William Wednesdays Volume 2

VOLUME 2 FALL 2014

William Wednesdays A special series from Out for Health’ s QueerTips tumblr

trans  selfies  top surgery  pride fashionista  showers  shaving

We did a thing.

So. There’s our tumblr, queertips, which is awesome, but then there’s this bi-weekly column called William Wednesdays we did that was freakin’ excellent and great. WW got so cool so fast we said holy hell, this needs to be a thing, a thing we can share and give out and tell people about because we know people learn from stories. A thing that needs to exist outside the Internet. Imagine that.

So, here’s Volume 2 of stories of one human’s life who is an awesome trans person doing his thang and being himself and trying to make his way in the world. There are a trillion other narratives, too. This is but one, so this isn’t a “how to” ‘zine but rather a "be yourself but how cool to get a look into another human’s life" ‘zine — because seriously, when we get an inside view into the lives of others we usually end up being nicer people, what with the reading and the learning and the understanding and the realizing that we all have tons of layers of stuff that make life, life. Read on queers.

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William Wednesday 6 Hashtag FTM, Hashtag Me A big criticism of my generation is the self-important, self-indulgent nature of the way we use the internet and social media. Attempting to mature as a person in a time that asks us, “How are you feeling today?” or “What are you doing right now?” every time we log into Facebook makes us crave constant acceptance and approval of our peers that we don’t necessarily need. We assume we have purpose if we think there is someone invested in reading about our daily thoughts and affairs. This can make us narcissistic at times, but it is a support to have what feels like an entire community backing you up and hanging on your every keystroke.

This of course crosses over into the world of “selfies” or “gpoys” (gratuitous pictures of yourself); those very obviously self-taken photos that started way back with the infamous MySpace mirror pictures, and can now be seen mostly as those low-quality Macbook photobooth shots. Anyone with a Macbook has had those days when you look SUPER AWESOME and want to immortalize your fashionable outfit and your perfectly parted hair, but you’re around other people, so you mute your laptop so no one hears the notorious selfie-signaling “beep…beep…BEEP” that would alert everyone that you are pretty into yourself today.

Why are we obsessed with having constant documentation of ourselves and sharing it with others? I seem to be criticizing this culture, yet if 3

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you go to my tumblr, you’ll see I’m a pretty guilty culprit as well. I think this gratuitous photo phenomenon is applicable to a lot of people in my generation, but has very different relevance in the transgender community for a couple of big reasons.

If you are at all familiar with the transgender community, you know that there is a huge amount of transition documentation on sites such as Tumblr and YouTube. I know when I was coming out as trans, I spent hours of my life watching videos of other trans guys who were updating their own friends and communities about their transitions. I could watch what it was like to go from your first month of testosterone to your first year. I could see what different types of top surgery scars looked like, and how long it took them to heal and fade. I could listen to coming out stories, and a hundred different self-realizations of being trapped in the wrong body. The reason this was so important to me, and to plenty of other transgender people, is that is can be a huge comfort to just see that there is someone else like you out there. Even if you are the only person in your school or your town or your county who is transgender, you know you are not the only person in the world who is struggling with their

When I was coming out as trans, I spent hours of my life watching videos of other trans guys who were updating their own friends and communities about their transitions….The reason this was so important to me, and to plenty of other transgender people, is that is can be a huge comfort to just see that there is someone else like you out there. Even if you are the only person in your school or your town or your county who is transgender, you know you are not the only person in the world who is struggling with their gender identity. You aren’t actually alone.

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gender identity. You aren’t actually alone.

Trans* people taking a lot of pictures and videos of themselves is not only a good way to be a resource for people who are looking up information about transitioning, but it can also have a lot of personal benefits in being able to see how far you have come. I know there are a lot of days when I feel like shit and my dysphoria is telling me, “You haven’t changed at all! You look exactly the same! You look like a girl! Or a 15-year-old boy AT BEST, but really you suck!” If I didn’t have a lot of old pictures of myself, maybe I would believe that. But whenever I am feeling awful about myself, I can go back in my giant roll of photobooth pictures and find a picture of myself at two months on testosterone, and I can see how my shoulders fill out my shirts more, and I can see my changing jaw line and my growing beard, and I KNOW that I am in a different place than I started.

Maybe some people can stop there, and they don’t need to post their comparison pictures on Tumblr and tag them “ftm” the way I, and plenty of other trans* guys, do. But sometimes telling yourself you’re okay is not enough. Sometimes it helps you get through the day to have someone you have never met find your picture and say, “Wow! I would never even know you were a trans guy!” They have a fresh perspective. They don’t see my face every day in the mirror. And having that support is something trans* people couldn’t really get before the internet, save for maybe seeing an old friend who hadn’t seen them in a long time.

I don’t think trans* people are the only people that like being able to look back at old pictures and see how far they’ve come. Maybe that’s why my generation is so invested in “selfies.” If we can see changes in our faces and our fashion sense and the places we’ve been, we feel like we have progressed. Our lives cannot be stagnant if we know we have gone from point A to point B, and being able to see that in pictures is concrete proof.

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William Wednesday 7 Thursday College Retrospective Edition

Every once in a while I get asked what it’s like to be a transman in college, and I am hesitant to answer because I started college before I transitioned. I’ve always felt like somehow that makes my experience inauthentic, because I can’t tell people about what it’s like to live in a boy’s dorm, or have to reveal my trans status to someone I was trying to hook up with, or how to go about being stealth on a large scale. But now that I’m graduating in a few days and looking back at my past four years at Ithaca College, both before and after I came out, I realize that there were a lot of valid struggles and a lot of triumphs I’m proud of that revolved around my transition.

I started college as an out “butch lesbian” who liked to skateboard to class and wear bandanas and cheap, dollar store knock-off Ray Bans, and apparently looked a lot more terrifying than I actually was. I met the girl who ended up being my roommate online, after choosing each other to live with because we were both queer and big fans of The L Word. For the first two years of college, that was my life. People knew me as my birth name, and I was pretty happy embracing all things lesbian. Maybe it’s the fact that I was already hanging out in a lot of queer social circles that made coming out as trans relatively easy.

