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comix-by-chloe · 5 years ago

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What Kind of Woman?

“What kind of woman am I going to be?”

That was never a question I asked myself, neither before, nor after, I realized I was trans. There was too much riding on the “Oh gosh, I wish I were a girl” thing, or the, “Jesus Christ, just pump me with hormones NOW” thing, to the point that the consideration of who I would become never really entered my head. The major reason I never questioned it is because I KNEW what I would look like and what I would wear (and for me, the whole of one’s character was involved in what one wears), and so why even stop to consider alternative? I mean, at least I THOUGHT I knew.

If you go back in time, back into little four year-old Chloe’s head, you’ll see a vivid picture of a kid getting obsessed with a certain type - namely, the Bad Girl, and, in particular, the bad girl who rocks a leather jacket and who could cut a man just by looking at him. This image was given to you by way of POWER RANGERS, and then by way of THE SECRET WORLD OF ALEX MACK, and then by way of the animated series BEETLEJUICE - all three include an episode in which a wonderful heroine gets somehow magically transformed into an alternate version of herself (or in the case of Alex Mack, an alternate bad version splits off from her gooey self and then traps the real one in a sewer). Also, all three rely very heavily on this alternate, “bad” version of each character to don a killer fit, accentuated (as almost always seems the case in this kind of rep, at least for the early nineties) by a leather jacket.

So, okay, you were very like INTO IT. But you were also like four. So what do you do? Well, you dream about it, aaaaand you want to talk about it but you can’t because this type of thing is literally labeled as “bad” (and, for a kid who lived her life with no intention of ever breaking the rules, something “bad” was inherently wrong, which meant you would NEVER EVER PARTAKE GOSH DARN IT!!!).

Over time (and by that I mean eleven years), you finally kiiiiind of talk to your sister about it (not about the gender thing, which hasn’t even truly shown up yet), and that gives you the courage to at least draw the things you want (tho not the courage to show said drawings to literally anyone else). And so you draw and draw. And you draw and you draw and you draw. Just…leather jackets and babes - that’s what you do. One day your mom finds your drawings. And like…the shame. The agony. THE HUMILIATION. In all honesty, the drawings weren’t even anything “bad.” They were just…unexpected, and the last thing you want people to know is that there are unexpected things to be learned about you, because that could clue them into… SOMETHING else.

Later in your teenage years you finally discreetly purchase your first leather jacket, and it’s pretty cool. Do you wear it outside the house? Nah, people could see you and TALK. You just wear it in your bedroom, constantly listening in to the other rooms in the house, forever being conscious of every other family member’s or roommate’s location in case they decided to rush the door (honestly what?). Eventually the guilt (oh yeah, there’s that whole “I believe in God, and he would NOT be happy with this” thing going on, too - that’s pretty important) drives you wild and you actually tear the jacket to shreds. And then the loss makes you so sad that you buy another! And then yadda yadda yadda, you eventually go to school and start wearing them all the time and it becomes your THING and people who you become friends with tell you that they were so intimidated by you at first because you looked so COOL and INTENSE (their words, not yours [well, kinda yours; you would definitely describe someone seeing you and not saying something to you as being because you looked COOL and INTENSE]) and then on and on and on and then HOLY SHIT WHAT YOU’RE TRANS??? AND YOU DIDN’T TELL ME (YOU)!?!?!? ALL THESE YEARS!!!!! WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!

So like, it was already there, right? You were already DOING IT. What you could not have anticipated, though, was just how wrong you were about everything.

For starters, personality and personal aesthetic ARE NOT mutually exclusive. This has always been tough for me to reconcile (and even now still is), because it’s created in me an inability to see these Bad Girls as reasonably human. And so, despite my incredible interest in them, I’ve never really been able to write a character I could define as a badass, especially as a protagonist, because she actually lacks all humanity (like, how could someone who looks so cool have like REAL PEOPLE problems?).

I also recognize that my OWN personality and aesthetic don’t mesh in the way people might expect - sometimes it’s been simple things, like people assuming I’m not into girls (?????), or assuming that my music taste is something that it isn’t (the discussion I had with a former boss about how my favorite genres are rap and pop still sticks in my mind); other times, unfortunately, it’s put me in more dire, even scary, circumstances, like the guy who gave me his number and wouldn’t stop overtly sexualizing and fetishizing me while I was checking him out at my register, or the dude who propositioned me for sex in the back of his Uber.

While it’s always been a nice idea to gain a wild amount of confidence by being myself, the truth is that I’m a neurotic mess: I think too much about everything, over-analyzing this and that, whether it has to do with me or not; because of this, it’s hard for me to ever believe I’ve actually gotten to the place I wanted to be. Am I a babe who wears siccc fits like 100% of the time? Sure, but do I genuinely FEEL like it gets me to the mental state I desire? Oh, absolutely not! My overriding fears kind of still pedestal this idea of some kind of “Unattainable Cool,” and disallow me to ever achieve it.

It would definitely be better to rid myself of this idea at all - people are just…people! We all make mistakes, we all look dumb sometimes, we have our silly moments along with our serious ones; and so, trying to achieve something that is virtually impossible, and which, if achieved, would rid one of her humanity, isn’t even a goal worth having.

So what does this boil down to? Essentially, this expectation that I had of just becoming this cool girl with no thought put into it at all has kind of proven to me that these images I had of someone cool are NOT what actually makes someone cool. A lot of perceived coolness in this world is created as some kind of mystique to pique others’ interests. If I read as unapproachable, I am “cool,” but like being fun and friendly and goofy and caring and all that good shit somehow is NOT cool? NAAAAH, that’s fuckin bullshit. The coolest people I know are those who’ve been welcoming and approachable, and who were willing to be there and help myself or others when they could. There was no true mystique about them: that’s not what it was about! If a true “Bad Girl” person exists, she’s probably just a piece of shit, because living your life on mystique alone is nothing.

So what kind of woman have I become, then? Well, not this picture of the purest form of badassery I had ever seen, because that’s not something even worth attaining. Honestly, I was even wrong about the fact that I “knew” what I would look like. For a while, I thought I didn’t really have that awkward, early transition phase where you wear wild fits until you find something that really works for you, mainly because I thought I kinda showed up fully-formed; obvs, that was DEFINITELY not the case, but never could I have anticipated that I would 1) retire like all the clothing I bought at first within a year or two, 2) grow out of a lot of my clothing fairly quickly (those ‘mones, man!), 3) stop wearing jeans, and 4) start wearing skirts. This last one was the biggest, because it ended up taking my style from androgynous-butch to girly-cute/hot (depending on the skirt). But what does this style and fashion-sense say about me? Whelp, if there’s anything I’ve learned, it just shows that your style doesn’t dictate much of who you are - or at least, not with regard to a lot of the traits that really matter.

#trans #hormones #fashion #leather #cool

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