Apparently, I Failed the Transgender Language Exam

I know, I know. Another Wittering article.

But this one is very, very short. It isn’t really a post and it's too long for a Note, so by process of elimination it must be a wittering.

Today was a funny old day.

I mentioned in my previous post that I was interviewed recently for a blog. This afternoon, for no particularly good reason, I looked up who else from Ireland had been interviewed and spotted the name of another transgender woman. Cork, too. Even more strangely, when I looked her up on LinkedIn, we were already first-degree connections. We’d apparently connected about six years ago.

So I sent what I thought was an entirely friendly little message along the lines of:

Hello! Small world. Look at this, we’re already connected from back in the days when I was the other fella.

I may as well have written:

Can I come round to your house and shit in your mouth? Also, I’m a right-wing fascist.

Jesus Christ.

She went off at me. Not mildly irritated. Not slightly frosty. Force Ten. Paragraph after paragraph about inappropriate language, flippancy, over-familiarity, gender dysphoria, trans activism and why on earth had I contacted her in the first place.

I sat looking at the screen thinking: What the fuck just happened?

Because I was talking about myself.

I was the other fella. Or, if you would prefer the official long-form version: six years ago I was still living socially as a man, presenting as male, using a male name and looking considerably less like the woman currently occupying my LinkedIn photograph.

“The other fella” seemed quicker.

It struck me afterwards that if your peace of mind requires everybody around you to use exactly the right language, all the time, according to a very particular interpretation of what that language means, life is going to be extremely hard work.

And in this particular case there was another slightly surreal element to it.

I am quite obviously transgender.

Quite spectacularly so, really.

I write endlessly about transition. I have spent an amount of money on transition that would have bought an extremely respectable Ferrari. I am probably not the first person you’d nominate for the local anti-trans society.

So if even I can accidentally fail the terminology exam while making a joke about my own bloody life, I think we may have made the exam slightly too difficult.

Anyway, I wandered off to Reddit afterwards in a mild huff and looked at the comments on something I’d posted earlier.

And there it was.

A phrase that produces roughly the same physical response in me as Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake.

“When my egg cracked…”

Hnnnnnnng.

I really dislike that phrase.

And I’ve been trying to work out why, because obviously I know exactly what it means. It means the point at which somebody finally realised, accepted or admitted to themselves that they were transgender.

Perfectly reasonable concept.

Still hate the phrase.

I think there are three reasons.

The first is that “my egg cracked” makes an enormously complicated thing sound like a single cute event.

Monday: egg.

Tuesday: crack.

Wednesday: woman.

That isn’t remotely how I understand my own life. There were clues. There were denials. There were periods when I knew things and then somehow managed not to know them again. There were bargains with myself, compromises, stupid decisions, sensible decisions and eventually a point where continuing as I was became impossible.

There wasn’t an egg.

There certainly wasn’t a satisfying little crack.

The second reason is that I find it slightly infantilising. It has the vocabulary of something adorable happening to a baby bird.

My transition has contained many things.

Adorable poultry has not been prominent among them.

And the third and I think this is the big one, is that I don’t like in-group language very much.

Not just this phrase.

Egg.

Egg cracked.

Top surgery.

Bottom surgery.

Baby trans.

There are loads of them.

And before somebody gets cross with me, I am not saying anybody else shouldn’t use them. If “my egg cracked” describes your experience perfectly, crack away. Have an omelette. I genuinely do not care.

What I dislike is the faint sense that once you belong to a particular category of person, you are supposed to inherit its vocabulary as well.

I don’t want to.

I don’t want transition to come with a phrasebook.

I had a vaginoplasty. That’s what the operation was called. “Bottom surgery” always makes me feel faintly as though I’ve been to a garage and had some work done underneath.

And perhaps this is why today’s two completely unrelated encounters ended up joining together in my head.

At one end, somebody was furious because I wasn’t precise enough about my own transition.

At the other, I was irritated by a community vocabulary that sometimes feels too prescribed.

Maybe I’m just awkward.

Actually, scratch the maybe.

But I do think there is something worth defending here: the right to describe your own life in your own language.

I was the other fella.

Somebody else’s egg cracked.

I had a vaginoplasty.

Someone else had bottom surgery.

We all know roughly what everybody means.

Perhaps we could occasionally grant each other that much.