At the beginning my junior year I slowly started coming out, and 7

luckily lived off campus, so I didn’t have to worry about dorm rooms or gendered showers anymore. I did have to re-navigate bathrooms, though, so I located the handful of gender-neutral, single stalls on campus. While Ithaca does have more of these options than some other colleges, there were plenty of times that I’d have to walk way out of my way to go to the bathroom, or hold it until I got home. Even by the time I was completely out as trans, I was still hesitant to use men’s bathrooms. I was afraid that some random person I’d known vaguely from a liberal arts elective would recognize me, even with my short hair and the tiny beard I was attempting to grow. This was especially a problem in the music building, which is my school, where I KNEW people would know I was trans. For a while I would actually leave the building to use the bathroom because I was so terrified of getting called out. To this day, I have still only used the practice room bathrooms twice (the fact that neither of the stalls lock is also a factor).

Another challenge of coming out mid-college was my name.

Even though all my friends were calling me Will, my transcript and every attendance roll had me marked down as my birth name. I spent the fall semester of my junior year getting called Will by my friends, and my birth name in class. Before the spring semester started, I emailed all my new professors to inform them of the situation, and asked them to use my preferred name. While this was great for the professors I had at the 8

time, there were a few professors of past classes that I forgot to email. I frequently ran into my jazz professor on campus, and he would always greet me with my birth name. Embarrassed to correct him so late in the game, I started avoiding eye contact with him when we passed each other in the halls, in hopes that I could avoid the awkward interaction. Instead I just felt pretty rude.

There were other places that my pesky birth name showed up, like my email and the college’s information system. Luckily, Ithaca has a preferred name option, so after a few emails to the registrar, I didn’t have to be greeted by, “Hello, Awful Birth Name!” every time I logged into a school related site.

Unfortunately, my student ID still had my birth name and an old picture of me, so for the rest of the year I had a few well-meaning cafeteria ladies who called me “miss” every time I bought a ham 9

sandwich.

I think the fact that I was able to transition pretty painlessly in the middle of college says a lot about my friends. They had to switch my name and pronouns pretty much overnight, and accept the fact that the person they knew was not entirely who they had expected. I am proud to say that I didn’t lose any friends because of my transition, and didn’t hear any negative feedback about it. To the shock of no one, the only place I have ever had offensive things said to me is on the Internet. I know that I am extremely lucky to have the support of both my family and my friends, and that not every trans* person can say that.

It has also been a great experience making new friends this year after being on testosterone for a while. Some of the freshmen I’ve met had no idea I was trans until someone else told them, and to my knowledge, that did not change how they saw me. They were able to meet me as ME, and not with the baggage of remembering who I previously presented as.

I have met people through every step of my transition, and as I graduate, I feel I’m finally at a place where it is not only the people who surround me who love and accept me, but that I love and accept myself as well.

And while I don’t NEED the validation of other people to affirm my gender, I will always be eternally grateful to the people who have never left my side.

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William Wednesday 8

Top Surgery Edition I don’t know if it’s the steady dose of oxycodone I’ve been taking for pain reduction, or the fact that I just had the most life altering surgery of my life, but I’m having a hard time figuring out where to even start this William Wednesday column. A lot of the people who read this already know the facts; I had top surgery last Friday, May 24th in Cleveland, Ohio with Dr. Medalie, and have been steadily recovering at my best friend Ellen’s house ever since. I got peri-areolar mastectomy with liposuction, which is the procedure for guys with smaller chests that results in little to no scarring, which will hopefully be great for my new, shirtless beach bod. By the time you read this on Wednesday, I will have finally gotten my drains and post-op binder off and will have seen what my brand spankin’ new chest looks like! [Editor’s note: it looks phenome-

nal.]

Facts like dates and clinical surgery jargon are easy to rattle off, but how can I even begin to recap the passionate feelings I’ve been having this week— not only about my actual surgery, but about the overwhelming support I have gotten from my friends and family? Both before and after surgery, I have been met with so many good wishes coming from more people than I even would have assumed would remember I had surgery coming up. Besides the procedure itself, the response from people who have stood by me unconditionally is what I’m going to remember most 11

a bout this life-changing week.

To begin my journey, last Wednesday I hit the open road to Cleveland with my best friend, Kasulke, totally crushing the 5 hour drive without stopping, armed with Dunkin’ Donuts and yelling the lyrics to the entire Wicked soundtrack for what was probably the fifth time together. This time, Kasulke took the part of Glinda using only the Teen Girl Squad voice. My vocal chords still hurt thinking about it.

We arrived at Ellen’s house just as the gas light on my tired little mini van turned on. After taking some update footage for the top surgery video/montage/mini documentary (in my dreams) that I will be posting promptly after my return to Ithaca, we took off for some Cleveland exploration, including a secondhand bookstore and an organic frozen yogurt shop, where an employee was very eager to tell us something about coconut milk that my meat eating brain didn’t really care about, but academically appreciated.

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On Thursday, my mom arrived from the Cleveland airport. We made a pit stop back at Ellen’s house, where Ellen and I put on a last-hoorah living room show for some of her family and friends. The two of us have spent the past year gigging around Ithaca, and since I graduated, this was our last opportunity to play music together for a few months. After the show, my mom and I took off for the Holiday Inn Express, where we would depart from at 5:40am for surgery the next morning. I wish I could say that I was a diligent patient and got lots of sleep so that my body would be in tip-top shape to recover after the operation, but I ended up sleeping for about 2 hours, partially because of my mother’s snoring, and partially because of my extreme excitement, and the fact that it felt like my own little trans boy’s night before Christmas.

It’s hard to retell much of what happened on Friday, mainly because I was unconscious for most of it. The last thing I remember is feeling nauseous, and the nurse telling me she had “the good drugs” in her pocket. As she put whatever magic she had into my IV she said, “It’s like two margaritas without the hangover.”

From my bedside, I heard my mom say, “Oooo!” and then I was out. I woke up groggily late that afternoon, saying a string of incomprehensible things, and then asking my nurses “when I get to see Kasulke and Ellen.” Not only did the nurses obviously have no idea who my friends are, but I also had a distinct lack of pants on, so they just let me figure out that I was delirious on my own.

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What started happening by the time that I was released from the hospital that afternoon is something I will never forget. As I turned my phone back on, I found that I had seven missed text messages, some from as early as 6:30 in the morning, wishing me luck with my surgery. As I began to answer them, more and more texts came in, all from different people from different parts of my life wanting to know the details of how everything had went and how I was feeling. For literally four hours straight I was responding to kind messages from college friends, high school friends, ex girlfriends, family members, and more. I have never felt so loved and supported in my entire life. I was amazed that I could go through this massive process, which might have seemed weird or unnecessary to some people, and instead of having to answer ignorant questions, I got only words of kindness and understanding. While I would have undergone all of the same steps of my transition without that support, having it makes me feel like I can do anything.

