The Little Tramp Comes to Dinner

As a child, I was terrified of being in awkward and embarrassing circumstances. Little has changed, and even today I will sometimes choose to not do something rather than risk an awkward interaction. Back when I was presenting male, this was interpreted as a very masculine trait, since one of the consequences was that I was loath to ask for directions. I’m sure on some level I was concerned about maintaining an appearance of competence and self-reliance. Mostly though, I was avoiding talking to people for fear that they would make fun of me for being lost or end up being berated for bothering someone. Why? Who knows. Maybe because, as a kid, that’s what it seemed like everyone did when I asked for help or admitted to not knowing something. Were they doing that to teach me self-reliance? Were they trying to teach this little kid to hold his own when bantering with the guys? I have no idea, but it left me with a life-long aversion to potentially awkward situations (or situations that I imagined could become awkward–which is, let’s face it, given a sufficiently creative imagination, amounts to 100% of all social interactions). How cruel a fate it is then to be a trans person in early transition. Life is a constant series of awkward and embarrassing interactions. Reality actually exceeded my wildest imaginings of embarrassing possibilities when during my first dinner out dressed en femme, I sat for a good hour unaware that I was wearing a Hitler mustache–in front of a bunch of Germans.

My life is now a never-ending parade of awkward scenarios that I simply have to learn how to bear. Most of the time, like in the case of my accidental Charlie Chaplin impression at dinner, there have been no consequences. That dinner, like most embarrassing moments, was funny in retrospect. We went to my mother-in-laws for dinner. I had come out relatively recently, and I had maybe 2 feminine outfits at that point, and I had never been out in public presenting as a woman. I was looking for a chance to dress up in a non-judgemental environment, and my in-laws, gods bless them, had been doing their best to be supportive.

So I put on my new wig, a blouse, and some mom-jeans. Adventurous, right? I spent little time worrying about my clothes, because the biggest challenge to dolling myself up was covering up my beard. At that point laser had done very little to get rid of my beard shadow, so to not look like the laziest cross-dresser in the world, I had to spackle on half a pot of color corrector, concealer, and then blend it all in to rest of my face with a full coverage foundation. At that point I looked like Data from Star Trek: TNG, so I clumsily applied some blush and bronzer to increase the chances that my gender will be read as “woman” and not “android”.

To a greater or lesser extent, people oo-ed and ah-ed over my appearance when we arrived. I’m sure the make-up looked a little weird. The pants didn’t fit well, and for some reason that now escapes me I did nothing to keep my hair out of my face, so I was constantly pulling wig hair out of my mouth and desperately trying to keep it tucked behind my ear. Hair clips exist for a reason. The oo-ing and ah-ing lasted for about 2 minutes before everything got back to normal, and the focus moved to food prep and catching up with a family friend that was visiting from out of town.

That was the best part of the whole experience–having my gender acknowledged and then largely treated as uneventful. We talked about gender transition related issues, because early on I couldn’t stop myself from prattling on about hormones and getting zapped with lasers. However for the most part, I was simply there, being myself, and the rest of the family carried on as normal.

After worrying about family break-ups, being mocked and laughed out of friendships, and losing all the close connections I had, to be unremarkable was a gift. Because of that gift, I was able to stop worrying about how others were seeing me that night, and I had the freedom to start to pay attention to how I felt about myself. I couldn’t really feel the makeup on my face, but its presence was made known by the fact that I couldn’t touch my face or scratch an itch without worrying about ruining it–and my face itched all the time because strands of hair from my wig were constantly tickling my nose or getting in my mouth. The wig itself was not too uncomfortable, but it made my bald head warmer than I was used to. The clothes were loose in places I wasn’t used to. The jeans were made for someone with more hip and butt than I had at the time, and the blouse was flowy in a way that I liked but was unaccustomed to.

Physically, I would not have described myself as comfortable. Mentally and emotionally though, I felt at peace in a way that I had not known was possible. Even while peering through a curtain of wig hair, trying to pull it to the side so as to not get gravy everywhere while shoveling lamb into my mouth (watch out not to smear the lipstick!), I felt an ease of being that had before then completely escaped me. Despite the immense amount of effort I had put into changing my appearance (changing my self in a way), I felt more like myself in that moment than I had in decades.

Since then, I’ve had that experience more and more often: the experience of feeling like myself. That import of that experience is extremely hard to convey. Most people feel like themselves all the time, and so, like a fish in water not understanding the concept of “wet”, they have no vantage point from which to understand what it means to not feel like themselves. If a person ever doesn’t feel like themselves, it is usually an acute event, ending shortly thereafter, and what it would feel like to experience that over a long period of time is hard to imagine.

Having now the perspective to understand what it is like to live for a long time while not feeling like oneself, I can relate a little bit of what it is like. It is like carrying a weight through life that you are never allowed to put down. It makes you tired. It is mentally exhausting, because you have to constantly keep it in mind during all activities so that you don’t drop it. You feel alienated from other people, because they can’t see the weight, and you can’t tell them that it’s there.

At that dinner, I started to feel the release of that weight and the unfamiliar sensation of coming home and being at rest in my own skin. I was happy and sad at the same time. I was elated at this new ease. I was desperately sad at how unfair it was that this was a new sensation. It was not fair. Why did I have to drag myself through the decades without understanding what was wrong?

I was crying into my potatoes.

No one noticed, but my eyes were filled with water and my nose was starting to drip. Had someone asked me to pass the asparagus, I would have started bawling. That would have been terrible. I would have to redo my makeup.

I took leave of the table to collect myself, dabbing my eyes and blowing my nose. I spent some time breathing slowly, and tried to focus more on how good it felt to be here and now and not on the sense of injustice of it all. Back to that lamb.

I spent the rest of the meal chatting, eating, and enjoying the company. My father-in-law asked completely inappropriate questions of our visiting family friend. My son hopped around his chair while we shouted at him to stop as he elbowed over a glass of juice. My wife and I engaged in a tense negotiation regarding who would get to finish the last of the vegetables. You know. The usual.

By the time dessert rolled around, I excused myself to the little girls room (did I get to call it that now?). I turned on the water and lathered up my hands. Looking up at the mirror and tossing my hair back (I could toss my hair, yay!), I saw gender-bent Hitler looking back at me. At some point during the evening, the makeup under my nose had been rubbed off, leaving a stark brown streak in the shape of a toothbrush mustache. My foundation was probably too light for my skin tone, and the effect of the beard shadow peeking through was not subtle. At some point my visage had taken a left turn away from the feminine mystique and towards the third reich.

Oh, shit. I knew what had happened: when I was crying I wiped my nose! I had tried to avoid touching my upper lip, but I must have accidentally wiped away the makeup! That was at the beginning of the meal, which meant that I had been sitting there for the last 45 minutes, goofily grinning at people like the little tramp. Why had no one said anything? I found my makeup bag, and I painted over that simulacrum of facial hair from the 1930’s and went back to the table.

Later, I asked why no one had told me. They said they didn’t want me to be self-conscious. Well, jokes on them, because now I don’t trust any of them and I’m committed to being self-conscious 100% of the time.

Seriously though, it turned out to not be a big deal, and I learned a lot about how much difference gender presentation can make in terms of my emotional and mental state. Poor-taste impersonations aside, it was a wonderful evening that I am very thankful for. And the evening encapsulates my gender transition experience so far: everything is sort of ridiculous, and there is no escaping embarrassing circumstances. I am a walking ball of awkward–a fate I have tried to avoid my entire life. However, I am more at peace with myself now than I ever was. I care a lot less about what other people think, because I don’t really need their approval anymore. I love myself now, and it turns out that is all I was ever looking for.