Uncomfortable Labels

by Laura Kate Dale

  Learning to be one of the gals

  Back when I still intended to hide the fact I was trans, in early transition, it always became awkward any time conversations of my childhood arose, as I had to on the fly tweak and rewrite history to better fit the version I wanted the world to see. I remember once in early transition, working in a retail store, having a customer sort of half recognise me, and ask me if I had a brother who used to work at the store. While it was clear they’d mistaken pre- and post-transition me as two separate people, I spun them some nonsense story about how my brother had moved to London and wouldn’t be working there any more. These were the sorts of lies I told here and there to make sense of my dropping into life as a woman out of nowhere as a young adult. I found myself forcing myself to laugh along at things I didn’t understand; I had to dodge my way around direct questions, and it was all just a bit of a rough time.

  Thankfully, I found a really great group of female friends through costume design in my late teens and early 20s, and they were not only aware I was trans, but willing to bend over backwards to accommodate helping me feel at home. They didn’t treat my lack of going through periods as a teen as something that made me less of a woman. They didn’t judge me for not knowing sleepover etiquette; they just let me ask questions without ever questioning my identity, which was exactly what I needed at that time. All too often in the media, we see trans women portrayed as ‘men pretending to be women’, but ultimately the opposite is far more accurate. As a trans woman, I wasn’t pretending to be female when I started presenting myself as female; I was learning to drop a carefully rehearsed act, and that was part of what was so tough.

  In previous chapters in this book, I’ve talked about how learning to survive autism symptoms was performative. I made flowcharts, I assessed actions and likely outcomes, I presented a version of myself that could get through the world unharmed; well, that’s what I was also doing with regards to gendered presentation prior to transition. I learned that holding myself in a certain way, making my voice sound a certain way, not acting in certain ways, could prevent me getting harassed. I spent years methodically pretending to be a man, only to come out and, with the right group of friends, just let myself start to unwind and be more authentically myself. I had to learn a lot of performative femininity to avoid harassment and NHS gatekeeping, but ultimately I just relaxed and let myself be who I was. I ended up finding that the best way to find who I wanted to be.

  As it turns out, the best way to learn to be who I was was to just drop the facade, and let myself be myself. The best friends I’ve ever had are the ones I can just be me with, whoever that is, and still be seen as the woman I am.

  CHAPTER 7

  Squeezing a Late Youth into Adulthood

  One near universal experience common to pretty much any adult who transitions once out in the world, rather than transitioning during their school years, is experiencing a second attempt at childhood. Usually manifesting as a sort of spiritual return to one’s teenage years, you’ll often see trans people spend a few years once they’re comfortable and established in their new life role being experimental and silly, taking risks and connecting with activities generally considered age inappropriate for them. It’s kind of an understandable thing, and something I know I have undeniably done a lot of over the past few years, and my whole life really. It’s totally healthy when done right, and fulfills a few needs that are present for people who’ve transitioned in their adulthood.

  First, there’s a medical reason a lot of us go through a bit of a teenage spell as adults: second puberty. I’ve not really talked a lot in this book about the medical changes I’ve chosen to undergo as part of my transition, because ultimately I don’t really think they’re important to anyone but myself. Getting surgery to change my penis into a vagina gave me the comfort to wear swimwear and leggings. Hormones changed my emotional range a bit, and are slowly changing my body shape. That’s the basics of the changes I personally made, but not every trans woman makes those same changes, and their reasons are their own. However, as someone who did undergo hormone replacement therapy (HRT), where I took one set of medications to block testosterone’s effect on my body and began taking oestrogen tablets, I did experience a second puberty.

  If you’ve been through puberty once already, you probably remember what it was like. A maelstrom of confusion, pain, exhaustion, urges and change. You’ve got body parts where you didn’t before, you’ve got interests you didn’t have before and you’re constantly running on full emotional blast. Second puberty for me, as for a lot of trans people, was much the same. I found myself being attracted to people I was not attracted to before, I found myself crying all of the time at everything and I found myself experiencing growing pains as parts of me began to change. Much like cis women, my hormone levels fluctuate in cycles across the month, so I’ll have some overly emotional days towards the end of the month, and I have to be aware of that in ways I didn’t have to with testosterone. The big difference for me as a trans woman between these two puberties was that the first one I experienced was nothing but negative; it was years of my body changing and me being upset and terrified at that notion. The second, on the other hand, was positive. Sure, it was tiring and emotionally overwhelming, but it was positive. I had all these changes happening, and the urge to seize all the opportunities I never felt able to in my first teen years. I wanted to show off my skin. I wanted to spend time outside with friends. I wanted to experiment and try new things. I wanted to introduce myself to new people. I wanted to take the time to discover who I was. My second puberty was a time of huge self-discovery, and a lot of the things people want to do in order to explore who they are happen to be things generally associated with people in their late teen years. We just kind of get to them a bit late.

