gym class

I had a memory today that I would like to talk about. And I would also like to talk about how awful it is the way that children are dissuaded from breaking gender stereotypes and even sometimes punished if they do.

BUT I’M GETTING AHEAD OF MYSELF.

Let’s get in the ‘ole time machine and head back about six years to my freshman year of high school. Yes, this is the scariest ride in the park so if you have a weak constitution I would advise you to sit this one out.

So let’s think for a minute about high school. It’s a pretty terrible and awkward time. We’re in the throws of puberty, hormones rush too quickly for some of us and not fast enough for others, hearts are broken and then healed the next day, everyone is too distracted by their social status/sexual frustration/unrequited love/magic cards to learn a damn thing, and crowds gather in an instant to watch those two girls from earth science tear each other’s hair out by the fistful. (Not to joke about girl fights, some of them got pretty serious, like when that one girl with the ring cut that other’s girl’s face open and broke her jaw or something and she had to go to the hospital) #classy #goskippers #weareNK

Sorry everyone, I’m getting nostalgic.

Anyway, everyone is mostly just trying really hard to fit in. And a huge part of fitting in, was squeezing into the neat oppressive little boxes marked male, and female. I remember the first day of freshman English class. We were filtered in from three different middle schools and so we didn’t all know each other. Our teacher instructed us to stand up, walk around the room, and introduce ourselves to three people we had never met. After about ten minutes we all sat back down, and she remarked that she was happily surprised to see that we had mingled so well, and that usually when she does this the boys introduce themselves to other boys, and the girls to other girls.

you come here often?

It was funny how even the most seemingly gender-neutral things suddenly seemed so divided. When we got our uniforms for band class (yeah yeah laugh it up…) Everyone received a (used) white concert shirt (talk about sweat stains), and a clip on bow tie, but the girls got cummerbunds, and the boys got suspenders. And I wanted suspenders dammit! Although I do remember being pretty happy about getting to wear a collared shirt and bow tie to every concert. But still, I was the only girl drummer in high school and a lot of people thought that was a REALLY BIG DEAL. I remember the first time I met the high school band director, before I even started high school and she was helping with rehearsals for the Rhode Island All-State Jazz Band (yeah, I know it’s the smallest state). She gave me a lecture about how girls hardly ever get this spot and how there aren’t many girl drummers and how music is a mostly male-dominated scene and how I should be very proud and how I have to make all my fellow females proud and play confidently to show everyone that girls can play the drums too.

Geez.

No pressure.

How about being proud of all the hard work and practicing I did to get to that point? How about people judging my drumming by how well I played and not my gender?

Then there was jazz band. The senior jazz band got to rent special concert clothes. The boys were all fitted for tuxes and the girls were asked what size (hideous) concert dress they needed. I remember being very upset when I saw the senior jazz band play for the first time. One of the only times when I felt really comfortable and good about myself was playing the drums, and I was NOT about to let that be ruined by having to wear a stupid dress (which was more like a glittery black toga than a formal dress JUST SAYIN’).

Luckily I was clever, and so I told the band director that I wouldn’t be able to wear a dress to play the drums since you have to sit with your legs apart (left foot on the high-hat pedal, right foot on the bass drum pedal). So I dodged that bullet and got away with wearing black pants and a black dress shirt. BUT STILL, what if I had played something else? I would have been very upset. And what about all those other boys and girls who would prefer to wear a dress or a tux or pants or a skirt or any of it? What would they have done? What do they DO? School was just a very oppressive institution when it came to following gender roles, and I don’t think the teachers even realize what they’re doing or how much harm a simple rule can impose on a questioning or queer or confused teenager.

Then of course there was drama club. I loved drama club; that was another place where I was really comfortable and just happy overall. I loved acting, and although it might sound sad, I liked pretending to be someone else sometimes. Not in a really desperate needing-to-escape kind of way, but it was a kind of release of tension and a loosening of the standards which I felt I had to comply to every day kind of way. It’s funny, because the majority of the roles I played required me to be much more feminine than I was in real life, but since I was pretending to be someone else anyway it didn’t bother me as much. Also, gender roles were bent and broken more in the drama club than anywhere else in school. 

gender norms? what are those?

