#i updated the pictures because I realized he kind of had a receding hairline

[rosemar-y]

Was flipping through my old sketch book and found some Ethan drawings from over summer and thought I'd share them here

(I can't do side profiles I'm sorry)

[casualfolami]

A Woman Like Me

This is something of a word dump and sort of a new follow-up to my “I Wanted to be a Boy” post I made so long ago.  An incident happened a few days ago at work and my reaction to it shocked me.  So I felt like just writing out my feelings in a weird sort of present-tense stream of consciousness.  The idea behind sharing it is just feeling like I want to.  I might wind up deleting this later, but on the same token sharing my feelings might resonate with someone else out there maybe?  Under a cut because it’s long and, as I said, more stream of consciousness than a real essay.

“One day you’ll be a woman like her.”

A mother strokes her young daughter’s hair before pointing to the bagger at the end of my lane and telling her little boy, “And you’ll be a man like him.”

No one notices my hands fumble as I pass groceries across a scanner.  The rhythmic beep of the computer gives no indication that inside I’ve faltered.  For a brief second I think about correcting her and saying, “I’m not a woman,” but no one at work knows this about me and if I ever do come out, it shouldn’t be to a customer first.

It’s not her fault, not really.  If I were to look at me, I’d think “woman” because we are told from birth what traits indicate masculine and feminine.  There is one or the other, and my form is that of a woman.  Even my uniform shirt is designated female and is different in cut and style from those of my male counterparts.

She wasn’t being rude, and I suspect if she knew me, she wouldn’t have made the statement.  She doesn’t know I spent that morning in the shower shaving under my chin and along my jawline to maintain an illusion that I have no facial hair.  The wide headbands I wear at work are thought to be a personal fashion choice of mine.  In truth it’s to hide the receding hairline and what my endocrinologist identified as “male pattern baldness” five years ago.

If I think about it, I can still hear the slight morbid chuckle in his voice when he says it.  Oh, the irony of diagnosing a woman with such a thing.  He isn’t harsh or mean, but neither is he kind or compassionate when he sort of shrugs his shoulders and says there isn’t much that can be done about it.

I hold it together until I call my mother after the appointment.  My voice cracks when I tell her I’m going bald like my father and nothing can stop it.

“My testosterone levels are elevated,” I explain.  “It’s something called PCOS, and I’ve had it since puberty, but no one believed me years ago when I first suggested it.”

I don’t try to hide the anger in my voice when I say it.  I should feel vindicated, but instead I’m defeated and lost.

“Facial hair is normal as you age,” my mother says days later when I talk about needing to purchase depilatory cream.

“Not like this,” I say.  My mother was in her late forties before she started to see some slightly darker hairs no one ever noticed except her.  I’m in my early thirties and I can’t remember any woman in my family capable of growing a beard.  (I can’t either, not yet, but it’d be impossible to miss a small five o’clock shadow if I stopped shaving.)

Strangely, I’m OK with the testosterone.  Maybe not with the increased risk of cancer and threat of diabetes, but the thought of my body producing more of a male-coded hormone doesn’t bother me so much.  I still take the medications prescribed to get my hormones back to normal ranges and my period comes back, but during this time I start to make sense of my past and memories of my childhood surface.

I’m a tomboy and I’m proud of it.  There’s a picture of me when I was about four or five and I’m decked out in camouflage and hunting boots.  It was the outfit I wanted to wear for the portrait studio.  My smile is slight, but I know that look on my face.  I was happy and comfortable.  Years later I show it to a male friend and he mistook the picture for another boy we knew.  I’m not offended by this and it makes me treasure the image all the more.

All my other pictures I’m wearing dresses or frilly shirts chosen by my mother.  I ask to take karate lessons so I can be like the Karate Kid.  I have to take tap dancing and baton lessons instead.

It’s first grade and the boys I’ve been playing with on the playground since kindergarten take me aside and say we can’t play together anymore.  Taken aback I ask why.  “We shouldn’t play with you because you’re a girl.  You should play with other girls like you.”  To a six year-old this is sound logic and I don’t argue.  Still, their words hurt and it bothers me.  It’s nearly three decades later before I remember this moment and another piece of the puzzle falls into place.

I try and fail to make friends with other girls.  They think I’m weird and I don’t have the same interests as them, not really.  I’m awkward and can’t fit in.  By third grade I’m bullied day in and day out at school.  I cry everyday over other kids’ cruelty.  It gets bad enough I’m put in a child psychiatric ward and enter into intensive therapy for the first time.

