The Acceptance Paradox

This is another of those posts that’s been struggling to emerge for some time.  A case of knowing what I want to say but not being able to figure out how to say it or even what point I’m trying to convey.  But then, as she frequently does, Kandi came to the rescue, albeit almost certainly unwittingly in her case.

In her post ‘What’s The Point?’ she included the following:

‘We are tied together with a feeling that is still viewed as odd by society. Is it more accepted than many think? Yes, but it still is viewed differently, unlike many other types of behaviors that are now just a fabric of society.’

At this point it’s important to stress that Kandi is a force of nature – not only does she fearlessly step out into society in her feminine persona but she also actually lives a proportion of her life through that persona.  And if any of us need proof that acceptance is there for the taking, we need look no further.  By Kandi’s own admission, no one who meets her is in any doubt about her ‘provenance’ but I would put money on every single person who she encounters leaving her with a more positive view of our community than they had before they met her.

But what about the rest of us who necessarily have to restrict our activities?  My interactions, although growing in number every time I step out are still not plentiful but everyone I have talked to will have had absolutely no doubt about my chromosomal combination. Even so, I like to think that they saw nothing in me that let the side down, so to speak.    And yet on each of those occasions, far more people than just those walked past me or otherwise saw me.  Whilst my uncorrected eyesight is appalling and my hearing is now going the same way, I didn’t see any pointing fingers or double takes or hear any shrieks of ‘get security, that’s a man’!  Now, it goes without saying that I’m not exactly skilled with the makeup brush and a lifetime of testosterone has taken its toll but the fact that I returned unscathed from my outings suggests that, to a reasonable extent, I got things right.  Or to put it another way, I did nothing to bring the trans community into disrepute.  But the truth is that those I directly interacted with have almost certainly seen it all before and nobody else seemed to register that I was anything other than what I apparently was at first glance.

And that’s the paradox.  To win over hearts and minds, we have to be the best that we can possibly be and yet by doing so, we effectively camouflage ourselves & the truth of what lies beneath.  And if people don’t understand who or what we are, how can we win them over?

I could say that it doesn’t matter.  Whether we’re teetering on the cusp of transition or a very occasional CDer, this is something we do to fulfil our own needs, not to be a crusader for the cause.  The decisions whether to go out en femme and, if we do, who we interact with are ours alone and there’s absolutely no imperative for us to take one for the team, so to speak.

And yet it does matter.  In fact given the unease that’s washing through the trans community on both sides of the Atlantic as I write this, it perhaps matters more than ever.

If the world was to end tomorrow and humanity, knowing what was coming, looked back at the highs and lows, our community would probably feel that the glory days were behind us, perhaps a decade or more in the past.  Rid of legislation that made it illegal to impersonate a woman in public in certain places, the efforts of various trans figureheads – Caroline Cossey, April Ashley, Caitlyn Jenner et al – had brought the trans community front and centre in the public eye and laws were being enacted that made it illegal to discriminate against someone because their presentation and lifestyle didn’t match their biological sex.  Trans forums and online meeting places gathered momentum and, at last, we could live our lives in the knowledge that we weren’t alone and the struggles we were enduring were exactly the same as those being experienced by thousands of others around the world.  And for those who decided to step over the gender line for good, hurdles which had previously impeded their progression were being removed and the community flourished.  Back then, we had it all.

But sadly, a small but very vocal cohort decided to carry on pushing.  No longer was acceptance enough and rather than us being expected to conform to society’s expectations of what it means to be female, society was expected to adjust to conform to ours.  Now, I don’t propose to elaborate further on this as I guess that everyone reading this knows what I mean by this and I don’t want to cause unrest here but the reality is that as society saw what was happening, their attitude hardened.  And whilst we know that we’re different to the TikTok radicals provoking misgendering, demanding that we use their ‘neopronouns’ and generally demeaning what it means to be a woman, for much of society, are we seen as one and the same?  Or, from a different perspective, because they’re very visible but we set out to be as invisible as possible, is society jumping to the wrong conclusions about most of us?

And perhaps therein lies another paradox.  How is it that we experience so much respect and acceptance when we venture into society and yet public opinion is seemingly so anti-trans?  Are we dealing with two completely separate populations?  Have we misread one or other point of view?  Is the media lying?  Or could it just be that, as a community as a whole, we see the two sides as irreconcilable and look for a scapegoat as a result?

I’m prepared to stick my neck out here and declare that, to use an analogy, in a Venn diagram where one circle contains those that accept us when we go out and about and the other is those who are increasingly voice their concerns about the whole trans ideology onslaught, the intersection containing people who fall in both camps is huge.  In fact I’ll declare that I’m in that group myself.  A hypocritical stance?  Some would undoubtedly assert that but my response would be to ask why I would not want to put women’s rights front and centre when I aspire to receive acceptance from that sector of society myself?  Why would I want to adopt any position that risks alienating the very people who I rely on to inspire me?  I’m not saying that I agree with every ‘objection’ society throws our way – the whole question of ‘bathroom bills’ has become very messy and needs a solution that doesn’t just require us to use the gents’ under threat of arrest if we don’t – but I’ve come to understand that everyone has limits to their tolerance and providing we stay on the right side of those limits (which in this day and age are pretty liberal in any case), we can live our lives to the full.

And that brings me back to the original paradox – how can we win over people if we camouflage ourselves to the point that most don’t notice us and don’t understand who or what we are?

The truth, of course, is that we can run but we can rarely hide.  The person we walk past in the street may not realise our little secret but the sales assistant we speak to almost certainly will.  And so will the people who are within earshot when we’re talking to her.  Perhaps we will be the first trans person they’ve knowingly encountered close up or maybe they’ve seen so many that it’s nothing new to them.  If it’s a ‘newbie’ seeing someone like us for the first time, I like to think that they’ll walk away with a positive impression and, for the old hands we interact with, we can hope that we do nothing to let the side down.

And that’s the whole point here.  We may not have a platform with wide reach as the celebrity transitioners do, we may not even be out and proud in the local community, seen by thousands as Kandi is and we may just be seeking acceptance one person at a time,  But I’ve seen the smiles, and judging by what I read here day after day, so have all of the other contributors.  And those smiles are not forced because ‘head office’ mandates it, they are the genuine smiles of people who understand that under the surface we’re no different to anyone else and perhaps even appreciate the efforts we have made to be a true representation of who we really are.

And what’s really unbelievable about the whole thing is we’ve managed to achieve all of that without dyeing our hair purple, declaring our pronouns before any interaction has taken place, screaming ‘trans women are women’ at anyone & everyone and threatening cancellation to anyone we feel may be a dissenter.  Just being ourselves was enough.