I once worked with a woman I considered to be one of the bravest women I’ve ever met. When I first knew her, she seemed tired out much of the time, lethargic and in my memory grey, though she had a wicked sense of humour.
These were corona times. I interviewed there in a full FFP2 mask around a huge table, each of us a meter and a half from the next. All windows wide open. Strange times. For the first months I worked there, only essential personnel were present, six of us out of more than fifty. But then restrictions lifted and I was able to finally get to know my new colleagues in person. The place was full of life and vibrancy.
One day while I was sitting at work, minding my own business, a message popped up and it made me cry. A fellow worker had written a very personal message, coming out to all of us that she was transitioning.
She had never identified with being male. She wrote the naked truth about loneliness, about the sense of not belonging that had followed her from childhood through the intervening years. How she never felt as though she fitted in. And how a life-changing event had made her realise that she needed to stop trying to be someone she wasn’t. Thinking about it and remembering how I felt reading it still reduces me to tears. I’m crying typing this.
A Woman full of Joy
Our lovely, diverse workforce welcomed her with open arms. I did not hear or experience a single negative vibe from anyone, and it made me fiercely proud to be part of that team. She positively blossomed. Gone was the tired, grey version of her I knew. Here was this shining, vibrant woman, and she was full of joy. The word that kept occurring to me when she walked into the building each day was elegant.
Eventually, that chapter of my working life closed, and I moved on. I did my usual break-all-contact thing, the one I do when I leave somewhere. Not because people stop mattering, but because I never quite know how to fit people in outside of context.
I did see her though, one time since. It was at a red light near where I used to work. She stepped out onto the road in front of my car, but then the red man popped up and she did an absolutely gorgeous pirouette and stepped back onto the curb with a giggle covering her mouth with her hand as she did it. It was just so cute, and so her. Then she saw me and waved. There was such fucking beautiful joy in her femininity, it still makes me smile remembering that. So now I’m smiling with tears on my cheeks.
I recently read a post on Mastodon by a trans woman called Alicja, about cis allyship and her expectations and experiences of interacting with cis women. I’m not bringing up my former colleague because their stories are the same. They’re clearly not. I bring her up because I have seen, up close, the joy and beauty of a woman being able to live as herself, and that memory was sitting very much within me when I read Alicja’s words.
The Profound Effect of Kindness
Alicja’s post is truly beautiful, though I had to read a couple of times to make sure I understood what she was saying. That’s on me, I need to go down to the very roots of something to understand it. And without that in-depth understanding, I cannot feel as though I can begin to speak about something in case I am spreading misinformation.
In summary, my take on Alicja’s post is this: Transphobes push the narrative that cis women as a group, view trans women as predators, frauds or intruders. That cis women should be mistrustful and unwelcoming of trans women.
Many trans women grow up hearing, or later find themselves surrounded by this narrative from transphobes, so even when they know that it isn’t always the case, it can be scary as hell for a newly transitioning woman to begin to interact with other women. In Alicja’s words “a lot of transfems really have this fear of imposing. Because we have impostor syndrome for womanhood as social performance.”
Alicja talks about how welcoming cis women can be to trans women. She writes that many of the struggles, hang-ups and fears of trans women are parallel to, and sometimes the same as, those of cis women. She also describes how cis women may not fully realise how profound small kindnesses can feel. To them it may simply be ordinary kindness, while to a trans woman who has had to live with transphobic narratives and the fears they create, that kindness can feel monumental.
There is so much in her post, it is such a powerful piece of writing and it got me thinking about my own relationship with cis women.
On the Periphery of Sisterhood
As a late diagnosed autistic woman, I can draw a lot of parallels with this. I am not saying these experiences are the same at all, or even carry the same risks, but the emotional shape of what she describes is familiar to me.
Before I had my diagnosis, I couldn’t make sense of the fact that I never felt like a woman. It wasn’t that I felt like I was a man, I do identify with being a cis woman. I just never felt as though I belonged to sisterhood or to womanhood in general. I didn’t fit the social norms and at times felt unwelcome, especially as a teenager. And that followed me through my life.
I was always astonished when I met a woman who found me genuinely interesting and wanted to interact with me. I would be bowled over by what I perceived to be kindness.
Since I got my diagnosis, I am able to understand this a lot better, and I find I’m curious about building real and proper friendships with women for the first time in my life.
A Non-Typical Teenager
At school, the other girls in my year picked on me, it was the kind of thing people dismiss as typical teenage stuff. Spitballs in the hair, ganging up in a bitch session in the changing room, telling me how hairy I was (one of my paranoias at the time, I knew exactly how hairy I was), or how ugly I was. I think they could just feel I was different somehow. And of course I had no idea how to respond, and was too afraid that if I did they’d get violent. So I just took it.
It felt to me like boys on the whole were much less complicated. In my mid teens, I gravitated towards them. And in the end at that school, my people were metalheads. My love of metal remains with me still. They were a lovely group of boys and a girl who just didn’t mind my social oddness and accepted me, and they lovingly gave me the nickname Morbid.
I felt as though I didn’t understand what it was to be a girl. The teenagers around me were experimenting with becoming women. I was busy sewing my own clothes and having a deep love affair with all things sci-fi.
Kindness felt like Love
In adulthood, one of the things I did was relentlessly compare myself to other women. And I always found myself lacking. I was too fat / thin. My tits were always too small. And I’d focus on things like make-up or high heels and how I could master neither.
Working in a female dominated office, I was bullied by a woman. Again I had no idea how to handle it so I let it just go on and on. But there were others there who were so kind, and like Alicja, those kindnesses when first bestowed, affected me deeply. So deeply in fact, I actually felt as though I was in love with some of these women, and I began to question my sexuality. But that’s another story.
Alicja’s experience is not mine, and mine is not hers. But her words helped me understand something about my own feelings on a loneliness I couldn’t really place before.
A Perfectly Normal Autistic Woman
I’ve said it before, and I feel a bit like I’m banging on about this, but it needs to be said here. Getting my autistic diagnosis has been such a healing, perspective-changing, ah fuck it, a life-changing thing for me. I can’t begin to explain the sense of relief I felt at realising that I’m not some alien imposter dumped on earth as a baby. The fact I’ve felt like I don’t belong to humanity at large all my life, and especially to womanhood in general, it’s not because I am a freak at all.
I don’t have to feel apologetic anymore for being abnormal. I’m a perfectly normal autistic woman.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to break the habit of deeply ingrained, exhausting masking. But now, I know what it is. And for the first time in my life, I find myself curious about women. Not as a group I’ve failed to be a part of, but as people I’d like to meet, to get to know properly.