I never fit in, and the bully doesn’t stop, but at least I can stomach it.  Mostly.  I’m thirteen before the suicidal ideation starts.

High school is a nightmare.  There are bright spots, of course.  I fall in love for the first time with a boy.  He’s a photographer and I think he’s the best thing ever.

It doesn’t last, of course.  My first heartbreak is agony.

In tenth grade I sit behind a girl in French class.  We’re in a lot of classes together, but it’s French class I dream about.  I realize I like her.  Like, really like her.  The same way I liked my first boyfriend.

She, of course, is the daughter of a Baptist minister and I will never once admit to anyone about my feelings.  My daily torture is terrible enough without being suspected of being gay.  It’s 1998 and the name Matthew Shepard is in the news.

My father doesn’t believe hate crimes are a thing and the memory of being cussed out when I rented the remake of The Bird Cage with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane is seared in my brain.  Just like my mother telling my hairdresser “You’re either one or the other” when the word “bisexual” is mentioned around me for the first time.

I know what awaits me if I ever admit aloud that I think I’m not straight.  Even if I’m not disowned, I might not survive the fallout.

“Oh, aren’t you just so fucking trendy.”  An openly gay man scoffs at the notion that I’m bisexual.  It’s 1999 and I’m away at college, out of my dad’s sight for the first time and I’m trying to be open and honest.  I’m rebuffed at every turn because I have a boyfriend and women are only bisexual for attention.

I question myself and my feelings.  I date a boy I convince myself I love but I actually hate, and I try to make friends with girls.  I have more in common with their boyfriends.

And I lie to myself without realizing it.  I think it’s attraction because I was told there’s no such thing as platonic love between men and women.  We can’t be friends.  This has been my truth since I was six years old and confused on the playground.

They were some great friends.

My life falls apart.  I run away with a man who was gay until he met me.  I get pregnant, and well, I’m a woman.  I’m supposed to be a mother someday anyway, right?

I like being a mother.  Pregnancy is amazing save for the last two weeks and then that whole postpartum deal.  I enjoy breastfeeding.  At least my desire for children hadn’t been a lie.  I must be a woman.  I must be straight.

My son is almost two and I stumble upon the word “genderqueer” for the first time.  A community of people for whom gender isn’t a strict binary share their feelings and it resonates with me.

A friend later laughs at me when I confess I’m considering this.  “You’re just making things up,” was the gist of the conversation.  “Playing with Hot Wheels isn’t an indication of gender,” and she’s right, but it was so much more than my toys.  She can’t understand what I mean and I give up talking to her.  But I also let the doubt take over and I drift away from that community.

I still find I have more male friends.  When I go to family gatherings, I sit awkwardly with the women and make small talk because that’s what you do while the men talk in the other room.  I’m afraid the entire time I’m going to be discovered as a fraud.  I’m not sure why, but that’s the feeling I have.  It doesn’t make sense.  I’m grateful my son is young and gives me plenty of excuses to chase after him.

At 27, I bury my father.  He dies without knowing me.  Oh, we were never estranged, and he was a proud grandfather, but we never talked about me.  The real me.  He died believing his daughter to be a little crazy, but she was a she and she was straight.  Not long after, I get away from my son’s biological father and his emotional abuse.  I start dating my future husband long distance.  

I’m 35 and I spend a long night online.  I write about something that’s been on my mind and post it to Tumblr.  When I’m done I feel relief.  I update my social media profiles to include a pronoun choice.  I’m no longer she or her, I am they or them.  Online, at least.  Months later, at 36 years old I’m getting married in a white wedding dress.  I’m a bride and a wife, not a spouse.  I’m happy and I love the dress, and doubt creeps back in.

In real life I’m still a woman, and at 37 I’m listening to a mother tell her daughter one day she’ll be like me.  I feel sick when I force a smile and mumble a half-hearted “That’s right.”

But inside a voice says no.  She’ll never be a woman like me because I’m not a woman.  For the first time there is a conviction that wasn’t there before.

This time it’s not a long night, it’s a few days of revisiting that moment.  It’s the culmination of months of thinking and a random twitter conversation with someone a few weeks ago.  It’s the realization I have some soul searching to do, therapists to locate, and finding the courage to reach out to others and talk candidly.

Do I want to transition?  I don’t know.  Maybe.  Some days the answer is more yes than no, and other days it’s still a mix.  Maybe I don’t want to be either male or female, but I also want the freedom to be out and to be brave enough to take that first step toward making that a reality.  At this point I only know what I’m not and what I feel both physically and emotionally.

That, and it’s past time for me to get my shit together gender be damned.