Roche - Trans power: own your gender

TRANS
POWER

Own Your Gender

Juno Roche

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia

CONTENTS

TRANS-CENTRAL

H elp! No really, Help!

I know that opening this book with a cry for help might seem (it does seem) a little (a lot) needy, but I am having a huge crisis in confidence as I dont feel like a woman (or a man) anymore; nor do I feel nonbinary as it includes the word binary; and nor do I feel fluid as it still posits two binary poles for me to become fluid between.

I feel trans.

And finally, I feel beautifully cut adrift from the endless layers of performativity that have weighed me down my whole life.

Layers of performativity: Im sure they have blocked any dysphoria from leaving me and allowed it instead to remain deep inside, turning to self-stigma and ultimately internalised transphobia. We do that. How could we not when the world throws so much transphobic shade our way, constantly telling us that we are not good enough to be considered as real? How could we not internalise that in our endless quest to become perfect binary specimens for them?

Those layers of performance were me trying to please everyone else in the world but me.

I have disconnected from those layers now because my label is simply trans and I have no idea how to perform trans, or if I need to. On the one hand, thats terrifying; on the other, utterly freeing. All those layers of expectation which are thrust upon us boy, masculine, femme-boy, femme, transgender, gender, passing, sexy, fuckable, sexual, woman, real are such a weight to carry around. Its taken physically moving to the middle of nowhere in the Spanish mountains to start to rid myself of the performance-memory that clustered around my frontal lobe every time I went to leave the house; the cloak of performance that enabled me to feel good enough to walk down the street, even when I appeared to be good enough or people told me that I was good enough on their terms.

Not to worry, they said, no one would ever know. You look just like a woman.

Ive cut adrift from all that now, Im simply trans, and Im not sure trans needs dressing up in any particular way or style. How do you dress or perform a prefix?

I feel trans.

I feel trans and maybe queer.

My queerness and transness feel vast and open like the Serengeti Plain. Trans was always my destination. I can see it now I see thats where Ive always been heading. Not to woman or man I hate being pinned down like that.

I feel transgressive. I feel hybrid.

But not first-stage hybrid like the early semi-electric cars that only went at 4 mph and only had the battery life of an aged alarm clock. No, I feel developed hybrid or sophisticated hybrid, like a new species that has existed for a while yet has seldom been encountered so we dont have the words to describe them, to describe me. Like a hybrid that at one point in history was born of male and female expectations but now is something completely different.

Trans, just the prefix, no need for woman as in trans-woman or gender as in trans-gender. I like the thought that we as trans are a prefix to some change that is brilliantly underway but as yet unresolved and partially unrecognisable. People, feminists, biological essentialists and bigots are still arguing the logic of the smattering of stuff they think they know and accept, the gender constructs and constraints. They cant see that a party has truly started, off over there in a far corner, where fireworks are exploding, drowning out their pointless skirmish over the word real. We are the prefix to change and we can see from this backlash and the emerging fundamental differences in the gendered landscape that change is afoot. The genie is way out of the bottle. They know deep down that we are winning and that so we should, as we are only adding to this world, not subtracting.

Deep down though, I sometimes wish I could avoid being trans and transgressive because it feels like a lonely path and, honestly, Im a little bit tired of being on my own. Im desperate for some shared sexual pleasure or intimate action a kiss, oral sex, a bite on my nipple, a huganything before I forget how to do skin on skin with another, before I forget what a kiss feels like.

I want intimate but light, airy dates. Im in a place that feels brilliant but confusing and lonely. A space I cant run away from if I want to be kissed. Ive got lips for kissing, I think?

Ive got nothing left to give to the gender binary, even though I might get kissed in its shadow. Naming myself woman allowed for easier kissing. Naming myself trans seems to create a divide between me and the kissing world. Why?

But, I repeat, I have nothing more to give to the broken, defunct, damaging, limiting system of gender binaries. Nothing, not even a single breath. Im all out of caring to even try to locate me within its parameters. I thought I would slip easily into trans woman and perhaps just woman but no, Ive turned 180 degrees away to my new buddy, trans.

The gender binary Ive realised is empty because it doesnt really exist not as a real thing like a tree or the ground we walk on. Its just a construct we spend our lives chasing and failing at, an insidiously silent construct that pretends not to exist when challenged: Sexism, its all in your head; its banter. It traps all of us and we have to work hard to get out from its grasp. I thought I needed permission to try to enter or leave it. I think its a working-class thing to submit without question and stay you are taught to be thankful. I spent years trying to find comfort, confidence and love within its bounds but to no avail. Stupidly I thought it would be home. I thought it might reward me for trying so hard to uphold its structures. I thought the binary was a two-way give and take thing.

Its not like Im naive and have lived under a comfortable moss-covered stone, or have sheltered in the wilds of the countryside or deep in academia. No. Ive been an addict, a sex worker, a truck driver, a drug runner and an assistant head teacher. Ive been single, married, divorced (twice), monogamous and open. Ive been kink, Ive been vanilla Ive been to sex and Tupperware parties. Ive tried relentlessly to find my place within the binary gender structure. But its not happening. Its just not happening. I want to live my life freely and weightless outside of a performed frame. I want no, I need to own every millimetre of my trans body, I want trans-ecstasy. I want to be trans and to be free.

By the end of my last book, Queer Sex , Id come to a conclusion that was troubling and deeply unexpected. I realised through the process of interviewing brilliant and inspiring people that I absolutely had to give away three words in order to start down the road to comfort and pleasure in my body.

The words real , woman and vagina .

Words I have spent the greater part of my life struggling to own, inhabit and use.

I struggled to hold onto the word woman at the start of my transition as people all around me told me Id be ugly and unconvincing and that no one would believe I was a woman. I fought for the word woman when people were telling me I needed to get voice coaching, walking and sitting coaching, eating coaching (I kid you not), and that in order to be seen as a real woman Id need to get the whole of my face and parts of my body de-masculinised. Would I consider, for example, removing ribs, chin bones and having my Adams apple shaved, even though people had always made fun of me for never having one. Kids at school said, You cant be a boy, you dont have an apple. I daydreamed about having an Adams apple removed that was never there. Thats some kind of deep dysphoric shit.