For those outside our community who don’t know what this phrase means let me explain. In trans land, there’s this elusive thing that everyone supposedly craves: to pass.
An honest and very well thought out examination of our "passing' conundrum. To be honest, I blame my own generation (OK, BOOMER) for this obsession, especially with stealth because we were the ones who came up with the concept.
It all boils down to the issue of shame; especially here in the good ol' US of A. Those of us born between 1946 and 1964 (ok,1953 for all you Generation Jones types out there) grew up in the extremely uptight, button-downed "Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" 1950's. Everybody was closeted in one way or another. Watch old shows from that period, like: Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best or The Donna Reed Show to get an idea of how people were expected to conform in the 1950's.
Men went to Work, 9-to-5, Monday through Friday. Women could teach, be a nurse or work in an office until they were married. That was it. Everybody went to Church on Sunday in their Sunday Best clothes. It was very stifling and as I said, conformity was the rule of the day.
And nobody had ever heard of the word "transsexual".
Blaming your own generation for it takes some nerve, and I mean that as a compliment. Most people just blame whoever raised them.
Stealth only makes sense as a strategy in a world that'll hurt you for the alternative, and it sounds like that was exactly the world you grew up in. No wonder it stuck around this long.
And you learned conformity quite early. This is from my own personal experience and perspective.
I knew I was somehow “different” by the time I was 3. My parents had been married for nearly 3 years and were still childless by early 1953 which made them nonconforming and subject to gossip. My mother had a very hard time carrying children which would plague her throughout her fertile years.
I was born 10 weeks early and spent the first 2 months of my life in an incubator, furthering the nonconformity. So my mother was extremely protective of me since I was fragile.
Further complicating matters, we lived above my Irish immigrant grandparents in a 2-flat apartment building.
I remember as a pre-schooler being completely mesmerized by the world of women. My mother’s younger sister was still living with her parents at the time so I had 3 very strong Irish females with me 24/7.
It’s much too long a narrative to go into here so suffice it to say that all 3 noticed that I wasn’t like all of the other boys in the neighborhood including my slightly older cousin.
My mother encouraged me to be her little helper around the house and she didn’t discourage me from playing with girl toys. In fact she enjoyed seeing my happiness and let me have some small but very female oriented toys like cleaning utensils and dishes. All quite innocent. Until my father found out about them.
Things came to a head when I was around 4. I would often stand next to my mother and watch her get dressed and put her makeup on. I was fixated on a tube of red lipstick 💄 in a red and white cloisonné container. I asked her if I could try some (which heretofore was never a problem). She instead got very angry at me and smeared lipstick on my face and then tied one of her scarves around my face as a babushka and paraded out of the house and to the local grocery store.
There were the usual snickers and insults about how lovely her “little girl” was. I really didn’t know what had gone so terribly wrong.
She marched me home and scrubbed my face clean, telling me to go away. But it was her who was in tears and sobbing uncontrollably.
Four years old, and by the end of it you were the one doing the comforting. That's a strange weight to hand a child, and I'm not surprised it's the part you remember clearest.
The lipstick was never really the problem. It rarely is.
An honest and very well thought out examination of our "passing' conundrum. To be honest, I blame my own generation (OK, BOOMER) for this obsession, especially with stealth because we were the ones who came up with the concept.
It all boils down to the issue of shame; especially here in the good ol' US of A. Those of us born between 1946 and 1964 (ok,1953 for all you Generation Jones types out there) grew up in the extremely uptight, button-downed "Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" 1950's. Everybody was closeted in one way or another. Watch old shows from that period, like: Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best or The Donna Reed Show to get an idea of how people were expected to conform in the 1950's.
Men went to Work, 9-to-5, Monday through Friday. Women could teach, be a nurse or work in an office until they were married. That was it. Everybody went to Church on Sunday in their Sunday Best clothes. It was very stifling and as I said, conformity was the rule of the day.
And nobody had ever heard of the word "transsexual".
Blaming your own generation for it takes some nerve, and I mean that as a compliment. Most people just blame whoever raised them.
Stealth only makes sense as a strategy in a world that'll hurt you for the alternative, and it sounds like that was exactly the world you grew up in. No wonder it stuck around this long.
And you learned conformity quite early. This is from my own personal experience and perspective.
I knew I was somehow “different” by the time I was 3. My parents had been married for nearly 3 years and were still childless by early 1953 which made them nonconforming and subject to gossip. My mother had a very hard time carrying children which would plague her throughout her fertile years.
I was born 10 weeks early and spent the first 2 months of my life in an incubator, furthering the nonconformity. So my mother was extremely protective of me since I was fragile.
Further complicating matters, we lived above my Irish immigrant grandparents in a 2-flat apartment building.
I remember as a pre-schooler being completely mesmerized by the world of women. My mother’s younger sister was still living with her parents at the time so I had 3 very strong Irish females with me 24/7.
It’s much too long a narrative to go into here so suffice it to say that all 3 noticed that I wasn’t like all of the other boys in the neighborhood including my slightly older cousin.
My mother encouraged me to be her little helper around the house and she didn’t discourage me from playing with girl toys. In fact she enjoyed seeing my happiness and let me have some small but very female oriented toys like cleaning utensils and dishes. All quite innocent. Until my father found out about them.
Things came to a head when I was around 4. I would often stand next to my mother and watch her get dressed and put her makeup on. I was fixated on a tube of red lipstick 💄 in a red and white cloisonné container. I asked her if I could try some (which heretofore was never a problem). She instead got very angry at me and smeared lipstick on my face and then tied one of her scarves around my face as a babushka and paraded out of the house and to the local grocery store.
There were the usual snickers and insults about how lovely her “little girl” was. I really didn’t know what had gone so terribly wrong.
She marched me home and scrubbed my face clean, telling me to go away. But it was her who was in tears and sobbing uncontrollably.
I comforted her.
Four years old, and by the end of it you were the one doing the comforting. That's a strange weight to hand a child, and I'm not surprised it's the part you remember clearest.
The lipstick was never really the problem. It rarely is.