So I’m at a friend’s house for a party. She had birthday last week so me and my partner came up with an appropriate present, asked the guests whether they want to join in, we split the costs, I got the present and got there (moderately early).
I’ve recently changed some things on my facebook so that it reads more feminine but I haven’t really talked about it with my friends yet so I’m really not in a position to argue against introducing me with my boy name. I guess it would have been nice if someone asked me but it’s more or less fine.
The party... well just goes on. More people come in. I talk to some, I avoid some. I discuss feminism, some anthropology, drink some wine, talk about university yada yada. Eat a lot of gluten cause life is stressful and people don’t have any snacks other than those. Apart from herring that was brought by my friend’s parents later but yuck, fish.
At some point I start using feminine verb endings (we’re not anglophones, we conjugate). Cause why not. I feel somewhat okay with it, at least around people I’ve more or less recognized as safe. Had they asked me why I’d tell them, why not. So it’s going okay, we talk about the academia, then I start talking about my masters, about gender of the brain, we move to the couch.
One of the male guests decides to sit by at some point. He’s drunk, most likely hetero, smaller than me. A person I wouldn’t normally talk to - there is just a certain type of aura around some men that I avoid, it’s hard for me to name it. I’m sitting with two girls, one of them my friend, another a girl one year younger than me who came with her husband. So he sits by and shoots me up with “Are you taking hormones?”.
It was so sudden that I just angrily replied “No.” To which he says either “If I were you I would be.” or “I think you should be.”
So at first I freeze, fuss a ltitle. Then I get angry and ask why does he feel like he has any right to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do with my body. He is defensive about it. In general he was coming up with bs that popped in his head. The more I tried to talk about why does he feel that he should give me his expertise the more he was going the route of “oh so you feel special” “oh you must have had a hard life”, asking me have I wished my mother happy women’s day to which I reply “no because I don’t have good relationship with my family” (which is true) to which he goes “that’s what I thought”. It’s just fucking unberable. A random guy with whom I haven’t even talked that evening gets up my goddamn medical business, while misgendering me throughout, victimizing me. Fucking pity from a cis-dude who has “friends like that” whom “hormones have helped”. This is fucking XXIst century, people. This is the pinnacle of fucking social progress. A heterosexual cis dude telling a person that reads at least as gay if not as gender nonconforming to go get her hormones therapy.
For what fucking reason should I get my hormone therapy? Do I go right this moment? Shoot myself up with whatever the fuck? To alleviate my dysphoria or to make him more goddamn comfortable with himself? And when my beard stops showing am I good enough then or not wearing makeup is still a sin? Do I speak in a higher tune and become more receptive to the words of critique? Is that good enough?
Since when is he an expert in telling me what to do with MY BODY. Maybe he is fucking right about me being wounded and anxious. But he wasn’t the one having each symbolic and physical hand of his fucked up mother on his body. He wasn’t the one bombarded with contradictions about how he should be. He wasn’t the one denied the right to be his own person. I was. I am a property. I am raised a property. A doll, a shell, a trophy. A music box to say what is expected. A mind to expect and to fear what must come.
And maybe I would like some pity but not from someone who comes in and shoves it up my ears. Not from someone who came to be oh so helpful to a transgirl while calling her with her boy name and using male-gendered verbs. Not from someone who brags how he has friends whom HRT has helped. I don’t know how they still call him their friend, maybe they are normative as fuck and it’s all fine and dandy in that weird word.
But what made me sad was my friend and the other girl sitting with me explaining how it doesn’t matter, how it’s an opinion from a total stranger whom I don’t even know. ‘If you knew him and came up for an advice then you would be right to feel angry if he had said something insulting’, ‘it doesn’t matter’. I even asked my friend, attempting to somehow explain how I felt, ‘[name] shouldn’t you have a baby soon?” (obviously acting out an unfortunately popular scheme and I made sure she was aware of it). She brushed it off. She said that people say that to her sometimes and she doesn’t feel the need to fight them. That some people say those things.
I do not want to live in a world where people, especially women, are blind to policing of their bodies. In a world in which they get BANGED OVER THEIR HEADS WITH CULTURE SO LONG that they become completely desensitised to it. To someone else telling them how they should be.
The other girl sitting with us said that when, after coming back from abroad, she put on her husband’s coat and hat to go for shopping (because they were unpacked) he asked her ‘Are you going out like that? This is men’s coat!’. And she brought it up simply to say that she doesn’t care. That some people say these things.
Men and women say these things and I don’t know which is more enraging. Women say these things because they were taught to believe in them, taught that is how they should be, how a woman should be, and, by proxy, how every other woman should be. And men say these things not even thinking twice.
We are the panopticon but it’s always a man gazing. A man, some men - looking, objectifying, policing, victimizing, justifying, having expertise. Having oh so much expertise.
I am sad, I am angry, I am sick. No amount of estrogen will calm this feeling. I may be coming from the outside into what we call femininity but I certainly don’t feel like this is something to brush off or just accept ‘as it is’. I want a world a little better and a lot less male-centered than the one we live in.
My women’s day wasn’t happy. I didn’t call my mother and I won’t.
To all women out there: get angry. And if you already are angry - stay angry.
