Five Years From Now

In a recent conversation, a friend shared how she disliked the question “Where do you see yourself in five years?” She acknowledged that she disliked it because, while she had some broad visions of where her life might go, she really didn’t have a clear and definite plan for what the next five years would hold for her. Her comment prompted me to reflect on my own journey. I realized that, had someone asked me this question five years ago, there is no way I would have imagined that I would be where I am today. Five years ago I was still exploring my identity in secrecy. I never imagined that I could or would come to embrace it and live openly as myself. Not at all. So how can I imagine where I see myself five years from now? This doesn’t mean I don’t have ideas, visions and even goals. But so much can happen between now and then. So many things could change in my life.

This reminder also helps me keep perspective on where I’m at. Sometimes, more often than I would like, I consider where I’m at right now, and I feel frustration, disappointment, and even shame. I succumb to the temptation to compare myself to those around me, and more often than not I come up short. I compile a list of all the ways in which I am not enough, in which my life doesn’t measure up. I have such high expectations for myself. I know what I’m capable of. I know what I want in life (at least to some extent) and I know I’m not there yet, at least not in some key areas. I feel like a failure.

At those moments, I appreciate the gentle wisdom of the same friend mentioned earlier. She will look me in the eyes (often filled with tears) and remind me of how far I’ve come in such a relatively short time. I’ve only been out 2 ½ years! In that time I’ve rebuilt my life from basically nothing. She will lead me back to affirming my strengths, to owning my accomplishments, to showing myself the same compassion I would show others in my place. Friends like her are a precious treasure.

These years have been a period of such intense growth. At times it has exhausted me. When I pause and reflect, I have the chance to recognize how profound my journey has been in that time. Five years ago I would not have imagined myself where I am today. I’m not done growing. I want so much from life. I have so much to offer the world. But there’s plenty of time ahead. I don’t have to lay out a plan for the next five years. I don’t even have to have a definite plan for tomorrow (though, being who I am, I have a pretty good idea of how I hope the day will unfold!). Sometimes, it’s enough to just take it one breath at a time. As Alanis Morissette sings: “What it all boils down to, is that I haven’t got it all figured out just yet.” I probably never will, really. I don’t have to meet the expectations of others. I don’t even have to meet my expectations of myself, though it’s nice when I do. I am enough today, in this moment. I can be patience and compassionate with myself. I am not a failure. I am enough.

Sometimes Courage is a Trip to California

Recently I took a small but significant step: for the first time since coming out two and a half years ago, I left the state of Arizona. True, I only went to California, but crossing the state line felt like a milestone for me. A friend asked me the other day why I don’t travel more. After all, I’ve seen a lot of the world, lived in a few countries and have the interest and skill set to thrive internationally. How could someone like me find it so momentous simply to travel to California?

I gave her three primary reasons:

Money. It takes money to travel. I’ve never had large amounts of money. Being a missionary isn’t exactly a lucrative career financially. I followed that with a teaching career. Again, not the path to financial wealth. Then I got divorced and started at an entry-level job. I’m doing okay financially, but I don’t exactly have a lot of disposable income that I can spend traveling. I’m working hard to manage my finances responsibly, so that means I don’t travel if doing so requires extensive use of my credit card.

      Fear. As a single transgender woman, traveling raises my fear level. I don’t know how I will be received anywhere I go. I fear for my safety. Certain cities are likely to be safe, or at least safer and more welcoming, but if I travel by car, I have to pass through places that don’t feel as safe, and if I travel by plane, well, see point 1. Any place that is likely to lean socially or politically conservative, which would encompass most anything surrounding my home city, does not feel safe or welcoming to me, especially in our current political climate. I would have loved to visit my daughter in Oklahoma, but there’s no way in hell I was going to risk a trip to Oklahoma.

      When it comes to traveling outside of the country, the risk level goes even higher. There are numerous countries in the world I would not even consider visiting. My very life would be at risk. One of those is Russia, a country I would love to visit again, but I cannot imagine doing so. I do hope eventually to get overseas and visit some places that would be more accepting of transgender people, but any step into a new environment raises my anxiety and fear. 

      I am working on facing this fear (such as taking a trip to California!). But my fears are real and valid as a member of a visible marginalized group that faces overt hostility and discrimination, even violence, in many places around the world, including in the US. I have to factor that in to any travel plans I make.

      Rootedness. This factor speaks more to why I don’t pursue an international career or a life as a nomad than to why I don’t visit places on vacation. I spent a lot of my life moving around. I’ve lived a lot of places and have never established deep roots in any one place since I left home after high school. Sure, I’ve had longer stints in various locations, but I’ve never really had the opportunity to settle in and make a city my home. I am enjoying this experience right now. I feel connected to my city, to the friends I have here, and to the communities I belong to. I feel at home, and it is a wonderful feeling. I care about this place and want to invest my time and energy into it. I have traveled halfway around the world, seen some amazing places and met some fascinating people. But in the end my journey brought me back to the place I left several years earlier and I found home right where I’d begun. There may come a time when I’m ready to move on again, but for now, I’m actually content to stay here in my quirky little desert city, enjoying the richness, beauty, and diversity it has to offer.

