Attitude adjustment

Sometimes I feel...boyish. No, not like a man. But male-bodied. Because my body is still more male than female, despite more than a year and a half of hormone therapy, which of course can't change everything. Sometimes I'm conscious of all those mismatched pieces—I feel tall, I feel big, I feel flat, I feel angular, I feel unfinished. I don't feel like this most of the time, but sometimes I do. Sometimes my heritage weighs on me.

This happened yesterday when we left a theatre after seeing Whip It, which, by the way, is well worth seeing for a number of reasons. I went to the washroom before we left. I wasn't looking around, but for some reason I felt like I was being looked at, critically. My hair was down, which I am discovering might not be my most feminine look, strangely. I was wearing a kind of pea jacket, which I think looks nice but is to some extent gender neutral. The feeling probably had much more to do with me than with any looks I might or might not have been getting.

After I have had genital surgery, will I still have these feelings? The operation won't change my height or my size or my shape. But will it change, or at least help change, my attitude toward myself? A significant part of me will no longer be male, the use of which part provided me one of my only strong links to being a man. Once I have a vagina instead of a penis and testicles, will my heritage still weigh upon me? Will it weigh less?

I cannot allow myself to fall into the trap of thinking this operation is going to be magic. I do think that it's going to be a change of great significance, a feeling that has only grown stronger with time. Yet when the procedure is done, it will still be me out in the world, the same me everyone can see and interact with now.

Through most of this process, even from the very beginning, I have had some serious attitude. Fuck yeah, I'm a woman. I was acting like that well before I had any right to do so. It keeps me walking proud and, yes, tall, and probably has kept me from being seen as a target. I don't know why that attitude has been shaken lately. Maybe it's part of the lead-up to surgery. Maybe it's me making sure that my expectations are realistic.

I think part of it comes from the recent discussions about whether we are trans women forever, whether we want that label or not. That was bumming me out for a while, but sometimes it pisses me off. Not that someone would want that label for themselves. That's their business and their right. But that someone would try to push it onto me. That feels a bit like what we in Canada call "tall poppy syndrome." Don't stick up above the crowd. Don't get above your station. Well, fuck that.

I know who and what I am. I know where I came from. I know what I've overcome. Just as I will always be both a Canadian and a French-Canadian-American-Canadian, I will always be both a woman and a woman who started life as a boy. Should I aspire to be less because of this? Are certain things out of reach because of this? I don't think so.

I have to get my attitude back. Not stop being realistic, just make sure I have the confidence that any woman and any person should have. The world tends to run over people who lack confidence. And that confidence will not be found in the result of a surgical procedure. My attitude is in my head and in my whole body.

The tag line for the movie Whip It is "be your own hero." No elbows to the head, I promise. Just good, hard skating.