Hiding in Plain Sight

I have been going out in public as a woman since early 1998; you'd think I was an old hand.  But on Sunday, after attending church services, a committee meeting, getting takeout food, fueling my car, and getting groceries, I felt a real sense of accomplishment that I was able to do all these things with little anxiety.  It felt like something new, and it took a little soul-searching to figure out why.  In a nutshell, I concluded that I was, for the moment at least, no longer hiding.

As I mentioned, I've been doing things as a woman for quite some time.  I've gone shopping and dining out too many times to count.  I've gone to museums and musicals, taken dance lessons, even went on a week-long beach vacation.  But in surveying all those experiences, I can break them down into two groups: experiences in LGBT-friendly territory and sojourns into "civilian" territory.  My strategies for dealing with each have historically been different.

For LGBT-friendly spaces, I tend to operate relatively normally; outside of my normal shyness, I have very little fear.  'Nuff said.

For "civilian" territory, my strategies have more or less been to blend in the background as much as possible, avoid attracting any attention, and for God's sake, don't talk to or look at anyone!  My anxiety levels tend to be high, and I feel very tightly wound.  Not that I've had any really horrible experiences so far.  Yes, I've been stared at, pointed at, giggled and laughed at--temporarily humiliating, not majorly traumatic.  Still, I feel much more pressure to "pass" and therefore escape unwanted attention, especially from people who react to trans folk with violence.  If I am with a cisgender person, I try to get that person to shield me from any other human contact as much as possible.  For much of my time out, that person has been the woman who is now my wife.

Take the aforementioned trip to the beach and surrounding areas.  Sounds like a trans person's dream, doesn't it?  Well, what I remember most is constant fear (that, and how much it hurts to shave closely twice a day for a week).  I was a walking bundle of apprehension, and my now-wife did nearly everything in the way of social interaction for me.  She paid for the meals (male name on the credit card, you see).  She bought the tickets to attractions.  She made the phone calls.  Meanwhile, I was like a little child clinging to my mother's skirts.  It was a relief to change back to male mode just to get away from the fear (well, and the shaving).  And so it continued for much of the next decade; despite her efforts to encourage (and sometimes goad) me, I largely depended on her to shield me from human contact.  And then, illness crept in and she became unable to be a companion and buffer on my forays out into the world.

Left to my own devices, I was forced to come up with new strategies.  For a while I stopped going places as Wendy, but I couldn't retreat into the closet again for long.  I managed to fight down the fear and begin finding new outlets.  The main outlet, as documented in previous blog entries, has become my church community: first I came out to a small group, then a larger group, then the women's group, and finally, I have recently begun attending church services as a woman.  Even though our church is LGBT-friendly, and therefore in the "safe" zone, it is still enough of a stretch and demands enough social interaction that my confidence and social skills are gradually improving.  I am also finding that my increased confidence in "safe" spaces is gradually seeping into the public arena, too.  And encouraged by the example of others, I am increasingly feeling that it's OK not to pass; being openly transgender is somehow freeing (if still scary).

I think of my journey thus far as a slowly-opening flower.  An incredibly, glacially slow-opening flower, but it's opening nonetheless.  Here's hoping that it will continue to open, at whatever pace.