The Dream You Sell Is Passing, Eh?

A response to the director of the “Female Voice Program” at a local college:

Thank you for taking the time to think about what might be possible with me.

I wanted to take the time to think about the same.

First, I’m not sure how much I want to try to change the pitch of my voice. I suspect that my best hope is becoming more resonant, more raspy, to do the Kathleen Turner as it were.

My real concern here is the same as my resistance to falling for dreams of passing as being born female and being raised as a girl. After long experience, I don’t think that’s really possible for me. I think that bones don’t lie, and my bones tell a specific story. Trying to pass, well, that just sets me up for failure, as I told Sr. Charleen.

That belief, though, informs the second point.

I am not someone your clients see as a role model, as aspirational. In fact, I am exactly the person that they fear they will become. They have no interest in becoming a “professional tranny,” rather they come to you specifically because they want to be more passable, disappearing into the world of women.

I know that your clients don’t come to me to see their reflection, but rather they stay away. They have different dreams, and those dreams are of being women, not of being trannys. You might want to ask them what they think about Callie. I suspect they don’t really like to hear what I have to say.

Just this weekend a transwoman who is bigger and taller than I felt the need to explain to me that passing is entirely internal, that if you believe you pass, you do. She didn’t want to hear the crap I had put on the list about biology and gender, about respecting womanhood & immigration, all that. She wanted to be a woman, and if she had to do it by brute force because finesse wouldn’t work, well so be it.

Your clients need to follow their dreams, and I assure you, I am not their dream. They would be much more responsive to an attractive, older woman born female who can serve as role model and mother, coaching them on being a woman as she would coach her daughters. This is their aspiration, not some old challenging tranny.

I do understand that you see the possibility of learning from my experience, that the “house mom” could do well to understand the experience of walking in the world as trans, which I have spelled out pretty well. But that doesn’t mean your clients want to learn directly from me; in many ways, I am what they fear.

I do write. I write like hell. My blog is here: https://callan.wordpress.com and my old site is here: http://callan.transpractice.com

My old poetry is here http://callan.transpractice.com/poemdex.html but if you read any of it you will understand why it isn’t why people who dream of assimilating in the world as women want to engage.

Thank you for your offer. In some ways I’d love to think that I can have a warmer, more powerful alto voice, feminine and pure. But that sounds like a bit of a dream too far now.

Go and help trannys, and if I can help, just ask.

Callie

Tough Night

In the end, I feel, my struggles have been pointless.

Or at least that’s how it feels in the middle of this dark night.

One woman tells me her women’s group has discussed me and decided it would be alright if I attend.  It feels like being invited to be the exhibit, and the idea that somehow, an open women’s group feels they have the right to decide if transwomen are woman enough to attend, well, that feels creepy.   Then again, most women grow up looking for the validation of other women, so maybe this is just another normal I have resisted.

I was aggressively challenged at a trans gathering, called a drag queen by a gay man, and my father told me that the gimmick I got him to have an unlimited phone in the hotel room is just crazy, crazy.

And, as always, I feel like my only support is talking into this can, which helps me think things through — why else would I be doing this at 3 A.M.? — but also feels empty and alone.  I know that I am a great writer, but I also know that there are much better authors out there, people who have gotten their voice out there in ways I never have.

There are the good moments.  I chased around looking for a working Coca-Cola fountain, and after three failures, the one that worked was in a shop managed by the woman who used to manage my local.   She called me ma’am twice and smiled, with those goofy-pretty white/pink nails, and it felt good and safe and affirming.

Even the astoundingly beautiful Candis Cayne walks in this world identified as trans, and that means identified by some as a man, by some as a drag queen, by some as not a real woman.

I remember some gimcrack show on A&E, where a British production company had volunteers cross gender.  Of course, while they sold the show on walking in the world as a woman or man, the participants actually walked in the world as trannys, but no one wanted to talk about those issues, because that was too, well, not mainstream.

Walking in the world as visibly trans.   Pointless.

Well, there may be a point, I’ll cede you that.  But a piffle, a drop in a vast sea.

I had to tell someone who thought I was smart and had leadership that since he promises better passing that I am not useful to him.  Being visibly trans is not what his clients want, rather it is what they want to avoid by using his services.

Heck, being visibly trans is, in many ways, what I want to avoid too.  It’s just that after twenty years, well, I’m a bit too gimlet eyed.  Makes my writing interesting, if not very engaging.

Got a movie on.  One of those chick flicks where women fall in relationships, with partners, with other women, with each other.  It seems so sweet and it seems so separate from me.  I know how to love, but no one has ever helped me learn how to be loved, and that seems isolated from me, as if I am on the other side of the glass.

It’s raining outside.  Has been for a couple of days now.  Spring showers, fertility from the shy, warm and most, opening up the buds.

But me, well, it’s a tough night were I feel pointless.

Oh, well.