Looking ahead, I do want to take another trip soon. I just need to collect some money (and some time off!) and decide where I’m going to go. When I do, I’ll encounter a measure of anxiety and fear, but I can deal with those one step at a time. Sometimes courage is simply taking a trip to California.

Transwomen are women

Every so often a weird inclination overtakes me and I sign into my online dating profile, looking for someone I might find a connection with. I haven’t experienced much success: just one single date that didn’t lead to a second one, and a couple scam attempts. Nevertheless, I keep fishing in that pond, hoping I might meet that special someone.

Recently I started chatting with a woman through the app. She seemed potentially interesting, and we had both indicated that we liked one another -- a promising enough start. We exchanged a couple messages. Then she dropped this line on me: “I don’t mean to be offensive, but are you cis-female?” I was aghast at such a tactless question. How could this not be offensive? I chose to respond politely with “No, I’m transgender. Is that a problem?” Not surprisingly, her response indicated exactly what I had anticipated. Sure, we could still be friends, she said, but she had issues with transgender women and male privilege. WTF? She, a cis-female lesbian, felt she needed to lecture me, a transgender female, about my “male privilege.” I gave her a brief response pointing out that transgender women rate pretty well near the bottom of the privilege spectrum. I left it at that, though she sent another message challenging my understanding of transfemale privilege. I recognized that this discussion would be a futile waste of my time and energy and left it.

I’d like to say I’m surprised by her attitude. Thankfully, I have rarely experienced such bigotry among cisgender lesbians in my community. But I know it exists, and I felt furious encountering it. It testifies to one of the challenges the transgender community endures. We face rejection and hostility not only in the heterosexual community, but also in the lesbian and bisexual communities as well. We look to the rest of the LGBTQ community for support, as we all face marginalization in various ways and to different degrees, but as transgender women, we often find ourselves marginalized by other groups within the LGBTQ community. We, as transgender women, aren’t considered to be real women by people on all sides. It’s a tough and lonely place to be.

The denial of trans identities opens transgender individuals to discrimination and violence. Denying my identity as a woman because I happen to be transgender is to deny my humanity. Once you deny my humanity, you no longer have to respect and treat me as human. This is a chain of logic that begins with trans women feeling uncomfortable and unwelcome, and at worst can lead to deadly results.

As a transgender woman, I still enter female spaces and groups that are new to me with a measure of fear and anxiety, wondering whether I will be accepted as the woman I am. When I wanted to start attending a feminist book group at our local feminist bookstore, I hesitated, wondering whether I would be welcome. When I was invited by a friend to join a group for divorced women, I hesitated, wondering whether the other women would accept me equally. When I wanted to share my stories in a local female storytelling community, I wondered whether I would be welcomed. (I most certainly was!) And let’s not even get started on the whole bathroom question. This is not a fear that cisgender women have to deal with. They might feel a general anxiety over whether they’ll fit in, or whether the other women will like them, but they don’t have to wonder whether their very identity as a woman will be affirmed or denied by the other women they meet. Many transgender women, including myself, wrestle for years with affirming their true identity. When we do find the courage, we then face the challenge of wondering, over and over again, whether we will be accepted and validated, not just by cishet women and men, but even by others in the queer community. This is traumatic and keeps many from acknowledging who they are openly. How cis queer individuals could invalidate the identity of trans queer people remains incomprehensible to me. How can one marginalized group choose to discriminate against another one? Yet it happens too often. In doing so we perpetuate the toxic culture enforced on all of us by the patriarchal cisgender heterosexual community, and we transwomen are left isolated and vulnerable, looking for inclusion and acceptance but finding rejection and inclusion.

I appreciate the powerful words a friend of mine reposted on Facebook, words that she wrote a year ago which are just as necessary today:

The starting point for any conversation about transgender female identity must be that transwomen are women, equal to ciswomen. Cisgender women, whether heterosexual, lesbian or other, do not get to police what it means to be a woman. When they do so, they perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes which have enslaved cisgender women themselves throughout history. They use their voices as women to invalidate other women. This, dear women, is not what we need. Please hear our voices and understand the pain, trauma and violence you bring to us when you exclude us as not being fully women. If our identities make you uncomfortable, maybe you need to sit with that discomfort and examine it, rather than invalidating our identities. Maybe you need to take the time to listen to us, get to know us, hear our stories and understand how our journeys to be true to ourselves have impacted us, rather than accusing us of usurping space that we have no right to occupy. Maybe you need to enter into conversation with us and build new, open, affirming communities together with us, rather than accusing us of invading your exclusive realm. The future is inclusive. The queer community should model that.

Note: I imagine transgender men face similar issues. However, I cannot speak specifically to their experience and have chosen to speak here primarily from my experience as a transgender woman.