As I finish writing this, I will be spending my last night wearing a binder. [Editor’s note: Will has to wear his post-op binder for another ten days, but it makes him look like Han Solo so it’s all good.] After 9:30am Wednesday morning, I will wake up every day for the rest of my life with a sense of freedom beneath my shirt that I have been anticipating for years. I can’t wait to see what new journeys I can take on, now that this is be behind me, and I have the rest of my life ahead.

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William Wednesday 9 Grandma Edition

My one and only experience acting was in my senior year of high school as one of the few straight protagonists in The Laramie Project, despite the fact that that was the year I came out as gay. My role was the police officer who cut Matthew Shepard down from the fence, so I had several very serious monologues about the gruesomeness of the murder and the possibility of having AIDS. After the show, an acting professor from UConn who was in attendance came up to me and told me that my performance was brilliant and I had really held the show together. Being the attention hog that I am, I was thrilled, and proceeded to merrily skip down the hallway, holding hands with my girlfriend at the time. Let’s call her Shmayla. I didn’t realize my family was walking behind us until I heard my grandmother literally yell down the hall, “Do they have to do that in public?!”

I still feel the words stinging in my ears, forever staining the one positive experience I had acting.

This was a few years before my transition, so Shmayla and I were a lesbian couple. My grandmother, or Avó as we call her, as she is 100% Portuguese, was not super keen on my gayness. Her biggest concern was the fact that I wouldn’t be able to get married in the Catholic church, not that had ever been on my radar as a possibility anyway.

At first she tried to be supportive by using the anecdote that she “was once a house keeper for a gay couple!” But after The Laramie Project incident, I started to notice her lack of support in other ways, like when she would do the sign of the cross around Shmayla and me when she thought I wasn’t looking.

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It was because of my grandmother’s reaction to my previous gayness that I was hesitant to come out to her as a trans man. I don’t know how I possibly kept it from her as long as I did, since I was sharing a house with her during the summer that I slowly started transitioning. My grandmother is 90, and has lived in my parents’ house for almost my entire life. She has a room down the hall, so there is no way she didn’t notice the tiny pre-T beard I was starting to sprout, or the fact that I was no longer shaving my legs or arm pits. Avó does have some hearing problems, but she’s definitely not blind.

I didn’t see my grandmother again until that winter, after I had already came out to the rest of my family. I was home for Christmas and everyone but Avó was calling me Will, though I’m not sure if she had any idea (due to the aforementioned hearing problem). One time she walked by the bathroom as I was shaving my face and she asked me, totally genuinely, if I was “making myself pretty to go out.” I chuckled and said yes, having no idea what she thought of me at this point.

Since I spent last summer in Ithaca, the next time I saw my grandmother was a year later for this past Christmas. At this point I had already been on testosterone for four months, and my changes were too obvious to ignore. Not to mention that it would have been pretty painful to revert back to using my birth name at home for a month. My mom and I agreed it was finally time to tell Avó that I was transgender, since she was the only one left that didn’t know.

Since my grandmother’s hearing is a problem, I couldn’t really call her up on the phone to come out to her before I got home. My mom, being the amazingly supportive woman that she is, said she would tell my grandmother for me. She printed out a bunch of articles that told stories of different trans men’s transitions and had some technical 16

jargon explaining what transgender meant. She sat my grandmother down and started to go through all of it with her. Before even making it all the way through the packet, Avó turned to my mom and said, “Are you trying to tell me that [MY BIRTH NAME] is a boy?”

That turned out to be about all that it took for Avó to be on board with my transition. She said she “had a feeling” but didn’t want to say anything, which seems characteristic of her generation. My grandmother is not an idiot.

Elderly people are not dumb. She’s seen a lot, and she has seen me grow for twenty-one years. She understood who I was, and never questioned that transitioning was the right decision for me.

Coming home for Christmas after that was still a little nerve-wracking. I didn’t know if it 17

would be awkward, so for the first day I kind of hid in my room, avoiding my grandmother for as long as possible.

Eventually I had to eat something, so I wandered downstairs the next morning for my daily bowl of cereal and coffee. My grandmother greeted me with the biggest smile I have ever seen on her face and said, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Will,” and gave me a long hug. Since then, my relationship with my grandmother is better than it has ever been in my life. She treats me like a real person, instead of just a kid running around the house. She is anxious to hear about my future and my career choices (still pending, if anyone reading this would like to hire me). My mom tells me that Avó will frequently ask “what her grandson’s post-grad plans are.” I never imagined that the biggest problem would actually be my post-grad plans, not my grandmother correctly gendering me.

Avó made her first visit up to Ithaca for my graduation, which meant a lot to me, as she is the only grandparent I’ve ever had. When my family was leaving, my brother was giving me an annoyingly aggressive hug, and I heard my grandmother say enthusiastically, “Brotherly love!” With that simple comment I knew. She just gets it.

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William Wednesday 10 Post-Pride, Post-DOMA Edition Last month was pride month, meaning queers around the world joined together in a cloud of glitter and rainbows and celebrated their queerness and yelled about oppression and ran into every single one of their exes that could fit into one city. I, too, partook in this celebration by frolicking around shirtless in the rain for all of New York City to see. Except by “all” to see, I mainly mean the male gays (for once the MALE GAZE is also THE MALE GAYS), since the largest percentage of the people I was around were interested in ogling men.

This was the second NYC Pride I’ve been to. The first time I went pre-transition, which made for a very different experience. At that point I was presenting as a lesbian, which made it easy to share the gay pride with strangers. Women hit on other women. Men hit on other men. Every once in a while you saw someone with a “bisexual pride” t-shirt. People sweat in the city heat while they receive buckets full of free condoms at the parade, go to a bar and make out with a stranger, and go home to lead their regular fabulous lives.

While all of these things are great and fun, this year I felt a lot of personal identity erasure as a trans man. While I was getting ready in the morning before I left for pride, I rifled through my drawers, picking around for something that would make me look “not straight,” which is ridiculous for a zillion reasons. There is no way to “look” gay or straight. I’ve known that forever, and hated that I was trying to fulfill a stereotype so that I would fit in. So I passed on my baseball caps and cargo shorts, and wore one of those tank tops that shows an unreal amount of skin under your arms, threw on my Sperry’s and hit the road.