Everyone had to wear makeup onstage (“hey dude can you pass me the MANscara?), everyone flirted with each other like crazy, and the only gay kids I knew in high school were in the drama club. I remember asking my director once, “when will I get to play a part that is more like me?” And she said, “when we can find a character like that.” What I was REALLY asking DEEP DOWN in my SUBCOUCIOUS was “How come I can’t play a male part?” But I never worked up the courage to ask out loud.

I remember once she cast me as Macbeth’s father’s ghost in a comedy that included a short spoof of Macbeth, and I was so happy. It was such a small insignificant part but it was awesome. I used the big deep gruff voice and yelled a little and that was it.

Wonderful.

OK now that we’ve taken a little detour down memory lane and you’ve heard all about my extra-curricular activities, I’m going to attempt to guide us back towards on-topic lane and get back to the original memory that I set out to write about when I started writing this post.

Gym class.

the key to dodgeball is body glitter and a fierce attitude 

We all remember gym class. Forced exercise. Hours of embarrassment for the un-fit, and a time to show-off for the athletically inclined. What I hated worst about gym class was how damn gendered it was. In my freshman year gym class was one of my best and oldest friends. The problem was, he was a boy and I was a girl so every time the class got split by gender I had to endure it without him. And we got split up quite a bit. There was the fitness test, where all the girls would run as many laps as they could in one gym while the boys would do push ups, sit ups, and leg stretches in the other, and then vice versa. I remember there was a “standard of fitness” that we were all supposed to meet, except that it was different for the guys, they were supposed to be able to do more push ups and sit ups and run more laps, and I remember always peeking to the boys side of the fitness rubric whenever I checked my scores.

Then of course there was health class. I remember on particular day of health class where we got split up; we were supposedly learning about dating and relationships and we were supposed to get into groups of three of four and were instructed to talk about what we didn’t like about guys on dates. First of all, I had never been on a date. Second of all, what kind of stupid-ass-stereotype-encouraging-gender-role assignment was this?? What exactly was the point of this assignment other than to drive high-school boys and girls further apart? I mean, I’m being completely serious here, each group got a piece of giant paper and a couple markers and we were supposed to write down basically what ticked us off about guys when they tried to woo girls. I just sat there, but I remember the other girls in my group saying how stupid it was when guys talked about how big their penises (peni?) were in order to try and impress girls. Just then my gym teacher walked up; Oh good, I thought, they’ll be embarrassed when she hears them and she’ll surely put a stop to this madness.

FALSE.

She just CHIMED RIGHT IN. “Yeah, that’s so annoying” said my GYM TEACHER WHO WAS AN ADULT AND SUPPOSED TO BE TEACHING US TO RESPECT EACH OTHER “they’re all just six inches anyway.”

…

REALLY MRS GYM TEACHER??

I mean, c’mon, right?

But the worst part of being split up from my friend, was that he wasn’t there to defend me when I got teased. Almost every day of freshman gym class, I got made fun of by this girl who thought she was from the ghetto (let’s call her Tiffany) and her two lackeys. By the way, my school was comprised of 98.5% white kids, from middle to upper class families, and I can assure you that she was not from the ghetto. Now, luckily I have a conscience or else I could have really done some serious damage, she was extremely overweight, barely passing remedial classes, and obviously came from a troubled home. She was always starting fights with people for no reason; one of her favorite lines was “My daddy’s blacker than the ace of spades! He’s from PORTUGAL!” She said that to me several times but I never knew why. I did a pretty good job ignoring her until she started to call me out specifically.

She made fun of my gym shorts, every day. I wore long cargo shorts and a t-shirt to gym class, and a few days into the semester she asked me why my shorts were so long. “Because I like them like this,” was my honest reply. She thought there was something wrong with this, and she and her friends started to call me “Mail-Man,” “Because you look like the guy who delivers my mail.”

