What Defines A “Real Woman?”
Can trans people ever find true, unquestioning acceptance, simply as themselves?
A friend of mine — a trans woman I’ll call “Grace,” to protect her privacy — was recently in a conversation with a cis woman friend of hers, who repeatedly used the phrase “a real woman,” in a context that implied Grace isn’t one. Now in its 5th year, Grace’s transition has proceeded as far as HRT (hormone replacement therapy) with testosterone blockers and estrogen, but she has not had any feminizing or gender reassignment surgeries.
She might never have any; that is her choice to make, and she doesn’t feel a pressing need to have any gender transition surgeries at the moment.
Now, Grace is about 20 years younger than I am, and by anyone’s standards, I would say that she is drop-dead beautiful, even with no makeup, in grubby clothes for gardening or housework, and showing her own not-very-long hair instead of the much longer wigs she wears most of the time.
But what makes a woman? Does it take being born with an “X” chromosome? Or is it a requirement that we arrive in the world equipped with ovaries and a uterus? If so, I guess we M-to-F transgender persons are forever doomed to second-class status in the perception of trans-exclusionary people.
At least for however much time I am likely to have on this Earth (I was born in 1956, you do the math), there will almost certainly not be any way for a geneticist to clone a female reproductive tract for me in a laboratory, or any fully developed and tested surgical procedure available to install those “parts” inside of me even if they were available. Besides which, at my age, I’m just a tad past the age of child-bearing, I think.
So what makes me, or my friend Grace, go about claiming to be women?
Since I can’t ever have female “pieces and parts,” there must be something else that makes me think “I am not a guy anymore, assuming I ever really was one in my mind; I am now a woman (or a trans woman, if you prefer).” Without those ovaries, I will have to use estradiol supplied externally for the rest of my life just to maintain my bone density.
Prior to my orchiectomy in September 2018, I had to take spironolactone, an androgen blocking drug, to suppress my testosterone. Then there are my physical attributes, most of which can’t ever be made to look womanly: I’m 6'-2" tall in flats, with the typical broad shoulders, big hands, and narrow pelvic bone of a born-male, and I am a lot bigger in almost every body proportion (except bust size), than most natal women.
I know that I need to lose weight, so speaking of my current 300 pound bulk (which makes me a favorite customer of certain purveyors of plus-size women’s clothing), that weight, at least, I have in my power to do something about. A surgeon could partially correct and feminize the structure of some aspects of my facial appearance, but there’s simply nothing to be done about my shoulders, hands, feet, and the unfeminine ratio of my hip to waist sizes.
As for my voice, it’s a baritone, and while I can soften it and raise the pitch a little, I doubt that I’ll ever be perceived as a woman on phone calls. I get mis-gendered as a guy on just about every phone call I make, even when I clearly state my name as “Laura-Ann” at the beginning of the call.
How about my presentation? My state of mind? My self-perception of who I am?
Ah, now we approach the important core of the matter.
There are times when I feel pretty. For example, when I am getting ready to join some friends for a GNO dinner party. I own some nice clothing, like a knee length knit dress in a dark green and blue pattern that I’m told I look good in, a few two-piece combinations with very nice skirts and blouses, a couple pair of boots with low heels that are very comfortable, and I feel wonderful when I wear a nice outfit.
I own a few dresses, but I only wear them a few times a year; my body proportions are too masculine for me to really rock a dress, especially since my gut is bigger around than my bust, unfortunately. I am mostly a skirt-and-blouse girl; two-piece outfits seem to me to be a little more forgiving of my unfeminine body shape than are dresses. I sometimes receive compliments on my outfits and my makeup — not just from my River City Gems friends, but from random cis women, too.
But those other times, oh Lord, when I don’t feel so pretty: those times, usually in the cold light of morning, when my back is hurting and I feel every minute of my 62 years weighing on me.
When I know that I look like the aftermath of a really bad train wreck, my hair like a bird’s nest that someone just exploded with an M-80 firecracker, my blotchy, worn-out face with no makeup, no jewelry, my nail polish coming off in chunks because I haven’t had a mani/pedi for 5 weeks, and my legs (at least the parts showing under the hem of my skirt) looking like hungry wolverines have been chewing on them because I’m not hiding them under hosiery at the moment.
When I roll out of bed in the morning and make my first visit of the day to my bathroom, I look in the mirror, hairbrush and scrunchy in hand to attempt to tame my wild tangle of hair in a ponytail, and there I am!
What I see can best be described as a “hot mess;” see definition #3 of this term on Urban Dictionary:
“A state of disarray so chaotic that it’s dizzying to look at. A mess that is somewhere way beyond the ‘normal’ range of disarray. Visual clutter that draws attention to itself.”
