Trans Day of Visibility 2021
Today is Trans Day of Visibility; a joyful counterpart to November’s Transgender Day of Remembrance, when we recall the names of those trans people who have been murdered, often simply for existing. It is a day to celebrate those of us who are still here, still alive.
I have been introspecting a lot in the past year; there’s not been much else to do.
It is a little over two years since I came out to my family and finally started the bizarre journey that I had dreamed of, and feared, in some form since I was 14 years old, and first learned that people did not only change their sex in fairytales and sci-fi novels. Those intervening seventeen years are a part of many trans folks journey that I think is often overlooked; transition itself is visible and obvious (even if many of us dearly wish it didn’t have to be) but in some ways it’s the tip of the iceberg of my gender journey, especially at this point in my life. I tried so hard NOT to be trans, not to be a woman, not to have to expose myself to cruelty. I used every tool in the arsenal of psychological self-harm: guilt, shame, denial, doubt, repression. I dissociated into daydreams, I wrote poems and journals, I cried whole nights away, I pined and mourned, I bargained and despaired. I tried being a goth and wearing makeup and skirts but as a man, then I tried taking I took up masculine hobbies, I tried watching football matches, I tried lifting weights and cycling, then I tried getting fat and sad and retreating from life. I grew a frankly impressive ‘denial beard’. I took every anti-depressant and anxiolytic and sleep medication under the sun; I tried sublimating my desires, my needs in different ways, I tried forgetting. Sometimes I would go weeks without thinking about it, maybe once or twice a whole month, when I was busy. But it never went away, and eventually it became unbearable, and so I finally had to take the terrifying plunge.
I was extraordinarily lucky. I know so many trans people who have lost friends and family in their transitions; I was prepared for the same. Almost without exception, everyone I know has been extraordinarily decent and accepting. I have been treated with more kindness and generosity than I was expecting, and I am extraordinarily grateful for that.
There are a small but vocal and dedicated cadre of people in this country who seem to dedicate almost all their life and energy to attacking and demeaning trans people. They attack us in the press, and in the courts, and in the streets, and they seem to want nothing less than to drive us all back into lives of closeted misery, or worse. Kind-hearted as I am, I find their wanton cruelty and cold malice impossible to comprehend. All I want to do is be happy, and to experience as much of my life as I am able as the person I truly am. There are things about being trans that will always be painful for me; in an ideal world, I would simply have been born unambiguously female, and lived all my life without the pervasive sense of wrongness, detachment and alienation that blighted me until that magical moment two years ago when I finally saw myself in a mirror. Womanhood and girlhood surely carries its own perils and traumas, and that is something I will always strive to change, but they would have been my perils and traumas. There are things which were not and which cannot be which I mourn intensely; but I am also aware that so much of the pain I have experienced comes from living in a world that has failed in so many ways to tolerate and accept my difference. I do think that, despite the bigotry and attacks, the world is becoming a better place. I want to see a future where trans people live lives as untroubled and uncomplicated by their transness as possible.
Because despite these pains, what there also is in my experience and to some degree in all trans experiences is joy. I lived all my life in a cloud of fog, and then rays of sun burst through; A great weight and a great pain is being lifted off of me. I am learning to run, to dance, to sing. I have felt what it is like to be beautiful for the first time, to be truly myself, to be truly alive. It is the most magical, wonderful, profound thing that has ever happened to me; it is awesome and terrible and glorious in the biblical senses of those words.
I am proud to be a woman, and I am proud to be trans. I am proud of the community I have found, of the support and kindness I have been shown. I am proud to be visible, here on this Island. I am looking forward to the rest of my life as myself, and all the joys and challenges to come.
I am ecstatic to be Sydney.
