what to keep in my purse for trans woman

The Assimilationist, or: On the unexpected cost of passing as a trans woman

The trouble with finding my true self in the dazzler aisles.

By Updated February 19, 2020, 6:50am EST

Annie Mok for Vox

Part of the Gender Issue of The Highlight , our home for ambitious stories that explicate our world.

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In March 2018, a handful of days after I came out to my therapist as a trans woman, I decided to buy a razor to shave my legs.

For the showtime fourth dimension in my life, I was aware that my legs had pilus on them, and I was at once irritated by that hair and a little anxious about it. I didn't know why, but I wanted it gone. Even though I had a perfectly good razor I used to shave my facial hair, I felt strongly that I needed something pink or purple to tackle the thicket on my legs.

So, standing there in a Target razor aisle looking for something functional simply as well cute, my anxiety growing as I was sure people were looking at me and seeing my cloak-and-dagger true self and judging me accordingly, I found myself torn. The pink razor marked as explicitly "for women" was then lovely and sleek — simply it was as well functionally the same product as the blackness-and-neon-greenish razor for manly dudes right next to it. And the pinkish razor was $ane more expensive.

Intellectually, I knew the "pink tax" existed considering I had spent nearly of my developed life reading up on women'due south issues. (I wonder why?) But this was my start encounter with it in the wild, with the fact that you lot could want so badly to experience a sense of belonging that y'all would allow capitalism gouge you over and over once again. I wanted so desperately to signal my essential woman-ness that I was willing to pay actress for it.

Screwing upwards my courage, I grabbed the razor, keeping my caput down at the cash register, gear up to say that it was for my wife, should anybody inquire. (Newly out trans people are terrified of the gender police, who generally don't exist except in our heads.)

That pinkish razor was a piece of crap, and inside six months, I had to replace it. My quondam men's razor — which I still use to shave what facial pilus I have left — is going potent after years of apply.

In the months thereafter, money seemingly poured out of me. It was and so, so expensive to be a adult female. I establish myself having to purchase an entirely new wardrobe, ane I'm nevertheless struggling to fill out hither and there. I needed new shoes. I needed makeup. Buying all this stuff in aggregate was expensive, of course, but each individual item was expensive in and of itself.

Can a man spend a lot of money on clothing? Of course. Just he also has many affordable options. Finding such options in the women's department was its own challenge. It was equally if I was experiencing the marketplace pressures of being a teen girl in the space of about three months instead of over several years.

Even beyond that, in that location'south the cost of laser hair removal and electrolysis to get rid of my facial hair. In that location are regular sessions with a therapist who specializes in gender dysphoria. There was a crash course in vox grooming, in an try to coax my old rumble into a reasonable alto. Irresolute my name price almost $500, and a printout of the paperwork proving my proper name was changed was another $fifty. There are so many expenses to come, including surgeries and more than documentation of my identity, and then on and so forth. Information technology'southward expensive and exhausting, and information technology will never end.

And all the same I never inquire myself why I'chiliad doing all this. I just am. I need to.

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In that location's a word that comes up in trans circles often, and I think it probably describes me (or, at to the lowest degree, people take used it to refer to me at times, when they call up I don't know they're doing it): assimilationist.

The all-time way to describe an assimilationist is to draw myself, and then here'due south what I'g wearing right now, on a dank California 24-hour interval at the first of the twelvemonth: My pilus (on which I utilise somewhat expensive lightening shampoo to coax information technology toward a muddied blonde) hangs just by my mentum. On my nose sit round-framed blue glasses ($500). I'm wearing a full face of makeup (my first visit to Sephora ran me $250, adept fucking God), and I have on a pink sweater, a grey undershirt, blackness tights, and a ruffled black skirt (around $120, all told, mostly from Target). Cap this off with some dark royal running shoes ($75) and you've got the whole look.

This outfit would non seem out of place on merely about any woman in her 30s who works in the media. It's a solid everyday look when I don't have to make whatsoever on-camera appearances. (I take a more expensive wardrobe for when I practice.)

That'southward precisely the indicate of the assimilationist claim: Equally trans people, nosotros're supposed to complicate the gender binary, not uphold information technology. Past trying my damnedest not to stand out but to alloy in — to tilt whatever lilliputian equation you run in your caput when you see me away from "human being" and toward "woman" — I'm propagating a system that hurts both trans people and women unduly, via everything from broad, systemic violence to the relatively minor sin of the pink tax.

Here's the thing that gives me a thrill but probably shouldn't: It's working. I can count the number of times I've been misgendered in the by six months on 2 easily, and it now happens so infrequently that I tin chalk information technology upwardly to somebody misspeaking far more often than to a deliberate attempt to make me experience like shit. I've fifty-fifty had a few encounters where someone was shocked to learn I was trans, not cis. I've developed cover-up.

