How Do I Look?

“Hey, Juniper! It’s good to see you!”

I gave Ollie a hug and smiled up at him. It had been months since I had seen him, and we were finally able to make a lunch hangout work. We sat, and I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear.

“Tell me about what’s going on with you? How’s Amy doing?” I asked.

“She’s doing well. Actually, great! We’re expecting a baby this spring!”

“Congratulations!”

I inquired about how the pregnancy was going, and then we chatted about work. Ollie and I are both data scientists. We used to work together, spending a lot of the day talking about everything from politics to machine learning algorithms.

Back then I didn’t have boobs. If I had, our work relationship might have been regarded with suspicion that it was more than it was. It wasn’t and wouldn’t be. After transitioning, I staked out a site in the gay camp, and I can’t imagine abandoning it. On the other hand, I wasn’t helping with the potential optics problem. I had made myself up as cute as I could manage. My wife later accused me of dressing in a distracting manner.

I did not have a choice. He had called me “dude”.

It was not fair to him to be upset about being dude’d. Ollie and I had known each other for the better part of a decade. When he had called me dude I had only been presenting female for a few months. Also, it had happened over the phone, and I had not changed how I spoke at that point. Frankly, he probably calls other ladies “dude”. Addressing people as dude is a verbal habit that, while stemming from the patriarchy, was not intended to gender me any specific way. There were lots of excuses, and given how close we were, it should not have bothered me, especially given the apology I got afterwards. 

Still, the thought running through my head while picking out my clothes was, “Try calling me a dude while I’m wearing this! I need more eyeliner....”

***

“Please welcome our next speaker, Juniper Maolchallan. She is going to talk to us about data mining in Windows registry logs.”

Polite applause from about a hundred people died down, and I began my presentation. The flow was good. I managed to hype the company I was with while at the same time keeping the focus of the talk on my research. I got some laughs. I was proud of myself for shutting down the inane and pointlessly critical question I got at the end without losing my cool or stumbling.

Leaving the podium, I was proud of myself for delivering it well and for remembering to hit all of the notes I planned to. It was probably one of the best talks I have ever given. Something was bothering me though. A critical question was unanswered. The experience felt incomplete. A thread was left dangling and unaddressed.

I had told Ollie about my talk at this conference. I had been frantically preparing for it at the time of our lunch. I had a laundry list of reasons to be nervous about the talk, and none of them were good reasons to be nervous. I have plenty of public speaking experience, and I like being the center of attention. I was more shaken up by the fact that this would be my first public speaking event as Juniper, and what was really bothering me was the same thing that bothered me after my lunch with Ollie. It was something that apparently mattered more to me than connecting with old friends or achieving professional notoriety.

The question was: “But how did I look?”

Really?! This is what preoccupies my thoughts? Was my hair OK? Did my makeup smudge? Is my outfit appropriate? Am I pretty? What time piece would you say my figure most resembles-- an hourglass or a balding grandfather clock?

It feels shallow to finish catching up with an old friend or to nail an important professional event only to find myself preoccupied with nothing but clothes and makeup, but I can’t help myself.

I have not figured out how to cope with these thoughts. How much time I spend preparing in front of a mirror and what I see in that mirror has no impact on those thoughts. Typically, I will worry about if my makeup has rubbed off, if the remainder of my beard shadow is showing, if my wig is crooked, etc. But even if I have convinced myself that all of that is fine, I will worry about my facial features and my figure. I worry my brow is too heavy and that I look like a guy in stage makeup. I will obsess over my shoulders being too broad and that no amount of draping fabric will hide the blocky masculine shape of my body. I am afraid my pants won't sit right because I do not have any hips.

After the internal meltdown, the questions start to come out.

“Do I look like a dude?”

“Are my shoulders too obvious in this top?”

“Do I look like a lazy crossdresser?”

“Does this wig look like I’m trying too hard?”

“Is my gut sticking out too much?”

“My brow makes me look like a caveman, doesn’t it?”

“I DO look like a lazy crossdresser, don’t I?”