When I got to the city, I started collecting as many free rainbow accessories as I could to add to my outfit. I found a rainbow thread bracelet on the ground that I thought looked fresh enough to adorn without picking up too many strangers’ germs. I got rainbow Livestrong style bracelets and rainbow beads passed out by companies trying to cater to the LGBTQ community. Although I was looking pretty fly, I couldn’t help thinking about this nagging feeling in the back of my mind. I was ashamed of myself for buying into “looking gay” and I felt a little lost in the celebration, since I kept having to remind 19

myself that I’M NOT ACTUALLY GAY. Although I feel great and validated when other men check me out, I’m not about to ask a guy for his digits. And I didn’t feel comfortable even looking at women I found attractive, because I didn’t want to invade a safe space for women who are not interested in men. I’m sure plenty of those women were bi or pan or queer, but that’s not something you can know without asking.

I am an incredibly proud member of the LGBTQ community, but I wasn’t there to celebrate my sexuality.

I was just as excited to yell about the death of DOMA with everyone, but my personal celebration was that I could finally take my shirt off and be read as male and just be me.

Pride can be tough for trans* people and non-binary people. Since we are the minority within the minority, not everyone is as educated on transgender issues as they should be. Trans* people who are pre-hormone therapy experience identity erasure, with people assuming trans men or masculine leaning non-binary people must just be butch lesbians, and that trans women must be drag queens. I could also count on one hand the amount of times I saw the transgender flag or mention of the full word “transgender” not just lumped thoughtlessly into the LGBT soup acronym.

While transgender inclusion is definitely on the upswing, the LGBTQ community as a whole still has to do a lot of work to achieve true equality for EVERYONE, not just to gain marriage rights for two people with the same set of genitalia. While talking about marriage equality should be a part of pride, it should not be the only part, especially in NYC, the home of the Stonewall Inn and the riots that sparked the gay liberation movement in 1969. One of the most prominent members of the riots was Sylvia Rivera, a transgender activist who went on to speak for transgender inclusion in the queer community. Her work needs to continue to be done.

Trans* inclusion goes beyond tiny issues like me feeling like I have to “look gay” to be a part of pride. Trans* healthcare, youth bullying, suicide rates and murders, and legal restrictions on gender markers are just some of the things that need way more attention in queer activism. The rainbow beads from a bank branch I don’t use and the Magnum condoms I got for free but will never need aren’t going to help any of that. Let’s start more conversations about these things and make changes that will save people’s lives. That is something we could be proud of.

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William Wednesday 11 Navigation Edition I’m writing this week’s William Wednesday from the passenger seat of my friend KJ’s SUV en route to his college in Tampa, FL, smelling like a dad (Speed Stick is the only travel sized deodorant I have, and I’m afraid to bring any toiletries larger than a jumbo shrimp on the plane ride home). We’ve tried to combine the fact that we are on road trip and we are “bros” and dub the trip the “bro-ad” trip, but we decided any way we tried to spell that, it would look like “broad” trip, which is distinctly incorrect. Little does KJ know, as he sings the soprano parts of the show tunes we’re listening to in the car, I am reflecting on the concepts of masculinity and existing in “male only spaces” as a trans man.

This summer I got to spend a lot more time around cisgender men, especially in groups, than I ever did in college or high school. When I started as a freshman at Ithaca, I wasn’t out as trans yet, so I had a female roommate and lived on all- girls floors in the dorms. That gym socks-mixed-with-weed smell of boy’s dorm hallways was only something I experienced by accident while walking to friends’ rooms, not my personal residence. Even after moving off campus, I mainly lived with women, save for two other guys that my exgirlfriend and I shared an apartment with. I’m not usually immersed in solely male company in a group for, except at band practice. But playing guitar for three hours is more about music and less about “male bonding.”

Now, as a trans man who is post-op and over a year on testosterone, the men I hang out with are starting to

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forget that there is one slight difference between us, and I’ve been able to have the most authentic male bonding experience of my life, and a lot more dick jokes that I can’t participate in and don’t understand.

Hanging out with cis guys has introduced me to some social situations between men that I didn’t even know existed; for example, men’s public bathrooms. True, I’ve been using them for the past two years, but rarely at the same time as friends. I usually make a point of going to the bathroom by myself, wanting to avoid the awkwardness of reminding my guy friends that I will not be joining them at the urinals.

The first time KJ and I went to a public bathroom at the same time this summer, we were in the midst of a conversation. As I approached the stall I was planning on using, I waited to go in while KJ finished his sentence. “You can keep walking. I know where you’re going, and you can still hear me talking,” he teased as he continued to head towards the urinals. Oh…I thought to myself. I realized I had no idea if it was socially acceptable to have a casual conversation with another guy while you’re holding your penis.

Another example of discovering a new part of existing in male spaces was the first time I went to hug a guy shirtless. I was swimming in the gorges in Ithaca with my friend Sam, so naturally, neither of us had shirts on.

When we were about to part ways, we went in to hug each other, and I hesitated. “Oh, is this a thing? Do men do this? Is it weird?” I asked. I realized that every time I have touched another person’s chest with bare skin, it had been in an intimate, sexual situation. I had no idea what guy-to-guy protocol was on naked bodies platonically touching.

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“It’s only weird if you make it weird,” Sam answered, completing the hug.

As I navigate new situations with other men based on this unwritten set of rules I previously had no knowledge of, it’s clear that so much of “guy code” is stuff made up based on societal expectations of masculinity. Luckily, I am fortunate enough to be friends with a lot of educated, socially aware men who don’t’ think it’s “gay” to hug shirtless, because even if that was the case, they wouldn’t see that as a bad thing. I feel good existing in a world where on this road trip, KJ can talk to me from the urinal because he knows it gives me peeing anxiety and he thinks that’s hilarious, and he can also be the Elphaba to my Fiyero as we belt “Wicked” down I-95 South.

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William Wednesday 12 Fashionista Edition Clothes shopping can be a pain in the ass for a lot of people. The lines, the nagging guilt in the back of your mind about the money you’re spending, and the haunting smell of soft pretzels in the air can all be a headache if you don’t have a game plan or a compatible shopping buddy. But trying to shop for new clothes as a transgender person, especially pre-hormones and presurgery can be a real nightmare.

