that by first talking about what binary means. A binary system is one with two choices, like on/off or black/white. When we talk about the gender binary, we’re talking about male and female being the only two terms we have when describing gender. For most of my life, I didn’t question that system or the limitations it imposed. Our culture uses the gender binary to define what roles, characteristics and appearances are acceptable for everyone based on their perceived gender. When I identified as a butch female, I was gender non-conforming. That means I wasn’t playing by the rules for being a female in American culture. I didn’t wear dresses, or keep my hair long and feminine. I embraced masculinity and put me outside the gender norms. Even as I chafed at the limitations assigned my gender, I still didn’t question the binary itself.

    Sit for a moment and imagine living outside that binary, imagine not being constrained by male and female. Can you do it? Can you think of a time when you didn’t feel intrinsically male or female? Even for people who are trans* identified, it can be a challenge. Most people relate to the gender binary in a positive way, for example trans women who identify as female or trans men who identify as male. But I am becoming more and more aware of people like me who occupy that gray area in between (or maybe outside) the binary.

    I first discovered this gray area through blogs and essays and eventually met some nonbinary people in person. I had a growing realization that this way of seeing gender, outside the restrictions of the binary, resonated with my internal vision of myself. I began to identify as genderqueer and tell people about the way gender intersected in me. The ongoing challenge is that it is really hard to explain not being male or female to binary identified people. Typical reactions are confusion, disbelief, even mockery – maybe you can relate to one of those.

    This being my first post here, I don’t want to go on and on, better to leave something for the next time. In my next installment, I will address a couple more things I spoke about in the second paragraph – my pronouns, name change, testosterone and how that reconciles with not being male.

    If you have questions for me on the topics I’ve raised here or questions you hope I’ll address in future posts, please leave them for me in a comment. You can also find more on these topics (and more) on my blog, Butchtastic.

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  • Gendering Outside the Lines (Part 1)

    Gendering Outside the Lines (Part 1)

    I was invited to contribute to this site and share my trans* perspective on sexuality and gender. To be perfectly clear, I am only qualified to speak from my own perspective and though my viewpoint will sometimes overlap with that of other people, there are times when it will not.

    Since I’m new here, I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself. I am a 51 year old transmasculine genderqueer who was assigned female at birth, uses he/him/his pronouns and is taking testosterone (T) to better align my physical body with my gender identity. I recently completed a legal name change to a typically male name which is similar to my birth name. Though I identify as trans* and masculine, I do not identify as male.

    I started taking T last year after a lifetime of not really fitting into my expected role as a female. Even as a masculine lesbian female – dyke, queer, butch – there was something that didn’t work for me, like a pair of underwear that rode up in the wrong places and also felt too loose. Yeah, it was that uncomfortable. Over the years, I watched as some of the other butches I knew chose transition from female to male, becoming trans men. I pondered their choice and thought about my own discomfort in being female, but something held me back.

    That something was the fact that though I do not identify as female, I also don’t identify fully as male. Combine that with my assumption that only male identified people went through transition and I was at a stalemate. Years went by as I learned more and more about gender identification and how complex it was. I hadn’t put my own situation into words, because the idea of not being female but also not being male wouldn’t fit into my head any better than a square peg in a round hole. You may be feeling similarly at this point, how does a person not feel either female or male, what else is there?

    I didn’t know it for many years, but I was on a quest to find the words to describe my sense of gender. The main problem was that the words didn’t exist yet. The words ‘genderqueer’ and ‘non-binary’ were outside my knowledge until about five or six years ago, and they hadn’t been in common usage much before that. When I came across the definition of genderqueer, I felt like my brain suddenly expanded like a giant sponge animal dipped in water. All of a sudden, there was more room in the world, more reality to explore and occupy. The thing I’d been chasing, my own personal golden chalice, had a name, it existed in the way that it hadn’t before because now I had a word for it, and a new understanding about gender.

    I’ve thrown a lot of terms in the preceding paragraphs that may be unfamiliar to you. You aren’t alone, I’ve had countless conversations with people over the last several years about the terminology used to describe gender identity and those conversations started with me being very ignorant.

    Read part 2 here

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