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date: 2019-12-19
weight: 6
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> Start at the beginning.

And when I get to the end, stop. Yes.

As soon as I got <a class="pulse" href="/gender/surgery">surgery</a>, literally when I was in the hospital, laying in bed on my five days strict bed-rest, something changed about the ways in which trans women interacted with me. I was, in some indescribable way, no longer trans.

> Or, perhaps, no longer trans enough.

Yes. I became a *persona non grata* in a way that didn't involve actually cutting me out of trans spaces.

> You were done. You were finished. You had beat the game.

I was a woman now. What could I possibly bring to a trans space, now that I was just a woman? I was appropriating their spaces. I was trespassing.

> So. Do you see yourself as a woman?

You just asked me that.

> And I didn't like your answer. Do you see yourself as a woman?

I don't. I see myself as a trans woman.

> Why?

Do you want the scientific answer(s), or the personal?

> ...

Right.

I see myself as a trans woman because that's who I am. That's *what* I am. I can't change that. I can't suddenly become interested in mechanical engineering. I can't suddenly be a dog. I can't even slowly become those things, I can't *learn* to be a mechanical engineer, because I'm not interested in it.

I can't become a woman.

This isn't some essentialist, transphobic bullshit. Trans women are women, period. I'm not denying that.

I'm just not a woman. I'm a trans woman. I'm *specifically* a trans woman. That's who I am. That's *what* I am. I don't want to pass. I don't want to be stealth. I don't want to be a woman, because that's very specifically not what I am.

To have someone say, "I just see you as a woman" is to have a portion of my identity erased. It's reductionist to describe someone as something they aren't. That's one of the lessons we learned from folks coming out, from folks learning about identity.

> You just also learned that other trans women are as apt to do the same.

Yes. I left chats. I stopped talking with some people. I didn't feel welcome, no matter how friendly folks were.

> All because they believed you were something that you weren't.

Yes.

> And did you ask them?

No.

> Why not?

I didn't feel that I needed to. It was one of those types of ostracization where you're part of a circle, and then slowly people stop referring to you, and then maybe someone leans over to nudge the person standing on the other side of you and then doesn't quite lean back all the way, and then somehow you're standing just outside this circle of your very own friends, holding your red solo cup, wondering what it is that you did wrong.

> Did you make your voice heard.

Not for more than a year after.

> Why not?

Because perhaps I was appropriating their space. Perhaps I was taking this venue that was for these pre-op trans women to talk about their struggles and stepping into it unwanted. Perhaps I was stepping out of my lane.

> Were you?

I don't know.