Now, this was all very stupid and at first it didn’t bother me that much, and when she noticed that I wasn’t getting upset over her name-calling she decided to amp it up. Tiffany and her friends started to tease me in the locker room, telling me I should be in the boys’ room. She would yell when I came in so everyone could hear; “there’s a BOY in the girls’ room! Somebody get the teacher!! Oh wait, it’s just MAIL MAN.” She would tell me to get out of the wrong room and say that I was perverted for sneaking in. I changed quickly in a stall before and after class and tried to ignore her. Then she and her friends started picking on other aspects of my gender-non-conforming appearance, asking me why I didn’t wear makeup or shave my legs, and said that I must WANT to be a boy because of the way I dressed and acted. After while I started to hear

“Male-Man” instead of

“Mail-Man.”

Getting teased sucks no matter who you are, but it invokes a different kind of fear and dread when you’re struggling with your own identity, constantly wondering what’s the matter with me already, and in fear that someone will be able to read my thoughts and prove that I’m insane.

Soon Tiffany started to find me outside of gym. I’ll never forget one day in the cafeteria when one of my other best friends swooped in to rescue me. I was saving her seat at the table when Tiffany walked up.

“Hey Mail-Man. When are you gonna get rid of those ugly-ass shorts?”

My face burned red but I ignored her. I hadn’t noticed that my friend had walked up behind me until I heard her voice,

“What’s wrong with her shorts??”

“They too long. They for boys obviously.”

“Well your sweat pants are even longer than her shorts, so they must OBVOUSLY be for boys too.”

Tiffany literally couldn’t think of anything else to say. She just scoffed and walked away.

I was beaming. One of the best feelings in the world is when a friend has your back, followed closely by making a bully feel like an idiot.

good friends know how to provide support

The teasing slowed down a bit for a few days but then she picked right back up and was even worse than before.

What’s funny is that the day I finally snapped, she wasn’t even making fun of me. Instead, she had targeted my friend. He had accidentally knocked some kid over during a game of basketball, and Tiffany had taken great offense to this and began to berate him loudly from the bleachers (she never participated in any of the exercise).

Now, let me just say, that my friend was, and still is, one of the nicest people on the face of the earth. He doesn’t go around fighting with people, he’s never mean to anyone, he never bullied or attacked anyone, and plus he just didn’t care enough about gym class to purposely knock someone down over a stupid game. So when Tiffany and her lackeys started yelling at him from the sidelines;

“oh yes you DID knock him down on purpose! I SAW YOU DID IT,”

he didn’t really know what to say. I just couldn’t take it anymore, I had had WAY MORE THAN ENOUGH of her, so I stopped playing, ran over to the bleachers and yelled with a voice that I did not recognize as my own, by rather seemed to materialize in my throat like the sword of Griffindor in the Sorting Hat, right when I needed it most;

“SHUT UP YOU STUPID JACKASS.”

A few kids stopped and stared. The gym teacher looked slightly startled but did not make any attempt to stop me. It wasn’t a sophisticated manipulation of the English language by any means, but for a fourteen-year-old it wasn’t half bad. She shut up for the rest of the day.

So the moral of the story is, high school sucks. Especially when you don’t want to conform to gender norms, but the thing is, I don’t think the teachers and administrators even are aware that they are helping perpetuate these stereotypes. There must be something we as a society can do about this. Kids spend so much of their time not only in school but also in extra-curricular activities run by the school after classes end for the day. What I’m saying, is that anyone in charge of educating and influencing young adults for six plus hours a day needs to be aware of the strain that pressure to conform to gender stereotypes puts on kids, whether the kids themselves realize it or not. I wrote about being picked on in gym class in a reflective essay for my sophomore English class and I remember getting the graded paper back and reading one of the comments my English teacher had written near the end of the essay; “where were your gym teachers for all of this?”

Well English teacher, I still don’t know where they were, but I sure would like to be a part of making sure that kids aren’t subjected to this type of bullying in school anymore. 

amsterdam

WOW. Ok so I haven’t posted in a while, BUTICANEXPLAIN! Here’s the thing, last Tuesday evening I left for Amsterdam, and since then I have been on a magically dysfunctional euro-adventure. You see, when I signed up to study abroad back in the springtime, I was under the impression that the dorm-less conservatory would help me find a place to stay, AND that they had somewhere I could live until I found a room. Why did I think this? Well, because it’s what the people in the study abroad office told me. #HUHinteresting…

BUT ANYWAYS. Long story short, I have (unsuccessfully) been trying to find a room for rent in Amsterdam all summer.

