One week away from surgery!

I can’t believe this has crept up on me! How am I feeling? Well, let me give you a little quote from the inside of my head just two minutes ago:

“I DON’T HAVE TIME TO BE TRANSGENDER TODAY, I JUST WANT TO MAKE A CUP OF TEA AND EAT RAMEN GOD DAMMIT!”

…

To put it in context, yesterday I spent a total of 16 hours in transit between countries, got home, went to bed, got five hours sleep, got up and went to work. I have a dance event to run and teach at this weekend, three job applications due on Saturday, and somewhere in there I’m supposed to be writing a dissertation. Someone remind me why I thought a daily blog was a good idea again?

But, it did lead me onto a pretty good point, which is that I actually spend very little of my cerebral time actively thinking about my gender. Probably more time, admittedly, than a cisgendered person does, but probably not as much more as you think. My impression from talking to people about my gender is that cisgendered people think I go about my day with a constant thought of myself as a transgender protagonist: I am a transgender human who has just woken up, and I shower thinking about my non-binary body, and choose my clothes with a deep awareness of my gender and how I present in the world, and then I go downstairs in my rainbow-flag house and make the queerest cup of coffee you’ve EVER SEEN…. And so on.

Some of this is, to some extent, accurate: my feelings about gender will affect how I dress for the day, and there is a rainbow flag on prominent display in my home – because my roommate hung it up in our hallway. But most of the day I’m just a Fen, living my life, which coincidentally happens to be lived with a bunch of unusual identity labels.

I think about gender most when gender is brought up in the world around me in some way. When I meet someone new, when I go on facebook and see the latest mess up there, when someone actively starts a discussion with me about gender, when I go black Friday shopping for clothes and mourn about how hard it is to find clothes that fit me, and my aesthetic etc. etc. But on a day-to-day basis in my working, playing life, I’m mostly just living as myself, rather than as Fen-the-queer… if it’s even possible to distinguish the two.

This is a position of extraordinary privilege and luck. A HUGE number of transgender people have to think about closeting, hiding, and covering themselves ALL the time, or at least outside of designated safe spaces. There are few enough consequences for me being transgender in my world that I can switch off the hyper-vigilance and just get on with doing my thing until it’s actively brought up. But I’ll say again, that’s because a) I have a really great community, and b) most people who look at me without knowing me will read me as cisgendered, which means I am less at risk from strangers than I might be otherwise.

I guess I’m circling back round to the “I want my gender to be boring” thing again, and I think I’ll continue on this theme tomorrow and talk about some ways of making that happen. I can afford to do all the other amazing stuff I do because I don’t have to spend a huge amount of time taking care of my gender, and have never really had to. What I have had to do is live in a situation where my PTSD was constantly being triggered, and then lived in a situation where it wasn’t, and OH MY GOODNESS the amount of energy it takes to run a constant low-level stream of fear is MIND-BLOWING. MIND-BLOWING. I can’t imagine how folks who have to safeguard their identity in the workplace manage to do it for years on end.

I don’t want to step too far outside my own experience, or make comparisons on an unsteady footing, so I think I’m going to end it there. I’m going to make myself some ramen, get back to my computer for a business meeting, and hopefully get to sleep before I’m eaten by the jetlag monsters. This is me with one week to go before top surgery – no time to be trans, but glad that I get to do it anyway!