This evening I’m sitting in my living room with my cats, sipping Earl Grey tea and listening to a record by Roberta Flack. My wife and I had plans to meet up with some friends for dinner and board games, but as we left the house I was struggling with anxiety about being perceived as woman and got hit by a migraine while on the highway. Historically I’ve found myself to be angry when a migraine has scrambled my plans - how dare my body wreck this for me! - but this time I cried as we drove back home. I had put a lot of importance on this evening because I wanted to really represent myself well as a woman in the company of some of the cis women attending, and had worked hard to put my best foot forward. To add insult to injury, after Lindsey had dropped me off at home and departed again, I got posted up in our bedroom with painkillers and my Cefaly only for the migraine aura to dissipate, and I was left with no headache. I let the Cefaly run its course just in case as I listened to an episode of the Gender Reveal podcast, and afterwards made an undignified sandwich for dinner.
There are some cis women in my life that I seem to value excessively for validation of my womanhood, and this habit is proving to be a big source of stress for me. I’m weighing a lot of factors in my head when I spend time with groups of cis women. Am I talking too loud or too deeply, or talking over them? Am I dressed appropriately or too young or old or out of style? Am I taking up too much space or am I positioned in a masculine way? Am I coming off as performative as a “woman,” or just as a woman? Basically, how’s my driving? Some cis women are fantastic at putting me at ease and my mental checklist disappears into the background quickly. Others seem to bring it front and center. I think the difference might be related to both how these women present themselves in their gender and how they reflect my gender back to me. Musing on it some more, the cis women I struggle the most around are those who lean into being feminine in the way that I want to as well. I’m trying to catch up in a lot of ways and want to hear that I’m on the right track from someone who seems more experienced.
At least one cis friend I’ve discussed my problem with has suggested that the stress of unfulfilled validation as a woman is often part of the experience of being a woman, whether trans or cis. She shared with me her frustrations around growing up with a mother that struggled to recognize her daughter’s growth in adolescence, failing to provide instruction around typical milestones of cis girlhood like owning a purse and leg shaving. She grew up having to navigate things on her own only to be mocked by her peers, and later recognized the emotional rift between her and her mother in adulthood stemmed from the unwillingness of her mother to see her as she was. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that the lack of validation my cis friend experienced as she watched her peers enter womanhood led to persisting gender envy, something I can relate to strongly.
I was recently thinking back to my own adolescence, inspecting my relationships with other girls on the “be with her/be her” dynamic so common for eggs. There was a girl I knew because our moms were friends who was kind of my e-penpal for a while in the early 2000s. As young teens we went out on a couple of pseudo-dates and were just really sweaty and nervous around each other. I liked her vibe though, she was very feminine and collected and had a truly wicked wit. But something that really bugged me about her was her absolute adoration for Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote. She worshipped Lansbury and tried to mirror Lansbury’s old lady affectations, and I just didn’t get it. I suspected that my friend had some self-deprecating notions about her own appearance and youth, and was kind of like settling for Lansbury as a role model? Maybe she was pioneering cottage-detectivecore in 2003, but to me it seemed like rejecting the “obviously superior” option of existing as a teenage girl in favor of being an old woman. Now I realize that this was gender envy; I wanted to be what I thought my friend was squandering. Besides my general teenage awkwardness, my gender envy led me to be indecisive about how I wanted my friend to perceive me - certainly not as a teenage boy. I tried for a long time to look appropriate to other people but otherwise blank and just check the boxes. There’s no way to seek validation when you’re doing your best to be invisible.
Two hannah baer quotes from Trans Girl Suicide Museum: “your gender is not something you experience only in isolation, but something that is reflected back to you by other people…” and “if someone tries to talk to you about your transness by asking what gender you would have on a desert island, you can tell them you wouldn’t have a gender in the same way because gender is inextricably relational, not merely individual.” I think that there’s a struggle for trans people in how we balance acknowledging the relational nature of gender and resisting an external locus of control. On the one hand, giving in fully to gender as relational ignores our intrinsic desires toward the embodiment of our genders. On the other hand, a complete rejection of the gender we experience reflected back to us can lead to anomie for the individual and inscrutability by others. I suspect that this struggle exacerbates the degree of learned helplessness many trans people develop from constant exposure to transphobia.
The psychologist Martin Seligman who first described learned helplessness went on to found a branch of his field called positive psychology, which studies the behaviors that lead to more adaptability and happiness in people. Going through the exercise of describing my issues around validation of my womanhood in this post has brought me to the point where I feel like I can examine my feelings more specifically through the the “3 P’s” methodology as proposed by Seligman. The 3 P’s are personalization, permanence, and pervasiveness, and users of the methodology reframe their feelings in opposition to each P in order to practice a more optimistic and resilient outlook.
- Personalization: There is nothing problematic about how I specifically live as a trans woman. It is normal to be both trans and a woman, and there are a lot of ways to do both.
- Permanence: As I’ve written about many times, my experience of womanhood and transness is constantly changing, and I’m growing in new ways every day. If I’m not as “put together” as I’d like to be one day, that doesn’t mean it will always be the case, or that other people will always view me as being that way.
- Pervasiveness: My stress was focused around looking feminine enough around cis women I see as fulfilling the femininity I would like to exhibit. I can identify that trigger point and examine my response to it to try a different approach next time.
Working my way through this blog post has been incredibly therapeutic. I feel like taking things apart like this will put me at a little more ease next time I feel stressed about validation as a woman around cis women. I hope sharing my thought process here proves helpful for any readers of the blog who find themselves caught in the same struggle.