I resent having to pick a gender every time I go out in public. I resent how conformity pushes at me.<\/a>\u00a0I want to feel good about myself <\/a>in any clothes I wear.<\/p>\n Duh, we’re all alike under our\u00a0clothes and other skins.<\/p>\n Still, it wasn’t obvious until I read about their experiences,\u00a0fears, confusion and anger. In\u00a0doing so, transgender writers\u00a0raise their vulnerability yet another notch, and I admire that.<\/p>\n I’m mesmerized by my mirrored self in their stories; I find myself nodding and saying “YES!” again and again. In those few paragraphs their humanity and its pain become visceral, and resonate down to my bones, an\u00a0earthquake and all its aftershocks.<\/p>\n Like Cherno Biko<\/a>. Outwardly I couldn’t be more different than her, but Cherno’s\u00a0description of the struggle to “celebrate my body” is absolutely universal.<\/p>\n …for the majority of my life I internalized the shame of being too fat, too black and too intersex for mainstream America. Everyday in ways big and small I was told that my body didn\u2019t belong in their bathrooms, on their airplanes and especially not on their runways. However since relocating to NYC earlier this summer I\u2019ve become one of the first plus size trans models of color. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n I believe that when we show up whole and authentically we allow others to do the same<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n YES. To show up whole and authentically: the best any human can do.<\/p>\n Similarly,\u00a0what Cherno\u00a0writes about her locs<\/a> (aka dreadlocks) is entangled with\u00a0me and my naturally outrageous hair. The feeling of memories embedded in hair, the sadness of a haircut – me too, me too.<\/p>\n Transgender women who retain the body hair of their male physicality\u00a0have an especially tough time. Still, any\u00a0cis woman could relate to fear about wearing “risky” clothing<\/a> as described by Alok Vaid Menon:<\/a><\/p>\n Here\u2019s the thing: being fabulous doesn\u2019t protect you.<\/span> Compliments don\u2019t keep you safe. The thing about being a transfeminine person is that\u00a0everyone always remarks on how \u201cfierce\u201d or \u201cfabulous\u201d you are, but few people ask how you are getting home.<\/span> Every day I look at my closet I have to ask myself how I\u2019m getting home. Every day I look at my closet I have to ask myself how I\u2019m feeling that day. Am I ready to endure constant street harrassment? Am I ready to be gawked at? Am I ready to have people take photos of me without their consent? Am I coming home late?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n YES. That is a dilemma I understand. My peak bimbo years<\/a> were a roller coaster: feeling great about being sexy, then abruptly feeling terrified about the\u00a0attention that would bring.<\/p>\n More than anything, I relate to transgender people because they don’t fit into a box and they rebel against being put there.<\/p>\n Identity is not a given. The transgender writers of\u00a0Gender 2.0<\/a> are pretty defiant about that, and their defiance makes me stronger too.<\/p>\n I cheer them on from the comments section and read them obsessively because this is me too:<\/em>\u00a0I am all my labels and none of them, and why don’t you just listen to what I ACTUALLY say instead of what you want to hear or think you know?<\/p>\n Best example:\u00a0Tyler Ford<\/a>. Tyler prefers the pronoun “they” and “them.” After several years as a transgender man, Tyler has taken on\u00a0agender<\/em>\u00a0as a more accurate self-description.<\/p>\n They\u00a0succinctly tell us what it is to\u00a0stride and dance and limp along those lines which divide us into male and female, black and white.<\/p>\n At 24, Tyler shows a\u00a0calm patience<\/a>\u00a0about this process:<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t black or white, but both; I wasn\u2019t a man or a woman, but neither. The two years I spent living as a man, and the following two years spent navigating my identity as an agender person inspired me to question everything I had been trained to see and embrace about myself\u200a\u2014\u200aand everything I\u2019d been taught to look away from. …\u00a0I now know that there is room for me to hold and explore all of my identities\u200a\u2014\u200athough I am still figuring out what it means to be black, what it means to be agender, what it means to be me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And that self-knowledge is evident in the\u00a0decision to wear a crop-top to\u00a0a concert<\/a>:<\/p>\n Nothing I wear is ever read as neutral; I, myself, am rarely read as neutral even to the people (friends included) I repeatedly come out to. As a result, I change into a tight crop top. Even though it\u2019s not what I\u2019m in the mood to wear, I prefer the ways in which people take one second longer to think before they speak about me when I wear one\u200a\u2014\u200aeven if it means tripping over pronouns and gendered language.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I had my own kinds of subversive defiance at that age, but I would love to have had their\u00a0level of\u00a0self-possession\u00a0to go with it.<\/p>\n Tyler, Cherno, Alok, your everydayness gives me courage. When you all put your true selves out there nonstop, what the hell do I ever have to worry about?<\/p>\n What do any of us ever have to worry about, when\u00a0we all feel these things and yet\u00a0remain\u00a0alive\u00a0in our vulnerable human skins?<\/p>\n Today the penny’s a 2015: a year when I’m grateful to be able to read the stories of transgender people, told by them and not through some mainstream media interpreter.<\/p>\n It turns out that I, a cis, have a lot in common with transgender women and men. (Stop laughing, transgender people.) It started when I discovered how\u00a0I completely relate to transgenders’\u00a0quandaries\u00a0about clothes. I resent having to pick a gender every time I go out in public. I resent how conformity pushes at me.\u00a0I want to … read more Day 77: The T and me<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5622,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[67,245,262,243,283],"class_list":["post-5618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-67","tag-cis","tag-clothes","tag-identity","tag-transgender"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5618"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5629,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5618\/revisions\/5629"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Day](\"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/Day-77-2015-300x239.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"