CREATIVE NON-FICTION

Almost Nobody Called Me “Ma’am” Until I Came Out as a Trans Man

Why do people need to affirm my “womanhood” now?

CW: Gendered perceptions of childbirth and sex from a trans man’s perspective; misgendering; dysphoria

It’s easy for me to understand that people who misgender my wife are assholes. It’s obvious that they’re a beautiful high-powered femme. Their makeup is more on point than I’ve ever managed across decades of performing femininity in my own search for love and safety. They have more skill with eyeshadow than most cis women. They’re almost always seen wearing bright, colorful silky blouses and skirts that perfectly match the day’s purse, sunglasses, and shoes.

Anyone who fails to recognize that they are all woman is just being ugly.

Recognizing that people who misgender me are assholes is a bit harder. I have more empathy for people who misgender me than for those who misgender my wife. Yeah, I have short hair, but lots of women do, too. I have developing muscles, a fairly flat chest, and a patchy beard when I don’t shave, like some women. I wear t-shirts and men’s jeans and shoes, like some women. My voice is lowering, but women who smoke a lot have that, too. There’s some evidence that I’m on testosterone to supplement my medical transition, but there are cis lesbians who use testosterone to feel more themselves without feeling any less like women. Hell, there are cis women who pass as men more often than I do despite my efforts because there is a lot of variation on what it is to be a woman.

Let’s face it: masculinity is much more acceptable on women than femininity is on men, so people expect some women to dress, act, and look a lot like men. I get that. When people call my wife and I “ladies”, they’re probably thinking I’m a butch lesbian and my wife is a lipstick lesbian, making ours the stereotypical lesbian marriage at first glance.

What bothers me is that almost nobody felt the need to constantly affirm my “womanhood” when I had long hair, wore femme clothes, and thought I was some kind of woman. I didn’t figure out that I was a trans man until January or February of 2020, so I spent much of my life fighting to force myself to be as feminine as I could tolerate at any given time. I would go through phases where I went out and bought a bunch of makeup that I would wear for about 3 days in a row before abandoning it all until the next major party reminded me to try again at performing femininity.

Sure, my students would try to call me Miss [Logan] because that’s what you do with teachers. I always felt really uncomfortable with that and reminded them that we were all adults. I tried to get them to just call me by my first or last name at the time, with varying levels of success. I thought my feelings on this were about teaching power dynamics. I wanted to earn my students’ respect, rather than demand it. It occurs to me now that the deep cringy feeling was actually a continuous low rumbling of social gender dysphoria.

I remember very clearly the first time someone called me “ma’am”. I was 35 years old. It’s the only time I remember that happening prior to my gender transition. It happened on Mother’s Day of the year before I found myself. A man with a cowboy hat opened the door for me and said sweetly, “Go ahead, ma’am.” It was the sort of thing that would have made my wife’s day.

My response to this chivalrous gesture was very similar to what it would have been today. I broke into a sweat from head to toe. Something dropped through my stomach. I think I managed to thank him, but I didn’t feel okay. I thought maybe I was having some sympathy discomfort with gender stuff, after having already paid heavily in lost family for being the out and proud queer and polyamorous spouse of a trans person. Gender hadn’t really been my friend by that moment.

I walked into my workplace and sat down at my desk. As if on cue, a coworker approached and asked, “Should I be wishing you a happy Mother’s Day?”

I wanted to vomit. I said, “No!” much louder and with much more anger than I had intended.

“Ohh, okay. Were you planning on having kids someday? Is this a sensitive subject?” This person just couldn’t catch a hint.

“Probably not and I’d rather not talk about it,” I answered.

I thought it was the pain of thinking about having kids that was bothering me. For so many reasons, this was out of reach for me, despite having always wanted to be a parent. There was money and the lack of family support for our queer and polyamorous lifestyle. There was the very real fear of a family member possibly challenging us in court for custody of any biological children I had. Then, there was the physical side of it.

I thought it was my trauma history that made me fear the biological process of giving birth, but there was also an element of unidentified gender dysphoria manifesting in a fear of losing all control of my body, of how it would be touched, how it would be medically treated, and how it would respond to something that wasn’t supposed to be inside of me growing and preparing to rip me open from the inside like something from a science fiction horror movie.

Heads up to cis women who want to describe childbirth in excruciating detail to me because I’m supposed to be more sympathetic to women’s issues than the average guy: I’m probably imagining some kind of science fiction horror movie from the moment you say “birth”. I’m not sweating profusely while writing this because the weather is unseasonably hot. Unless I’m deeply invested in your well-being and/or the well-being of that baby, I’m probably about to excuse myself real quick at the beginning of that conversation about your prolapsed...okay, moving on.

It speaks to my level of investment in the abortion debate that I can even sit through any of the endless Roe vs. Wade discussions that are inundating my social media feeds right now. It isn’t easy, and sometimes, I just have to opt out when someone says something like, “if men could give birth, they’d have abortions at every gas station!” Hahaha! Yeah, I can’t think of any guys who could give birth! That’s so funny!

But let’s get back to why this guy was never up for popping out any biological babies. There was also the part of figuring out how to have sex that could result in procreation without causing my wife and I to both get squeaked the fuck out. I didn’t realize in the closet that I was having gradually intensifying sexual gender dysphoria. I just knew that any lesbian sex between my wife and I wasn’t quite working for me despite having known I was queer since I hit puberty. I’d never considered intercourse to be in my top fifty list of favorite sexual activities, but it was rapidly falling down the list of things I wanted to do. It would soon hit rock bottom for both of us.

So, when the first of several coworkers asked me if they should wish me happy Mother’s Day, they were each treading on some shaky ground. Questions about having kids were getting increasingly painful to answer. It would take me the better part of another year to understand why I struggled to answer these questions, but that first day where I heard the word “ma’am” used in reference to me was a hint that I didn’t belong in the feminine world I was inhabiting.

It still irks me though…for 35 years, I only heard the word ma’am once. Then, beginning with the very first steps of my social gender transition, I would begin to hear it over and over. Hundreds of times.

Why?

Was it that I looked older after cutting my hair? That should have stopped after I got on testosterone. Everyone seems to mistake me for a twenty-something now. One older lady in our old neighborhood even thought my wife and I were high school students who had just gotten off the school bus. I don’t look so old anymore.

Is it that people feel the need to assert gender onto specifically androgynous people? Does that make them feel better? Do they think it makes me feel better for them to let me know they see me as a woman?

I’m genuinely curious. Why did people suddenly decide to gender me only after I began my gender transition? Any theories?

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