Unplugging From Gender

 “That’s ugly dude. You gotta shave.”

I put my hand over my chin and blushed as the other boy laughed.

“Why do you have that? Just shave it off,” he said, rubbing his chin and then pointing to mine.

“I don’t know,” I said, dropping my eyes. “Leave me alone.”

“Jeez,” he muttered as I stormed off to class.

I gingerly touched the single, inch-long hair coming off my chin and felt nauseous. I had been putting off asking my dad how to shave. For the last few months, little hairs had started coming out of my face. I had tugged at the longest one, thinking that maybe a could pull it out. It hurt terribly, so instead I tried to ignore it.

I could not ignore it. The thick dark hairs were there every time I looked in the mirror. There were only maybe 5 very noticeable ones, but lighter fuzz was beginning to cover my jaw like mold growing out of an old loaf of bread. I stared at them in the mirror, and, with a sense of horror in my gut, I touched one of those hairs just enough to feel resistance on the pad of my finger. I felt a slight tickle in the follicle. I shivered. It was like picking at a scab. I wanted to stop, and I was disgusted by it, but I couldn’t stop myself from touching and looking at it.

After a few more days of other kids commenting on the hairs on my chin, I resolved to shave them off. Wishing them away had proved ineffective. That weekend my father was home, and he would be able to show me how to shave. I went into the bathroom and stared at my reflection. Shaking and slightly nauseous, I imagined covering my face in shaving cream and then running a razor over it. The nausea got worse. I took a deep breath, held in a sob, and I blew out through pursed lips. I forced myself out of the bathroom, my gait determined and deliberate. I steeled myself as the world and my body grew more distant. With grim resolve, I planted myself in front of my father and watched from above my body as I struggled to tell him what I wanted. He was understandably startled. I had stomped around a corner and intercepted him with no warning. My eyes must have looked haunted.

“Can you show me how to shave?” came my voice from somewhere nearby.

He looked confused, as if it had never occurred to him. Wait, was I not supposed to ask? Did other boys figure it on their own? Had I already failed some essential test of manhood?

“Uh. Sure, buddy. There’s not much to it,” he said, recovering his composure. He led me into the bathroom. He was not ready for a shaving lesson, because he rarely shaved himself. Occasionally, he used an electric razor to trim his beard. I had never seen him clean shaven.

“Ask your mom to pick up some shaving cream. You’ll have to use some hand soap until then,” he said. He squirted some soap into his hands, lathered it up and demonstrated shaving on the areas just above his cheek bones where his beard thinned out. I copied him, smearing watery handfuls of bubbles across my chin wishing that I was anywhere but there. I interpreted his unease, which was probably his own insecurity at whether he was being fatherly enough, as disapproval that I even had to be shown how to perform this ritual—something that was surely evident to all boys when they started developing beards. I saw men do this on Gillette commercials all the time. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. Just do what those guys do, right? Too late now.

With a pair of safety razors that he dug out of the back of a cupboard, we scraped the slimy surfaces off our faces. I resented my mom for not showing me how to do this. How different could it be from shaving your legs? I had asked her if she could show me how to shave, but she insisted that I ask my dad. I looked up at his reflection in the mirror and felt like this would have been easier with her. I heard the sandpaper-scraping as he pulled the blade across the stubble on his cheek. Was that going to be me in a few years? I hoped I would never hear that sound coming from my own face. It was like nails on a chalkboard.

A few minutes later, defeated, bleeding, with toilet paper stuck to my face, I left the bathroom. Holding back tears, I thanked my dad. Tears were welled in my eyes. I hated this. I hated everything about it. The embarrassment of having something growing out of my face. A future of needing to clear that growth every single day. The feeling of the razor. The cuts I would inevitably get from scraping too hard to remove as much of the hair as possible. Later on I hated the feeling of the skin of my face even after I shaved. It was never smooth again, and later in life I would have significant stubble even 4 hours after shaving.

The next day at school none of the children commented on my facial hair nor the lack of it. But, since I went through puberty very early (this shaving lesson happened around 12 years of age in middle school), the next year I started getting comments about my stubble.

