hey everyone today I just wanted to talk about the difference between being
stealth as a trans person and being out as a trans person stealth here I'm defining
as people around you assuming that you're cis and assuming your gender correctly
in a sense so when cis people are assuming my gender and thinking that I'm cis it's
because they think that I'm a cis guy the two types of experiences I'm gonna
be comparing it's not gonna be basically me before I came out or before I started
passing but it's gonna be me talking about spaces that I'm in right now today
in my everyday life that's either around people that assume that I'm a cis guy
and people who I guess would have grown up with me and things like that and are
from my hometown and therefore saw my transition and know about it which I
think is an important distinction because there's a lot of misconceptions
about being stealth and I'm not gonna get into all of them but one of the most
important ones I guess is that there's no way to be 100% stealth and there's no
way to be 100% out there's always going to be random people on the
street that are gonna assume something about your gender
so in that case anybody in the world who's trans and doesn't matter how
vocal they are about it they could be also living kind of like stealth I guess
to people on the street who are gonna automatically assume their gender
correctly and assume that that means that they're cis and then on the flipside
of that there's always gonna be people in the past in your life that will
know about your transition and things like that the first thing I want to talk
about is compliments so a few people in my life who have seen my transition when
they see me now they say that I look good and I'm always like oh yeah thanks
cool but then I've gotten in moments where they will be like no you look GOOD which is
supposed to mean that they're saying that I look masculine and that I look
like a cis person which is I don't know what kind of compliment that really is
but it happens to me opposed to where I'm around people who think that I'm a cis
guy who usually compliment me for real and say that I have cute glasses or a
nice outfit on or I look good or my hair is nice or whatever another thing that
I've noticed is that people who know what my transition will also do this
thing where they'll talk maybe making generalizations about cis guy bodies or
cis guy existences and then they'll kind of
stop and look at me and then have this guilty smile on their face I guess but
they're kind of being like oh like oh you know like they'll say something
about all guys being whatever which is something that I guess they think that
trans guys can't be and they'll be like you know just kind of like hesitant and
then carry on in the conversation which is a little bit awkward to be honest
because I feel like it only happens because I'm there but otherwise they
think it's fine to make generalizations about all men
being something as long as there's no trans men present I also experienced
this weird phenomenon when I was more so younger but even now actually when I go
back to my hometown where random people would have heard about me
and I can assume that they didn't hear a whole lot about me because they don't
know anything about me except for the fact that I'm trans so I guess that was
the thing I mean that might be more I guess to do with me because I'm from a
small town so people are more you know talking and stuff like that and I can't
say now the random people have heard about me on the streets of Toronto by
any means when it comes to being transphobic there's a lot of things I
could say in this department but I will just talk about the fact that basically
when I'm around people who know about my transition they talk to me about
anything almost all the time of any time they ever heard anybody be transphobic
which can be a lot I don't know why we always have to have these conversations
but I guess that has to do with something I don't know some sort of
guilt they feel where people just tell me about somebody just hating trans
people or just saying something totally awful and potentially triggering and
they just think that it's something that we should talk about so they can tell me
how awful they think that is to me it's quite the experience where on the
opposite side of things when I'm hanging out with people who think that I am a cis man
they will tell me just their awful opinions about trans people which to be
honest I kind of prefer because then I get to tackle it and tell my coworker
why that was an awful thing that they just said whereas on the other side I
just get to hear about people like hating me and all this kind of stuff for
no good reason the next thing is more I guess about generalizations and gender
roles and things like that where people who know about my transition can
sometimes assume that I have similar experiences to girls or I like the same
things that girls would like just because of the way that I would have
been raised as a child I guess it's the the reasoning behind that
whereas now I get the opposite around people who think I'm cis who assum
that I will dislike everything that is feminine which is pretty wild because I
think this is not true for anybody whether they're cis or trans that they're
automatically gonna like something of one gender and hate something of another
gender and things like that so I think that's more like a general problem but
it's strange to go from like the complete flip side opposite of it
related to that it's also like I have when people know my transition there's
women who assume that I have like the same experience as them or that we're
gonna like have a really close bond whereas when people see me as a cis dude
there's guys who think the same thing where they think that we have like this
bond and we're going through the same thing I even the other day had an uber
driver who was like talking to me about some weird feelings that he had about
one of his friends and he was like oh of course you get it though because you're
a guy and you feel these things and stuff and I was like this is a lot for
me to handle on just an uber drive but yeah so it kind of goes both ways of
course this happens people outside of being trans but it's just strange to see
both flip sides of it lastly on a bit of I'm gonna condense this one because I
could talk for a very long time so the difference between being seen as an out
trans guy in lgbtqa+ spaces opposed to being seen as usually honestly I get read
as this cis heterosexual guy when I go to lgbtqa+ spaces even though I don't
identify as straight but that's a whole another thing typically I guess I
like I would be seen as prioritized in these types of spaces if they knew that
I was a trans guy I think that there's a lot of prioritization of trans masculine
people or even just like girls who dress androgynously so yeah I guess it's kind
of strange for me to enter space knowing that I don't know like it's just more
inviting and people are taking more time to consider my thoughts and feelings and
experiences opposed to if I enter these spaces and everybody like just assumes
automatically that I'm cis and then I'm straight too which is kind of
strange and then I don't know it's just like a weird mix of like it's less
inviting in a sense and I think it depends of course on from like from
space to space to space or whatever but I've also like been in the situation
where it was the same space and then I didn't talk about being trans and it was
weird and then I did talk about being trans and then it was even weirder
because everybody was like really intensely all about giving me more
attention than they would have before so yeah it's kind of a strange mix these
are just a few things that I've noticed clearly everyone experiences this differently and
also clearly there was a lot more things that I could talk about in this
department but I just want to make it concise list to talk about because as
always I wish that I'd known this before I was going into things not that it
would really like change or even be able to prepare me for it to be honest but I
think I saw things very differently but I think I also have like the opinion
that if I was stealth that nobody would ever know that I'm trans ever again for
some reason I didn't take into account and a bunch of people in my life who
have seen my transition would know and then I didn't also take into account
that that didn't mean that cis people would talk like I thought that cis people
would no longer start talking to me about trans things or I don't know I
guess I just envisioned it a little differently
not to say that it's bad or that it's better or like any of those things it's
just different so yeah that's it for me today I'll see you all sometime in the
future with another video
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