I remember a couple of years ago having a major problem trying to shop at the Gap. I had made the trek from Ithaca to the Syracuse mall with some of my friends, hoping to expand my menswear wardrobe. I had only come out as trans a couple months before that, and a lot of my dress clothes were still technically women’s, despite the fact that my style had been button downs and loose jeans for a couple of years. I tried not to let the label of “women’s” clothes bother me. I wanted to believe that a button down was a button down, and was genderless.

But women’s shirts had too much space in the chest when I was wearing my binder (which was always), and the sides were cut in a way that attempted to accentuate the curves I wanted so desperately to hide. If I wanted to pass as male, I needed some new threads.

Once my friends and I set foot in the Gap, I found a treasure trove of clothes that perfectly suited

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my style. Plaid button down dress shirts, v-neck t-tees, and cardigans with those trendy elbow patches were just waiting for me to take them home. As my friends wandered off to the women’s section to shop, I gathered some items to take into the dressing room, excited to finally wear the clothes I thought were meant for me.

Although I did avoid the problem of gendered fitting rooms, as the Gap only had one long row of unisex stalls, I quickly got annoyed with the clothes I had chosen to try on. I started with the dress shirts, as I was most excited about looking incredibly dapper. Unfortunately, there is nothing dapper about sleeves that extend all the way to the tip of your thumb, and a torso so long you could wear the shirt without pants and have it pass as a short dress.

I had the same problem with every button down I had picked out, despite the fact that they were the smallest size the store had to offer.

Frustrated, I decided to move on to the t-shirts. As soon as I pulled the soft, overpriced cotton over my head, I realized that the “V” of the v-neck was too low and that my binder was showing. It wasn’t even one of those INCREDIBLY deep v-necks that only assholes wear. [Editor’s note: I am one of those assholes.] The binder showing reminded me of that early 2000’s, v-neck and camisole look that all the girls in my eighth grade class used to wear. Not wanting to look like an eighth grade girl or give away the fact that I was binding, I tossed the t-shirts to the side as well.

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I continued to try on clothes with no luck. The cardigans were too baggy. The pants had too much extra room in the crotch area. The polos made me look like a dad on vacation. By the time my friends found me, it had been almost half an hour of getting rejected by every piece of clothing that was supposed to be validating my identity. So much of what makes menswear work is the correct fit and cut for your body type, and I hated that there was nothing for me. I was actually almost in tears over clothes.

The more time I spent shopping, the more I realized that some stores just wouldn’t work very well for my body, the same way that they wouldn’t work well for cisgender men with small frames. I’ve since learned that there are some stores, like H&M, who both run smaller than the Gap, and carry a size extra small, though that is a little TOO small for me, personally. There are also other options for trans men, like shopping in the boys’ section of stores, instead of the adult men’s section, especially if you have shorter legs.

Being post-op and over one year on testosterone has made it easier to work with things like super low v-necks and tank tops, but I still struggle to find pants that don’t drag on the floor, and have to be careful about the cut of the dress shirts I buy. I keep hoping that I’ll grow a couple inches and that it will solve all my problems, but as testosterone won’t help me with that, I will have to focus on being the most dapper 5’5” trans man I can be.

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William Wednesday 13 Not-So-Golden Showers Edition

As someone who started to transition at the beginning of my junior year of college, I avoided most of the more complicated aspects of gendered dorm life that many other young transgender people have to deal with. By the time I came out, I was living in apartments with girlfriends and shared one unisex bathroom with roommates of various genders. I never had to deal with being placed in a single gender hall that didn’t match my identity (although Ithaca College has a transgender housing policy that lets you be placed wherever you want, regardless of your legal gender marker – other colleges, get on that). However, I recently started dating a really awesome girl who is still in college and lives in a dorm, and it has opened my eyes to how stressful and sometimes scary it can be to try to navigate these gendered college spaces as a trans* person who is trying not to out themselves.

When I walk down the hallway of my girlfriend’s all-girls floor and down the stairs to the boy’s floor, the atmosphere instantly changes. The girls’ closed doors with whiteboards that say things like, “Grace and Chloe <3” or “Room 218 is Sexy!” turn immediately into the boys’ opened doors with visible TVs playing sports or Halo, and everything smells faintly of gym socks and weed. (Disclaimer: not all girls have signs on their door, not all boys have TVs in their rooms, “not everyone smokes weed.” I am aware these are generalizations, they just happen to be the vast majority in this particular experience).

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Luckily, going to the bathroom is not very stressful at this college. There are five stalls and no urinals, so I don’t feel the pressure of “what if these guys start to notice over time that I never stand to pee?” However, what I have found to cause me so much anxiety that it has left me close to tears is attempting to shower when there is even one other guy in the bathroom. This sounds like an exaggeration, but for some reason, when I’m trapped inside that tiny shower stall that is not even large enough to stretch my arm out all the way, all I can think about is what would happen if ONE douchebag guy thought it would be a funny idea to open the curtains on everyone who was showering. Does that happen? I have no idea. I have no experience in all male shower situations. I know men walk around naked in locker rooms. I have a feeling many seventeen to nineteen-year-old college guys are still too insecure about their bodies to be showing off their junk. But whether or not I acknowledge that intellectually, the entirety of my shower ends up being me hastily rubbing my Old Spice body wash over my overly-bent limbs as I replay scenes from Boys Don’t Cry in my head.

I want to feel silly reacting so strongly, and probably unnecessarily. But some of the conversations I overhear while there are a few guys showering at once don’t exactly make me think I’m in the most queer-friendly space. For example: Bro Number 1: My dick is sore!

Bro Number 2: Don’t tell me that, homo.

Bro Number 1: Who else am I gonna tell, my mom?

Here’s another gem from last weekend: 29

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Bro Number 1: Why is everyone showering right now?

Bro Number 2: Shower party!

Bro Number 1: Who am I talking to?

Bro Number 2: Tom. Bro Number 1: Who’s Tom? Bro Number 3: You know Tom! Pussy face Tom! I don’t even know what that means, but I know I am bothered by it.

My second favorite terrifying thing about showering in the shared bathroom space is the “privacy curtains” this college has installed. I use the term privacy loosely, as the curtains are too small to cover the entirety of the mini-changing area outside the shower stall. You can either pull it all the way to one side, and have about two inches of open area on the other side, or have it directly in the middle and have about an inch open on BOTH sides. Obviously, neither of these are ideal if other guys are walking around and have a wandering eye, so after my shower, I just try to put my clothes on in that tiny, wet shower cubical.

