Being a person versus being a gender

Various people, notably my wife, have been urging me to pick myself up off the mat. People have said it to me in different ways:

• What about being trans in a Buddhist way?
• You should be more than a gender--you're a person
• If you need to change your gender, then fine, but you've been a mess for over a year now, and this doesn't seem to be making you happier.
  

It's pretty hard to argue with. It makes sense when I read it. It's advice I'm trying to follow.

But my reality is that most of these suggestions offer little relief. Rather than pursue Buddhism, I have taken up Yoga, and it's fabulous. Beyond that, I'm a little stuck. I can't just order myself to stand up and resume being a person because I'm hampered by the fact that no one will treat me as a woman when I skip the boobs, makeup, and bullshit. Getting stuck back in "man" mode, even a man mode as queer as the one I'm running around in these days, is excruciating at times. And slipping back into a more male, less obtrusive presentation fills me with disgust (a major inconvenience).

What I've come to realize is that as soon as I'm presented with someone who wants to deny me my preferred gender, I become obsessed with that problem. If possible, sparks start shooting out my ears, my eyes glaze over, my straight arms rise stiffly from my shoulders until they parallel the ground, and I stagger off to go shopping. If shopping's not on, then I probably plummet into some sort of despair. Shopping or no, I will also sometimes have a fit of extreme hatred of my body.

My wife urges me to transcend the sex of my body. She says that womanhood is a state of mind, and that most of what I indulge in are luxuries. But that doesn't work either. Being a woman in a man's body, even in liberal, deferential Toronto, is nothing like being a woman. As far as most people are concerned, it's like being somewhere between a freak, a sad sad person, or an object or ridicule.

I think that in order to be call myself a woman with no prefix attached, I will need to transition hormonally, make myself relatively passable (which I, very luckily and thankfully, expect to be able to manage), and live for several years, to experience some life as a woman.

Because life is about people. Our interactions with others are how we contextualize, benchmark, and understand ourselves. We need the people around us to "get" us, or we're uncomfortable. I won't be able to be a woman until other people understand me as a woman.

But I'm still trying to find a way to feel secure in my gender even when I'm in "man" mode. It won't make my desire to transition hormonally go away, but it will hopefully make it easier to live my life while I wait to start on the hormones.