21/07/2023 Midnight/Μεσονυκτικό - The time stamp is a tad misleading as I am currently in an airplane flying high above the arctic ocean, somewhere around Iceland. I caved and bought the wifi pass. Local time is probably something more along the lines of 2-3am but my laptop is still on Montreal time so I'm sticking to it. And plus this would be my first ever post at the liturgical hour of midnight so you know I had to do it.

Scholars will know that I have been recently experiencing the full richness of the human experience with regards to the shitty ways in which trans women can get treated out in public. Everything is very weird. I don't really know how to even talk about this really. I suspect maybe that on the surface to people i'm not very close to i exude the self-assuredness of someone who has been transitioning for a long time and has had time to become comfortable with herself, but this is very much not the case. At a year and almost a half of HRT i still feel very new to this. I'm still discovering what it means to navigate the world as a trans woman. My comfort with myself has improved, but of course my experiences with the world have gotten worse.

Something really strange is that about 6 months ago I started to get the feeling that I was beginning to pass visually in most cases. I went a period of several months without really getting clocked off looks alone in any situation. Then suddenly things started to kind of backslide on that front as of the last two months or so. Blair suspects that it has to do with my facial hair growth returning after laser and I think there's definitely a chance that he's right, but of course the little dydpshoria creature in my brain wasted no time in going to work picking apart my appearance - has my jaw gotten sharper again? are my shoulders gaining more muscle? did perera hondose me when she changed my prescription last time?

The worst was certainly yesterday, when I got harrassed out near mcgill. I was standing at the intersection of hutchison and sherbrooke waiting for the light to change, and a man in the back seat of a car stopped at the light put down his window to scream at me - "HÉ C'EST UN GARS! C'EST UN GARS! C'EST UN MEC LUI!" over and over and over again until the light changed and I could walk away. Beyond the sheer humiliation I felt in that moment in front of all those people, the slight fear that this freak might get out and do something, the worst part of that was definitely the fact that he clocked me at a distance of 15-20 metres. That was certainly something that hadn't happened in a long while.

I wanted to crawl into myself, hide my body, not be seen, cover up. And this kind of goes back to that lack of self assuredness. When this sort of thing happens, or even something as mild as a mildly weird interaction with someone that really shouldn't prey on my mind at all, it immediately kicks my brain back into self hatred mode. I immediately become completely disgusted with my body, my outfit, the amount of skin i'm showing, how feminine my clothing is. I mean just classic transphobia, directed by me, at myself. Regular internalised transphobia stuff. But the thing that's upsetting to me is that I thought I left this kind of thinking behind in the first 9 months of transition. I thought that by coming into myself and meeting actual trans people in real life whom i was able to love and respect, I had cured myself of those transphobic brainworms that were once so deeply internalised that they crippled my every interaction with the outside world. Qhether it's a matter of a temporary backslide after a traumatic incident or representative of a failure to root out the actual deepest most engrained manifestations of that transphobia is something the jury is still out on.

At the airport, a couple of hours ago, in semi-boymode as I want to still look a bit like my passport when I'm crossing a border, I was pulling my card out to pay for a water bottle when the young man behind the counter (brutish looking fellow) suddenly said "are you a man or a woman?" I was COMPLETELY dumbfounded, I decided best to not answer and hopefully he would get the message. unfortunately I overestimated our strapping young protagonist's ability to read the fucking room. he asked again, following it up with "you have really nice hair". I thanked him for the compliment and didn't answer the question. He asked again, what gender are you? I made like I didn't hear him and thanked him again, kind of gesturing at my hair as though accepting the compliment. Finally he asked again, "are you a woman or a man?" I said I'm trans. He got the glint in his eye that told me he was about to start taking the piss and said somethign to the effect of "ohhhhh, ok". I took my shit and left. He kept talking at me after me, still asking questions. I didn't hear what it was but I know for sure just by the guy's facial expression and stuff that it was definitely invasive.

So my experience of travel today in my weird semi boymode has been being called sir about 60% of the time, madame about 30% of the time, and 10% 'other' ("are you a man or a woman huhuhu"). Don't know how to feel about this!

Side note - the nice young male flight attendant just handed me a raspberry yogurt which i am at present moment slurping down merrily. It is very tasty. Yum!

All this a matter of weeks after the very first time that I went fully stealth in an extended interaction - lunch with blair's mother's friend Lynn and her husband on our way down to manchester. we chatted and interacted over the course of the lunch and they fully did not clock me. Lynn even texted Andrea afterwards to say i had beautiful eyes (so sweet of her ;-; makes me wanna cry just thinking about how nice that is!) this of course happened in the same day that I experienced Weird Boob Misogyny™ at the hands of blair's dad, so you know, you win some you lose some.

All this to say basically I'm finally beginning to experience the thing that so many trans people attest to - that basically, sometimes you pass, sometimes you don't, and there really isn't anything you can do about it. It's weird and overwhelming somehow. Mentally, being an actual trans woman, and one that can sometimes pass no less, is something that could happen at some point, not something that is currently happening. I still feel like my brain is stuck in this way of thinking where I am someone who is starting to transition and will become a trans woman at some point, despite the fact that I know that this is not the case and I am very much a fully fledged trans woman. I've got a long way to go still of course but at this point, I'm no longer just starting out exactly. God this raspberry yogurt is really fucking delicious. At this point, these incidents here are no longer the type of uncomfortable incidents faced by the girls just starting E. Now I'm fully in clocky tgirl territory. I no longer have plausible deniability in either direction. I can not convincingly pass as a guy or a girl. If I try to boymode, I get clocked as something weird and feminine, my cissexual privilege is denied me and I therefore get treated shitty. If I present normally, I get clocked as trans and get treated shitty. Not really quite sure what to do with a lot of this stuff, and on that note being in Paris now is going to be interesting. I expect it to be a lot of incidents like the guy on Hutchison and at the airport kiosk, but way more often bc french people truly do not give a fuck that they're being freaks. I kinda had a fairly good idea from my friends and such of what to expect from being in this stage of transition in Canada, but I truly do not have a singly clue what to expect from the French.

Anyways my hour long wifi pass is probably gonna give out in the next few minutes. My next blog will be in Paris! Vidimo se.

-ana

ALSO! i intend this private room to be more intimate but also lighter and more fun. this one ended up being long and contemplative which is boring as fuck i'm sure you're all sick of that from me at this point. the point is basically you won't have to sit through too much of it!