“You should grow a beard!”

“I wish I could grow a beard like that!”

“Macho!”

I interpreted all the comments on my beard growth as mockery. I suppose I took the comments negatively because I could not imagine someone being happy about having hair growing out of their chin. I assumed that they must be making fun of me. Looking back on my experience of school, this was a common pattern. I had a constant sense of being persecuted. Some of it was legitimate. I was much shorter than all the other boys, and I was made fun of for it. For a while my name in school was “small fry”. However, some of what I felt to be mockery was almost certainly other boys trying to make friends with me. I felt so out of place and so uncomfortable with myself and my appearance that from a very young age any attention that caught me the least bit off guard was interpreted as aggression. I responded to such attention defensively, and I developed an arrogant demeanor to ward off all the “bullies”. In retrospect, a lot of these bullies were probably boys trying to relate to me the same way they related to other boys—friendly banter and teasing.

Parsing what happened over 25 years ago is tricky business. I have only the perspective of a scared and angry teenager to rely on. Surely others remember awkward moments from their childhood. Perhaps some cis men can relate to my story about learning to shave. That awkward father-son moment was as much due to the emotional distance between my father and I at that age as it was due to my transness. Similar interactions must have played out between cis boys and their fathers. I am certainly not the only child to have let insecurity prevent her from bonding with her classmates.

What makes this a story about a trans girl learning to shave is what was going on internally. Teenagers are weird, and there was no reason for my parents to consider the shaving incident as unusual. This is true of a lot of trans children. The extent and nature of the distress is invisible, and their experiences may seem from the outside to be identical to those of cis children.

A lot of children are embarrassed by having to change in front of others in the locker room. Not wanting to shower communally is relatable for many people. Plenty of kids show an affinity for activities or toys usually associated with the opposite gender. Lots of kids are picked on and have trouble making friends.

When trans people share an experience from their childhood to illustrate what gender dysphoria was like for them, other trans people nod knowingly, while cis listeners look on and shrug their shoulders saying, “I didn’t like locker room showers either.”

This is why communicating trans experiences is so hard. Sometimes a superficial reading of a transgender experience does not provide any features to distinguish it from a cisgender experience. Even for a trans person, understanding that their experience differs from that of a cis person can be difficult.

Children’s literature is full of Peter Pans—characters that don’t want to grow up. The awkwardness of puberty is a frequent topic of television and movies. How is a 12 year old supposed to recognize that her horror at the growth of facial hair is not comparable to the embarrassment other children experience with the onset of puberty? How is she to know that the gut wrenching fear that she experiences when she is told that she’ll grow up to have a beard like her father or an actor on TV is different from the typical childhood reluctance to grow up? How is she to know that the numbness and detachment she leans on to get through a locker room changing experience is not the normal coping mechanism for shy teenagers? How do you convince cis people that her experience is actually different in quality than that of the average child?

To make explicit the common anti-trans talking point, “How do we know that these children’s affinity for another gender isn’t just an unhealthy avoidance and reluctance to address typical adolescent experiences?”

Making people aware of gender would be a good start. We, as a culture, have made huge leaps in gender equality. You would think that people would be more aware of gender given the feminist struggle for social justice and given the ongoing public discussion regarding the rights of women. However, most people are largely ignorant of gender. Gender is the water in which we swim, and as fish in that sea, we are unaware that we are wet. Gender provides a framing for almost every social action, and even our private moments are embedded in gender.

The Wachowskis described gender through Morpheus in The Matrix:

The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church...when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

While The Matrix was written such that it can be applied as an allegory to almost anything, the Wachowskis wrote it while going through their gender transitions, and it was written to convey their experiences.

Like the matrix, gender is impossible for most people to grasp unless they have been unplugged from it. Having everyone around you treat you differently as you transition, realizing how many of your private thoughts and activities are informed by gender, and having different social rules and sometimes differnt laws applied to you will cause a jarring awakening much akin to Neo’s very rude awakening from the matrix.

