INNER WORK VS EXTERNAL – VISIBLE VS OUT
When my ex-girlfriend told me she wanted to get her entire arm tattooed in the upcoming summer, I was upset – because in addition to not generally being a fan of tattoos – I also knew she hadn’t done the inner work to own her trauma, to own her urges to self-harm from the past. I saw patterns where her desire to control the external overshadowed the importance of owning her internal self.
Transgender people know all too well the overemphasis placed on external work. For trans women, the culprits come in the form of sculpting the physical such as genital reconfiguration surgery and facial feminization and breast augmentation – and sadly, most almost always overlook the internal work, which is so much more important – such as dropping the masculine socialization by learning how to enter a room without swinging their dicks like a wrecking ball, by embracing femininity to socialize like women, and facing their emotions with receptivity rather than with masculine toughness and reticence. For transgender men, almost all know of or talk about top surgery – the removal of their breasts – but many struggle to claim their man card with courage and confidence, where they have a clear cut descended testicle moment of swagger that showcases their physical strength or impresses those they are trying to court on a date. To really own those moments and integrate them into our psyche and everyday habits means dropping the decades of socialization in the wrong gender roles, and to embrace a completely new way to think about and approach life.
To me, the external and physical aspects of a transgender person’s journey has always been about aligning our external presentation to match our internal core. When we boil the essence of what it means to be queer in this world – in this specific case to be transgender – and reduce it down to the lowest common denominator and its essential elements – the key, at least to me, always reveals itself to be claiming our individuality through emergence. That emergence, though, requires both external and internal work, but the process of owning that integration depends more on the internal work than the mere external bolt-ons of body sculpting surgeries or shallow wardrobe changes.
Joseph Campbell famously said “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are,” and my synonymous adapted version for transgender women is: “The ultimate transgender surgery is to remove the stick from one’s own ass.” Being who you are is to show the world who you are on the inside, to remove the fear-based defenses so you can show what your heart and soul feel themselves to be irrespective of the external packaging. For those of us who lived in the wrong gender roles for so many years, a very important question needs to be asked: how much of us is really us, and how much is what we were taught to be in order to survive undercover while living in the wrong gender role?
For transgender women, so many of us have thousands of dollars of work done on our body – from painstaking and expensive hours of hair removal like electrolysis, to body sculpting surgeries like tracheal shaves and breast implants – only to get called “sir” when we walk into a room because we still walk through the world and leave a masculine wake, as we walk through the world without apology. Some of us never dropped that hardened masculine armor, never dropped our psychic cock, even though some of us already had our original factory cock inverted into an aftermarket pussy.
But I can understand why the transgender community continues to make the choices they do. There’s often more social pressure placed on the transgender community – especially for transgender women – who are already facing a handicap to begin with in wanting to minimize the biological features that go against their innermost identity, that go against the gender identity they are trying to claim. To try to pass as their newly claimed gender, often times they undergo or rush into surgeries without full comprehension of the risks versus rewards, without even giving themselves a chance yet to own their internal growth prior to initiating their external changes.
Furthermore, it makes me sad to realize so much emphasis is placed on political correctness to be accepting of those who are overweight, short, or cisgender-women – a woman born female – but those same social markers are not as forgiven when applied to the transgender community. The demand for a trans woman to look like a cisgender woman suddenly holds massive validity, even for someone who is six-foot-four and 250 pounds for having gone through male puberty and transitioning late at the age of 54. Too bad, you’re forever an “ugly” tranny, a “guy in a dress,” a “freak,” especially if you are merely trying to use the women’s restroom as a more noticeable tranny. The policing of what a woman ought to look like – rooted in shallowness and largely driven by unattainable Hollywood standards – reached such a frenzy that a few years ago, when bathroom bills were implemented in several states across the nation, even cisgender women who looked tomboyish were beaten and had security called on them for not “looking feminine enough.” This despite me personally knowing some of these larger framed trans women to be amongst the softest, most feminine-hearted people who give off massive chocolate chip cookie baking grandma vibes.
