Burning Words

I’m trying to get at something that’s been bothering me for a few months now. I am forever thankful for the luck I’ve had in recent times. I am slowly coming to terms with the realisation that I will in all probability never be misgendered again, in spite of all my fear. I have a fantastic support network. I look at my life these days and see a life that I never thought I could have. I have been luckier than so many of the friends I’ve known over the years, luckier than I could have ever expected. Yet all of this is provoking so many questions about where to go from here, and I’m scared and confused about it all.

It feels like so much of this is rooted in baggage I’ve been avoiding dealing with for years. I have a childhood which I have almost no memory of, a handful of fleeting memories amidst an entire decade. By the time it was over, I was so badly shut down that I practically was incapable of meeting new people, and couldn’t even look people in the eye, such that it often feels to me as if my life began at thirteen. I can better recall the years that followed, especially after being pulled out of school at fourteen for two years, for at least those years held things worth remembering. All of those teenage years, though, were so interwoven with coping with being trans and being forcibly closeted: every relationship (romantic or not) and the vast majority of all my experiences from those years: the reality of living with something that was enveloping my entire existence.

It’s because of that that I never expected to be here. I spent a lot of those years expecting that I’d probably be dead by the age I am now. I never was able to bring myself to comprehend a future in which things would be so much as okay. I’ve on hormones nearly two years now, but it was only three months before that that I was standing on a Flinders Street Station platform on the verge of ending my life. Two years on, I’ve been incredibly lucky, but it’s almost as if it’s caught me unawares. I’d never seriously considered a future where I could realistically go after what I wanted: it was always one based, if I was going to live, on survival. This makes day-to-day life these days a bit of a shock.

I chose to leave my hometown behind years ago and move here, and it was the best decision I ever made. These days, I have a great group of friends who’ve generally only known me as Rebecca, and some of whom I have no idea know or care if I’m trans or not. It’s a strange feeling after all those years to just be another girl in the crowd. I’m not around much at my residence hall, but one of the things I’m loving about moving back on campus is that if anything I’m just seen as the new girl, rather than the token transwoman. Until these last few months, I’d been getting by mostly in the queer community for a long time, and had gotten used to being out, to assuming that everyone knew I was trans. It was a bit of a crappy situation, but safe; it was routine, and I’d gotten used to it. These days, I find that I’m almost ending up stealth, not through concious effort on my part, but because it simply doesn’t come up: to be that out now would practically require wearing it on my forehead. In every aspect of my life, my job, at home, at uni, and when I go out, I’m just able to have people see me for me, rather than having judgements - conscious or not - made about me on the basis of what rather than who I am. At the same time, it’s almost like - this is a bit new to me. I’m used to being hated, I’m used to being excluded, I’m used to keeping to myself. Those days, though, seem to be, thank god, gone, and simply being treated the same as any other women my age is fantastic. And so I now meet people rally easily, and get along with most people, but at the same time, it’s kind of an upheaval of what’s been my reality for twenty years. It’s so hard to believe it’s happening that I find myself in a bit of shock at times, and it’s meaning the end of a routine that I’ve been used to living with for a very long time, and replacing it with something that - while better, is nevertheless an unknown.

So now, I’m having to start, in many ways, moving on. I’ve wound up spending so many years metaphorically disappearing up my own arse that it’s been taking a while to work out who I am and where I want to be going. My life has been influenced in so many ways by being trans that now it doesn’t have to be an everyday issue it’s hard to start putting all those pieces together; who I was when I was younger, and the things I’ve picked up over the years. Those last couple of years before transitioning really put me through the blender; consequently, I’m far more political than I was in my younger years. Where once I would have been very content to skip university and get married (as most of my friends from my teenage years did) and then go stealth and disappear into the woodwork, those years got me into politics, into activism, and into wanting to shake things up. I’ve stuck out law school, even though it’s not the career I’d have chosen had I been cis, precisely because I’m one of the only transpeople in this country of my generation to get that opportunity, and when there’s work that needs doing, I’ve always felt it was wrong to pass up the chance I’d been given to help with that. This said, I’m tired of having to deal with crap from the left, the right, the cultfems, the gender warriors, and all the other intolerant folk who want to impose their own morality on my life or make me fight their revolution. These days, now that I have a present I can live with, I’m not sure I feel that same totally consuming desire to fight that fight anymore. I still care, I still have to care, but I wonder if my life might be better and happier spent doing something else, at least as a day job.

So now I find myself, at 22, effectively starting again in many areas of my life. I’m so thankful I have that chance, as I’ve known far too many people over the years that haven’t. Yet in all falling into place, it’s such a massive change, both from the life I was living, and from the life I ever expected to be living, that adjusting it is taking some time, and a lot of it keeps coming as a bit of a shock. I’ve been stewing over it all for months, as it’s really difficult to try and explain to people how the best thing that’s ever happened to me keeps sending me into bursts of anxiety.

Tags: personal, theories of everything, trans