(highlight:: I am seventeen years old.
Girls start to think I am a cute boy. I start to think I am an ugly girl.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Later during this trip I am having a conversation with my new friends about femininity. They are articulate and intelligent women. I’m grateful to be around them. Until I am told by one of them, angrily, that I am not really allowed to talk about femininity because I am a straight cis boy. It is not my place and it is not my territory. I should shut up and listen. Are these my people?
I don’t correct her. I never correct anyone.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: I say that I feel like claiming that self-sacrifice and kindness are feminine values that men are borrowing is like claiming that they are Jewish values that Buddhists are borrowing.
One of the students tells me that I can’t be objective about masculinity because I am a straight cis male, and that I should shut up and listen. Are these my people?
I don’t correct them. I never correct anyone.)
- View Highlight
-

It is interesting to see where people insist proximity to a subject makes one informed, and where they insist it makes them biased. It is interesting that they think it’s their call to make.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Proximity correlates with understanding, but it does not cause understanding]

I become an ardent fan of Eddie Izzard, who describes himself as a “male lesbian.” Though many accuse him of internalized transmisogyny — afraid to call himself trans — I at least admire his rejection of the constant attempts to squeeze his identity into a universal taxonomy that other people decided on.
- View Highlight
-

- View Highlight
-

They can believe deep down their feelings on who is smart & strong & reasonable and who is dumb & weak & dangerous are within their control, are controlled exaggerations and self-aware and performed, are well-examined. If they saw me nude and wigless and wet, would I not be subject to their funny opinions on penises? On neckbeards? On maleness? On who has a right to talk about femininity? They will read this and tell themselves “No!”
- View Highlight
-

I mention to a cis feminist friend that I don’t think it’s cool to use “neckbeard” as a pejorative. I say I think it’s hypocritical. I say I know some wonderful, tender, thoughtful neckbearded humans. I also know some people who are very self-conscious about their neck hairs and can’t do much about them. I wonder if there are ways to criticize people based on their character without impugning the hairs that come out of them. She says I am mansplaining. She says I am Not-All-Men-ing. She also says I couldn’t possibly understand the standards of beauty imposed upon women. As if I didn’t spend years bent over a toilet, feeling miserably that even if I were thin enough I wouldn’t be girl enough.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: When you are trans and you don’t shave your legs, it is taken as evidence to everyone — even to allies in their dark, unadjustable subconscious — that you are not a real woman. Sometimes even by yourself.
She is furious. She tells me I am a straight cis male and I need to shut up and listen. What she is really furious about is being contradicted by someone who, according to their facebook profile, has a lower ranking on the discourse clearance chart than she.)
- View Highlight
-

A person’s privilege is very often an explanation of why their beliefs are warped, if indeed their beliefs are warped, which they usually are in some way. But—it’s not proof of shitty beliefs. Those tend to out themselves by…being shitty. If a person is telling this cis girl she is taking for granted a privilege that trans girls don’t have, why is it this cis girl’s instinct to hunt for that person’s identity to see if she can discredit them and not have to think about their point? Don’t answer that. We already know.
- View Highlight
-

And I hear my proudly misandrist-identifying cisfemale friends making fun of bald men as if it were a shortcoming or decision of the men themselves. Bald men make them think of television pedophiles. Bald men remind them of self-indulgent authors and desperate improvisers. I see men on the train losing their hair, their youth, their options, and I feel for them. It’s not funny. It’s a dysmorphic nightmare for anyone. I don’t bother mentioning that I find the jokes unnecessary and insensitive. I know what the girls will say.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Do I have to out myself to be treated like a person worth listening to? To stop my cis classmates laughing at someone who’s reckoned with the boundaries and the dimensions of masculinity and femininity in ways they never had to? With the life I’ve been living for all the years I’ve been living it—do I need their permission to speak?
I genuinely don’t know.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Without reservation, I embrace the theory of intersectional feminism. I need it — we all do. But do I want to join social circles that won’t have me until I disclose my most private experiences? That will leave me on permanent probation or tell me to shut up until I lay bare every year of dissociation and dysmorphia and dysphoria?
Do I need to be inspected and dissected by the people who laughed at me in order to receive my credential?)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Because it turns out transition isn’t the answer for everyone — to suggest otherwise is narrow-minded and proscriptive. Because for some transwomen, femininity can feel asymptotic — the closer you get, the more you feel you can never make it. I realize it’s not an inspirational message but it’s a hard truth: some people manage dysphoria better than others. When you fight it, it fights back. I am a pharmacophobe and diagnosed obsessive compulsive. I can barely take NyQuil and a cowlick can make my blood pressure rise. I am not strong enough for that battle. I am not well equipped to transition.
The best I can do, for me, is divest—as best I can—my identity from my appearance and focus, mindfully, on other things.)
- View Highlight
-

