I feel like I turned a corner in my physical transition a couple of weeks ago, and since then it’s been a lot easier to see the girl in the mirror. The sort of attention I’ve been getting lately has been shifting as well. It’s hard exactly to quantify, but I feel like people are starting to treat me more like a woman at my work and when I’m out and about.
There’s been ups and downs. Yay experiences reinforcing my pronouns! I was on a business trip recently, and listening to people talk about me in the third person (“she’s been collecting requirements for the documentation”) was capital-E Empowering. Boo getting talked over or patronized - and it’s been shocking how many people who didn’t talk to me that way before now do. And some of it’s been just plain weird. One evening I thought was making friendly banter with a stranger at a bar, and later in the night one of her friends brought me a piece of paper with her number on it. I proceeded to spend the next half hour with my friends trying to work out why she would do this, as they all laughed at my fulfillment of the Clueless Lesbian meme.
Last night at a local queer bar I was approached by my first chaser. I was on the dance floor with a number of other trans women, and this young cis woman was making the rounds between us. She and I eventually danced a bit together, and she started to get a bit flirty. She said to me things like, “You’re so pretty, you look like Aldous Harding,” and “I looove trans girls,’ and “I’m… a bit gay.” Which putting together now, I’m reading as: you look pretty but clocky, I fetishize trans girls, I’m in it for the girldick. Once I said I was in a committed relationship but was enjoying the dancing she left me alone.
“I looove trans girls” was just inappropriate. Why are you calling out our differences and making me feel othered? And “a bit gay,” like, are you into girls? Or into guys but make exceptions for girls with dicks? While it was intoxicating to receive compliments and that kind of attention - and she was attractive - she was giving off total fetishist vibes and made me feel like a body. I felt gross afterwards.
This isn't the first time I've experienced a shift in transition. When I started changing my gender expression to be more feminine in public, I experienced after a few months an inflection point like this where I went from the invisibility of masculinity to being SEEN. Suddenly people were either staring at me, or staring at my body, or very aggressively not looking at me, which continues to be a vaguely gaslight-y part of the trans experience for me. The switchover wasn’t instantaneous, but there was definitely a threshold that I crossed.
I’m honestly grateful that these inflection points haven’t all hit at once, that I have had time to adapt to one normal before the next one comes along. I guess that this further reinforces the “onion peel” theory of transition - your internal experience changes, there are external ramifications, you have to recalibrate your internal experience and discover new things in the process, back and forth.