  Putting aside the medicinal aspect, probably the far bigger factor in trans adults embracing traditionally more youthful aspects of life is the feeling that there’s a lot of things we ultimately missed out on our chance to do. I was living as male during pretty much my entire childhood, and there were a lot of aspects of childhood I kind of just had to watch from the outside: gossipy sleepovers, going out clothes shopping, simply walking platonically holding hands with a friend, singing songs as you skip down the street. These are all really simple things, but when they’re seemingly kept away from you for arbitrary reasons, there’s a real urge to engage with them when you’re finally able. I have a couple of friends, Becky and Makeda, who have been incredibly helpful in my life at allowing me to basically get around to these things a little late, without judgement. We’ve had adult, giggly gossip sleepovers. We’ve skipped down the street arm in arm laughing. We’ve gone shopping together as a group. I’ve thankfully had a chance, as an adult, to engage with some of the activities I missed out on my chance to do.

  Much earlier in this book, I mentioned asking my parents for a paper doll, like the one they had made for my sister, a request they twisted to something more socially acceptable. As an adult, I will occasionally just buy myself a cute female-coded toy or doll. Not because I need it, but because I can. I’m at a place in my life where I am able to, guilt free, engage with things I was unable to as a child who had been assigned male.

  I was stopped from dancing out of fear that I would be bullied by my male peers. Now I go out dancing a couple of times a month. I’m reclaiming feminine-coded activities that my childhood denied me, because being an adult doesn’t mean I can’t embrace and support the little girl inside me who just wanted to dance and play with dolls like her sister. I own stuffed animals as an adult, and proudly give them pride of place in the bedroom my partner and I share, because I’m at a place in my life where my friends won’t judge me for sometimes wanting to just hug something cute and cuddly. I’m living out aspects of feminine-coded childhood as an adult, because a few decades ago there was a little girl living in this body who wasn’t allowed to explore those aspects of life.

  On top of that, there’s also the
part that romance plays in reliving your wild and crazy teen years, but as an adult with same-sex attractions. I didn’t view myself as holding same-sex attractions until I was a little way into transitioning to female. I knew that my whole life I had been primarily attracted to women, but my dating life had been held back by my own lack of awareness over who I wanted to be. Before coming out as trans, I felt awkward and uncomfortable dating, because while I was dating the people I wanted to, I was not doing so the way I wanted. The who I was dating was right, but the who I was dating as was wrong. When I came out as trans and reframed my relationships with women as being same-sex relationships, it changed so much about the mechanics of dating, and my place in that world, that I felt like I was dating for the first time all over again. Also those awkward shy ‘is it okay if I tell you I think I might like you’ interactions that are usually gone and out the way before someone hits their 20s were a big part of how I engaged with romance. I was still anxious and new, trying to work out who I was, who I liked and what I liked in a relationship, and I was doing it considerably later than my peers.

  Outside of that, there’s also being on the autism spectrum, and the effect that can have for many individuals. I, like many people on the autism spectrum, sort of felt the need to mature before my time. I was societally shunned by my peers; people my age just wanted nothing to do with me, and my obsessive urge to learn meant I often wanted to engage on topics in ways that did not connect properly with those around me. As a result, I am one of the many people on the autism spectrum who grew up very early in an attempt to find connection and solace in adults instead, people who might be more willing to look past my awkwardness. The problem with that is two-fold. I sort of skipped my chance to be a carefree child; I wasn’t allowed to engage with my peers, and even when I was, I was often too anxious to, jumping straight to behaving properly and following the rules religiously. Second, as addressed earlier in this book, trying to engage with adults at times put me in traumatic situations, and those traumatic events when paired with bullying from my peers forced me to grow up and mature early as a coping mechanism. Trauma forces you to grow up fast, because it robs a person of some degree of innocent positive naivety.

  When you add all these together, and look at LGBT trans women on the autism spectrum, it’s no surprise that so many of us engage with aspects of childhood well into our adulthoods. We’re forced to grow up fast by peers who don’t understand us, we’re denied aspects of childhood we have to look in on from outside and we’re often unable to experience teenage puppy love at an appropriate time.

  People like me often get into our 20s or older, transition, and find the world suddenly open to us. Suddenly we’re positive; we’ve got a handle on our lives, we know who we are and want to share that with the world, regardless of what they think. Suddenly we have freedom, and money, and friends who understand what we missed out on. I don’t think it’s a huge surprise that some of us just quietly want to act a little young, silly and carefree once we get to grips with who we are. We just want some space to make silly voices, take some risks, wear something garish and dance around the living room without a care in the world.

  CHAPTER 8

  I’m Proud I’m not Invisible

  As a trans woman with autism, I’m most palatable to the world when it can pretend I don’t exist, and this is something that I want not only to push against myself, but really hope we see the world push back against in the years to come. The world is getting more comfortable with a certain class of trans people. In particular, trans women who can ‘pass’ as cisgender. But what about those of us who can’t pass – or don’t think we should have to? Here’s to women with prominent Adam’s apples, five o’clock shadows and deep voices. Here’s to women like me.

