Neue

Earlier this week, I made a date to meet a coworker for coffee. Since it's a female coworker and I still present as male at work, I tried to express that it was a purely platonic engagement. She canceled at the last minute and the subject has been taking possession of my mind fairly frequently since. I was going to give her the big reveal about being TG, and part of me was relieved when she didn't show up, freeing me from a possible Awkward Moment. But other feelings crept in, and later that night I felt torn up over it. It's a weird, muddled feeling: the sting of rejection (that's largely my own self-esteem issues and social anxiety talking) and the (temporarily?) lost opportunity to be honest and vulnerable with another human being. I had hoped to create a larger slice of the universe to explore as a transperson (as a woman? As someone apart from the gender binary? I don't know.)

I just feel rotten about it, which I can't really hide from her, which I feel hurts my chances of seeing her outside of work. The flavor of despair is something I think a woman is well-attuned to smell on a man. Despite my incongruity with the genders involved, my radar would be up if I were her and approached in a similar fashion, and it drives me nuts. I've never come out to someone over the phone, so I'm just not sure if I can break through whatever barriers separate us in addition to the brick wall that is gender. I suppose it's my calling to learn to scale that wall as a person who exists on the outskirts of the gender bell curve, but it's really hard and I'm feeling kind of delicate.

I like this woman because she is seemingly straightforward and may actually be in my intellectual league. The fucked-up part of my brain smells some damage on her, and I'm worried about how that factors into me fancying her. My common associates are fucked up enough, and I don't want to buy any more drama, especially with a work acquaintance. Despite it all, it took me no tiny amount of courage to get to the point where I could try to make a new friend relatively cold. I'm kind of short on the courage, to which my extended transition will attest. Although I've started to change my schema of courage and fear from the monolithic, boys-don't-cry stuff I learned from my father, I still can't help but view myself as a coward. Ironically, I construe that as a feminine quality and look down on myself for it.

I hate that as a transwoman, I have a really weird set of gender biases, but I'm kidding myself if I say that I'd be any better off were I cisgendered. Also, I hate that sometimes gender is all that I can talk about. I need to be around other trannies and transfolk, but I think I fear being read as unworthy if I'm to enter any circle of my people. Susan Moses on her Talking Tranny podcast did a great piece on hierarchical bias recently, basically stating how the trappings and status of subculture that we take on influence how those groups view us and the validity of our membership and opinions (I probably could have phrased that better, but just Google her shit because she's intensely intelligent.) I fear that moment of walking into a group of transfolk and being deemed unworthy due to my low passability and the mix of whatever else my subconscious can pit against me. It's not a rational fear, but few are, and realizing its irrationality won't do anything to dispel it.