Acute Ain’t Cute

You know, having an acute and exquisite sense of the world around me doesn’t tend to make people see me as cute.  People tend to be cuter when they are really focused on something they are doing, not seeming to be aware of us, because their awareness of us puts us on our guard, makes us feel observed and a bit defended.

This is all, for me at least, just an aspect of living in the question rather than in the answer.  People tend to prefer questions to answers, and especially to questions that tend to shatter the assumptions & expectations that underlie their worldview.   Of course, it is always the questions that open up the view and reveal connection that I love most.

Somehow, though, I don’t think these aspects of me are going to change soon.  The question is how to be compelling and attractive while still being aware and questioning.

Anyone got a good trick for that?

Chasing Normal

Pamela just wants to be normal.  

Her wife, well, she just wants to be normal too, but since her husband wants to be a woman, well, that doesn’t seem to be going so well for her.

Pamela is in her late 50s, working a less than rewarding job.  She has a degree in theology, which to her means Bible based religion.  She hasn’t been going to church, though, since she mentioned transsexualism to her pastor, and he swept it into the mortal sin of homosexuality.

Living in small towns, she doesn’t get read out a lot, so to her she walks in the world as a woman.  Now, that’s a world of shops and karaoke bars, and not a world of work and congregations.   She dressed for Halloween, they told her she couldn’t, so she wrote the corporate diversity coordinator.  Next day they parachuted someone in, and started creating a transpolicy.

Tonight it was the Indian casino or the trans group, so she joined the ten or so in the old closeted gay bar, now a hobby jazz bar, that has hosted groups since before I came out there in 1984.

Pamela isn’t wired into community.  She worries that if she decides to emerge, to go full time, she won’t be able to take hormones; her cardiologist is worried enough that she sometimes has to skip meds.  nd surgery seems farther than that.

Pamela just wants what she wants.

Pamela wants to be normal.

I tried to be normal getting ready tonight.  A nice denim skirt, a brick coloured top, you know. 

But normal didn’t feel right.  So I pulled out the new long black skrt with sparkles, wore it with the black robe/jacket, my dichroic pendant, lashes.  You know — vestments.

I smiled at Pamela tonight.  I understand what she wants.  Isn’t chasing normal, or at least normative, what everyone wants to do?

Well, maybe not everyone. 

Normal feels lost to me.  I don’t know if I’m supposed to hide or talk or whatever.  I get bollixed by normal, it feels like a trap.  If I’m going to try to be invisible, my gender neutral boots, jeans, polo shirt and fleece do the job just fine.

My comfort, though, is outside of normal,  actively following my own path, being visible in my own beauty.  

I just don’t think I can explain that to people like Pamela, who have so much invested in their own chasisng normal, who really, really want that dream that they can just fit in.

“Do you know lots of transsexuals who just fit in?”  Pamela asks.  I tell a story about a local gal whose doing great, but she’s a primary, transitioning in her twenties, and well, it’s different for the gals who emerge young.  They don’t have as much to peel away, less history, less body steeped in maturing sex hormones.

But still, all those WBF and Transsexual Rights people, demanding that people see them as they see themselves, as having achieved normal.  They are chasing normal, aren’t they?  Or maybe trying to hunt it down with big-game rifles.

It’s the confidence to not try to be normal, not to get lost between a normative I can’t meet with my body & history and a desire I can’t really speak if I am trying to be in the woodwork, that I seek.

It’s the job of the tranny to hold open the space for transformation beyond biology, beyond history, beyond expectations, to trust the connective urges in the heart of people, the urge to beauty & expression that speaks boldly not of social separations but of continuous common humanity.  Or at least, that’s what I believe, though I also believe it is a job that is hard as blazes.

“What the hell is a trans support group where you can’t wear lashes?” I ask. 

And I might ask, what is a world where you can’t wear lashes?  Sure, the masses want comfort over power, but how much do we have to sacrfice our own power to be accepted and acceptable?

I don’t know.

I do suspect that chasing normal is the wrong thing for me.  

And I know that scares the shit out of people around me.

And I know that stimulating their fear scares the shit out of me.