  In the 1990s, trans women were punchlines: awareness by way of mockery. It felt like we only existed so the hero of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective had an excuse to comically vomit at the thought that he might have liked a trans woman, and then forcibly strip off her clothes and out her genitals in front of a crowd of vomiting onlookers. At least someone was acknowledging our existence, right? In that era, trans women in media were usually very feminine – but only to set up the punchline. The big reveal. In the 1990s conception of a trans woman’s transition, we simply snuck off for one secretive operation. We’d reappear with bandages on our faces, and slowly unwind the bandage to reveal the most unbelievably, effortlessly gorgeous woman anyone had ever seen.

  The trend continued through the 2000s. Popular culture still portrayed trans women as flawlessly beautiful but with a horrible secret – a penis! You heard the transphobic slur ‘tranny’ everywhere. Trans men got no representation at all. As far as I can tell, comedians found the concept of a ‘man’ giving up his ‘manhood’ funnier than they did a ‘woman’ becoming more ‘manly.’

  Things got a little better in the 2010s. First, we got our first high-profile examples of trans actors playing trans characters. In Orange Is the New Black – the first season, at least – Laverne Cox got to play a nuanced trans woman of colour who suffered for being trans, but also got to be part of a story that wasn’t just about her transness. Second, Caitlyn Jenner publicly transitioned and appeared in a glamorous Vanity Fair spread. Here’s the thing, though. A major reason Cox and Jenner enjoyed the friendly media coverage they did came down to their ability to conform to a traditional standard of female beauty. Trans women who can attain a level of traditionally cisgender female attractiveness – which keeps them from being obviously transgender – are safe and acceptable. Even if their appearance is merely an accident of luck, wealth or the timing of their transition. In reality, most trans women don’t look like Laverne Cox or Caitlyn Jenner. Most of us look…well, like trans women. We might have a visible Adam’s apple. We might have real trouble hiding that five o’clock shadow. We might have broad shoulders or big hands and feet. We might be really tall or have a deep voice. We might have a penis. We’re what’s sometimes referred to as ‘non-passing’. As trans women, we are told that to gain acceptance, we have to pass for cisgender. We have to be invisible. We have to be indistinguishable from someone who was assigned female at birth. We are the trans people who most badly need protection in the world today. We’re the people who get the most badly hurt when the government rolls back our rights. We are the trans people you don’t see in the media. When the media portray non-passing trans women, it’s usually cisgender men who play them. Male actors win awards for their courage in playing trans women. In truth, they’re just reflecting back at the world what the world assumes trans women are. We’re not women. We’re just men in dresses. That’s the message that the media today tries to send. The media wrongly depicts us as makeup-obsessed little boys who made a choice one day to become women. We’re never just women who happen to possess some untraditionally feminine attributes.

  But here’s how things are changing for the better. Non-passing trans women enjoy wider acceptance when more high-profile trans women come out publicly – and don’t make an effort to ‘pass’. The more non-passing trans people in the popular consciousness, the closer we march to the day when the general population of the world take the non-passing trans population as seriously as they do the high-profile passing population. It’s already happening. Laura Jane Grace, the lead singer of Against Me!, came out publicly in one recent album, packed her next album with angry trans anthems…and didn’t change her voice! That gave deeper-voiced trans women hope that the wider population might one day take them seriously, too.

  Honestly, I don’t pass very well. My voice falters. My stubble is visible late in the day. I’m over six feet tall and I struggle with traditionally feminine movements and mannerisms. I spent a long time trying incredibly hard to pass. I eventually stopped trying. I started posting selfies in which I had visible facial hair or where I’d tied my hair back, exposing more of my traditionally masculine facial structure. I stopped wearing scarves that disguised my manly neckline.

  I’m glad I
did. I honestly think the world needs more trans people who are open about their transitions. Who don’t try to pass. Who insist that beautiful can mean a lot of different things. The same goes for autism and how it’s seen in the world. People with autism are seen as valuable if we can do something truly amazing – we’re talking those rare savant-level abilities – or if we can keep our issues hidden well enough to get through the day unnoticed. Basically we either have to have superpowers or be invisible. We’re portrayed in media as being visibly symptomatic only when that can be offset with some genius ability that justifies our right to be allowed to be a bit different. We get portrayals of characters like Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory who is permitted to be obsessed with routine and structure and rules and organisation, because he’s the smartest person in any given room by a country mile. He’s also offset with goofy silly catchphrases, like ‘Bazinga’, to make his quirks appear charming and fun. We’re not allowed to exist as normal. We’re not allowed to exist as people who are a little different, but just like anyone else are trying to live an average kind of life, get by day to day and make do. We’re not allowed to be normal people who occasionally need to flap our hands back and forth to calm down. We’re definitely not allowed to exist as LGBT and on the autism spectrum at the same time; that’s way too many forbidden things going on. It’s too out there: representation gone mad. No person is that many diversity tick boxes at once, are they?

  I’m an adult who can’t hide my autism and LGBT status. Anyone who knows me long enough will work out that I am trans, I have autism and I experience same-sex attractions. You know what? I’m proud of that. The world may want me to be invisible, but I am proud to be visible, to be known, to be seen.