What do I even have to say. I don’t. I don’t know. I’m not articulate. I feel a lot of pain and rage and violence from working retail and being trans. I could make a handful of jokes (If you’re trans simply don’t work customer facing positions! I need to either detransition or develop a misgendering kink! Etc!) but the basic point that I’m not cutting enough to make enjoyably or well is that being in customer service and being trans means that every single fucking day you show up, for hours, people misgender you. Every single day you’re at work people (in fact, almost every single person you will come into contact with, coworker or customer) question your reality without even thinking because it’s just obvious for them. Something so fundamental and core to your being is not only invisible to them but also not real, not even thinkable or a thing to consider, because it’s such a given that it’s not real. How does that not make you crazy?
I can’t speak for everyone’s experiences of being trans and handling customers. I am white and I live and work in the greater Bay Area (the greater being extremely important here). Maybe transfemmes get more people being straight up threatening, I don’t know.
Sometimes I think about detransition. I think, fuck it, I’ll be a girl for a day, I’ll do my girl drag today. And I get to relax when I do my femme mannerisms, release a breath I didn’t know I was fucking holding, when I look at my painted nails and think, at least no one is judging what my gender is from this. It’s easier to fail when you’re not trying than to try and feel good and be repeatedly reminded that to everyone else in the entire fucking world you fail, easily, without thought, immediately and every time. Maybe today I’ll go to the dispensary in a romper, full tits out and unbound and a skirt, because they’re going to deadname me anyways.
Seeing the fucking guides and articles that come up when you search “trans retail” or any similar set of terms makes me almost angry. It’s all the same bullshit. Have you thought about bothering enough to fucking change, like, a small handful of words at minimum to not contribute to the constant beating over the head of you-are-not-what-you-think-you-are your trans employees are facing every waking moment. Have you considered not outing their deadname, to make them “feel more comfortable.” There is nothing comfortable about the society I live in where not passing means any time literally anyone besides trans friends and trans loved ones denies my reality every. Single. Time. Every day. Every time I step out of the house. Any time I’m on public transit. Any time I’m in a store. Any time I just need to get groceries. Any time my neighbors talk to me. Any time I am visible, at all, ever.
Separate to this, is this idea that transmascs just pass easier, naturally…. Hearing this all the time drives me further to madness. Who is it easier for. The ones who took to testosterone quicker. It hasn’t helped me. My voice didn’t get deep enough for people to gender me without me having to intentionally drop it further, when that even works. The facial hair didn’t stop people from seeing the slight bump in my chest from the sports bra I use because I can’t bind properly, not with my weird persistent cough and my bad acid and the waistbands of all my clothes contributing to this as well, to the point I, for no other reason, almost vomit in the store. The binding doesn’t work. The mannerisms don’t work. The dress style doesn’t work. I can look as boring or tailored as I want and I can dress in the ways that cisgender masculine men do and it doesn’t make people gender me. I can do all these things simultaneously and it doesn’t make people not misgender me. Who is it easier for exactly. Hearing it’s easier for transmascs to pass, in the way that people say it where it means it just happens on it’s own, suggesting that if only you try, if you just put in a little effort, then you’ll pass, and therefore if you do those things and you still don’t pass, surely it’s your fault, you must just not be trying hard enough. No matter what degree I dim myself to try and pass it doesn’t work.
I promise you when I sit down the many times taking my 2-3 hr transit journey home from work I think about the spread of my legs. How I’m holding my bag. I think about it when my legs cross each other when I walk out of a movie with friends. I can not flick my wrist and jab the iPad screen instead of tap it flatly with my finger like I’ve got press-ons, I can not say “like” and not gesture when I speak and never say “sorry” or “I think” or “um.” And none of these actions will stop people from telling their friend to “just ask the lady at the counter” it won’t stop my coworker from saying “she’s getting you a new one from the back,” it won’t stop the person preparing my order from saying “she got the mango green tea.”
It’s cool that a handful of transmascs get bottom growth an hour after their very first T shot or their voice lowers to an unmistakably deep register within 1 month or who get a full beard after 2 months. I’m glad that for them, binding seems to make people actually gender them correctly. None of those things do shit for me, and I’m tired of being expected to just accept a community narrative that that’s the norm and I should atone for being upset when people act like it is.
And because otherwise (and, frankly, regardless) people will say I’m saying things I haven’t, to clarify (to eternally guard myself even in my personal posts from people who would willfully search out and misinterpret my own feelings and experiences and then try and fault me for it), this is not saying that transfemmes have it easier instead, or that this narrative is the fault of transfemmes, or any other bullshit.
And at the end of the day there will be fucking people who will be mad that I don’t do all these things, none of which work, every single day, and say that since I’m not doing that my feelings are invalid. I don’t care. I will never be that bitch calling someone ugly for being shitty but I WILL tell you to kys. This isn’t a safe space it’s MY space, and I’m angry, I’m a bitch, and I will scream at you. No person, and especially no trans person, should have to do all that bullshit just to not get misgendered, and I’m too pretty and too femme and too gay to do it! But it feels endless. It feels like a constant, deep violence. It hurts and I scream and I rage and then I think about how I don’t even know the fucking half of it.
If you see a trans person today, gender them correctly, or else.