I adore Laura Jane Grace, but I never wanted to be a punk rocker. I don’t want to be a conversation-starter or a curiosity, and that’s what I would be in this world, to so many people. All I wanted to be was Wendy Darling. I wanted to be an average girl with an average girlhood. I’ll never be able to go back and have my friends do my hair at sleepovers. I‘ll never go back and wear a gown to prom. I will never have had a girlhood. I’ve had years to try and be at peace with that loss and often I manage. We’re humans. None of it’s fair. So many of us have things taken away from us.
- View Highlight
-

I have seen transwomen use “egg” as a playful pejorative for a time in their lives when they were still developing their presentation and ideologies—sharing awkward pre-transition photos and shaming their past shelves for questionable aesthetic decisions. Even when it’s self-inflicted, it strikes me as deeply uncompassionate, but how these people deal with their own histories is their business. When it’s aimed at other people, though, in an effort to diminish their position or their authority on their own identity, it reflects a prescriptiveness and smugness that I would never have expected coming from the trans community.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Imagine, dear reader, a cis-woman evenly saying:
“I wish I looked like that but I don’t and can’t. It sucks and it makes me feel really awful if I brood on it. That’s why I focus on my writing—I’d rather make things. Investing in and building things that aren’t my body helps me cope with the body issues I’ve been saddled with against my will.”
She doesn’t sound like she needs advice on how makeup will actually fix her core problem, does she? She seems like she’s doing alright. I’m her and I’m trans. That’s all.
I appreciate the encouragement I receive from trans friends, but I reject the implication that transitioning is my destiny. My brain is my brain — my body is my body. They don’t match, and I’ve chosen to devote my energy to coming to terms with that and focusing on other things, rather than trying to change my body. I’m not here advocating this position to other trans people or discouraging anyone from pursuing the path they feel is best for them. I admire and applaud each and every brave, pliable person who can do both.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: I am seventeen years old.
Girls start to think I am a cute boy. I start to think I am an ugly girl.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Later during this trip I am having a conversation with my new friends about femininity. They are articulate and intelligent women. I’m grateful to be around them. Until I am told by one of them, angrily, that I am not really allowed to talk about femininity because I am a straight cis boy. It is not my place and it is not my territory. I should shut up and listen. Are these my people?
I don’t correct her. I never correct anyone.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: I say that I feel like claiming that self-sacrifice and kindness are feminine values that men are borrowing is like claiming that they are Jewish values that Buddhists are borrowing.
One of the students tells me that I can’t be objective about masculinity because I am a straight cis male, and that I should shut up and listen. Are these my people?
I don’t correct them. I never correct anyone.)
- View Highlight
-

It is interesting to see where people insist proximity to a subject makes one informed, and where they insist it makes them biased. It is interesting that they think it’s their call to make.
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Proximity correlates with understanding, but it does not cause understanding]

I become an ardent fan of Eddie Izzard, who describes himself as a “male lesbian.” Though many accuse him of internalized transmisogyny — afraid to call himself trans — I at least admire his rejection of the constant attempts to squeeze his identity into a universal taxonomy that other people decided on.
- View Highlight
-

- View Highlight
-

They can believe deep down their feelings on who is smart & strong & reasonable and who is dumb & weak & dangerous are within their control, are controlled exaggerations and self-aware and performed, are well-examined. If they saw me nude and wigless and wet, would I not be subject to their funny opinions on penises? On neckbeards? On maleness? On who has a right to talk about femininity? They will read this and tell themselves “No!”
- View Highlight
-

I mention to a cis feminist friend that I don’t think it’s cool to use “neckbeard” as a pejorative. I say I think it’s hypocritical. I say I know some wonderful, tender, thoughtful neckbearded humans. I also know some people who are very self-conscious about their neck hairs and can’t do much about them. I wonder if there are ways to criticize people based on their character without impugning the hairs that come out of them. She says I am mansplaining. She says I am Not-All-Men-ing. She also says I couldn’t possibly understand the standards of beauty imposed upon women. As if I didn’t spend years bent over a toilet, feeling miserably that even if I were thin enough I wouldn’t be girl enough.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: When you are trans and you don’t shave your legs, it is taken as evidence to everyone — even to allies in their dark, unadjustable subconscious — that you are not a real woman. Sometimes even by yourself.
She is furious. She tells me I am a straight cis male and I need to shut up and listen. What she is really furious about is being contradicted by someone who, according to their facebook profile, has a lower ranking on the discourse clearance chart than she.)
- View Highlight
-

