“Can I take your order, Sir… Ma’am… Uh…?”
People get funny when they can’t immediately figure out your gender. If you haven’t had any personal experience with this, take it from an expert. You can practically watch the wheels spinning frantically in their head.
Sometimes there’s a polite smile that mostly looks like a grimace, or sometimes they just blink. You can see the brain cells firing rapidly, like if they don’t know what you’ve got in your pants, they don’t know how to communicate. As often as this has happened to me, I think it’s a wonder we don’t go around speaking directly into each other’s crotches.
As a transgender man, passing (having my gender identity correctly interpreted by others) has been a struggle for me for years. Fortunately, now that I’m on hormone replacement therapy, my voice doesn’t give me away nearly as much as it used to. Bi-weekly injections of testosterone are a hell of a drug, but this whole “second puberty” gig sucks.
I get that I’m not the most masculine looking guy around. My round face makes me look either like a woman or a twelve-year-old — not that there’s anything wrong with those things. I’m just not either of them.
I’d say most days I get addressed half the time as male, the other half as female. Or, to be more accurate, one fourth male, one fourth female and half the time the verbal equivalent of six question marks. But when I’m wearing a man’s watch, have on Converses, jeans and a button down and pull my leather wallet out of my back pocket, I’m left wondering what else I could possibly do.
Should I get the “male” symbol tattooed somewhere on me?
That little circle with the very phallic upward pointing arrow is pretty cool, but I don’t know if I’d want it on my forehead.
Should I wear flannel all day every day?
Trouble is, we live in Mississippi, and as much as I love plaid, summer would be the death of me.
Maybe I could pretend to know enough about cars or football to have normal “manly-man” conversations, but that seems like it would involve a lot of research I don’t want to undertake.
Spit and scratch in public?
Or maybe I should just throw all hope of subtlety out the window and scream loudly as I walk into every room, “Hello, yes, I am a boy, please respect my gender identity!” The thought has occurred to me more than once.
If you don’t think much about how other people read your gender, then congratulations, you’re probably cisgender.
Don’t get offended. It’s not a slur. It just means you’re not trans; that you never disagreed with the doctor who proclaimed, “It’s a blank!” And while I don’t hold that against you, I do think you’re a lucky son of a gun.
Next time you go out, try and count how many times people call you “sir” or “ma’am” or say “he” or “she.” When you’re noticing it, that number gets really high really quick.
So, until my ratio of male to female to “oh God go away quickly so I don’t have to pick” ends up with me getting called the guy that I am every time, spare a thought for your trans brothers, sisters and nonbinary siblings.
Also do your best not to make fun of my dirt ‘stache. I know it looks terrible, but I’m too proud of it to shave it off.
Morgan Philley is a junior English major from Clinton.
