Code-Switching By Gender
Gender socialization determines how we access the clues
It’s a Friday evening in February, and it’s cold and dark. I am driving around a part of Albuquerque I am not familiar with, and I’m very nervous. What am I doing? Am I crazy? Is this really me? These questions are running around in my head while trying to find address numbers and street names, and there are only a few street lamps. Still, they are not anywhere close to the intersections. I’m trying to read the address and directions I wrote on a post-it note, but they’re challenging to read in the dark. I am looking for a church, a small white building with a steeple. A trans support group meeting is to start soon.
It was 2001, and I had just come to realize that I was probably trans. I was thirty-eight and newly separated from my soon-to-be ex-wife. For thirty years, I struggled with a secret that I never told anyone until the previous December, when I told my wife. I told her that I’d been crossdressing since I was about eight years old. I had been researching online, and from everything I found and read, I was transgender.
I would not have found the church if it weren’t for the steeple that reaches just high enough past the four large trees that camouflage the façade; I would have driven past it. The clock in my car reads 7:15 pm, and the meeting starts…
