Be Like Me!

I sometimes wonder why Natalie can’t simply be gender fluid, not full-on transitioning transgender queer, and leave it at that.  Why can’t she be like me, I think, until I remember this is exactly what cisgender people think when they witness their cousins, siblings, old friends, children, spouses come out of the gender queer closet in all their gender queer glory.  We all want to know: Why can’t they be like me?  Why won’t they be like me?  Why do they insist on not being like me?

I get it.  Many people, especially other cisgender women, have wondered out loud to me why I can’t be like them.  They’ve tried to convince me to embrace the full pageantry of womanhood.  When I was a teenager, my female friends loved coaxing me into make-up sessions.  They’d paint my face with foundation and rouge and eye shadow and lipstick, and they’d pile on the cosmetics until I couldn’t breathe and while they’d coo “You’re so beautiful!”  “You’re a fox!” “You should wear make-up all the time!” I would scrunch up my face and force a smile and try my damnedest not to, in a fit of frustrated anger, knock over the table piled high with mascara and dirty make-up implements . I would usually feel like crying and wouldn’t be happy until the make-up was completely washed off.  Was it my Pentecostal upbringing?  Was it my radical feminism?  What was it?  What was it?  Why did I react so strongly to a mundane teenage girls’ game of grown up?

Now that no one bothers me anymore — my skin is no longer taut, so what’s the point? — I know why.  As Natalie transitions it becomes clearer and clearer why. At first Natalie asked for make-up advice and I had nothing to give her.  Now she gives me advice, and I try to listen, and I force a smile, and I suddenly find myself back in my teenage years, in my friends’ bedrooms in front of make-up mirrors and this time, because I understand myself better, I don’t feel the urge to cry. I know why I used to want to cry, though, and it’s because my friends wanted me to be like them, and I couldn’t because I wasn’t.  And now that I’m old-age transparent, I get why I used to often feel out of place and sick to my stomach when placed in a situation where I was supposed to be not me.  

I get Natalie, too, when I stop long enough to think about it. When I stop looking at the world through my own lens but consider hers.   And when I think about it like that I stop thinking, why can’t she just be gender fluid like me?

Transitioning isn’t easy for a middle-aged queer.

Being middle-aged is easier for people like me who aren’t invested in looks or gender, who don’t care about passing, because I don’t have to, because I am already just fine with the me that I am.  

Transitioning male to female (mtf) at middle-age means struggling with whiskers, broad shoulders, male pattern baldness, and fully developed man brows.  It means shifting from one adult life to a completely new life mid-stream. 

For all of us, cisgender and trans, the ability to maintain, attain, retain physical beauty fades with time, so for transgender people, the compulsion to change has to be stronger than the need to pass without notice.  The need to be who you are in public – the same you you’ve always been in secret – surpasses the need to be pretty, or even the need to be seen.

Natalie looks at pictures of younger transgender people who have had the benefit of hormone blockers, who probably have had the support of their family and friends early on, who have had the benefit of science and some sprinkling of legal protections, and who can easily get the information they need to explain themselves by searching the web with their thumbs.

The younger a person transitions, the more passable they seem to be, and I see the longing and frustration in Natalie’s eyes when she looks at the pictures of transgender folx who are Gen Zs and Millennials. They’re not clockable.  They pass. The young MTF girls are soft, supple.  I can almost hear Natalie saying over and over like a mantra, “Why did I wait? Why did I wait? Why did I wait?” But she isn’t saying anything.  The pain in her face gives her away.

I try to remind her, “Because you had little choice, because you didn’t know, because it wasn’t time” while I tease her and playfully spank her ass and kiss her and let her know that she is lovely and the love of my life, and I’m glad she’s not like me, or like anyone else I’ve ever been with, woman or man, and that love doesn’t give two cents about gender or taut skin.