I stand there in front of the mirror, bleary-eyed and half-awake, my brain in gear but thought processes still not fully on track, as if some internal clutch in my head is slipping a little. What I see isn’t “him” anymore, despite the awful condition I’m in when I first climb out of bed every morning.
But who I see is Laura-Ann — there she is! — and I smile, thinking:
“Wow, I’m still alive, I get one more day to be myself. To appreciate the gifts I have been given, and to love my family, my friends, and myself. To interact with the world as a woman (who happens to be transgender). One more day to hold my beautiful Pauline in my arms and have some cuddle time with her.”
In that moment, it doesn’t matter if I get misgendered on a phone call, or dead-named by someone who has known me for 25 years and is so used to calling me “Larry” that it’s automatic. I know that being misgendered and dead-named by my friends and family isn’t being done with malicious intent, and that even total strangers who do it don’t generally intend to hurt me.
I have a deep male voice that’s stuck somewhere between bass and baritone, and it’s just a fact of life that I’ll be misgendered from time to time because of it.
But what the hell, when I look in that early-morning mirror, I have to smile, because my first thought is almost always:
“Laura-Ann, you look like hell, but you are a happy girl this morning.”
It’s a comforting thought, and maybe that’s all any of us can reasonably ask for: a little self-comfort.
To love myself, at last, and to know — as I approach the start of the 37th month of my HRT next week — that gender transition was the right choice; it was the path I really needed to take, and the joy I live in now is all the justification I need for having turned my life upside down.
If I were to have a conversation like Grace did, with a friend who is unwittingly using language that delegitimizes my womanhood, I hope I will remember these things, and not take umbrage at being called out as “transgender” and therefore “not a real woman.”
Okay, I am not an AFAB (assigned female at birth), cisgender woman, I got that. I will never have ovaries, or a uterus, or ever know what it feels like to give birth to a new human being, or to have a little girl’s childhood experiences of playing with Barbie dolls and tea sets instead of Tonka trucks and cap pistols. (Anyone else remember these?)
But, I had a mostly joyous life as husband to a wonderful woman, now sadly deceased way before she should have left this world, and almost all of what I know about this universe and my place in it, and about people and relationships, came from my life experience as Larry, as the guy that I thought I was.
I would be foolish to reject that life now. I like the way Sabrina Symington, a trans woman and graphic artist in Vancouver, B.C. puts it: “The best parts of the guy I was are still a part of me, and all we had to throw away in our transition was the sadness.” I couldn’t say it better.
If any of you reading this are in the early stages of thinking about transition, and maybe you haven’t started HRT or even gender therapy yet, don’t let other people who may not have your best interests at heart influence you unduly. Only you, yourself, can decide who you are, where you want to go in life, and how you want to get there.
If something inside you is whispering that your assigned sex at birth doesn’t feel right, those are communications from your inner self that you should heed, and spend however much time you need to understand them.
At least consult a gender therapist if you are in any distress about your gender identity. A good therapist will not tell you specifically that you are, or are not, transgender, or gender fluid, or agender; their job is to help you understand who and what you are for yourself, in your own mind, and then to help you make whatever decisions you need to make, yourself.
Transition isn’t necessarily difficult, but it isn’t particularly easy, either. And it can cost an enormous sum of money for the medical services and surgeries if you don’t have good health insurance and are facing having to pay the costs out-of-pocket.
Especially if you are married, and/or have a job in a place that doesn’t provide legal protections to your employment as a transgender person, you will face difficulties; the potential loss of your employment might be just the least dire of these setbacks. But if you look around, you can usually find transgender support resources in the larger towns and cities, and good therapists.
Whatever decisions you arrive at, like whether to transition or not, to have GRS or not, and how/when to let your loved ones know you are trans (if you decide that you are, and you need to transition), then I hope you will find the love and acceptance that I did when I came out. This world is a long way from being a perfect place for anyone who is LGBTQ, but it’s slowly getting better.
And don’t let transphobes give you any flack about who you are: “Trans women are women” — full stop. Doesn’t matter if you’ve had all the gender re-assignment surgeries, or none of them. This isn’t about making yourself into the ideal image of an AFAB (assigned female at birth) woman, it’s about how you feel inside yourself.
If you ever pulled on a dress or a skirt, and felt better about yourself in that moment, or you’ve had an idea that you wish your name was Kimberley instead of Kenneth, JoAnne instead of John, or Rebecca instead of Robert, you should take heed of these thoughts. Maybe you’ve imagined what those names would look like, and feel like, were they on your birth certificate and driver’s license, with an “F” instead of an “M” in the gender tag box.
