I'm not ashamed of my love for pumpkin spice lattes, comfortable wool leggings, or oversized sweaters. I know next to nothing about cars and couldn't care less about sports. Video games aren't really my thing. I prefer to sit with a book and a cup of hot tea. Pop music is ok sometimes.
Since I'm a transgender boy, all of these things are used against me. I like sweet lattes, that obviously means I'm really an attention seeking girl. I sometimes wear leggings when lounging around the house, clearly this means something. I don't hate Justin Bieber? I'm a girl, and a young one at that.
I'm held to a different standard. Like every transgender person, I'm looked at with more scrutiny than a cisgender person is. Transgender boys are expected to morph overnight into super masculine men, or else they risk not being boys at all. Transgender girls can never again work on a car, and if they do, they're disgusting fakers.
It's stupid, especially when you consider that gender roles are not biological realities. No one would ever tell a cisgender girl that she can't play video games. It's perfectly fine to tell a transgender girl that, though. Girls can do anything boys can do! That is, unless you're a transgender girl. Then you can only like and do girly things. Sorry.
Gender roles are typically used as a double edged sword in attacks against trans people. On the one hand, trans people are walking stereotypes. Transgender men want nothing more than to live as a lumberjack in the woods, and transgender woman want to be barefoot and pregnant. We're setting gender equality back by shoving women back in the house and man back into the hyper-masculine box. On the other hand, if trans people don't live in a gender fantasy land, like the transgender pageant winner who was stripped of her winnings, we aren't really trans, we're just mentally ill.
It's no wonder that trans people feel like we're in a pressure cooker. One of the transgender men I know says his biggest concern was the fact that he still liked dresses. Shouldn't he, as a man, hate them? Why should he, upon coming out, burn everything feminine he ever liked? He was raised to be a feminine girl, why should he have to wash his hands in the flames of his childhood?
As a little child I collected porcelain dolls. In my room, they sit on the top of the bookshelf, where they've sat since I moved into that room 9 years ago. On occasion, I see a porcelain doll that I love and bring it home with me. I take down all my dolls, I take them off their stands and adjust their clothes and comb their hair. Then, I put them all back up.
Does this make me less of a man?