A person’s privilege is very often an explanation of why their beliefs are warped, if indeed their beliefs are warped, which they usually are in some way. But—it’s not proof of shitty beliefs. Those tend to out themselves by…being shitty. If a person is telling this cis girl she is taking for granted a privilege that trans girls don’t have, why is it this cis girl’s instinct to hunt for that person’s identity to see if she can discredit them and not have to think about their point? Don’t answer that. We already know.
- View Highlight
-

And I hear my proudly misandrist-identifying cisfemale friends making fun of bald men as if it were a shortcoming or decision of the men themselves. Bald men make them think of television pedophiles. Bald men remind them of self-indulgent authors and desperate improvisers. I see men on the train losing their hair, their youth, their options, and I feel for them. It’s not funny. It’s a dysmorphic nightmare for anyone. I don’t bother mentioning that I find the jokes unnecessary and insensitive. I know what the girls will say.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Do I have to out myself to be treated like a person worth listening to? To stop my cis classmates laughing at someone who’s reckoned with the boundaries and the dimensions of masculinity and femininity in ways they never had to? With the life I’ve been living for all the years I’ve been living it—do I need their permission to speak?
I genuinely don’t know.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Without reservation, I embrace the theory of intersectional feminism. I need it — we all do. But do I want to join social circles that won’t have me until I disclose my most private experiences? That will leave me on permanent probation or tell me to shut up until I lay bare every year of dissociation and dysmorphia and dysphoria?
Do I need to be inspected and dissected by the people who laughed at me in order to receive my credential?)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Because it turns out transition isn’t the answer for everyone — to suggest otherwise is narrow-minded and proscriptive. Because for some transwomen, femininity can feel asymptotic — the closer you get, the more you feel you can never make it. I realize it’s not an inspirational message but it’s a hard truth: some people manage dysphoria better than others. When you fight it, it fights back. I am a pharmacophobe and diagnosed obsessive compulsive. I can barely take NyQuil and a cowlick can make my blood pressure rise. I am not strong enough for that battle. I am not well equipped to transition.
The best I can do, for me, is divest—as best I can—my identity from my appearance and focus, mindfully, on other things.)
- View Highlight
-

I adore Laura Jane Grace, but I never wanted to be a punk rocker. I don’t want to be a conversation-starter or a curiosity, and that’s what I would be in this world, to so many people. All I wanted to be was Wendy Darling. I wanted to be an average girl with an average girlhood. I’ll never be able to go back and have my friends do my hair at sleepovers. I‘ll never go back and wear a gown to prom. I will never have had a girlhood. I’ve had years to try and be at peace with that loss and often I manage. We’re humans. None of it’s fair. So many of us have things taken away from us.
- View Highlight
-

I have seen transwomen use “egg” as a playful pejorative for a time in their lives when they were still developing their presentation and ideologies—sharing awkward pre-transition photos and shaming their past shelves for questionable aesthetic decisions. Even when it’s self-inflicted, it strikes me as deeply uncompassionate, but how these people deal with their own histories is their business. When it’s aimed at other people, though, in an effort to diminish their position or their authority on their own identity, it reflects a prescriptiveness and smugness that I would never have expected coming from the trans community.
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Imagine, dear reader, a cis-woman evenly saying:
“I wish I looked like that but I don’t and can’t. It sucks and it makes me feel really awful if I brood on it. That’s why I focus on my writing—I’d rather make things. Investing in and building things that aren’t my body helps me cope with the body issues I’ve been saddled with against my will.”
She doesn’t sound like she needs advice on how makeup will actually fix her core problem, does she? She seems like she’s doing alright. I’m her and I’m trans. That’s all.
I appreciate the encouragement I receive from trans friends, but I reject the implication that transitioning is my destiny. My brain is my brain — my body is my body. They don’t match, and I’ve chosen to devote my energy to coming to terms with that and focusing on other things, rather than trying to change my body. I’m not here advocating this position to other trans people or discouraging anyone from pursuing the path they feel is best for them. I admire and applaud each and every brave, pliable person who can do both.)
- View Highlight
-