Transtastic: On Gender Policing by Friends

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Email: transtasticgabe@gmail.com
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About: Gabe is a trans(itioned) man. He's taken T, had top surgery, come out to everyone who could ever want to know and then a few other people, just for kicks. Now he's just another 22 year old guy, who happens to have spent three quarters of that time as a woman. This blog is about his adventures in boyland and toyland, as well as anything else related to being post physical and social transition but still very much trans self-identified.See Authors Posts (29)

I had an interesting and somewhat disconcerting experience this past month. I spent the time backpacking with a friend whom I hadn’t hung out with in years but had known for a long time and been very close with in the past. This time, though, out of nowhere, he started using the word “gay” as an insult and generally taking every opportunity to make clear just how straight he is. My reaction started with shock, moved towards upset, and ended with some self-reflection about what might be going on.

To give some background, T, who is male bodied and identified, and I, who was female identified when T and I met, were good friends in highschool. We went through a lot together, including both of us questioning our sexuality and experimenting some. In his case, he ended up straight, and in my case, I ended up a lesbian, but even then, we bonded over our newly shared love of women. All was well. And, in fact, he seemed generally comfortable at the time with the fact that he’d experimented, though he decided it wasn’t for him ultimately.

So imagine my surprise when T starts saying things are “gay” and, upon being asked what he means, making explicit that he is using “gay” to mean all manner of negative things. And imagine my surprise when he offers to give me a massage, but then promptly revokes it, under the explanation that “that’d be pretty gay.”

Now, at first, I was just plain surprised. I was confused by the fact that this had started apparently out of nowhere. Yeah, those are annoying comments, but I hear them all the time and they don’t get to me all that much anymore. But from a good friend? A friend I’d known since I was 15 and who had been my confidante through thick and thin? I was just plain shocked.

It wasn’t until our last night there that I got a clue to what might be going on. See, we were talking about tattoos, and what and where we might get. I said something about getting one on my hip bone, to which he looked generally dismayed and said “You can’t get a tattoo on your hip! Guys don’t do that.” I looked at him, mildly annoyed, and filled him in on the fact that I’m not super committed to the rules of gender. To this he replied that he was “just providing a healthy level of male socialization.”

Ah, the moment of clarity that hit me a few minutes later. The subject dropped, but it had served its purpose. The piece of him that had changed, I finally realized, wasn’t just about the specific comments he’d been making. It was about the fact that he was suddenly policing my gender in a way that he’d never done before. Maybe it’s that two years had passed since we last hung out, and previously, I’d had 2 years less testosterone in my body and therefore was less obviously masculine. Maybe it was that two years of male socialization had had their effect on me, and I walked, talked and joked in ways that were more clearly masculine than before. Or maybe it’s just that he’d changed, and come to see me more as a guy friend than as whatever he’d seen me as before.

Whatever it was, T had decided that I was a man, and therefore believed I was interested in his feedback on how best to be a Real Man. He didn’t seem to understand that I was far past that stage of my gender development. Yeah, there was a time when I was looking for tips on how to pass. But that time is long past. Now I’m in a place where I construct my masculinity actively, and usually with disdain for many of the standards upheld by college aged men.

It was a sobering moment for me because I’d never considered that friendships might suffer as people accepted me as a man. And no, I haven’t given up on T’s friendship yet—we’ve been friends too long for me to give up on it without at least talking to him—but I feel fairly confident that it’ll take a real conversation now, and real effort on his part, to curb this instinct to socialize me into “appropriate” male behavior. Ironic, isn’t it? I spent a long time dreaming of the day when all the people in my life saw me as wholly male, without ever considering the potential downsides of such perceptions. Luckily for me, though, there are plenty of guys I’m friends with now who see me as male but get that I’m not aspiring to be He-Man. And I’ll just hang out with them until T gets his act together.