At this point you may be wondering “Are you currently homeless?” Thankfully, no. My only friend in Amsterdam very graciously let me stay in his apartment in the middle of the Red Light District so that I would not have to sleep on a park bench. Although, the park is lovely this time of year.

But I digress… My trip in Amsterdam has just hardly begun, but allow me to tell you about my first time travelling as a boy and the gendered experiences I have had thus far.

So first off, I will being going “stealth” in Amsterdam as they say. Not that I’m trying to hide, but I am just going to intro myself as “Miles” and not “Miles the transguy” to the people I meet while studying at school. So it is going to be very interesting to see what it is like to interact with people who know me as Miles from the start, instead of re-introducing myself to people I have know for some time, which is what I have been doing at home. Of course, there are some people who I will have to come out to right away. Already I have told the school that I am transgender, and they agreed to change my name in the system to Miles without any trouble. #thatwaseasy. Also, the receptionist at the hostel that I moved into this afternoon knew that I wasn’t biologically male as soon as I handed her my ID. Luckily there was a bed available in a co-ed room so that I wouldn’t have to stay in a room with nineteen girls for a week.

I have been using public bathrooms without any problem as well since I got through security in the airport in Boston. Thus far, it seems as though men’s rooms in Amsterdam have a lot more stalls than those in the US, which is a huge relief. Passing 100% of the time is also a relief, although I haven’t really been able to enjoy that feeling yet because of the ocean of stress I have been drowning in fed by the rains of sleep deprivation and the nagging need to find a room to stay in for four months.

Anyway, the interesting part of my journey began upon my arrival to Centraal Station, Amsterdam….

We got off the metro in what appeared to be right in the middle of everything. As my friend showed me the way to his apartment, we entered the Red Light District. And let me just say, I had heard about this part of the city before, but it was nothing like what I had pictured in my mind on the plane ride over. As we turned the corner onto his street I could not even believe what I was seeing: Prostitutes. Everywhere.  Real live women, standing in big glass window-doors, posing seductively under florescent red lights in an attempt to attract customers, interspersed with various sex shops and live-porn establishments. 

I was not prepared for this. 

how you doin?

As I walk further down the street, the rows of women in windows went on and on, some high up on the second floors of buildings, some down low in basements. Some women posed enthusiastically, waving and winking at men that walked by, while others looked bored or forlorn, sitting back in chairs and staring dully at the passerby on the street.

Was I, a young man arriving in the city, supposed to find this appealing? It was like a human meat-market: women displayed like fresh (or not-so-fresh) cuts of beef, available for the picking to men who walked by to judge which leg, thigh, breast etc. they would like to purchase. Honestly, it mostly just made me uncomfortable. But it wasn’t the women themselves that made me uneasy; it was the thought of the practice. Now, I grew up in a place very different than Amsterdam, and having spent my formative years as a girl in the smallest town in the smallest state in the US, I grew up learning that prostitution was illegal, scandalous, dirty, sad, and potentially dangerous.

My friend took me to an old church in the area, and even the narrow streets that circled the building were lined with red-lit windows. THE CHURCH! As we got close to his apartment my friend informed that he lived on the corner where the transvestite prostitutes worked. Their windows were lit with a blue-ish purple light rather than a red, to indicate that they had penises. My friend smiled and waved politely to the girls as we walked by, so I gathered that I should do the same instead of just staring in disbelief.

As I got settled in the little third-floor room, I looked out the window and noticed the glaring sign across the street that read “SEX PALACE,” flanked by subtitles reading “Peep Show,” “Live Couples,” and “Bondage, Homo, and Teen-Sex.”

AH! 

Gross!

that doesn't look good

Again I thought, am I supposed to find this appealing? Does being disgusted and a little frightened make me less of a man? Do all men have sex with hookers and enjoy lap dances and peep shows??? #calmdown 

No, of course not. You can’t say that ALL MEN are like this or ALL MEN like these things or act this way. Any sort of very broad generalization like that is just false. But still, I felt weird about it, because these windows and these sex shows were obviously advertised towards men, but I just couldn’t see the appeal.