My justification for my style, from the commencement, has always been that if y'all Google my proper noun, the very offset folio of results is filled with stories almost how I'm trans. Even as I increasingly "pass" for a cis woman, I can't escape the fact that I became a vaguely public effigy and spent more than than a decade publishing journalism (and a book!) under a human being's proper noun. Fifty-fifty if I am invisibly trans in a crowd of people on the street, I am visibly trans once y'all know who I am, because unlike so many trans women, I was already visible when I transitioned.

Still, my transition has gone much, much improve than I expected it to. I had certain advantages in this regard, from economics (I have much more than money than the majority of trans women) to race (white trans people take the same born societal advantages as white people in full general) to geography (California presents few structural barriers when an developed wants to transition).

I also had advantages when it came to my genetic code. My testosterone level has been depression my whole life, so my body was already fairly androgynous. It didn't accept that much estrogen to shift androgyny toward traditional femininity. See as well:

Many trans women accept few or even none of my advantages. They cannot escape the fact that when they go out into society equally themselves, they are constantly, visibly trans, with all the horrors that tin can bring. They can't pay to eliminate their beard shadow. They can't buy feminine dress that fit their frames. They tin't spend endless hours preparation their voice to audio just so.

And non all trans women are traditionally feminine. Many adopt looks that might skew toward androgyny or butchness. And this is just trans women — I oasis't touched on trans men, on nonbinary people, on gender fluidity, on those who are agender.

Our goal as trans people should exist to normalize all of these identities and in so doing button dorsum confronting an unfairly limiting gender binary that hurts cis men and women, too. That binary imprisons all of us within a limited set of ideas of who we can be and what nosotros are capable of, and many of the rules that govern it are arbitrary and invented by a lodge built past cis men for the benefit of cis men.

Okay. I agree with all of the above. But I also dear to be a traditionally feminine woman. Womanhood and women in full general just brand more sense to me than annihilation else I've ever tried. (My attempts at male bonding over the years glistened with bomb sweat.) The gender binary makes me feel more like me. I want to eliminate it. I also desire to hang on to some of it. It feels like I just got hither.

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The affair almost self-acceptance is that when yous're simply getting used to it, you go an like shooting fish in a barrel mark. The first time I went to Sephora, I spent style more than on makeup than I always thought possible, because the salesperson who helped me made me feel so skillful about myself. From the second she learned my name, she chosen me Emily, even though I was in full guy mode. She used she/her pronouns. She told me I was pretty. I plunked downwardly $250, and I would have spent well over $300 if she had managed to talk me into a $70 foundation. (My wife saved me on that one.)

To exist articulate: None of this is the salesperson'southward fault. None of it is my fault, either. This is merely how society is designed to function, and to come out as trans later in life is to suddenly start careening downhill into a newer, truer gender, without some of the guardrails that snap into identify when you grow up cis and figure out the ways society tries to exploit you on the grounds of gender.

It's not like any of usa are immune to these capitalist pressures. There are distinct economic expressions of "womanhood" and "manhood" that are meant to help us all find a sense of belonging and centeredness in our ain genders past spending money on products to affirm them. Nosotros can be aware of this manipulation, can fifty-fifty roll our eyes at it, and withal be susceptible to it.

Annie Mok for Vox

The problem, I suppose, is that I like being an assimilationist. I like it when people just assume I'k a woman without a second glance. I like it when I don't take to explain myself. I similar that if I become to buy a pink razor that's more expensive than a men'due south razor at present, I never experience I have to come upwardly with an excuse for why I might be buying it.

This makes me feel more affirmed as an individual, only it also makes me feel similar a shitty fellow member of the trans community. The larger political project of dismantling the terrible structures of the capitalist patriarchy continues apace, and here I am cooing over my friend giving me a bracelet that spells out my name in Morse code. (Want to win a trans girl's heart? Give her jewelry that involves her name somehow. You'll have a friend for life.)

I cannot ignore that in my attempts to slide headfirst into womanhood, I am more or less appeasing a lodge that is set upward to favor cis people. I am especially doing a disservice to my nonbinary siblings, whose very existences challenge the idea that there are "men" and "women" and that's information technology. I am a rubber version of transness, corporatized and commodified, fit for mass-market consumption. I do non challenge you to rethink the gender binary in any real style.

But affidavit is not a matter that tin can be given to us. It is something we nurture and abound from within, and it comes in as many shapes and sizes as there are people. Gender is a social construct, except for all the means in which it sure seems similar information technology's deeply ingrained within my very self, and if y'all tell me I look pretty today, I volition smile and thank you for the compliment.

This is non all that different from how a cis woman might navigate the world, or so I'm told. We're all constantly making our ain compromises with some feminine platonic that was created for the states at some point, an amalgam of a million different ideas of what information technology ways to be a woman that is internally inconsistent and makes no sense, yet holds this unattainable appeal for way too many of united states. (Men do this, too, of course.)

Maybe I run and then hard toward becoming that idealized girl because I know I tin can never exist her, due to the circumstances of my nascence. Maybe if I run difficult enough, I'll get in that location and all of a sudden wake up a suburban female parent of two in Omaha, Nebraska. Possibly I vesture so many dresses because I actually love wearing dresses. Maybe I'thou just overthinking it.