“How long should I hide inside a dark cave and not speak with anyone?”

To my wife, I apologize for badgering you with all those questions. Really, how can anyone respond to them? It is like asking someone if you look fat.

No one really wants to hear yes when they are asking that question. I am trans. I look like a trans person. What am I supposed to do about that? Forcing someone else to reiterate that fact just externalizes my own insecurity and makes the other person feel bad.

What if the person answers no? Am I going to believe them? Cue hysterical laughter. No, of course not. I could win the Miss America pageant and have everyone in the country telling my I look like a pretty pretty princess, and I would still assume that they are humoring me and that everyone is going home thinking, “I can’t believe he thinks he is getting away with wearing that.”

The answers yes and no are not helpful and any other answer feels like a dodge.

The catch-22 nature of the question doesn't stop me. I keep asking people questions to which I will not accept any answer. I keep asking myself these questions for which I will accept no answer other than the one that make me feel terrible.

Should I be asking these questions? Woman have way more pressure on them to dress well and present a polished look to the world. The dress of the conference attendees differed dramatically between the attending men and women. The men wore everything from T-shirt and jeans to business suits. The women there were all dressed for a business meeting. When I started transitioning, I felt that pressure immediately. Everyone internalizes the expectations society applies to women, but only women tend to feel it as the crushing weight it is, and it came down on me almost immediately. 

Despite my awareness of the external pressure being an unfair social construct, I still play the game. I fret about what to wear and whether it will be appropriate in a way that I did not when the world saw me as a man. I can handle that game--at least I can handle it as well as most people. The pressure to conform to gender norms is not what drove me to distraction after my conference presentation or while catching up with a friend. 

I am distressed because I think I look too manly. I cannot accept what I see looking back at me as sufficiently feminine. I cannot accept my appearance as the appearance of a woman. No amount of reassurance from others seems to change my perspective on this. No amount of academic reasoning or meditating on the phrase "trans women are women" seems to help me accept my appearance. And so I think about my appearance constantly and crave affirmation that I will summarily and immediately reject. 

I do not have a way out of this mental trap. I have only the observation that I am not alone in suffering in it. Other trans people deal with these thoughts and concerns on a daily basis. Other women, cis and trans both, deal with similar insecurity around their body. This morning on WYPR I heard Rabia Chaudry speak about her own body image issues. It struck me how similar her experience was to mine. She described making public appearances and speaking about her advocacy confidently only to fall apart at home upon seeing photos of herself from the event. Despite all her professional success and all the hardship she survived, her insecurities about weight appearance completely overwhelmed her.

Chaudry has always struck me as an impressive figure that is confident, driven, and hyper competent. To hear her struggle with self-image made me realize that anyone can be the victim of crushing insecurities about how one looks.

I do not know how she approaches her body image insecurities. I did not finish listening to the interview, and I have not read her book yet. I am looking forward to reading her perspective on the issue. Generally though, when I people discuss solutions to body insecurity, the answer tends to be acceptance. For example, normalize, accept, and celebrate fatness.

As a trans woman, I have become suspicious of far acceptance can take you. In transgender healthcare, it is widely known that for some people acceptance of their body is just not possible. This is why gender affirming surgery and drugs are considered medically necessary. The mind is not going to change, so the only option is to change the body.

This is, I think, only partially true. Some trans people choose not to seek certain gender affirming treatments despite those treatments being accessible. What is their deal? Are they less trans than the trans people that feel like they need every available treatment? Instead, have they achieved the higher goal of personal acceptance, and are the trans people that feel they need to change as much as possible mentally weak and not able to overcome their social conditioning regarding gender? 

Both those answers are wrong and rooted in transphobia, but it is true that there is something going on that is not covered by the typical dialogue about the necessity of gender affirming treatments. Some people do seem to achieve a level of acceptance that others cannot. My current understanding from talking to trans friends and acquaintances is that limited acceptance is possible and different levels of acceptance are necessary for different trans people. However, in this context acceptance means something completely different from the celebratory acceptance that is often the discussed in body positive spaces. There are nuances necessary when discussing gender affirming care that would be valuable to extend into the larger discussion of body acceptance.