I definitely have it a lot easier than many trans guys trying to just get their bodies clean in public bathroom spaces. I’ve had top surgery, so I can walk around in just a towel, like the rest of the guys on the floor, and I feel like it helps me blend in. I’m usually not very picky about being stealth, but when I feel like it’s something that could be a safety issue, being “one of the guys” becomes very important to me. Even now as I’m writing this, I’m thinking about the friends of my 31

girlfriend who have recently added me on Facebook who didn’t previously know that I’m trans, and wondering if that’s going to change how I interact with them. If you’re one of those people and you’re reading this now, hello, welcome to my internet life – you should see how queer my tumblr is. Yes, I am actually straight. Please stay away from me in the shower.

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William Wednesday 14 Working Man Edition As of this past weekend, I have finally joined the rest of post-graduate society and am officially employed! This means that I will be tackling the same question many working transgender people are faced with – to disclose or not to disclose their trans* status. This isn’t always an option for everyone.

Trans people who haven’t gotten the opportunity to change their name and gender marker on their IDs are either out-ed by default, or are forced to exist in the gender that coincides with their gender marker, instead of the one they identify as. Luckily, my license has the correct name and that shiny new “M” on it, and I have been on testosterone for over a year, so passing isn’t really a concern anymore, to the point where I don’t consider it “passing” as much as just existing as male. This means I am lucky enough to be stealth at work, should I choose to do so.

The last time I had a retail job, I chose to keep my trans status to myself. For about half a year I worked at Sears, which luckily has a non-discrimination policy that includes gender identity. I hadn’t started testosterone or had surgery when I applied, so my gender marker was still incorrect on my license. The only person who knew I was trans was the Human Resources woman who I had my first interview with, but she was a fantastic lady who liked to talk about musical theatre with me, and she never told anyone, and never even discussed it with me. For all I know, she could have not even looked at the gender marker on her photocopy of my ID, and never have known.

When I look back at photos of myself from the time period when I started working at Sears, I am actually shocked that no one knew. My baby face and pre-pubescent-sounding voice should have given me away, but instead, everyone just had a hard time believing I was in my senior year of college, and not my senior year of high school. When I started T in August, I was paranoid people would notice my voice starting to drop and my beard coming in fuller. Luckily, I was working almost 30 hours a week (despite my begging for less because I was, you know, taking eight classes and juggling rehearsals for my musical and other various performances), so my coworkers saw me almost every day. Just as it’s hard for me to recognize my own changes when I see myself in the mirror every day, no one ever 33

noticed. A few times someone would ask me if I was getting a cold, or if I had been working out a lot, to which I always said yes, but that was it.

Eventually, I got close enough to one coworker that I actually started feeling guilty that she didn’t know I was trans. I know you never “owe” anyone that type of personal information, but it IS a big part of my life. I feel that for anyone to really know me entirely, it’s a fact that’s relevant to my history and my identity that they should be aware of. So after a couple weeks of dropping hints that I had something to tell my coworker, and that I was not planning on telling anyone else I finally disclosed that I was trans, and she was totally cool about it. I did end up telling one other person at Sears, but that was because by coincidence, another trans guy started working there. My irrational desire to be friends with every trans person ever was too strong to not out myself in that case.

The one great thing about being stealth when I was working at Sears was how validated I felt every day. There was no asterisk when people asked for my opinion “as a guy.” The one time a girl told me I was a “unicorn man” because I was “the one actually nice guy she had ever met,” she didn’t mean, “because you’re not actually a dude.” Girls would call me their work husband. Between writing these William Wednesday pieces, running a trans*/queer/selfie heavy blog, and constantly talking to people who are dealing with gender identity issues, I devote a lot of my time to actively being a transman.

Although I really love doing this, and it’s a very important part of my life, it’s nice for a brief, few hour shift at an unsuspecting workplace to just leave it all behind and be just some dude for a hot second.

So here I find myself, about to start working at a new place with an entirely clean slate, and getting to actually choose what I tell people about myself for once. I look forward to the Facebook friend requests I will ignore, as I have learned that adding people on Facebook is the fastest way to out myself. Hopefully in the course of this new job, I will meet some more people who I like and trust enough to tell them about my history, but for now I am just looking forward to the opportunity to just be a guy, no questions asked. Oh, and also not being a broke New Yorker.

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William Wednesday 15 “ Nope, Got ‘ Em All Cut” Edition Since I’m a trans man, and a very curly haired one at that, I had been putting off going to an actual barber for quite some time. Not that I don’t love the haircuts from the women at salons I’ve gone to (especially Lindsey - miss you, girl, but I’m in the big city now), but there’s something manly and validating about sitting in a chair while I guy has a giant razor at your neck, sculpting your beard. I had always heard horror stories (but not Sweeney Todd type horror stories) about barbers ALWAYS cutting hair too short. Since I have the luscious curls of a Jonas brother, I was afraid to go to someone who would hack it all off. But since I’m living in a new place and needed someone new to cut my hair anyway, I decided to give the barbershop a shot.

Feeling great about my first MAN’S CUT, I first took a manly look around Yelp to find the closest, cheapest barber I could find. I acknowledge that you get what you pay for, but I’m living on a tight budget right now. I found one about 25 blocks away that had great reviews, a wet shave, and was only $12. I power walked all the way there, only to find that Yelp had led me astray, because it was actually FOURTEEN DOLLARS. I’m sad to admit that I didn’t have enough cash in my wallet to be able to tip the guy afterwards, so I turned around and decided to look for a different $12 hair cut.

I finally found one that was in my price range, and sat down to wait while the barber finished up another guy’s hair. They were silent, which was very different than when I used to get my hair cut in Colchester or Ithaca. My hairdressers knew more about my life than some of my peers. But I had noticed one review on Yelp about a different barber shop that said something like, “No unnecessary talking – guy just cuts your hair in peace and quiet like it should be.” As someone who talks a LOT, I thought that was weird, but was ready to accept it to get the TRUE MANLY BARBER SHOP EXPERIENCE, if that’s what it entailed.

