InsaneJournal

Current mood:	mellow
Current music:	Ben Folds Five--Philosophy

go ahead, you can laugh all you want--i've got my philosophy, and i trust it like the ground
Erin Denley
English Comp II
Causal Analysis
10/14/09

Sweet Transvestite

It started in high school, I guess...well, no, it started sometime between negative-nine months and birth, either when my chromosomes were rolling the dice on my future chronic conditions or when I was rocking out in my amniotic sac and the wires got crossed on what hormones I was supposed to be bathed in. But I wouldn't know about that for a good nineteen years after the fact, so for all intents and purposes, it started in high school.

Spending four years as a liberal Catholic in a fundamentalist Baptist school does a lot of things to your philosophy, very few of them pleasant. I could detail all the angsting and depressive fits and one downward spiral in particular that set me back thirty pounds and roughly a year of normal life, but that's another memoir, one that'd span quite a lot more than eight hundred words. The important thing here was the dress code.

God, I hated that dress code. The boys could get away with a nice shirt and pants, but the girls were stuck in knee-length dresses or skirts, every single day of every single week of every single year, no exceptions. The other girls looked good in them, but they did nothing for me but showcase my fat, a sensitive issue that I had no idea that I had no control over at the time. Those damned skirts...I froze my assets off all winter, tripped over them in the warmer weather while the boys ran free, and if I took a tumble during a game, there was an inevitable panty-flash moment until I wised up and started buying boxer shorts.

At least, I claimed that was what the boxers were for--an extra line of protection against embarrassment during rough play. Really, though, they were my only chance to lash out against the oppression of the dress code. Skirts weren't me. They were wrong, always wrong. I coped with it all right, but I was never myself in a skirt, not completely.

Disliked for being Catholic, I was pushed through a smaller and smaller series of hoops of good behavior to be allowed to stay, until I was eventually kicked out on the condition that I was breaking the school's zero-tolerance drinking policy by taking holy Communion that included real wine. Again, in the vernacular, a whole 'nother story. More importantly, I was now free to wear what I wanted. However, unwilling to waste my wardrobe, I kept wearing skirts, the discomfort not gone, but leveled, the way someone with chronic pain will cease to consciously feel it, but not cease to suffer.

Several years later, I went to the emergency room with abdominal pain of the "Dear sweet baby Jesus please make it stop" variety. An ultrasound revealed a cyst the size of a chicken egg on my left ovary. When subsequent tests revealed a large number of smaller cysts, I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian disorder--due to genetics or an improper hormone bath in the womb, my body produces an abnormal level of male hormones. It didn't make me any less of a woman, but it did, I realized, make me more of a man. The extra fat and sparse body hair was explained. So, too, was a piece of the strange dichotomy I felt about my own sexuality.

At the same time, I met one of my current best friends, a female-to-male transgendered boy with a fully asexual sex drive. After getting to know him, I realized that while my mind applied a general feel of "male" or "female" to most of my friends, his feel was something entirely different, something that transcended gender and sexuality. I took a Human Sexuality class that semester, and studied Kinsey's research, beginning to understand that both gender and sexuality were sliding scales, not absolutes. And I began to understand myself.

These days, I wear skirts three or four times a year, to appease my mother and to let my feminine side make an appeal. But most days, I wear jeans and a T-shirt or button-down shirt--buttons on the right side, if you please. I have an ever-growing selection of ties and boxer shorts, and aspire to suit status once I can find someone to tailor to my needs. I wear breast-slimming sports bras and practice walking like a man when no one's looking. I tuck a pair of socks into my panties like an enterprising frat boy and keep my hair buzzed down to half an inch.

I am not a good female transvestite, but I am a devoted one, striving for, if not total masculinity, then respectable androgyny. I crossdress to take back what rabid fundamentalists tried to take away from me. I crossdress to challenge people's perception of gender, to force it out of the boxes that mass media and religion pigeonholes it into. I crossdress as a protest against the trivialization of sexism and as a campaign for rights regardless of mental gender and physical sexuality. Mostly, though, I crossdress because it's me, and that isn't something I'm willing to trade for anyone else's comfort ever again.

...and no, I don't crossdress because I like women. God, you people...I swear I'm going to start beating folks around the head with Eddie Izzard.



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God, some people.