Acts of Greatness

I decided to legally change my name shortly after I began gender therapy, with the prospect of being prescribed testosterone at least another half year away. In transition, there’s no hard-and-fast rule about when to change your name (if you decide to change it at all), as opposed to a legal genderchange, which does require a certain chronology (at least in Massachusetts). To change my name, all I had to do was pick one, file the appropriate paperwork at probate court, pay the exorbitant fee (~$200), and wait the 5 weeks to receive my official name change document in the mail. Unlike others I know, I did not have to announce the change in the newspaper or even appear before a judge; all I had to write was that the change was “personal”/”name I use daily” and I received the stamp of approval. I got the impression that as long as the change wasn’t in service of evading a past crime, the state didn’t really care why I wanted it.

The minute I received my official name change document in the mail is where the fun began . With this piece of paper in hand, I suddenly felt the power, duty, and burden of having to inform everyone from my school to my bank to my job to my utility companies. As soon as the name change order was stamped into being, my former name ceased to be “real” and the new one was “who” I was … yet the old name persisted on everything I had touched up until now.This left me feeling in a sort of limbo where everything felt false, down to even the perfunctory level of giving my name to the barista for my daily coffee. Unless I went to everyone individually and changed it. (I acknowledge that this sense of “falseness” was a personal — and actually somewhat unexpected — reaction, and not everyone who doesn’t immediately switch over to using their new name after a legal change is somehow deceptive. Moreover it was a personal feeling of not being true to myself, rather than feeling I owed it to everyone else to not “trick” them — none of their business, in my opinion!)

However, to go to everyone and announce my name change was, in a sense, to announce my transition.

 Not that the nice lady at my bank necessarily assumed that this signaled that I was on a gender transition journey, but my new distinctly male-sound name would raise some eyebrows. I felt a somewhat political urge to explain anyways, even though most people would make a professional attempt to be nonchalant about it —  a way of sending the message that gender transition didn’t need to be awkwardly danced around in everyday interactions. I ended up assessing it on a case-by-case basis, with telling my landlords via note-with-my-rent-check being the most nervewracking. In some instances I haven’t even got around to mentioning it, particularly in over-the-phone services (i.e. cable, electricity, etc.) where the only indication of who’s on the other line is my high, pre-testosterone voice. Does not taking every opportunity to change my name and explain myself make me a coward or a transperson refusing to be the open book that society expects us to be about our personal lives and bodies? Jury’s still out on that one.

In certain places — for instance, my work as a server and bartender — I couldn’t just announce a name change without explaining more to my curious coworkers, who literally have to refer to me by name a 100 times a night, not to mention my name being emblazoned on every kitchen ticket and receipt I print up (you never really notice this until you have to!). I thought, in those first moments after I had completed the legal change, that I could and would keep going a wile with the old name until I was realistically closer to receiving hormones. But once I had it, I almost felt like a kid with a special gift that they just had to show everyone. Or at least to everyone safe — and when it comes to coworkers/peers in our generation, I feel protected by the general youth attitude that everything’s “cool” as long as you’re being yourself and not hurting anyone.

In retrospect, I see that I didn’t think ahead to how the name change would “force my hand” in coming out as trans to the myriad people in my daily life … though I am still waiting to tell my super-macho barber until he is literally trimming my beard for me. But I don’t necessarily regret legally changing my name so early in my legal-social-medical transition process. It gave my coworkers and school administrators time to really adjust to the idea that I would be changing and started the conversation about my gender pronouns, which is another work-in-progress. But I also sense, now 6 months after my new name became law, a question behind their sometimes exaggerated attempt to use my new name: when is your body going to follow? It’s really, once again, none of their business, and only the truly adventurous (or perhaps “rude” is the word?) venture to ask about when I’ll begin testosterone. But that socialized part of me trained to please does get anxious during such interactions. My only response to this subtle questioning gaze is to keep it private, when part of me wonders whether I should be super vocal about it to demystify and destigmatize the hoops we transpeople jump through to get what’s ours. Coming out to yourself as trans is half the struggle and the victory, but each step you take seems to bring a whole new way to come out. My legal name change put into motion a process that I’m doing my best to approach with dignity and joy.

When I do "Trans 101" workshops for adolescent audiences, I sometimes simplify my transition into an explanation that I think they'll grasp: When I was born, the doctor looked at my body and declared that I was a person who would grow to become a woman. But I eventually knew in my head and in my heart that I'd grow to become a man. And I have done so, with some effort and assistance.

