How Hard Can It Be?

I know it seems impossible to you that you could pass as a woman: you’re too big; you’re losing your hair; you need to loose weight; your feet are too big; blah…. blah…. blah.

Society doesn’t want you to know how easy it is to pass as a woman.  It takes attention for a while, but you can learn what is expected of women in our society.  When you do what is expected, you can pass, regardless of your height or size.

Instead, we make it hard.  Without full awareness, we clutch at the life we have lived from birth, even as we assert our desire to grasp another life instead.  It is hard to let go of being male.  I know it’s hard, and I see transwomen living with male behaviors as they stumblingly act out some vision of femininity: they do what they themselves expect instead of what others expect.

The biggest giveaway is for a transwoman to insist that she must be a woman on her terms — everyone else has to change and to stop laughing at how she acts out her fantasy of womanhood.  I am thinking of

•  The transwoman who refuses to wear a wig even though she has a huge bald spot
• The transwoman whose belly hangs over her belt and doesn’t understand that womens’ bodies don’t look like that
• The transwoman who can’t understand what’s wrong with slim hips and won’t do a thing to pad her own

We invite others to notice us when we present visual elements and behaviors that are not congruent to other women around us: we don’t fit others’ expectations.  If you choose to thumb your nose at others’ expectations, and they see you as a threat — they will act appropriately.

This entry was posted on 29 November 2010 at 17:56 and is filed under Passing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.