When I grew my tits, I found my wits: The Transgender spirit in motion.
Maybe my personal tundra is thawing.
The best thing about working on the registers is that time flies.
I’m just another cashier in a long line of them, 15 in all, if not more. An expressionless female voice, the siren of the queue management system, trills my till number so the customer knows they are next. They haul their swollen bags with harried airs, their eyes full of dubious calculations as to what they’ve spent.
Beneath my register lies two switches, black for a male voice, red for a female. I’ve never once heard the male one. Press the button, the black one, and there’s complete silence. Maybe some glitch in the system gave them a tracheotomy. It adds to the sense of Amazonian self-sufficiency of the place, a matriarchy really. Female worker bees outnumber the male drones by 5 to 1. And then there’s me, a fully-fledged member of the 5–1-club. It’s hard to envisage life any other way.
I stand at my register like it’s an improvised stage. I’m part handmaiden, robot and sprite. You’ll get a warm welcome if you come my way. If I like your energy, you’ll be momentarily beatified. There’s no poker face at my hatch, unless you are a twat, that is. The elder employees, a formidable coven of bleached blonde ladies with nicotine rough voices and barely concealed stingers, sat back to enjoy my banter with the customers. They beamed with pride at my rare gift and nodded approvingly at each other, completely ignoring their own customers whilst they did. What can I say? I like people.
I sometimes wonder at the dour, put-upon presences of the younger girls. False lashes hide the sparks in their eyes, tapping the screens in front of them with false nails fresh from the bar, a finger or too rocking a band aid where the nail was ripped off by contact with a hanger or a garment. National minimum wage doesn’t cover personality, it seems. Maybe they are right. My place of business is not known for the politeness of its clientele. They leave chaos and disorder wherever they roam through the valley of bargains, manners left outside the door of the place. Small hillocks of spontaneously discarded clothing litter the floor in ever inventive states of distress. But I am who I am now, amn’t I? Attention has a geotropic effect on me.
More often than not I’m gendered properly and I add a certain spice to the transaction.
Women, naturally, are the ones that understand. The men don’t know what hit them. They leave the counter either blushing or with their balls swelled two sizes larger to compensate for offended masculine sensibilities. As I scan their socks or jocks they often stand rigid, eyes like a stunned mullet and jaws gaping like an opened cash drawer. It’s like I prove that there’s life on Mars after all.
I’ve become slightly more self aware on my jaunts out and about.
The first day I was trained I lost the run of myself and started calling “NEXT” in a bid to hurry things along, but I don’t do that anymore. It breaks the illusion. They see blond hair, makeup and tits — and then a voice issuing forth like a dybbuk from a wardrobe at Heffner’s mansion. It makes me feel awkward.
So I buttoned my lip gladly and let the female voice call “Counter # 9” instead, like Yoko Ono on Fentanyl. My voice was once my pride and joy, especially when I was a folk singer. It’s a big bastard of a thing, all resonance and rasp. I make the bleach blonde old guard sound like the Trinity College choir.
When I am misgendered, as I was by three customers in a row last week, I get deflated. I think to myself I’ll ask management to take me off registers altogether and let me roam free on the floor. But I’m stronger now, right? I’ve grown enough to see it’s a common, understandable occurrence. Ignore it unless someone says it twice in a row, then correct them. Most people are allowed one mistake.
Jamie Aileen, a fellow writer on Medium, put it best when she said last week:
We want to be connected to others. We are hardwired for connection. But we have to be who we are in order for others to connect to us.
I’m still trying to gather myself into a coherent whole so I can make contact with someone in the polar regions around me. I keep a hungry eye out for a glance or a word that will help prove to myself that I am who I want to be. When I get it, it’s like a bong hit. I’m satisfied and I grow wings at the thought of it but when the elation wears off its back to my grey ways.
If this is dysphoric, well, I’ve had it all my life. It stems not from my transition but the lack of connection to the Father. The mother didn’t seem to matter much to me, but his utter lack of regard for me did. My life up to now had been lived as if I’d sustained a head injury. All my old coping mechanisms prevented my living La Dolce Vita.
When I grew my tits I found my wits, I guess.
But I’m taking a deep breath and performing mental keyhole surgery on myself. It’s a precision job, needs a steady hand and an unwavering eye. Forceps hover over tiny loose wires on the circuit board. I’m giving myself time to muster the requisite concentration, foostering with the lamp so I can turn the key light my way. I feel embodied now but I often lapse into the old ways. My spirit wants to connect to my surface and has sent friend requests but the connection is still pending.
It’s only since I got my part-time job that I’m beginning to believe the change is finally underway. My journey has glimmers of becoming an adventure because I’ve come to the point where I realize it’s my choice.
Maybe, just maybe, my personal tundra is finally thawing.
