A humorous and poignant look at the author's experiences as a transwoman in a world that often feels hostile and discriminatory. From TSA agents to street preachers, the author recounts the daily indignities and subtle (and not so subtle) threats she faces simply for being herself.
drastically reshaped my view of the world. For instance, now I plan my days based entirely on what shoes I want to wear and the relative pain they will cause. Even more significant, though, is that I think I’m starting to believe in the devil. I grew up going to Sunday School, but I only went because I idolized all of the cute high school girls who taught there. Well, that and my certainty that God would turn me into an arthritic dung beetle if I didn’t go.
Gradually, though, I came to believe this is no heavenly attendance chart. Go to church. Don’t go to church. Either way, there was no smite in sight, so I stopped worrying about pleasing God or avoiding the devil.However, since I began to openly live the life I’ve always wanted to live, I’ve been convinced that Satan does actually exist. Who else could make people so deliberately hateful toward a group they won’t even bother to speak to or try to get to know? As a trans woman, my life is now a haunted house. I know demons and ghouls are constantly coming for me — I just don’t know when or how they’ll appear. I recently flew to San Francisco for the vocal feminization surgery I wanted in order to get customer service reps to stop calling me “sir.” When I got to front of the security line at Newark Airport, I walked through the TSA scanner and expected to head to my gate. Instead, the TSA agent stopped me and asked me what I was hiding in my, um, “groin area.” Apparently, as you step into their scanner, an agent pushes a button based on your perceived gender. If the agent marks you as a female and a red dot appears on their screen near your crotch, you get stopped. The TSA agent explained she needed to pat me down to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything dangerous. (This was, by the way, the first and only time my ... situation has ever been accused of being dangerous.)TSA agent (Looking like she was just forced to watch ”Madame Web”… twice): I still have to pat you down. This is gonna be way worse for me than it is for you.Me: I assure you that’s absolutely not true.After stewing about this for my entire six-hour flight, I finally made it to San Francisco. When I exited the subway at Union Square, I walked past a seriously tattooed, jacked-up dude who immediately began ranting at me with his bullhorn. “How dare you blaspheme the Lord with your appearance!” he screamed while his two buddies/bodyguards and a handful of passersby stopped to laugh (although not at him).“You were not meant to remove parts of you your body that the Lord designed just for you, so you could go forth and procreate!” I started to argue that he was thinking of the wrong body part I planned on losing in San Francisco, but that was a trans rookie mistake. Never engage. He launched into the classic, “only mentally ill people don’t know the difference between men and women” tirade as I slipped away. However, that was when a woman asked me for change. I politely declined and kept moving, only to be serenaded by her piercing, “You fuckin’ trannies! You can’t fool me! You should be ashamed!”At the airline check-in counter on my way home to New York City, an employee sized up my best Stevie Nicks look — flowy skirt, tank top, denim jacket, sandals, dangly earrings, more hair than you can shake a curling iron at — and asked, “How can I help you, sir?” I explained that I was not a “sir.” Without changing any facial expression, she said, “Sorry about that, sir. So did you need help with something?” Two weeks later, on my way back to San Francisco for a post-op appointment, another TSA agent stopped me when I stepped from the scanner, pointed to that dreaded red dot on my crotch, and asked me what I was hiding “down there.”I was under orders to not use my newly surgically altered voice, but I still tried to rasp that I was a pre-op trans woman. She told I was giving her “attitude” and called her boss over to complain about me. That woman proceeded to pat me down in front of the world, and when she got to my “situation,” immediately stepped back upon realizing what I was packing in my panties. For the rest of that trip, all I thought about was getting back to my lovely little trans bubble, aka Manhattan. It’s not perfect here either, but then again, it’s New York. Odds are there’s a guy two subway seats away taking his underwear off over his head while while trying to convince his fellow passengers that Han Solo really did shoot first.Still, even New York City can’t always save me from the pain so many love to inflict on trans people. Often that pain is courtesy of the very individuals who are elected to lead and protect us. I’ve pretty much given up on the fact-averse Republican Party, which is constantly vowing to literally eradicate our existence, but even the Democrats — allegedly our strongest allies in the government — were recently happy to approve a military spending bill that banned funding for gender-affirming care for minor
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