In the Philippines, only about a month after my gender “transition”, I was traveling with my father and we took a taxi. The cabbie’s wife told me, insistently and repeatedly, “You’re so beautiful!”
Nice, right? Well, sure. Undeniably a little odd, though.
Come to it, that whole conversation was odd. More than just the often difficult language barrier. Something was off, which neither my father nor I could put our fingers on.
And then it “came out”, so to speak. The cabbie’s wife started telling us how accepting she was. Of everyone. Even – and I felt that this was strongly implied – of trannies.
But how did she know that I was transsexual?
I don’t look like a guy. Even when I was trapped in a male body, I didn’t look like a guy. The male body I was trapped in never had the bulky arms or broad shoulders of a typical guy. It never had chest hair. Other than a few dark hairs on the hands and feet (which drove me crazy and I often just shaved off) I was lucky. I was in a fairly gender-neutral body. (Albeit with male genitalia. But the cabbie’s wife – I hope! – didn’t see that.)
I’ve never had trouble “passing”. (I’ve got another post on the absurdity of “passing”…) But, somehow, this woman just knew. Maybe it was my voice. I have a ruined voice, destroyed by too much testosterone. I can manage to make it not sound male, per se, but it doesn’t sound naturally female. Or maybe it was my face. Granted, this is after I had facial feminisation surgery to undo a lot of what testosterone had done to the body I was in. But I’d only been off of testosterone for a few months, and it takes up to a year for the fat in a face to re-distribute.
The truth is that switching sex takes time. As much as I wished that there were a magic button to press, to escape from a male body and enter a female one, there isn’t. It IS possible these days – thanks to medical advances for which I’ll always be grateful – to switch sex. But it’s not complete. I’ll always have to take oestrogen, to make up for the ovaries I don’t have, and I can never give birth to a child. Trans men have it even harden: they can never get – with current technology – naturally functioning male genitalia.
And it takes time. As much as I rage against WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) for making me be a “woman with a penis” for a time, the truth is that it takes time. Even if WPATH’s stupid “guideline” hadn’t existed (that you can’t have genital surgery until a year on hormones) and I’d had my “bottom surgery” when I had FFS, I still would’ve been fairly male-looking. I was in a male body, after all, that had spent 28 years being ravaged by testosterone. A lot of things will reverse when you change the hormone that you’re getting, but it takes time.
Update from October 2020:
I’m over a year past that incident now. Still dealing with transsexuality (facial hair and a masculinised voice box) but at least I don’t get things like “You’re so beautiful” anymore. Still… As much as it bothers me, completely switching sex takes time.
But there IS a light at the end of the tunnel! At least for MTF transsexuals (I feel so bad for transsexual men) and at least for people who are lucky – as am I – that their families accept them as who they really are. For people like me, it really is just a waiting game… and a lot of surgery!
But it’s possible.
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