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However, the second I got into the chair for my haircut, the guy started blabbing away and asking me a million questions. First it was just polite things like, “Are you new to this area? Where are you from originally? Do you have roommates?” Then the atmosphere quickly turned and the questions became more like, “Do you live with girls? How old are they? Are they single?” I explained that both of my roommates were in long distance relationships, and he instructed me to let him know if they became available. REALLY BUDDY? BECAUSE YOU HAVEN’T EVEN SEEN THEM, NEVERMIND TALKED TO THEM. YOU LITERALLY JUST KNOW THAT THEY ARE WOMEN. Already uncomfortable, he then asked me if I “hear the moaning at night.” Not wanting to go any farther, I just said no, but he then clarified, “Sometimes when the man is not present, the woman touch the clitoris.” THAT IS A DIRECT QUOTE. Not wanting to go into how inappropriate and also heterosexist that was since he had a BLADE AT MY FACE, I kind of laughed it off and said no and steered the conversation in a different direction. So much for men not talking at the barbershop, according to that one Yelp reviewer. This guy was talking as if we were already best bros. Best SEXIST bros.

He went on to say some more inappropriate things, like when I told him my girlfriend was 19 and still in college he said, “Hey, the younger the better, right?” WRONG, RAFAEL, WRONG, AND THERE’S ONLY A TWO-YEAR AGE DIFFERENCE ANYWAY. He then badgered me to write him a review on Yelp, which I lied and said I would, just to get him to shut up. He also messed up my side burns, after telling me that cutting them along my jaw line was “gangster,” and just squared them off right above my ear instead. I watched literally years worth of facial hair growth and sculpting fall to the tile floor. RIP. What I’ve noticed as I’m navigating the world being stealth in a lot of new places in the city is that a lot of men talk to me like this. Not knowing my history, or the fact that I am a raging feminist, they talk about women in derogatory ways and expect me to laugh along with them. It makes me super uncomfortable. I’m not just gonna play along in order to fit in with a few asshole cis guys. I made a vow to myself that I would get better at standing up for my morals in situations like that, as long as the other guy doesn’t have a blade to my face.

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William Wednesday 16 Forget Me Not Edition In ten days I’ll be one year and three months on testosterone, and sometimes I forget. I mean, I don’t forget to fill a syringe with my magical puberty juice and find a friend to stick a needle in my butt every other week. And I definitely won’t forget how hectic it was having to run around New York City looking for a pharmacy with testosterone, because the type I used to take (testosterone enanthate) is now on backorder and impossible to find, and my insurance didn’t cover the switch to the other type (testosterone cypionate) and I had to pay way more than usual out of pocket for the hormones my body should be taking care of by itself. I’ll never forget that fear of wondering how I could possibly function if I couldn’t take testosterone anymore, and if parts of my second puberty were to reverse. My hormones don’t define me, but they definitely don’t hurt.

I don’t forget about my trans status when my girlfriend’s friends are talking about having to pay for birth control and I say, “Luckily I come with free birth control, HEYOOO!” and high five my girlfriend, and I act like it’s a gift while it simultaneously kills me that I can never use my own body to start a family. However, I do know that family does not always mean blood relation, and that it doesn’t make you a “more real” part of a family than someone who’s adopted. My own brother is adopted and is as much a part of my family as I am. He’s just a little more tan.

I don’t forget about being trans when I’m at work with a bunch of male coworkers who are joking around about fighting each other and they say that “below the belt shots are off limits,” and I laugh nervously and feign a look to convey, “Yes, I know exactly how much that hurts.” But I don’t laugh when they make jokes about women’s rights or feminism, or attempt to put each other down by calling each other gay.

I am at a weird place in my life where I simultaneously want to embrace my transgender identity, because it is so relevant to my history and because I feel like it’s my duty to educate people and be a resource, but I also want to be living the life of a 20-something cisgender guy who has to worry about buying condoms, not his chemical makeup. I feel both out of place and like everyone else. I miss the queer community when I 37

don’t have other queer people to talk to on a regular basis, yet when I’m at queer events I feel like I’m on the outskirts, and that my issues are irrelevant to cis queer people. I am either assumed to be a gay cis guy, or I just get asked a million questions about transgender issues, as if I’m a representative for the entire trans community (No, I will not give you my birth name. No, I will not discuss how I have sex with you. Yes, I will talk to your friend who is struggling with their gender identity, here’s my phone number).

So what is there to ground me when I am constantly reminded of my “otherness,” and feel out of place in a lot of different groups? Thanks to where I am in my transition, for the first time in my life I feel like I can actually validate myself.

When I say that sometimes “I forget” that I’m transgender, I mean I can confidently walk out of the shower shirtless, with just a towel around my waist, and not think twice about it. It means I can attempt to grow in the rough, patchy hair on the side of my face for No Shave November and feel like every other guy that doesn’t have a perfectly sculpted mountain man beard. I can make my music and sing with my newly settled, dropped voice, and not be paranoid about people thinking I’m a girl singing.

Having a complex relationship with my gender history doesn’t mean that I have to have a complex relationship with my identity now. I am proud to be someone’s son, someone’s boyfriend, someone’s nephew, someone’s male coworker, and someone’s trans mentor. I like that I am not “passing,” and that I just exist as me. As my best friend frequently says about me, I’m “just a dude living a dude’s life.” This dude just happens to also be transgender.

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William Wednesday 18 No-Shave November Edition In honor of No Shave November, I decided to write this week’s William Wednesday on a topic that a lot of trans* guys think about year round: beards, or more specifically, why is my perfect dream beard taking so freaking long to grow on my face? Being Armenian and Portuguese (read: a really hairy dude), I have been pretty lucky with my facial hair. My relationship with my beard dates way back to before I had started testosterone, and even before I knew I was transgender.

Many 90’s kids incessantly whine that “Disney gave them unrealistic expectations about love.” While I have nothing to complain about in that department, I did grow up through the 90’s with my dad giving me unrealistic expectations about beards. Since I can remember, my dad has had this perfect, full, salt and pepper beard (although recently it’s been mainly salt. Sorry, dad). As a kid I would watch my dad trim it to sculpted perfection, which I attempted to recreate on myself with face paint on Halloween with such classic costumes as Joey Fatone from N*Sync at around age ten, and a few years later, the vague costume of “a film director” who sported a goatee.

It wasn’t long after that that I got my wish, and I started to see some dark hairs sprouting on my upper lip. This was around the same time that a couple of girls on my soccer team had noticed my thick patches of armpit hair while I was wearing a tank top at one particularly hot summer practice and laughed at me. Just as I had reluctantly shaved that off to ward off their jokes, I knew my mustache hairs were the next to go, despite years of feeling like they belonged on my face.