For people that have been able to unplug (even briefly) from the matrix, trans experiences stand out glaringly and obviously even while they remaining obscured and inscrutable to everyone else. People are unaware of their gender except when it stops them from getting what they want. Gender is obvious when it stops you from getting a job or when your are judged by social standards that are unfair or when you are forced to decide between what you like and what you are expected to like. You do not notice your gender when you are sharing coffee with a friend. You do not notice your gender when you put lotion on your hands. You do not notice your gender when you are stuffing your favorite food into your mouth. Trans people do—or at least they can when they direct their attention towards it. Cis people usually do not. But, whether you notice it or not, it is there. Gender effects how your body feels, the texture of your skin, how you are regarded, and the way in which you walk into a room. Gender affects every aspect of your embodiment and it affects all of the written and unwritten rules of existence within a culture.

Trans children’s stories have a latent dissonant quality. When we hear hear these stories (such as the time I learned to shave) trans people can intuit that the awkwardness and the distress is not limited to that situation. My shaving story is not about one awkward moment, it is about being fundamentally alienated from my position in the world. It is a single illustration of a compatibility failure with the matrix that will not resolve itself. Those that have no concept of the matrix—those that do not recognize the ubiquity of gender and how it operates—cannot understand that what they’re hearing about is a compatibility problem. They only hear events that individually sound similar to problems they are familiar with. The whole escapes them even while they seem to grasp the individual parts.

Like the matrix, you cannot be told what gender is nor how it functions. You can only be shown. I am frustrated by this, because I know it is important to communicate my experiences. Both trans and cis people will benefit from hearing about trans lives. Unfortunately, I can only tell stories. Actually understanding them requires something more from the reader. The distress of learning to shave was connected to my body image and it revealed a dissonance between my subconscious sense of my gender and the rest of physical reality. The story is about more than a moment in time. It was a continuation of frustrations and moral injuries from being forced into the role of a boy, and it was an anticipation of horrors to come as I considered what was going to be happening to me as I aged. It was a promise that I would never feel at home, because I was being biologically anchored to a role in family and society that I could not bear.

The Matrix works very well as an allegory of my experience as a trans person. I have gotten to the end of the movie by now. I am not trapped by the gender structure in the same way that I was as a child. I have realized that I can control a lot of the aspects of the matrix around me. Social and medical gender transition defy what most people consider to be fixed rules of reality. After decades of being miserable with my beard, it is almost completely gone. With a small amount of reprogramming, the matrix now recognizes me by a different name and face. The people still trapped in the matrix react differently to me now, and, like in the movie, they sometimes transform into agents intent on eliminating the disruption I have caused to the original code design. Despite that, I am much much happier for having been unplugged. I wish I could explain to others what the red pill* is and why it is worth taking—for cis people as well as trans. We would all understand each other and our stories better if we could break through to a wider perspective. We can all (cis and trans) live in our genders while still recognizing the rules and power structures that are tied to them. Recognition of those structures allow us to change them when they perpetuate suffering or oppression, while still keeping and celebrating those things about gender that we like and bring us joy.

If you are cisgender and have a hard time understanding transgender perspectives, spend some more time thinking about the stories that trans people tell. You may have lots of different explanations for what could be behind those stories instead of a transgender identity. I promise you that there is something that you are missing. What you are missing is not present in that story. It is all around you. We cannot tell you what it is. We are trying to show you, and to really understand you will have to experience it for yourself. It may take a while for you to recognize it. Some people just aren’t ready to be unplugged.

*I am borrowing the red pill metaphor from The Matrix in this blog post. That metaphor is easily applicable to any truth that is uncomfortable and that most people choose to ignore. The red pill has unfortunately become synonymous with the so-called Men's Rights movement and Incel culture. My usage of the metaphor has nothing to do with how they use it, and I am probably using it in the way that the Wachowski's originally intended. In fact, the Wachowski's probably chose the color red to match the estrogen pills they were taking at time. The most common drug for trans feminine hormone therapy in the 90's would have been Premarin, which was red. Estradiol tablets, which trans women most commonly take today, are blue, so the visual connection of the metaphor to gender transition has been lost.