In these words I'm addressing an unspoken question that lingers in the air: But how do you know you're a man?

I've been meditating on this query lately, and I keep coming to the same counter-question: How does any male-identified person know he is a man? And does my answer really diverge greatly from how many men, trans or cisgender, would answer?

Transgender people are often said to have a "narrative" to their lives; we're encouraged to see our journey toward recognizing our gender as a story with an articulable pattern. The truth is, though, that everyone's gender is a story; it's just that trans folks are more likely to be -- perhaps I could say "are given the gift of having to be" -- aware of it.

The story of becoming a man, a woman, or a person of any other gender often follows aspects of that most instinctual of story arcs: the hero's journey. For instance, my personal narrative was one of effort in seeking a transformative goal (a quest), assistance (tools provided by medicine, law, and intangible emotional support), and mentorship by those who went before me (guides).

And my manhood was ultimately achieved through what could be considered rites of passage -- which is to say a similar structure to communal cultural tales of how one achieves cisgender manhood. It's simply some details that vary.

I do see one key difference in how all this plays out, however: Trans men make this invisible process disconcertingly visible by flipping the variables. While a cisgender man may be born with certain inherent potentials to physically embody a manhood that others will acknowledge socially, he's not necessarily imbued with the demanding drive, the internal compass, the awareness of the systems and tropes he's drawing on, and the deep gratitude concerning the specific man he'll be.

It's quite possible to reach cisgender manhood externally (for instance, by reaching a certain age or displaying changes in voice, facial hair, etc.) long before one reaches an internal sense of his own unique self -- and, further, before one reaches a sense of how hard he'll fight to be that self, no matter the costs or resistance. For trans men it's often much the opposite case.

Manhood is an accomplishment, an internal need and quest, for both cis and trans men. (The same could be said of cis and trans women in regard to womanhood, of course.) When we acknowledge this, the necessity and intelligibilty of questions like "But how do you know?" fades away.

Ultimately, seeing this will help dismantle one of the structuring cultural approaches to transgender people: mistrust. Mistrust that we know it's the right time for us to transition. Mistrust that we won't eventually regret transition. Mistrust that one's sexual orientation won't suddenly change by sleeping with us. Mistrust that when we say we're men, women, neither or both, we really, truly are.

I'll end this meditation with a response I sometimes give to that mistrust: Socially, we're all taught when we're young that just because there's something we don't like or wouldn't do, it doesn't mean it can't be fun or useful or important to someone else. As childcare-worker friends delightfully put it, "we don't yuck someone else's yum!"

As children, we learn a vital truth: To be decent to others we share communal space with, we must look internally and adjust our own instinctual "I personally wouldn't do that, so it must be wrong!" response. At the same moment, we're trusting that those around us are also sparing us from their judgments. This is something we as cisgender and transgender adults would do well to remember and enact.

In so doing, we won't simply be living lives of disingenuousness. This process actually changes us, helps us grow, opens our minds to ways life can be lived differently. It's part of maturing. It's part of building what we all need as humans: strong communities, families, and senses of self.

We heart this so much. 

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No matter how many art history courses he took in college or the number of art institutions he visited, artist Gabriel Garcia Roman never saw art depicting queer people of colour. Rather than feel defeated or decry those spaces as universally exclusionary, however, Garcia Roman decided to create the change he wanted to see. And that's exactly what he's doing in his photographic series, "Queer Icons."

WE LOVE ORPHAN BLACK!

LGBTQ representation isn’t a foreign concept to BBC America’s award-winning clone show Orphan Black. Now in its third season, the show doesn’t shy away from the characters and their identities – all things that viewers are very invested in. So let's talk about why the show is so successful at sharing diverse LGBTQ stories. 

From our recent article with tips on coping when being misgendered:

We chatted with Andrew Morrison-Gurza, a Disability Awareness Consultant advocating to change the conversation around disability and make it accessible to everyone – whether they have a disability or not. "I want to see the LGBTQ+ community start to accept all forms of differences – particularly when we talk about the body. In my experience as a Queer man, I have felt the sting of rejection because my Queer, Disabled body doesn’t fit into what a gay man is supposed to be. I think a big part of 'progress' in our community is to realize that we in the LGBTQ+ community can also contribute to our own oppression. We need to acknowledge this, and look within our community to start truly pushing forward for the equality we seek."