A transgender journey: Making space
Juliet Jacques, guardian.co.uk, 27 July 2011
Juliet Jacques learned to deal with heckling in public, but hadn't anticipated the problems with being 'read' as trans on a night out
Pre-transition, I managed my gender difference through careful compartmentalisation. In my teens and early 20s, inferring from the media and my peers that social disapproval could make transsexual living rather complicated at best, I suppressed my "dysphoric" feelings and then disclosed them gradually: first to myself, then friends, more or less in order of how accepting I thought they would be. In other circles, I kept them to myself, reasoning that my family and colleagues (for example) did not yet need to know.
I took a similar approach to presenting as female, starting alone in my bedroom, then moving outwards into places which I understood as safe, and finally doing so everywhere. Verbal and physical disclosure developed a symbiotic relationship: finding on coming out that my internalised fears were not actualised gave me greater confidence to negotiate public spaces as I wished; doing so without encountering the problems that overdramatic documentaries and films had led me to expect made it easier to tell more people, rather than having them see me and then gossip or ask questions.
I began at "trans-friendly" bars (recommended by friends, magazines or websites) but going to these meant lessening control over my disclosure. This led to being outed in my then workplace – which caused no real problem but definitely could have – but as I found myself in more sympathetic jobs and social circles, my psychological barriers fell and I realised that what I'd always wanted was to live as female. Doing so meant telling everyone I knew, potentially affecting my interactions, and radically changing my relationship with the space around me, mainly because I had very limited experience of the unwanted attention that can come with full-time female presentation.
My pre-transitional bar and club outings, and the heckling that occasionally punctuated walks across town to them when I couldn't afford a taxi, suggested the usefulness of "passing" as a strategy against transphobic hostility. This I had expected, but being "read" as trans in other places raised different problems: venues that welcomed trans women also attracted people interested in trans women sexually, who didn't always understand that, whatever my gender, the usual rules about where they could put their hands (for one) did not change. (I was not alone: 64% of the trans women surveyed by the Equalities Review in 2007 reported experience of public sexual harassment.)
Female friends pointed out my naivety and explained what they'd learned in similar situations years earlier. I knew I'd have to learn fast how to handle myself and which areas of my home town were the most tolerant. Fortunately, my relative social privilege made it easy for me to move primarily within safer spaces, and existing connections helped: I was relaxed by the knowledge that a familiar face was usually nearby if anyone took exception to my entering more rigidly gendered spaces, or simply to my presence itself.
Transitioning complicated every aspect of my life: with varying levels of effort needed to normalise them, I prioritised those closest to home. It proved some time before I travelled out of Brighton, where I felt increasingly confident, because I was less sure of how I'd be received in other places that did not have such a large trans community. By this point, I'd decided to stop letting my social interactions be constrained by anxiety, feeling that a combination of self-assured demeanour and inconspicuous attire would mean that I was treated with respect in English villages or European cities, whatever the cultural differences.
As it happened, I was right: I had more trouble getting a taxi in Pulborough than doing anything else (not one reference was made to my gender during a 10-minute lecture about people who come from the cities and just expect to get a cab); entering the 50,000-capacity Stade Vélodrome football stadium amid Olympique de Marseille's notorious "Commando Ultras" unit of hardcore fans, the worst I got was one man, easily ignored, yelling "Monsieur? Madame?"
So it was that I broke the final boundaries I had placed around myself, asking myself as I approached new places: "What's the worst that can happen?" For me, in a comfortable area of a city that prides itself on its open-mindedness, the answer has so far been "very little" – certainly nothing worse than laughter or verbal abuse. But as Viviane K Namaste argues in Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgender People, social interaction is tougher for poorer or marginalised individuals – the Transgender Day of Remembrance list of murder victims includes many people from developing countries, or societies with sharp class divides; these problems are exacerbated by the lack of provision of relevant services, which necessitates sex work, made even more dangerous by official indifference towards or even complicity in transphobic violence.
One effect of NHS funding for gender reassignment is to limit the need for survival sex, if not always eliminating it – my relative ease in accessing this was another spatial privilege for which I was thankful, and made me feel more optimistic about the place of trans people in contemporary Britain. As the EHRC point out, government-collected date on trans people "is virtually nonexistent", but just a quick glance at the Engendered Penalties survey results suggests that there are still plenty of places, here and overseas, where being visibly trans in any form can make life very difficult, giving people far more tangible reasons than I've ever had to live in fear.
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