Gender dysphoria affects everyone differently. Which gendered parts of their body and behavior cause distress varies among trans people. A trans person who has not sought genital surgery may not have had to "accept" that their genitals differ from what is typical for their gender identity. It may be that they simply are not bothered by that discrepancy. A trans person who has had genital surgery may not have ever experienced great distress over their genital configuration. Instead, they may have sought surgery as a matter of safety because of societal expectations and prejudices. A trans person may desperately want to undergo a certain type of surgery but voluntarily chose not to do so for reasons unrelated to gender, like cost, risk, and impact on relationships. Looking from the outside in, it may be easy to miss that these individuals have drastically different experiences and that what each person needs to "accept" is very different. 

As I am hounded by insecurities and worries about my appearance, this question of acceptance keeps coming up. What kind of treatments do I need? What does "need" mean? What should I be trying to accept? What counts as success when it comes to acceptance? I would love some relief from my constant distress regarding my appearance, but it is not completely clear to me what the best way to achieve it is. How much of my distress is related to social conditioning? How much of my distress is due to my subconscious gender coming into conflict with my physical body? What can I cope with, and how much cost and risk am I willing to accept to gamble on a fix for my gender dysphoria?

I am pretty sure that I will never celebrate how my face looks, and in that sense acceptance is likely impossible. For myself and many of my trans friends, acceptance might not mean accepting how our body looks. Yes, some people can rearrange the gendered part of their mind and accept the notion that their masculine body is simply what some women look like (and vice versa for transmasculine people). That is, I suspect, extremely rare. Most trans people who have talked to me about acceptance describe it not as accepting their body per se, but as accepting the distress associated with their body as inevitable and permanent. The acceptance a trans women achieves regarding her extremely masculine face may not be an empowering act that redefines what constitutes femininity but rather an acceptance of what they must bear and confront in the mirror every day. This type of acceptance is not the same type of acceptance people are talking about when they advocate celebrating fatness or expanding the definition of beautiful. For some of us, acceptance is the last stage of grief, and not something we are likely to ever celebrate.

Acceptance for trans people is a nuanced term that could describe a lot of different experience from coping with grief to liberating ourselves from social conditioning and everything in between. I suspect that that expanding the meaning of the term would be useful for a lot of other people who are dealing with body image issues. Limiting acceptance to mean a celebratory experience that embraces the current state of things can produce a lot of guilt. There are people who will never celebrate what they look like. There are people who feel that it is necessary to take drastic steps to change how they look. Limiting how we talk about acceptance and framing it as the only ethical way to approach body image casts those people as failures, which they are not. It is hard being human. Things do not work out the way they should. For many people, a celebratory acceptance of themselves as beautiful would be a superhuman feat of transcendence-- a standard that no one should be held to.

Will I be able to accept myself? Will I reach a stage in my life where I do not want to reach across the table, grab the person by the collar and shout, "Stop talking about your dumb baby, and tell my I look great! Reassure me I do not look like a frickin' dude!" I don't know.

If I am to ever stop badgering my wife about whether or not I look like a man in the dress, it will likely be because I had a surgeon grind off a few millimeters of skull. Barring that, I am not sure I will ever really celebrate my appearance. If I do not undergo facial surgery, acceptance for me will likely mean going through a long period of grieving and learning to accept that my appearance will always be upsetting to me on some level. A lot of people have to cope with grief, and it would be unfair of me to demand that I not have to cope with the same. But if that is the road I have to go down, I want people to understand that my acceptance is not celebratory and it should not be used as an argument against other people’s need to find solutions to their insecurities and distress about their body. No one should judge or mock another person's appearance, but it is also the case that no one should be critical of how person judges their own body. A person's relationship with their body is fraught and difficult to navigate, and no one needs the crushing weight of guilt coming down on them because they haven't learned to be happy with their appearance.