To Tell A Story From Your Past: He or She (update: May 7, 2008)
Here’s a question for all transgender people. When you recount your youth to friends, do you use a male or female pronoun? (Opposite of what you are aiming to be presently). So for mtf transgender people, would you say, “When I was a teenager, my friends tell everyone ‘don’t mind him, he just has his head under the hood all the time because he’s forever trying to get his 440 Big Block sleeper on the road.’”
I use the above situation to illustrate the difficulty of the scenario when the topic is about something that is traditionally associated with boys.
There’s a tad of untruthfulness if you substitute the feminine pronoun for a male, since for many of us, the moment of realization (or what Carson McCullers calls a moment of “illumination”) may have very well come a little later.
To a certain degree, this almost becomes a post-structural debate over the old chicken-and-egg question. Combined that with the notion that successful transgender assimilation means surrendering the old identity.
I guess we could always use what a friend suggested, “a birl.
How does a girl solve this problem? Whatever it is, it pays to plan ahead.
Tags: community, transgender
