Oh. Emm. Gee. I'm Old. š
About two weeks I received a rejection email from a reputable journal.
I had submitted an essay I’d been working on for years about internalized fears I’d long possessed about being a transman in male spaces.
The focus of my highest anxieties, I wrote, occurred in the gym changing room. Sans the right junk, I thought I’d be skewered and rejected. I described various coping strategies for changing my clothes with my back turned toward the other men. Friend suggested I stop changing in the locker room, or change in the unisex changing room. Not for me, thank you!
I concluded with a story about the extreme shock I experienced when a cismale friend told me he’d never changed in the locker room nor would he ever. I was even more shocked when he told me he would never use the family changing room. “Just another way to draw attention to myself,” he had said. The story goes on to describe how I’d separated myself from other men in my mind, unable to believe any cisman could be uncomfortable in their bodies or in male spaces.
The rejection email was quite thoughtful. They thanked me for submitting the piece and even commented on the nuances of transition (which, enter nous, never seems to end!) I brought to the story.
“Nuances of transition,” in the context of this rejection email, made me feel very old. I transitioned in the 1900s, 1996 to be exact. I love being a transsexual man, which seems so old school these days. Young people have wonderful ways of expressing their gender that seem to tilt away from the binary.
Is my gender expression still relevant, one that turns on that very binary?
One of my primary reasons for transitioning was a desire to age as a man.
I hadn’t counted on the possibility of becoming an irrelevant transman, though! ššš»šš»
Until next time, Jay
P.S. Here is a link to a true story I wrote that has been published.