G.O. writes about her decision not to emphasize passing.

K. wrote:

>Are you transitioning at the job you previously worked as a male? That's always a bad idea if you ask me.

Many people have transitioned very succesfully at work. This is a very case specific and individual decision. If you have a supportive workplace it can be easier to stay in a position where you have some security and supportive friends.

>Passing is important. How successful you are in transition is directly proportional to how well you pass, regardless of what other "trans activists" may tell you. This may seem harsh, but it also very true.

Again, this is very case specific. "Passing" may not be terribly important if you live in an urban area or college town, or a place where people are even a little open-minded and tolerant. I transitioned in Chapel Hill, NC, and I chose not to try to "pass". The things that I might have done to pass felt artificial and wrong for me personally. For my transition, I changed my name and began to dress a little more androgynously. This was difficult only to the extent that I felt people expected me to be more femme. The advice I got from people in the gender community was that I should "act the role". And that was really impossible for me - I can't act. I think my transition might have been easier if I had heard from people saying that it is OK not to pass, that it is fine if you get interpreted as male sometimes and female sometimes. During my transition, people respected me for my integrity and courage, and they really didn't care that my gender was ambiguous. (I should say that I didn't live in a place where someone might attack me because they didn't know what my sex was. If Texas is like that, maybe you do have to pass there.)

I'm two years post-surgery now, and I still don't try to pass. I still get interpreted as female sometimes, male other times. Often I think people aren't sure, and that has never created a problem. I'm definitely not a "trans activist", but I do believe that feeling forced to "pass" can be much more stressful and exhausting than not worrying about passing. Passing can be equivalent to shame, silence and the "closet".

This has worked for me - I can't say what works for everyone, but I do feel obligated to object when I hear someone making fairly arbitrary statements. Everyone's situation is different - there is incredible beauty in our difference and diversity, we have an infinity of possibilities. I think we are stronger if we help each other explore those possibilities, and respect the different paths each person follows.

R. wrote: >One of my own personal goals has been to not rely on secrets. Sure, there's plenty of information about myself that I consider private, and that I don't bring up in casual conversation, but one of the things that provided the motivation to finally do something about my gender conflict, despite the heartache that this entailed, was that I couldn't stand not being honest any longer.

I felt much the same - I felt that honesty was so important that I decided to transition even though I knew that I would never be accepted as a woman. And now that I know it is not impossible for me to "pass", I still choose to be very open about my history because honesty is so important to me, and because I believe it is so important to increase peoples awareness and acceptance to diveristy in gender.

A few years ago I posted some writings from Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow which finally gave me the courage to be honest. I especially reccomend "On Becoming a Person" by Carl Rogers. To paraphrase from a foggy memory, Rogers wrote about the contradiction between the true self, one's image of self, and the self which one shows to society. There is always conflict and inconsistency until those three selves become one, and other people can sense the conflict in the person. To be able to fully experience existence and to fully relate to others, we must be able to resolve the self that we are with the self that we think we are and the self that we show to the world.

Also this, from "On Becoming a Person":

I believe it will be clear that a person who is involved in the directional process which I have termed `the good life' is a creative person. With his sensitive openness to the world, his trust of his own ability to form new relationships with his environment, he would be the type of person from whom creative products and creative living emerge. He would not necessarily be `adjusted' to his culture, and he would almost certainly not be a conformist. But at any time and in any culture he would live constructively, in as much harmony with his culture as a balanced satisfaction of his needs demanded. In some cultural situations he might in some ways be very unhappy, but he would continue to move toward becoming himself, and to behave in such a way a to provide the maximum satisfaction of his deepest needs.

I'm posting this not to antagonize those who choose a more conventional path, but hopefully to support those who are still struggling to find a path that makes sense.

Please address flames to: bounces-off-me@sticks.to.you.com ;)

G.

D.V. shared these thoughts about the relationships between those who pass and those who don't.

G. wrote:

>dianews@mindspring.com says...

>>Passing is not not NOT essential. There are genetic women who don't pass reliably; people, please get OFF this myth that it's an automatic for those born to it. Beauty isn't an essential, either.

>How come it is those people who don't pass well who all jump up and down asserting that not being passable isn't such a big deal?

G.,

I'll take this from right here. One of the reasons that folks who don't pass well are so vocal in asserting that not being passable isn't such a big deal is because, if you can't pass well then you cannot afford to let it be a big deal. That doesn't mean that you may not wish that you could pass well, but it is not in your best interests to believe that passing is the be-all, end-all of TS existence.