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There are reasons to blend in beyond cocky-credence. Namely, the world is already vicious, and being trans but ramps upward that cruelty. If you lot can notice a manner to escape that cruelty, shouldn't yous?

Let me give y'all an case. While riding the train from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica recently, I became dimly aware that a homo standing right in forepart of me was shouting a homophobic slur at someone sitting behind me, over and over. This other person, whom I could not see, begged him to stop, in a voice deep enough for me to assume masculinity.

I was wrong. When the target of the man's slurs launched herself at him, I saw she was wearing a woman's top and skirt. She had long messy hair. She windmilled down the aisle of the train and tried to land a punch or slap or something on the man. She failed, while he dropped her to the floor, flailing at her with his fists and feet, mostly failing to connect. Eventually, they were separated past others on the train.

As the woman pulled away, I felt the lurch of recognizing a fellow trans adult female, albeit one who does not laissez passer for cis, whether she wants to or not. I cannot know her situation, but I accept seen variations on her in every support group I've been to, in every young, scared woman DMing me on Twitter to ask if she, likewise, might be trans, as though I had the power to elevator a terrible curse.

While she retreated, other passengers laughed that wearied, relieved laugh that arises in any situation where people who've just been through a tense situation are just glad to have gotten out unscathed. Simply I felt something else in the laughter, something across "What the fuck was that?" I figured it out equally I exited the train at the next stop, in front of some teenage boys who were however laughing about the altercation.

"Y'all run into that dude?" one of them said. "He was in a skirt." They howled at the idea, while I was ii steps alee of them, wearing a clothes. They were oblivious to my presence and to my transness. I passed, because I assimilated.

Hither's the office where I tell you that I turned effectually and told them to shut upward, risking the freedom of passing to do the right thing. Or here'southward the part where I tell you I found the adult female in the oversupply of people exiting the train and walked her to wherever she was headed. Or here's the part where I tell you that I resolved to do better, to push more than confronting the strictures of the binary.

But I did none of these things. I only quickened my stride and walked on to my date. Assimilation affords me the privilege of not getting involved, of doing the easy thing instead of the right thing. It as well afforded the teens walking behind me the privilege of laughing at a cruel joke, rather than trying to push back against it. And information technology afforded all of my beau passengers the privilege of rolling our eyes when the man started yelling slurs at the woman, rather than trying to get him to end. Absorption lets me exist seen but also not seen. I tin disappear. And in disappearing, some part of me evaporates.

Could I take said something? Certainly. Should I take said something? I don't know. I keep wanting to call myself a coward, but I am likewise right to feel scared. What if everybody had found me out? What might have happened and then? The border between my prophylactic and something horrible is so tenuous, and societal norms dictate that I am the one who's asked to enforce it, not everyone who might cartel to cross it.

Annie Mok for Vox

This is bereft equally an apology to the woman on the railroad train. I'm sorry virtually what happened to you lot, and I'm sorry I didn't stop it. I'm sorry literally everyone else who could have didn't shout down that man. I hope you are okay. I have no excuses. I alloy in considering I dear to wear dresses. I alloy in considering I beloved to exit with my women friends and accept no one bat an eye when they run into united states of america together. And I blend in because I feel a ability in living as my true self.

Absorption is powerful and affirming, just it is besides a bind that traps me, tempting me into endmost the door behind me to all of the trans people who cannot assimilate or exercise not want to. It'south a fake choice between the attraction of belonging and the power of speaking out against injustice. Early on in my transition, a trans guy friend told me that sometimes trans people are then enlightened of their individual privileges that they become all they can see. I didn't empathize what he was saying at the fourth dimension. I do at present.

Just my friend said something else, likewise, which is that one'due south own happiness is non a sin. Assimilating, blending in, is not a option I made for rubber reasons or even aesthetic ones. It'southward an expression of who I actually am. The challenge is to go on holding that door open, to not close information technology backside me, to take a sledgehammer to its edges until it's broad enough for everyone. Womanhood is as well expansive a category to be defined past express parameters, no thing how it'due south marketed.

Capitalism feeds off this platonic woman, merely it didn't strictly create her. She's an outgrowth of all of united states, a golem created over millennia by an ever-shifting prepare of thoughts on what it means to be a woman. To exist a trans adult female is perchance to exist more aware of this odd ready of expectations, of the style you probably don't need that pink razor but desire it anyway. But it's non to exist uniquely aware of those expectations. I am an assimilationist not because I have failed to examine my choices or the options afforded me under capitalism, but because when I observe myself affirmed past family unit, by friends, by random strangers, I realize how deeply intoxicating it can exist to dear your life.

What a novelty this is! To fight and fight and fight and notice the simple beauty of actually living the life you lot only occupied before.

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Emily Todd VanDerWerff is Vox's critic at large, and the former Television editor for the A.V. Club. She previously weighed in on the 25 all-time best episodes of television for The Highlight.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2020/2/12/21075683/trans-coming-out-cost-of-womanhood-pink-tax

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