Ani Trueheart - Through The Eyes of Change

Image Description: A family photo before a wedding. From left to right: My mom–a tall, white woman with short, dark hair wearing a floral dress; my sister-a white, teenager with blonde hair wearing a black and white floral vest; my Mawmaw–a short, white woman with blonde hair, wearing an orange vest and skirt. I am standing in front, wearing a gold vest and dress pants. Mawmaw has her hand on my shoulder.

Through The Eyes of Change

April 17, 2020

For 22 years, my name was Jenni. I had long, curly hair. I wore mascara and eye shadow. I shopped in the women’s section and wore dresses and heels. While playing soccer in college, I played on a team of 30 women. I lived in a house with 4 of them: Maggie, Mia, Sage and Chloey. And I shared all the space with them. We ate together, drank together, changed and got dressed together, giving opinions on each others’ clothes. We would talk about our relationships, men and women we were attracted to, sex, soccer, gossip, TV shows. We would role play and designate our house as casts from shows. I was told I was Kramer from Seinfeld because I would walk in the house and say really weird things. I loved my friends. I love the experiences I had. I know nothing else than the story of my life.

Now that I am out and living as myself, I do not regret how I lived. I would never trade it, unless it looked like being out as trans and still living with my friends. Today, as I exist in the world and am read as male, my life has changed completely. When I came out, I had no framework for how this would feel, no expectations for how the world would treat me differently. I just knew I wanted my body to reflect physical masculinity. Oddly, sadly, interestingly…it feels like I was pushed over to the other side of an imaginary line of which I used to be accepted on, was familiar with, and knew so well. And it hurts every day. It feels like my life, a decade’s worth of habits and comfort was ripped away after merely growing facial hair. People would never guess that my name was Jenni and that my whole life looked different up until a few years ago when I became visible to the world as queer. This is a grieving process I never knew could exist.

Even in this grieving, I am feeling so much more comfortable in my body. I love that my hair is getting thick and dark. I love that my voice is getting deeper. I love that my shoulders and back are becoming broader. It shows masculinity in a visible way that I feel empowered by. However, it has taken me years to reconcile that changing my body has been the catalyst for uncomfortable social changes and grieving, as I took the steps to uproot my entire existence to express my gender honestly.

My transition meant a loss of privilege: presenting as a cisgender woman had its advantages and comforts. So the unprecedented social treatment of being visibly queer rocked my psyche and my body. Transitioning has been traumatic. I have been through the ringer, so to speak. I have dealt with domestic abuse, job discrimination, harassment, hateful treatment and slurs, gaslighting, feeling erased from existence, and the weight of social and emotional adjustment to my transition itself. It sometimes feels like I’m standing still, as my child self, silent. And I’m watching a time-lapse of people pass me by and treat me as they would a little girl, then a strange entity, a monster, a gross human, then all of a sudden, a man that has unspeakable authority. But I still feel like a child. Or a faceless entity that is watching a movie of the world’s madness.

As a trans and non-binary person, toxic beliefs about masculinity are what I wish to distance myself from. Beliefs that say that masculinity is superior, that men are stronger, are more sexual, are more aggressive, and are dangerous. But it feels like people are treating me like I am these things, or that I believe myself to be these things because I am perceived now as a cisgender male. And so, my trans identity becomes invisible in a culture of socialized toxic masculinity.

Yes, I identify with masculinity, but I do not see my role as a man alone. I don’t like being viewed as a stereotypical man because feel like I am feared. And I do not want to be feared. Although I lost a privilege of being perceived as cisgender woman, now I am perceived as cisgender man and I have recently gained certain social privilege of being perceived as male. But this sexist privilege makes me feel trapped. I do not want people to treat me more respectfully just because they see me as male. I do not want women to be scared to look me in the eye. Especially when I think of how many years that I lived with women. They were my comfort zone. And I was theirs. But I know where this fear comes from. I know it from my own lived experience.

During my junior year at Lindenwood University, I studied abroad in Costa Rica for a semester. I was living as a woman, with my long curly hair and athletic build. In some Latin America spaces, men hiss at women in the street, literally cat-calling them. When I was there, I lived in Heredia, a city outside of San José. And I had to walk about a mile to get to my university. I can’t count how many times over the course of a day that I felt unsafe and angry while just trying to walk. Groups of men would stare at me and make loud hissing sounds to try to get my attention. I was under a spotlight, on a stage I did not want to be on. I constantly felt unsafe.

One night, my host brother, Armando, and I were walking back to our house from the bars. It was around 2 a.m. A car with tinted windows pulled up to us and started sexually harassing me. Armando told me to keep my head down, to keep walking. I could tell he was scared. I was scared too. The driver kept talking to me and I told them to leave us alone. They circled the block a few times. Armando had picked up a huge rock and was ready to fight if he needed to. We got back safely, as we ran through an alley to detour to our house.

Latin America is not the only place where this happens. The social climate in the U.S. feels very much the same. As a woman, being catcalled by strangers out of car windows or walking down the street happens daily. And I absolutely understand why I am not immediately a safe space for women anymore, as there is palpable social injustice that forces women and femme people to protect their space from men or masculinity, as it has historically and experientially proven toxic.

I am working not to personalize this—the drastic social change of being treated as a man—as something that reflects my masculinity or my self-identity, but rather, understand it as a reflection of dissonance to the sexist and toxic culture that exists to oppress femininity. As I work through grief of old ways that humans used to socialize with me, I am also working to cope with social expectations that are now thrust upon me. Through it all, I want to maintain a sense of gender-less engagement, where the role I play in conversation is equitable, where I engage through a space of awareness versus allowing social conditioning to change me in ways I do not want to change. Like looking people in the eyes, asking how they are, being sentimental, emotional and vulnerable, as these ways of socializing are less accepted, or seem less prevalent in masculine people in the South. I also want to engage with people in ways that are genuine to me. To talk assertively, to speak up and get passionate about my ideas, to fight for my opinions and beliefs. And I know I need to do this in a socially-aware way, to balance the new privilege that I have in our social reality of gender inequality, in the oppression or othering of femme-ness, femininity and other gender expressions that are not male|masculine|man.

For me, I simply want to express that I am not separate from maleness or masculinity in this body. And that masculinity in itself is not bad, but that what we do through the lens of masculinity becomes a social trademark that affects our communities on a deep level.

As a society, I hope we can work to re-shape how we define and treat gender in ways that are equitable, honest and real, to repair and soothe the traumas brought on by sexism,heterosexism, cis-sexism and transphobia, for all trans, non-binary, agender, gender-nonconforming folks, women and men alike.

#sexism #heterosexism #cissexism #transphobia