Let me try to put it into another context. I know I use this a lot but it is the place where I came to understand what it means to not be 'passable'. You've seen my dredloks, G., they are more than a way of fixing my hair. It started from one place---realizing one morning that as long as I saw beauty through the filter of whiteness I would not be able to see myself beautiful. In that moment I decided that I would no longer try to measure up to a white standard of beauty. I shaved my straightened hair and let it grow into a small, well-combed natural for two years before I loked it. I decided that if I were to have long hair I was going to get it through loks, not extensions, not braids, loks...something only black folks can do with their hair and really pull it off.

One of the side effects of that decision is that I've lost this belief, that was lurking in my subconscious, that blonde hair was the most desirable hair of all. Now, there are some folks---black women among them---who would disagree. But since I can never have that long, blonde hair naturally I don't try. I've had to redefine what is important to me in looking like myself. I'm certain that the process is similar, but I'm sure no where near identical, to what non-passable TS women go through. To survive and be able to do more than sit at home they must redefine what is important and what isn't. Not doing so is a sure trip to mental dis-stress.

What I haven't heard from all of us who are passable and are getting into what could quickly become an orgy of agrandizement is this---we are blessed. I'm not lucky, I'm blessed. I was passable within a year of starting on estrogen. And not huge, doses designed to bludgeon my endocrine system into submission. I have small hands, size 10 feet, had very little facial hair, and a very small frame. I get to forget for all but three events in my day---showering, going to the bathroom and sex. Actually, four---I change my clothes at the office before I go to the gym or the dojo. That's it. I can count on one hand all the times I've been read as sir in the last 18 months. I don't wear much makeup and when I do it's lipstick and blush. Now, if that is not being profoundly blessed by Spirit then I don't know what could be.

It means that I get to go in and just be one of the grrrls at work. It means I can walk into the womens' locker room at the gym and no one bats an eye. <provided I keep all my clothes on below the waist> It means that I can be on a bus, in the bathroom, in just about any public space and not have to even think about how to answer that question. When I told my boss I was TS she thought I was an FTM and she was confused 'cuz I'm SO femme!!! <it was lots of fun!!! ;-) > When this is over in another 18 months or so, it's over. There are some of our sisters out there who will never be able to say that. IF they spent Bill Gates fortunes they couldn't say that. They lead an existence where doing things you and I can take for granted are acts of extreme courage. If they see the situation differently than us, it is because they're lives are different than yours and mine. They deserve better than our pity, our scorn or our fear of association---they deserve our utmost respect.

>What L. and I are saying (she'll correct me if I'm speaking out of school) is that if you wish to be accepted as a WOMAN and not as a TRANSSEXUAL or a TRANSVESTTITE, passing is the single most important thing you can do.

No, G. If you wish to be accepted as a woman then being a woman is the most important thing you can do. I'm a woman sitting here writing this to you. although you've both heard my voice and seen my face I could look like anything. but my voice the way I come to this subject is a womans' voice. THE most important thing you can to become a woman is to take that little girl none of us really got to be fully, and gently, tenderly, mother her yourself until she becomes the adult woman you might have become anyway. Changing the body is only the middle, it is neither the beginning or the end.

For some of our sisters out there, reading this or not, they will not be 'accepted as an average' woman except in their most intimate circles, by the people who take the time to know them. They will not have that experience in the public sphere. Now, does that make those women less women than you or I? Does it make the experience of their closest friends of them as women, less valid than my bosses experience of me? I don't think so.

These women are my sisters too. They know that territory that I know. They are not doing anything wrong, they are not defective, and they are beautiful---even though the rest of the world may not be able to understand it. They do not need to change their attitude, sit down, shut up and disappear so the rest of us won't be painted with the same brush and they don't need a make-over at Glamour Shots. If anything, when we seem them on the bus, at the water-cooler, in the line at the market---if time permits, if our mental state allows, they deserve acknowledgment. If all we have time for is a smile, then smile. If there is space to say---'me too, been there, done that, have the T-menace tee-shirt and you're not alone and you're lookin' good' then do that.

In sisterly spirit;
D.

G. wrote:

>I don't believe for a moment that being "beautiful" is the way towards being "passable". There are GGs who are less than "beautiful" and they pass. There are M2Fs who are less than "beautiful" and they also pass.

I wasn't talking about beauty, G., I was speaking specifically to passing. It's akin to black folks who can 'pass for white'. Those who could did. They said <and still say> some of the same kinds of things about us darker skinned folks that is being said about the less passable among us. "What's wrong with them." "I'm not like them." "I don't want to be perceived as being like them." "Poor wretches." Conversely it was those of us who couldn't pass who had the firehoses turned on us, who marched, who have had to withstand the daily humiliations of being black in this nation. Not because we wanted to but because fate simply removed any choice.

