Having been yanked out of Pakistan in the middle of my stay with a host family, because that country went into a severe lockdown in early April, I confess that I hadn’t quite shaken off the travel bug. (Maybe I never will!) Then, in July, I discovered that, for less than $400, I could fly, round trip on American Airlines, from Los Angeles to Sao Paulo, Brazil. Better yet, Brazil was allowing foreigners. Their only requirement is that you stay less than 90 days, enter and exit by air (not land or sea), and buy health insurance for the duration of your trip – for me about another $50.
So now I’m in Brazil. Working from my computer (I’m a freelancer who can work from anywhere :P) and staying with a wonderful host family who – even if they aren’t doing much about COVID-19 – are such warm and loving people, they instantly accepted me as part of their household. (And self-quarantine, which I did for a week in an apartment in Sao Paulo, just after arriving, was SO isolating!)
Maybe this has become my new favorite country. I’d REALLY enjoyed Pakistan, but Pakistan had its problems. I felt people’s disapproval of a woman traveling on her own. (One man straight-up told me, “That’s not right.”)
Here, my gender hasn’t mattered. My sex hasn’t mattered. Well, not to anyone but me.
It’s mattered to me because, unlike most women, I live in a body that hasn’t always been female. I’m transsexual. Kind of.
Because, honestly, I consider the tormented soul who used to inhabit this body as a different person entirely. But having full use of this body, being able to look at a mirror or pose for a picture; being perceived by others as me, and not that male facade; being able to go to the beach, even, and look, to others, like just another woman in a swimsuit – that’s all new.
Here, I’m essentially cis. Here I entered the country with a passport under my name, that flagged my sex as female (and my sex IS female, thank God). Everyone I’ve interacted with has only known me as a woman. Here, the past doesn’t matter.
And why should it? People, especially some people in the U.S. of A., get so stuck up on this, as though, just because I was born wrong and trapped in a hellish male identity for 29 years, that somehow negates my womanhood. It doesn’t. I’m a woman. Period. And here in Brazil (as well as in Pakistan) I just get to be me.
I think that’s the only thing that differentiates me from any other infertile cissexual female. I have a greater understanding of what my biological sex means to me, and why it matters. Every time I look in the mirror, and see the woman that I am, I have such a burst of joy that any body-image issues (like my little belly flab, which just won’t go away) really pale in comparison. Just going swimming at the beach is such a joy, or just being able to wear clothes that actually fit, because I’m – at last – the sex that they were designed for.
Cis women don’t know what it’s like to not have these things. Cis women don’t know what it’s like to have society build this whole fake identity around you, so much that you become lost deep inside, and have to claw your way out.
Maybe that’s the true reason I love to travel – even have to travel, maybe. And maybe that’s why I enjoy, so much, being abroad. No links to the past. No one who knew that past identity, the person I call “Hell Guy” – even if they accept that I’m not, and never was, him. Away from family and Hell Guy’s old friends, traveling and sustaining myself from the work I do through my computer, I get to be me; and isn’t that all that any of us really want in this life?
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
