How To Tell You've Transitioned, Part II

I had a kinda frantic day today--spent all day trying to get some SQL to behave correctly, even though the task should have been pretty easy to do. Plus I was late for my therapy appointment--even with catching a cab.

As I was coming up out of the subway, a panhandler asked me for some money; and as I was walking away, he said "You have a nice day ma'am--sir--ma'am." (I'm assuming he saw either my boobs or my lipstick and that pushed him over the edge.)

I wasn't particularly happy to hear that, but I wasn't terrifically surprised either. I was dressed for work, when you work from home: a black tee, jeans, and sneakers. As I was walking away, I thought to myself, you've forgotten how to be a girl.

I am much less enlightened in the dark recesses of my mind than I am in print.

But there has been a change in how I present myself over the two years of my fulltime life; there was a time when I always wore eye makeup when I went out, and gave much careful thought to what I was going to wear. Nowadays, not so much; I've even gone out without wearing any lipstick, something I'd been avoiding ever since I got read when not wearing it.

A little of this is the weight I've put on, and being too broke to buy new clothes and too unmotivated to try and lose weight. But a lot more is simply that I've reached a new point of stability with my life; that my acceptance of myself as a woman means that I need fewer and fewer reinforcements via the trappings of femininity. (That, and a year of pounding concrete sidewalks; that gets you out of heels really quick.)

Three years ago, in the middle of my dark winter of discontent when I began to seriously consider the idea of transitioning, I would sometimes ask myself (as a way to not transition) what the difference was between hanging around my apartment in my PJ bottoms and a tee as a man and doing the same as a woman; the idea being that my life would be the same whether or not I transitioned, so why transition? I think I know that answer better now; it's because now I'm free of the doubts about whether I should transition, the doubts about whether or not I really was a woman, the awful amount of psychic energy I dumped into worrying about that problem. And a lot of those issues are gone now, and overall (when I'm not fighting off major depressive crises), I have a lot more energy to think and do things--case in point, this blog, started a year after I transitioned. Even if I have forgotten how to be "a girl," however it was that I construed living inside the public tokens of femininity.

Being a woman--a person--is a lot more satisfying anyway.

How to Tell You've Transitioned, Part I

How can you tell you've transitioned?

...because shopping for clothes becomes a tedious chore rather than a fun excursion.

OK. Not fair, I get that--I know plenty of women of all stripes and origins who enjoy clothes shopping, including me, on occasion. But still...as compared to the times when I constructed myself as a crossdresser, shopping for clothes doesn't have the same kick.

On the face of it, this seems strange. I mean, I no longer have to use the exasperating and even sometime ridiculous accoutrements to round out my figure, give me the appearance of having breasts, add to my hips so that my skirts wouldn't fall down. I've got a body that actually fits the mold women's clothing is intended for...and that is a relief and a pleasure, often.

On the other hand, maybe my body's part of the issue--I've gained about 25 pounds in the last six months, and while that's not an earth-shattering, cry myself to sleep issue, I am a little unhappy about how I look in my clothes lately.

Which got hammered home yesterday when I went out to buy some clothes for the first time in months (business has been slow and I haven't had the cash to spend on clothes--though maybe I'd kill both my issues there if I stopped ordering out all the time.) But I'm travelling tomorrow and wanted to have some new clothes for the trip, especially some casual dresses, which would be light to pack. I didn't find any that I liked, although I did get some new jeans that will actually fit.

I hate shopping for jeans. There are times I just can't even work up the energy to go try them on, even though I think I look good in a lot of different styles of jeans. But I just hate doing it.

Maybe that's another sign I've transitioned.

My relationship with my clothing has always been...interesting. I'm not like a lot of trans women--I don't deny having had a long period of time identifying as a crossdresser; I think I was a crossdresser, albeit one with a greater interest in transitioning than I let on, even to myself. Back in those days, clothes held an allure, a mystique, an air of the forbidden about them. To crossdress was to engage all my hidden desires and frailities at once; the feeling of being at home while crossdressed was exhilerating and terrifying, and my clothes were fraught with a lot of meaning.

Which isn't to say that clothes aren't fraught with meaning for anyone--compare the different uniforms we wear every day, from bike messenger with one pants leg rolled to corporate honcho in a bespoke suit. Clothes are shorthand for our identities, they send out messages about us--sometimes ones that we don't want to send.

For example, when I was in India, I bought two saris. I bought them because I loved India and the culture and the people, because I wanted to bring home a souvenir, because I think saris are beautiful dresses. I even asked a friend of mine (not Indian) if I could wear one of them to her wedding, and she enthusiastically agreed.

All this was before my "second awakening," though. After I began to engage identity politics further, I saw that my wearing a sari just couldn't be an isolated action--that I couldn't avoid all the centuries of past interactions between Western and Indian people, and that ultimately I wouldn't be able to get past the fact that if I wore a sari, I'd be a cool multiculti chick--whereas an Indian woman who wore a sari in America would seem to be "fresh off the boat," unassimilated, perhaps ingnorant of American culture or even English. And that while some Indian people wouldn't have a problem with me wearing a sari, others would, and it wouldn't be easy to just discount their opinion simply because it was a beautiful dress and I liked it a lot.

I did end up wearing the sari, because my friend insisted, and she was the bride. I was fortunate; the only couple I met at the wedding who were from the region didn't mind at all. Still I changed out of the sari and into a dress after the ceremony. And I'm not upset that I felt I had to do it, and certainly not upset at any Indian people who might take offense at me wearing a sari. I'm upset at the four centuries of Westerners who plundered India, who exoticized it, who used and abused the people there. They're the ones who've "ruined" it for me--not their victims.

So yeah, clothes mean a lot more than just something to keep the wind out.

But you knew that already, didn't you? Any woman who has been verbally (or all too often, physically) assaulted because her neckline or hemline had crossed the invisible threshold between "prude" and "slut," who's been told she's "asking for it" because of what she's wearing, who's been told that her outfit was part of the reason she was attacked (as if women in pants and long sleeves are never raped) knows this. Hell, even I knew that back when I was a crossdresser, although sadly like many of the CDs I knew, I don't think I really fully engaged with all the implications of what that meant. (There are things that being full-time does to you.)

Wearing clothes has a context for me now that it didn't have back when I kept mostly to safe spaces--it has the context any woman has to deal with, from issues of personal safety to the whole construct of female beauty and its impossible-to-attain ideals. So yeah, some of the fun has leached out of it. And that's how I can tell I've transitioned.