Or perhaps you’ve thought something like, “I wish I could be less angry and aggressive, and more kind-hearted, gentle-spirited, and open-minded. More like my wife and sister and less like my dudebro schoolmates or co-workers.” Or perhaps you already possess these attributes, and your wife has told you that she appreciates how gentle-spirited you are, as my wife told me many times over the 29 years of our marriage, before she died.
You don’t need anything more than that conviction in your own heart and soul to be “a woman.”
You’ll know it by the happiness you feel when you look into the future and imagine what it will be like to see your true affirmed name and gender on your driver’s license, on mail that gets delivered to you, on your desk or office door nameplate, or in the way you will look at yourself in the bathroom mirror some morning, and simply see a woman even if you have no makeup on, have never had face feminization surgery, and your hair is a wild mess.
I want to leave you with the image of me in the above photo; a selfie I shot on a hike to Upper Yosemite Falls, on a glorious late autumn day, two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2014. I had been widowed for 363 days on the day of this hike, and in the preceding 10 months, my childhood gender dysphoria, which had plagued me from 1962 to 1985, returned in January 2014 after lying mostly dormant and forgotten during the 29 years of my marriage.
The dysphoria had begun small, but it had gradually grown to the point that I was starting to become unsure of who I was. I was spending more and more time at home “en femme,” wearing skirts, blouses, women’s shoes, and pantyhose, and I had begun experimenting with makeup (thank you to all of the YouTube makeup tutorial content providers out there in Internet land!)
Sometime in the 5 weeks following this hike and the next selfie I shot, I was overcome one day with the need to pierce my ears, so that I could start wearing some of the earrings I had inherited from Lynn when she died. I proceeded to do this in my own bathroom with a sharpened embroidery needle and rubbing alcohol. Two months later, after the first piercings healed, I did it again, for a total of four, and to this day I wear one small and one large stainless steel hoop in each earlobe as my everyday earrings.
In early summer 2015, I bought my first breast forms, and then started trying to figure out, by trial and error, what styles and sizes of bras worked best for me, and what would support the weight of the forms without the straps killing my shoulders.
By the summer and autumn of 2015, I was half out of my mind with fear and uncertainty, as I was growing to hate wearing my “guy” clothes, and I sensed that sooner or later, dressing in the house and staying concealed wasn’t going to be enough. I wanted to live in my girl clothes, run errands in them, go grocery shopping in them.
In October 2015, I turned 59. Which marked out 54 years, more or less, since I had first realized that my true name was Laura and that I was a girl. But other than that childhood memory, faded almost to transparency from 5 decades of being forced (by circumstances and other people’s expectations) to live as a male, I had no clue as to why I felt so compelled to wear women’s clothing. Especially considering I might risk losing my daughter if she found out and rejected me.
“Transgender?” What the hell did that have to do with me? And so it went, month after month, starting in mid-December 2013, three weeks after Lynn’s death, when I began shaving off all my body hair (again, without any clue as to why I felt driven to do so), and finally culminating, on Christmas Day 2015, in a real gender crisis that forced me to to seek help.
On the last day of 2015, I joined a support group for transgender women, the River City Gems, and a week later, on the night of January 9th, 2016, I attended my first Gems event, a dinner party in a private home.
There were about thirty transgender women at that party, some with their spouses, and as I circulated around and met people, I was drawn into long conversations with four individuals: one full time, post-op transsexual and her husband, who was a part-time CD (cross-dresser), two other part-time CD’s, one of whom has since transitioned and is now post-op, and the AFAB wife of one of them. These four conversations were to be a nexus point in my life.
By the time I left that party to go home, everything had crystallized: I knew that I was transgender, that all the years of fear and uncertainty had been unnecessary, and that, had I been born 40 years later, I would have found proper gender therapy and transition services while still a child.
I knew that I wasn’t going crazy. I knew that I wasn’t alone, and that I had a dedicated support group at my back to help me through whatever was going to come of this craziness that had engulfed me.
As I left the house that evening at the conclusion of the party, walking back to my car, I kind of knew that I was going to transition. The occasional reconnections with memories of having been a little girl named Laura, for a few minutes on a sunny summer morning in 1961, were nothing more or less than the truth about who I am, trying to force its way through the wall I had built around Laura so long ago.
Good luck to you, whether you’re contemplating what defines a “real woman,” or struggling, like I was, until I encountered a near-suicidal bout of gender dysphoria. It was on June 6th, 2016 — two days after the near-suicidal bout —that I phoned my therapist and committed to transition. And here I am! I hope you find the peace and self-love that I did when I finally accepted the truth about myself.
LAURA-ANN MARIE CHARLOT (she, her) is a retired civil engineering and land survey technician, a native Californian, a transgender woman, a proud parent, and an SJW when need be.