Another is how discussions of what it means to be transgender almost always solely revolve around topics of hormones and surgeries – despite many trans people never applying either of those changes to their bodies. The overly transmedicalist view that society upholds – that being transgender is primarily a medical issue related to the incongruence between an individual’s assigned sex at birth and their gender identity – erroneously implies that external changes through surgery are the answer – which is harmful for young transgender people who may or may not want to undergo physical changes, but nevertheless immediately feel the pressure right from their youth due to these social stigmas and discussions. None of these political and news outlet arguments ever consider the truth of the matter of what it means to be transgender: that tranvestism is about changing your clothes, transsexualism is about changing your body, and transgender is about changing your mind. In these scenarios, the surgeries and body changes are the false holy grail of promises. In this zeitgeist, the social weight placed on physical beauty makes someone more of a woman than any other factor – and is a large reason why so many transgender people focus on the external sculpting of their bodies rather than the much needed – and often more important aspects – of doing the inner work.
Many years ago, I was at a restaurant with my friend Patti. Her masculine features were very prominent, and she stood at six-feet-three inches. Our waitress was a beautiful gal, and my head turned as my gaze followed her when she walked by our table. “Natalie, stop looking at her like that,” said Patti. “It’ll out us as trans women, and I don’t want to be out to the staff here at this restaurant. I come here all the time.” In that moment, I realized for the first time that my friend Patti – who I had known for 20 years – was still not out with her queerness, despite being very visibly trans; and on the flipside of the coin, I was very out, despite not always being very visible as queer.
I didn’t say anything to Patti, but what she said made me sad in knowing that she had been presenting as a woman for over 30 years at that point, and she was still in her lucite bubble of fear and denial. She had already had the external facets taken care of, but the internal work was lacking. It reminded me of the arduous journey I had undergone all those years after I emerged as trans in the world, of all the work I had to do to claim my identity and integrate my feminine heart into my day to day life through considerable practice and mindfulness of my choices.
It reminded me of how I had to pop my delusion and lucite bubble early on in my emergence as a trans woman, when I had to walk away from a business partner as they refused to work with me once I began living fulltime as a woman. “How come your other trans friend gets to be around your friends and family and I can’t?” I said at that time. I was furious that a business we had both worked so hard to start was now in jeopardy of disintegrating due to him still living as a guy who only crossdressed on the weekends, a guy who was not out to his family and friends. “I don’t want our business to lose its reputation when our clients see that you are a tranny,” said my ex-business partner at the time. “Unless you get breast implants and plastic surgery to look more feminine in the face, I can’t be seen alongside you as you’ll risk our business,” he said.
I continued to recall how I also had to overcome the fear of revealing my history, the fear of being outed at work, as I went from a new hire who dressed in Michael Kors heels and Marciano dresses and in a full face of makeup in my first month as a new employee, to eventually accepting the fact that everyone knew I was a transgender woman, and that no amount of painting myself over was going to change any of that. The goal wasn’t to stay hidden and avoid the acceptance of the parts of me that were difficult, but rather, to accept that the everyday challenges, the mundane, and the prose of my everyday life – not the poetry – was what made the difference.
The work I put in all these years for my inner growth was not lost on me during a recent visit to AutoZone for some car parts. Upon checkout, I realized the man behind the counter was the same motherfucker I had encountered over 10 years ago, when I had first transitioned. During that visit, despite that I had makeup on and wore a sundress that hugged my figure, he kept calling me “sir” and I kept correcting him, to the point where the manager came out and we had an argument, and I left the store crying.
This time, when he rang up my total, as I inserted my credit card, he asked me: “Would you like me to put these items in a bag, miss?”
I smiled and said “No thanks, that won’t be necessary.” Even though I wore jeans, a NorthFace jacket, and my face had no makeup on, I was almost certain he didn’t recognize me, and as I walked towards the exit, he propped one of the double doors open and we both said “bye” politely as I drove away. I knew having experienced 10 additional years of living as a woman helped me convince him I was just another everyday Asian gal next door. But I also knew part of the reason why the interaction this time went so well had to do with how much more comfortable I was within my authenticity because I had explored the edges of my own essence in the world, and came back knowing the depths of my inner self. Despite no surgeries or body sculpting whatsoever, I was much more secure within, and now derived stability and comfort from my core identity rather than rely on my external physical looks and my desire to paint over my body to try to look a certain way. I instead let my inner work bring forth to the surface an integrated everyday demeanor that was just naturally me – to the point where the same man, 10 years later – didn’t remember me or make an issue out of me being a transgender woman.