There is an imposter in the bathroom…..
Being trans is one weird motherfucking ride.
I don’t know if I am alone here, but I have more than just an internal dialogue. I have a little internal sim. There is a Little Kari in my mind. Not quite like that little guy in the humanoid mech suit in the Men in Black. More like a little avatar I imagine doing me stuff. Okay, Little Kari has wider hips and a flat tummy but other than that she is a dead ringer. Oh wait, she also splurged for that pedi last week so she has cute toes.
Anyways
Little Kari is how I imagine myself doing things, having conversations and monologuing. The trick is that Little Kari has always been there and always been a girl.
When I was rock climbing hardcore, way back before I came out or even accepted myself as trans. It was Little Kari who I saw in my mind when I was composing the movements and tying them together for a route.
It did kinda freak me out a little. No matter how hard I tried or how hard I begged, I could never imagine myself as male.
Little Kari was always there.
In fact, I couldn’t even imagine myself as a dude at any time. It got to the point when I did something cool, in my mind Little Kari was there to say “Not bad for a girl”.
Okay cis people, I will answer your pervy sex questions because cis people always have pervy sex questions. I used to imagine myself as femme with a strapon. Happy?
The point is that at no point have I ever thought of myself as male. Not even imagined I was male. There was however a very limited little place I sometimes manifested as male, in dreams. It’s strange, just there could I see myself as male and it always left me feeling uneasy.
Jumping forward to today. I have been out for around five years. Three of those years on HRT and one and a half post orchiectomy. I have a few T-shirts and a jacket that have managed to soldier on from my pre-transition days. For the most part though, my wardrobe is all femme. I am a bit of a slob so it’s more femme T-shirts and jeans. I am legally a woman and at work I am stealth. Most days I forget I am trans. I am just Kari, the girl with a weirdo deep voice and a sneaker purchasing habit.
However, every once in a while I will have a dream where I appear male. Those dreams are absolute nightmares. Not because of the contents of the dream. But because when I wake up, a big fat dose of imposter syndrome will be waiting for me.
For the next few days I am going to feel like my subconscious has spoken and sent me the message that I am not trans. It’s told me loud and clear I am a dude. Sometimes that little moment when I put on perfume in the morning can kick me out of it. More often than not though, just trying to dress femme or doing femme things is going to make me feel like I am lying.
It’s unpleasant.
It’s in those moments that I think of detransition. Sometimes I look in the mirror and this insidious little thing in trans people surfaces. It’s the eye for detail you develop to judge your appearance. It’s the thing that alerts you the pretty girl who clears her throat in that telltale manner that trans girls do. She does it just too often, a small habit, she must be trans. You notice your hairline more closely, you count your throat clearings. You mentally measure your forehead and your hip width.
You slump down and think: I am not fooling anyone.
You collapse into a pile of self loathing misery. Your transition has been pointless and you are just a dude. Your subconscious has spoken.
You are an imposter. A wannabe, not an am or an are.
Except, men are not too thrilled when they grow boobs. Nor are they really happy when healthy testicles are removed. In fact men don’t do what I do and did. There is an ocean between how I understand myself and my body and how a man understands himself.
So maybe I paid my fees at the door and now I am a Legitimate member of the “Even Number Club” (In Denmark, women have even social security numbers, one of my good friends calls being a woman the Even Number Club).
Maybe imposter syndrome is not about who you are at your core. Is it possible that imposter syndrome is not a syndrome but merely internalized transphobia? Is that uncertainty we feel as trans people not more an expression of our internal transphobia. A symptom of all the anti trans flotsam and jetsam that floats past us in this sea of cis supremacy?
Possibly the imposter is not us, but the idea that we need to look cis to be socially acceptable.
I am beginning to think my subconscious is an asshole.