>I'm talking about having an appearance which is even remotely plausibly feminine -- even if only "butt-ugly" feminine.

I'm not arguing that if you gave me a choice I'd choose to look the way I look than to be non-passable. But if this were forty years ago and you'd asked me if I would rather be high-yella <light skin, straight hair, smaller lips> or looking like my father <who is the most beautifully rich, chocolate colored man you're every likely to meet> I'd choose to be light-skinned. What rational person wouldn't given those various realities. But we do no better than those in my mothers' family who looked down on the members of my fathers family because the former is much lighter than the latter. Even the term 90% non-passable or 90% passable remind me of the gradations we black folk use with one another to determine hierarchy. I'm toward the high end of the middle---dark enough that I'm clearly not-passable but still nowhere near the deep mocha of my sister or the coffee-bean of my father. Somehow, that simple trait of having lighter skin is supposed to make me a 'better' black woman than my sister, my mother is at the top of that particular food-chain. In her younger days she was just barely passable. If this description of hierarchy within my black culture turns your stomach that's an admirable response. What's the difference then in what is happening here.

We can come up with whatever complex justifcation we might want to in order to explain it away. But really what it is is our own internalized oppression. YMMV, of course, but I defy you to tell me what it is if not that.

Adrienne

A.N. speculates on why this is such a hot topic in our community.

I think the reason the issue of passing gets us all so jacked up is simply this: We are all incredibly socialized regarding gender roles. This applies equally to non-transgendered people.

We essentially define "passing" as racing from one closet ("male") to another ("female") without being detected in between. As I read the thread entitled "Importance of Passing" I could see the power of socialization at work. We give ourselves and each other brownie points or demerits on how well we are able to scoot from closet to closet. What a weird pecking order! Don't we owe it to ourselves, our community and to the world at large to do a little better?

I will borrow Dallas Denny's phrase about transgendered people being social engineers. Laying aside that small group of individuals whose features are so amorphous as to allow easy gender switching, most of us find it a substantial undertaking to effectively and consistently present ourselves as members of the gender not of our birth. Let's be honest about this and take a hard look at ourselves in the light of day and our comrades in our support groups. There are rough edges.

So do we castigate ourselves if we are misperceived? Can we allow ourselves smugness in the event we slide by better than some of our colleagues? What if you are transgendered and stuck in a physical form that just doesn't lend itself -- no matter how hard you try -- to a pleasing image of a different gender?

I submit we absolutely have a duty to carve out a place, or at least start getting out the chisels, where no one is locked into a stereotyped self-image. I don't mean that we have to start running around with blue hair or underwear on our heads. At the same time we need to start building a world where people are not judged harshly if they don't fit within the increasingly narrow confines of male or female. The beneficiaries of this are not only transgendered people (by definition the audience composed by this newsgroup) but society at large. But surely transgendered folk should be in the forefront of change.

Everything I have written hereinabove (THAT's one hell of a word) is qualified by the fact that I just got home from a date during which I had four glasses of a tres mediocre Chardonnay. And I am pleased to say that, in part due to same, I am under pressure to quit pecking on this keyboard. But before I shut up, I will tell you that this evening alone I sat in an upscale hetero-mainstream piano bar here and people-watched and saw that about 90% of the people in there were struggling really hard to "pass" as somebody or something they thought they should be, but that most were clocked as something else.

We can lead the way to something better my friends, if we don't get too damned self-absorbed in our own little worlds. Better for us, and better for everybody else, too.

Well, I'm outta here and hopefully off to something wicked. Bye.

A.

I agree with Becky that the best circumstance may be when people know you've changed but don't care. That gives you an enormous sense of openness, and the freedom to bring you entire life experience to the table.

Sometimes I like to imagine a life where "no one knows". But I really don't think that is realistic -- people are going to find out. More importantly, I think that such a situation actually forces you back into the closet, in that you are then increasingly caught up in an effort to revise your personal history and keep the truth hidden.

The vast majority of the time, I believe, your gender history is relatively meaningless to other people. I don't give much thought to whether the folks I meet were at some time of a different gender and I do not think they give much consideration to me in that respect either. When it comes up, I try to tell the truth (although I don't perceive any need to elaborate unless special circumstances exist) although sometimes I admit I fudge to sort of "grease the wheels" where no explanation is really necessary.

I respect those who crusade for new gender definitions. Philosophically that seems wise to me, and possibly society may someday change for the better. But such change will occur slowly, for our perceptions and feelings regarding gender are rooted deeply in our individual and collective consciences. Most of my meager resources are consumed by the modest journey I have undertaken thus far and in carrying on with the usual demands of life.

Kind regards.

A.