Trans day of visibility writing prompts, days 11-15

[alpin]

Day 11: Talk about expression and presentation. Do you present as your identified gender? Do you use cosmetics? Do you use scented products? Do you wear jewellery or other accessories? Which rack do most of your clothes come off of? Do you take any special measures with regard to body, facial, or head hair? Have you faced any particular challenges related to your gender expression or presentation?

Yes, I present as a guy full-time, in every aspect of my life. 

I do not wear make-up, which I’m delighted about after a radical change from wearing makeup literally every day in all situations from age 11 to 26. It’s very freeing. I thought I might like to wear guyliner sometimes, but I don’t, and once or twice have used concealer on a spot for the length of a photo. I wear nail varnish sometimes, pretty much entirely because I enjoy the colours and like to have them close at hand (ha) where I can admire them throughout the day. It’s not about presenting to anyone else.  I do enjoy scented products, mostly shower gel and face wash but sometimes solid perfume. I refuse to use 3-in-1 style products partially because I am an adult with standards, who likes and is able to be a bit fussy, partially because I genuinely like experiencing several different products with different scents. My partner makes me beard balm with essential oils, which is fantastic. Everyone with a beard should oil it, it makes it so much softer, smoother, less itchy and more styleable. Recently I’m wearing orange and cedarwood, but I won’t shut up about how much I liked the smokiness of one batch which had birch tar.

I wear jewellery occasionally, usually capturing a goth aesthetic which I don’t tend to commit to in my everyday clothes. I buy clothes exclusively from the men’s section, and love it. They’re soft, thick, substantial, plain, no gathers or frills or viscose or elastic. They don’t dig in or itch or pinch or rub or ride up, they have pockets, they survive the laundry and my thighs and the basic endeavour of moving around, which you’d think would be basic but no-one’s told womens’ clothing designers that.

I am quite particular about my haircut, which also isn’t anything exciting (shaved sides and back, a few cm longer on top, undercut not fade or blend) but barbers seem to just give everyone who sits down the same style no matter what they say, so my partner and I cut each other’s hair. They’re great at it and I’m enjoying getting more confident. I trim my moustache about once a week, and my beard every couple of months, shaving the neck and cheeks to keep it neat every other day. I grow my body hair out because I  love being a bear. 

I have faced people who were surprised that I present as masculine, that I don’t feel any particular urge to do or wear feminine things, that I wear men’s clothes and have body and facial hair. I’ve also faced people who were surprised by the nail polish. In both cases, that’s their problem. They’re projecting things onto me that have more to do with them than with me. I’m just going to get on with my life.

Day 12: Talk about other trans people in your life. Have you met any other trans people? Do you have any trans friends? How have you helped each other?

I have a lot of trans friends, many of them met pre-transition. I met them through my university’s LGBTQ society and through the kink scene. I’m grateful for the example of those who transitioned before me, and commiserated over name change wrangling with those who transitioned around a similar time. I owe a lot to two particularly close nonbinary friends who listened to me freaking out while I was coming to terms with my gender and talked with me about their experiences of medical and legal transition. Now that I’m later in transition, I like to try to offer advice to people earlier in their journey, mostly strangers on facebook and discord. 

I know a lot of trans people who aren’t pursuing medical or legal transition, nor wider social transition apart from among close friends. I know plenty of trans people who are pursuing those things but with totally different goals, priorities, choices, pacing than me. I have transfeminine friends who I’ve swapped clothes with, pleased that the things we don’t want anymore can bring another person joy.  It’s important to remember how our needs and experiences vary, even though we’re all part of the same community.  

Day 13: Talk about music, art, writing, and other forms of creativity. What do you create? Do you include trans themes in your creations? Does your creativity help you with any trans issues?

I do not! I occasionally write fanfiction (like, one story per five years) and some of that includes a trans headcanon, but generally it’s very rare for me to want to do that. I bake and I make little silicone knicknacks, but have never felt the slightest desire to include trans themes somehow in that. I’m not a fan of the colour scheme (too pastel), and it’s just not my thing. 

Day 14: Talk about traditional media. Have you been influenced by trans themes in the media? Have you had to correct misinformation about trans people that others got from the media?

My initial reaction was that I prefer not to consume trans media, as I often find it either wrong, cringe-inducing, or both, as even the accurate by-trans-people-for-trans-people stuff speaks to views and experiences that I do not share and it’s a common phenomenon that things that are nearly right are more jarring than things that are wholly removed from one's own experiences… but actually, I do find some trans media compelling. 

I watched and cried at the documentary Disclosure, and recommended it to my family (my mother assumed that when I said “netflix documentary” I must mean the 90s erotic thriller, wow). The youth have an embarrassment of riches, they really don’t understand that when I was young, there was nothing in terms of queer media, we had to glean scraps. How could I be influenced by such tiny drips of information? In terms of scraps, there was Max on The L Word (which I managed to pirate once I got to university), Dax on Star Trek with a certain interpretation, Mulan and Alanna of Trebond and suchlike, a rubbish YA novel called Warriors of Alavna. Now there’s so much more, in a wide range of genres. I tend to prefer them a bit removed from real life: I love a book of short stories called Beyond Binary, the trans characters in Ann Leckie’s gods series, Krem in Dragon Age, Casey and Ethan in a series of delightful werewolf erotica novels by Dessa Lux, the geologist side character in KJ Charles’ Band Sinister. 

I find that real-world depictions lean too heavily on the experiences of American teenagers for me.  I strongly dislike the trans character in Dream Daddy: there is no reason that an adult man, living as male full-time for years, with a job (and a physical job, at that), house, and grown child would still be putting himself through the significant physical pain and daily life restrictions of binding instead of having had top surgery. It’s a cis person’s idea of “representation”, a  poorly-thought-out symbolic gesture devoid of context. 

I’ve had to correct information that other trans people got from the media, depressingly. Mostly about UK paperwork, mostly that it’s less onerous than they expected, sometimes also about common effects of T (why they’re asking social media instead of their doctors or reading the label I do not know). I don’t know where cis people get their misinformation, to be honest -I certainly don’t recall any media that states that trans people get all their surgeries at once, immediately upon coming out, while isolated from society and then change their name as the final step in the process, but a bizarrely high number of people seem to believe it.

Day 15: Talk about social media and online gaming. How have people reacted to your being trans online?

They haven’t, honestly. A twitter community that I’m loosely part of has been supportive when I mention trans things, and has a few other trans members. I don’t tend to engage with strangers on twitter or facebook, nor post much on tumblr. I don’t really chat with other players in MMOs, and never used voice chat anyway. It has given me complex feelings about playing customisable characters of any gender, honestly. I almost exclusively interact with other trans people on discord. I made a whole new facebook account and allowed my old one to go inactive, finally deleting it after retrieving all the photos and other data last year. There were a couple of weird interactions there, actually -some people continued sending birthday messages to both accounts (weird, but I assume they weren’t paying attention when they did so) or exclusively to the old account, which I was surprisingly hurt by. Sometimes it was just a mildly funny indication that the news hadn’t propagated or that I didn’t really know this person, but a couple of times it was people I used to be close to, former housemates, people I still considered friends though we’d drifted apart. It was sad to realise that while I viewed their updates warmly, they didn’t even know I existed.