First off, I couldn’t really understand the concept of live porn as a whole. I mean, what do you do? You watch people have sex, but you’re not just gonna masturbate to it right there in a room full of people, right? And I kept on seeing guys walking in in groups, I mean, it’s not like being part of a film club, where you go out and see a movie together and then discuss it over coffee afterwards, right…?

Later, as I did a bit of exploring on my own, I kept on getting startled as prostitutes would knock on their glass doors as I walked by, trying to grab my attention. They certainly grabbed my attention, but my returned expression of awe/confusion/surprise was probably not what they were going for. Although I personally couldn’t imagine having sex with someone I didn’t like and trust a whole lot, or, you know, didn’t even know at all, I was flattered in a small way when the women would look at me and smile and try to beckon me inside. I even looked up once to see a transvestite licking her lips at me as she curled her index finger in towards her palm, motioning to me to come here. 

HEY THURRR

Did they think I was cute? Or did I just look like a dumb tourist with lots of money to lose? Did they pick and choose who they smiled at or did they just try and attract every man that walked by?

Over all, the Red Light District just makes me sad, especially after today when I learned that the majority of the women working in the windows are trafficked, and that pimps own the buildings they work in, and that these men are actually the ones making most of the money off the exchange. It would be different if these women were working as prostitutes by choice; choosing to make money using their bodies and not being forced to have sex with sixty men or more each night, but unfortunately the fact that prostitution is legal here does not mean any of these things are true. 

Living in Amsterdam is obviously different than what I’m used to, and it’s going to take more than four or five days to understand a completely different culture. I’m looking forward to seeing how masculinity is constructed somewhere outside of the US, and I think it will help me gain a lot of perspective on American culture and masculinity as well.

haircut

Earlier this summer I went and got my first professional hair cut. Ever since I was very little my mother cut my hair, and since I went off to college I’ve had a friend do it for me.

I actually had quite a bit of hair when I initially started school, it was long and quite frizzy; the volume was exacerbated by the extreme New Orleans humidity. One night in late February, I decided I wanted to get rid of all my hair. I had wanted short hair since childhood but had never mustered up enough courage to just cut it all off. My friend agreed that she would help me shave my head, much to the dismay of all our other friends. So after procuring clippers I locked us in my room, took a shot of tequila, and told her to go at it. Just as she was about to shear my untamed mane, our quiet and mild mannered friend knocked on the door. She had been violently shaken from a nap and urged by the others to “save me” from certain disaster.

“Please, just let me in.”

“No, go away, I want short hair and you can’t stop me!”

“I won’t stop you, I just want to help you.”

My friend and I agreed that we didn’t actually know what we were doing and that a little bit of guidance couldn’t hurt.

Long story short, my quiet artistic friend gave me a wonderful (and short) haircut and has been cutting my hair ever since.

i was skeptical at the time

UNTIL, earlier this summer, when I got my first professional haircut. #dejavu #backtothestory

Right. So I decided that a men’s haircut might help me pass more easily, and looked around until I found a nice little barber shop in Uptown. (My friend suggested Supercuts while we were driving around getting frustrated at our attempt to find a suitable establishment, and I had to explain to her that that is where white people go to get mediocre haircuts.)

I knew this little barber shop was perfect as soon as I saw it. My friend and I walked in and the short balding barber told us he would be with us in just a minute. As he finished barbering his current customer I looked up “men’s hipster haircuts” on my phone so that I could show him what I wanted.

When I sat down in the hair-cutting chair I asked him for a “typical men’s haircut, but longer on top, like this.” As he draped the smock over me and ran a comb through my locks I began to look around. What I saw made me mildly terrified. I had been so distracted by the prospect of looking good that I had failed to notice the abundant right-wing propaganda that covered the walls. Pictures of Bush, Rush Limbaugh quotes, and a cartoon that read, “You’re going to vote for Obama? Do you have your head up your ass?” were taped to the mirror directly in front of me, framing my nervous twinge of a feigned smile.

