Look At Me That Way

“The young man’s eyes were on Eugenia, telling her that though she may be through with men, they would not be through with her.”

That quote is on the back of Banu Gibson’s My Romance CD, though without any source.

I know that my life would have been different if I looked different, different in a way that was attractive to men.  It wouldn’t have changed my essentials, but I know it would have changed my behavior.

Imagine one of those classic “I hate my penis” MTF transsexuals getting a visit from a fairy godmother, feeling the magic, slipping their hand down to their crotch and feeling a vulva, moist vagina & labia and even a clitoris where their penis was.  Then they look in the mirror and see that they still look like a male.   They got what they said they wished for, replacement of their hated penis with perfect female genitalia, but without being seen as a female, does it really mean much?

Years ago, I wrote a poem called Look At Me,  which attempts to convey the conflict between wanting to my heart to be seen, but not wanting to be seen as a freak whose insides have lead them astray, away from the expectations placed on their body.

Those expectations and projections placed on our bodies, by the men who were not yet through with Eugenia for example, well, they change you by changing the context you live in.   I find it amusing that in the last week on our local trans list, one person has found me heinous for using statistics to challenge her beliefs about how transpeople are under attack — the statistics must be wrong, wrong, wrong, though she can’t show how — and another has decided my words are so seductive that I should have a profile to show my love — a profile like the profile she and so many crossdressers have to facilitate “hook-ups.”   One hates me,  one wants me, different projections of their own needs.

There is no way forward but forward.  I cracked another tooth last night, and I can never go back to having it not cracked.  From here on out, until something else happens, that is fact.

But still, all those missed whatevers in the past call to me.  What if men had looked at me like they looked at Eugenia?  How would my life be different?  Heck, some MTF trannys have even created a whole narrative of their life as a woman born female, making up another history, and tried to live from that straightforward and fictionalized narrative rather than their own messy & twisted one.   Of course, their narrative is limited to what makes sense; truth is always stranger than fiction because we expect fiction to make sense.

I know that one of the greatest joys to many transpeople assigned as male at birth is when women see them as another woman, and include them in their women’s games.   It’s when we are looked at that way.

And crossdressers often seek places where they feel men are treating them as women, though usually as simplified women who have much less nuance than the raised women kind.

Not being looked at that way, well, it really defines much of a trans life.  And being looked at as a freak, well, that defines much of the rest of it.