Category: Written by Roxanne

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Slipperversary

It was 365 days ago today that I went to a friend’s birthday pyjama party dressed head to toe in pink. I had been taking a low dose of oestrogen for 2 months by then, so I was feeling rather fine, but physical changes visible to others were still a month or two away. The friends that I went to the party with, along with the birthday girl and her boyfriend, were the only people at the party that knew of the path that I had chosen for myself, or that life had chosen for me, depending on your perspective. I was a little bit terrified. My friends were not.

I wore pink winter pyjamas, a fluffy pink dressing gown and fluffy pink slippers (seen below). I was mis-guidedly hoping that my costume would make for me a loud-and-clear non-verbal-statement that didn’t require further explanation. It was my first foray outside my home dressed in feminine clothing. It wasn’t the first time that I had worn feminine clothing outside my house, though that’s a story for another day.

We had been at the party for an hour or two when another friend walked across the balcony towards me, accompanied by her partner. They sat down on chairs adjacent to me. After a few minutes of small talk, my friend offered “So … I wouldn’t have thought that pink would be your colour of choice for pyjamas”. I composed my thoughts and said slowly “I’m transitioning”. She thought for a moment or two, and looked quite puzzled as she said “transitioning to wearing pink?”. I chuckled as I said “No … transitioning to becoming a woman”.

Some of my friends thought the abysmal failure of my loud-and-clear non-verbal-statement was hilarious, which of course it was, but maybe not as hilarious as they thought. It was definitely a lesson for me though: that important messages need to be delivered verbally. Or perhaps in writing.

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Conformity Conshlormity

Society is insistent that you bend to it’s paradigm. We’ve surely all heard that before. We’ve probably all assumed that we are able to resist it’s demands. I certainly thought so. I honestly thought that I had been running my own race all this time, and proudly so. In fact, what I had been doing was just opting out … only engaging when absolutely necessary … operating below the radar. It’s much less stressful to exist this way for sure, but also far less rewarding and much less interesting.

I believe that it is only when you move to break one of society’s taboos that you can truly understand the power of it’s grip. Not so long ago this might have meant divorcing your spouse, or having a child outside marriage, both now widely accepted actions. For many people, challenging the (erroneously) long held belief that there are only two genders by transitioning from one of those genders to the other, or even stepping outside the binary gender construct, remains a taboo. Not only have I had to negotiate society’s predilections for the binary system, I have had to gently prize this framework from my own internal paradigm. That there is a spectrum of gender is now obvious to me.

I haven’t even gone full time as Roxy yet. Sure, I wear a lovely pair of sandals, I’m edging gingerly towards curvy, I sport longer hair than ever before, and my skin is softening delightfully, but I’m still not wearing in public the clothes that I wear at home and when I am with friends. Why? Because I still have some remaining facial hair. Hopefully for not much longer, but it’s still there, glaring back at me in the mirror every morning and every evening.

Society prefers to plonk you into categories. And by categories, I mean well established categories. Not “oh, is that a thing now?” categories, but “yeah, that’s what my nan and pop did!” categories. Society is like a super tanker: it takes ever such a long time to change direction, but changing direction it certainly is.

So parents … please talk to your children about gender diversity. Talk to your children’s friends parents and suggest they talk to their kids about it too. Children … talk to your parents about gender diversity. Tell them all it’s okay to be whoever they are. As long as they aren’t hurting anybody, they can be and love anybody they choose. They can have their coordinated lipstick and beard combinations. They can have their boobs and bow-ties. For you or your kids, it might only mean one less quizzical glance at an occasional passer-by. For that passer-by, having several dozen less strangers stare at them each day over many years might just save their life. Let’s make this a better world for everybody.

Oh, and please read Jacob Tobia’s article too.