Oh dear god.

I was certain for a minute that he was just going to slit my throat with one of his razors.

And I couldn’t help but wonder, was I passing??

Was he perceiving me as male?

Or as a lesbian?

Or maybe just a masculine girl??

When he asked me how I wanted my sideburns done I thought I was in the clear. Sideburns are just a guy thing…right?

it's a guy thing

I said I didn’t know how I wanted them done, whichever would look better. #rookiemistake

He stopped cutting my hair, tilted his head, and looked at me; “Are you going for a real feminine look?”

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Fail.

There was my answer. I was not passing.

“Oh, uh, no no.” I tried not to sound embarrassed.

I mean, I should have known that he would be able to tell, since he was going to see my (hairless) neck and face up close.

Later on in the haircut, he asked me if I wanted him to touch up the back, and after I replied yes please, he told me ok, but he usually didn’t do that for women.

As he grabbed his straight razor he added “Don’t move or I’ll cutchya!”

Hahaha…. #rushlimbaughwouldlikethat

When he was finished he told me that there was only one other woman whom he also gave a touch-up in the back, except that she had a flat-top. “A real flat top!” he exclaimed in amazement.

He said that she had several kids and was very “athletic.” (ha)

He was actually a very nice man, and he gave me the best damn haircut I ever had in my life! Which is why I went back a second time…

When I went back for my second haircut, there were two other barbers as well; a woman barber cutting someone’s hair, and an elderly man reading the newspaper. So, I sat down in the same chair and asked the same barber for the same haircut. My barber and the old man were making cracks at one another as he began to cut my hair.

He remembered me from the last time, and so I told him how well the first haircut had worked out for me. To this, the elderly man commented jokingly, “Hey you cut his hair once and he came back a second time?? He’s a brave young man.” #youhavenoidea

The elderly man and woman barber referred to me as “him” and “young man” several times after that, and I could tell my barber was starting to feel awkward. I was feeling the familiar twinge of nervous-awkwardness myself, because although I like passing as male (duh), what I absolutely do not enjoy, is when I am passing and something happens to make someone “realize” my biological gender, because then they either:

1. Apologize profusely.

2. Avoid talking to me because they feel embarrassed/awkward/disgusted.

3. Start to treat me differently/extremely nicely, because they feel bad.

4. Make some weird comment about how they couldn’t tell because my hair is so short or something like that, basically implying that it is my fault because I don’t present myself in a way that makes my biological gender obvious. For example...

Over Christmas break, before I had come out to anyone at home, I went down to the gas station to purchase lottery tickets to give to my grandmother as a Christmas gift. When I got up to the front of the line the cashier was finishing up a conversation with a police officer, and when I told him I would like to purchase some lottery tickets he said "You better get out of my face! How old are you??" Shock overshadowed the anger I should have felt and so I answered "19..." I handed him my license.
"You don't look nineteen. Are you a man or a woman?" and then, as he actually looked at my ID, "Oh, well, I couldn't tell, uh, you know..."
The policeman butted in, trying to make up for this man's rudeness; "it's just the short hair, don't worry about it..."
"Yeah, you should grow your hair out because, you know, how is anyone supposed to tell?" replied the RUDEST CASHIER I HAVE EVER HAD THE DISPLEASURE OF INTERACTING WITH.
Right...
There were so many things wrong with this situation, I don't know if I even want to get into it. He was basically telling me that I needed to conform to gender stereotypes regardless of how I would like to present myself so that others could have the ease of immediately judging me based on my outside appearance.

SO ANYWAY, I was getting anxious along with my barber, because I really wasn’t in the mood to go to awkward-town.

to awkward town! 

i think we're already there.

Unfortunately, my haircut was finished much more quickly that before and didn’t turn out nearly as good as the first one. As I got up to leave, he leaned in and said “you really should consider the flat-top, it’s something that looks good on a lot of women.”

I have encountered many situations similar to this, and when I think back on them I wonder, what should I have done?

Should I have explained what was going on to my barber? I mean, I don’t feel the need to come out to every random person I encounter each day. Actually Mr. Deli man you can call me SIR and while you’re at it I’d like that sliced extra thin thank you throw in some potato salad as well have a nice day.