As a thirteen-year-old human who people perceived to be a girl, shaving my face with a razor was not really something I thought was a possibility. I thought that was only for dads. Instead, my mom bought me this goopy, white cream that I had to put on my face to sizzle off my facial hair in ten minutes. Now, anyone who has ever used these hair removal creams knows that it is just a 39

law of nature that if you put that gunk on your face, someone will need to talk to you in that short period of time. You will have to either answer the door or talk to a family member or housemate while you attempt to casually, but unsuccessfully hide your face and your white goop mustache-killing-mustache.

Not only that, but the facial hair remover left this weird smell and burning, tingly feeling for a while that just reminded you all day of the deed that had been done. Mustachicide.

When I started college, my mom offered me a new solution to my fuzzy face: laser hair removal treatment. For those of you unfamiliar, this is an extremely uncomfortable process that involves zapping your hair follicles with concentrated blasts of radiation. I learned later that this is the same procedure many transgender women go through to remove facial hair permanently. I believe I went to about four or five painful sessions (which barely worked on my dark hair/tan skin combo) before calling it quits.

In my post-laser removal, pre-transition life, I started dry shaving my mustache and chin with one of those dainty pastel razors that I think my mom bought for me to make me feel better about the fact that I had a mustache and beard. However, as I started to question my gender identity the summer before my junior year of college, I decided to stop shaving altogether: my legs, my armpits, my happy trail, and my chin. I was dating someone who hated mustaches, so I kept that at bay for a while longer. By the middle of my junior year, I had given all those pastel razors to my girlfriend, and I was sporting a tiny, scraggly goatee that gave me just enough shade under my chin to help me pass before I started testosterone.

After starting testosterone, I started to see some gradual changes in my facial hair. It began to fill in and became coarser, and my mustache, goatee, and sideburns started to inch their borders towards each other, trying to come together to become one full beard. Even now at one year and three months on testosterone, my facial hair is not yet at the level of greatness of my dadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beard that I grew up dreaming of having for my own. However, I have recently gotten to start experimenting with different tools for facial hair maintenance and sculpting: the wet shave, the electric razor, and even the old school blade at the barbershop. Â 40Â

Although I understand intellectually the thickness of my beard and style of my facial hair doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have anything to do with my identity as a man, it has definitely made me feel better in times when I felt down about my gender, especially pre-testosterone. Now, as someone just existing as male in the world, the fact that I can casually participate in something silly like No-Shave-November makes me feel like a regular dude, for once.

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William Wednesday 19 Preemptive New Year Edition As 2013 comes to an end, and the threat of pretending to pick a New Year’s resolution draws ever closer, a lot of people have started to do some selfreflecting. One life’s most frequently asked unanswerable questions is “why are we here?” I think that one of the ways human beings motivate themselves to keep moving forward, even without a verified answer to that question, is by measuring how far they have come. I happen to be a master at this, as I have spent the past two and a half years of my life marking my milestones to keep myself going through my transition. In the spirit of the New Year, I have been thinking a lot about where I was a year ago at this time of year, and how far my transition has brought me.

A year ago, I was still in college. I was almost four months on testosterone, and I had just celebrated my twenty-first birthday over the weekend. I was living in the leaky, cold basement of a house with two of my best friends. Exactly one year ago today I would have woken up as late as possible, leaving myself only enough time to wrestle with my binder and make sure everything looked as flat as possible before running out the door and driving up the hill in my mini van to get to class.

I would have started my day in Choral Conducting, where

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I may have been filmed in order to study my posture and form, and learn what had to be worked on to make myself a better conductor. In reality, I think I watched those videos more to compare how different I looked in each of them due to the testosterone changes (sorry, Dr. Galván).

I would have gone to chorus, where I was still standing right on the border of the alto 2’s and the tenor 1’s. I was frustrated because I couldn’t sing some of the lowest tenor notes, and I was afraid I was sounding like a girl on the higher parts. In the evening I would have either been suffering through one of my last shifts at Sears, where I had just come out to a coworker who I found out was also trans, or I would have been running off to rehearsal for the second performance of my musical, The Lesbian Fairytale Musical. I would have argued with my ex over whose house I was sleeping at that night, crammed in some homework, shimmied out of my binder, and went to bed.

It’s actually pretty startling to think about how much can actually change in a year, regardless of if I’m focusing on the changes that have been due to my transition or not. Today I woke up in my apartment in the city I have always dreamed of living in. I set my alarm early enough to have time to make coffee and get some things done before being at work all day. I walked shirtless to the kitchen without needing to put on a binder, because there is nothing there to bind. This evening I had a band practice with one of my old roommates, and didn’t worry

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about sounding like a girl when I sing, because I couldn’t hit a large portion of the notes in most of my older songs even if I wanted to. If you’d had told me I was gonna be a tenor 2/baritone a year ago, I would have squealed (and probably cracked my voice) with joy.

None of us know where we’re going to be in a year. I was worrying about passing as male and finishing my school work and pleasing people who aren’t even in my life anymore. Now I’m worrying about finding a job more related to my field and being able to keep in contact with my friends and what time I have to be home to feed my kittens.

If you’re trans*, or anyone really, and you’re in a tough place this holiday season, I am begging you to stick it out. I know how tough waking up and feeling like everything feels wrong, down to parts of your body you never even wanted. I always have mixed feelings about the “it gets better” mantra, because I think sometimes we can’t rely on just waiting it out. But no matter who you are, you can make it better, even if it’s not all at once. If you can’t afford top surgery right now, get the best, safest binder you can. If you can’t afford that, buy one of those compression sports bras for fifteen bucks at Target. Surround yourself with people who will love you no matter what your chest looks like when you wake up in the morning. Decide to work out more to change what parts of your body you can

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with or without hormones. Stick with it or decide you’d rather eat chips and salsa and watch New Girl on the couch and don’t judge yourself either way. And if none of that is working, come talk to me, and you’ll at least have one person rooting for you who knows first hand how much life can turn around in a year.

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Want MORE excellent queer and trans stuff? queertips.org Outforhealth.tumblr.com Facebook.com/outforhealth

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Calvin Kasulke, editor & illustra ons William Shishmanian, author ©2014 queer ps.org ou orhealth.tumblr.com facebook.com/ou orhealth

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