I’m still not entirely sure, but I do hope that as I continue transitioning it will become easier and easier to go stealth with strangers and those who I don’t feel the need to pour my heart and soul out to. I would like to continue to see the same barber, and so I’ll just have to see how it goes once I start showing up with facial hair. 

going home

Good News!

Turns out the TSA agents aren’t looking at our privates when they send us through the x-ray scanner machine. How do I know this? Because even after I was “randomly selected” (is it still random when it happens to you every time?) to stand with my hands up in the scanner machine for a little dose of unnecessary radiation, they still thought I was a man. How do I know this? Because they had the male TSA agent pat me down. Which, in and of itself, was not a cause for celebration, but hey, I’ll take it!

Before I cut my hair and started binding I was regularly “randomly selected” for an additional pat down whenever I made my way through airport security. Usually a portly older woman would check my arms, legs, and chest for who-knows-what, but on my most recent trip home I was addressed as “sir” and checked for explosives by a mustachioed man.

Progress!

Maybe the next time I fly I’ll try wearing my packer. I have avoided wearing it through airport security for fear of appearing as though I am trying to smuggle something on to the plane in my pants. Can you imagine? Now that would be awkward. “Excuse me sir but we’re going to need you to empty your pockets completely.”

don't touch me there

Anyway…

What I really want to talk about is going home. My trip back to New England was actually quite enjoyable, because I passed very easily the entire time; the flight attendants called me sir, someone on the plane called my “guy,” and someone else referred to me as a young man. So, needless to say, I was in quite a good mood. Actually being at home has been a bit more difficult than expected.

I have been out to my parents for a while, and I had asked them as well as my close friends from home to call me Miles and to use male pronouns when referring to me. I also called my sisters a few days before I flew home and came out to them. So I was hoping that everyone at home would just call me Miles and refer to me as a boy and that everything would be easy, but this was a bit unrealistic. #yeahyouthink??

Of course I understand that it is weird for my close friends and family to call me by a new name and that it will take some time for them to get used to it. And I know that they are trying. My mother and cousin even came up with the idea of the name-and-pronoun-jar, like a swear jar, but instead of owing money after cursing, they would owe five cents for every incorrect pronoun and ten cents for forgetting to use the name Miles. It seems to me, however, that this worked better when I wasn’t actually around (they started before I arrived.) Which actually makes sense when I think about it; it’s a bit easier to refer to me as Miles the boy when I’m miles (ha) away than it is to look me in the face and call me something other than what my family has associated my visage with for years and years. Several hours after telling me about the money jar idea, my family just resorted to calling me “M.”

The problem really lies with me, because I am SO IMPATIENT. I wanted everything to be different as soon as I stepped off that plane, I want facial hair and a low voice and a flat chest RIGHT NOW #morelikeyesterday

But I have to wait.

Because it’s a very long process. #waytoolong #thatswhatshesaid

What I REALLY can’t wait for is having a flat chest. Each time I go to the beach or walk down to the docks to go for a swim, I am so indescribably jealous of all my guy friends; walking around with the shirts off, swimming in shorts, getting a nice even tan, and then drying off and putting their shirts back on without having to wear anything underneath. It’s all that I’ve ever wanted.

I cannot even begin to describe how uncomfortable it is for me to live with breasts. Even though half the world lives happily as women, I feel as though I am carrying all this extra weight around, as if it is not a part of me but something merely attached to my front, pulling me down, getting in the way. To me, they’re just completely useless. It’s like when I had long hair; I didn’t own it, I didn’t want it, and I certainly didn’t know what to do with it. I just carried it around everyday even though it annoyed me to no end, because I thought that that was what girls were supposed to do.

I dream of how free I will feel after chest surgery, how light it will be and how I will finally feel like I am in control of my entire body. I’ve always been extremely jealous of flat chests, but now that I have a name for what I’m going through and know that’s it’s actually possible to reach my goal (now that I’m closer to being happy) it seems like I am even further away.

This transition is going to be quite the lesson in patience. But I’ve never wanted anything more, so it must be worth it. 

headed in the right direction