Creepy Guys and Creepy Girls

A Transgender Experience

All my life both men and women have found me attractive. I am not vainly bragging, I am just telling the truth. Many times it has been flattering but there have been times when it has been insultingly aggressive. It is one thing to encourage the interest, it is another when, after a polite refusal is disregarded, the continued interest becomes uncomfortable and sometimes even menacing.

I hate it.

I was born physically male in the 1950s. It was a time when the concept of sexuality and gender was rigidly binary and the acceptance of gay and lesbian individuals had just barely passed beyond barbaric “medical” conversion therapy phase as a “fix” for homosexuality.

I was born transgender and at the time, I had no clue. My condition was not diagnosed until my 61st birthday. Until then I had learned to hide my gender confusion and to march to the strict male binary drumbeat that Society required.

As a child, I learned about creepy men. They were disguised as priests and Boy Scout leaders. They were the minority but, as trained sexual predators, they knew who the easy victims were. They tried with me but I was strong enough to make them look elsewhere for their prey.

In junior high schools suddenly girls started to get aggressive. I would get calls at home. Back then we had one house phone and my parents regularly answered it. Either it was a girl or her girlfriend asking for me. They would put notes in my books and cards in my home mailbox. At first, it was flattering but this would go on well after I asked them to stop.

In seventh and eighth grade, even though I had girlfriend, the aggressive pursuit by girls continued. They seem to take having a girlfriend as a challenge. Today I guess that they would be called alpha females. Regardless, it was aggressive and arguably “creepy”. I was a guy and I wasn’t allowed to be aggressive back. One girl took to hitting me with her school bag to get my attention and I couldn’t hit back. I wasn’t allowed to hit girls. Eventually, my mother modified her rule telling me “If the girl doesn’t act like a lady, don’t treat her like one.” That gave me a chance to defend myself.

I went to high school in Manhattan and had to take the subway every day. I always had to be on guard but predatory male interest was so prevalent for me as a young teen that I had to periodically stop cops to chase the aggressors that were following me, away. This happened with enough frequency that friends used to tease me, calling me “fag bait”. It was the 1960s when people’s words weren’t anywhere near politically correct.

This had been the pattern most of my life, unwantedly aggressive approaches by both men and women. Once, even after I married, it got to the point that I had to file a sexual harassment complaint against a female coworker.

Once I hit my late thirties and early forties the aggressive interest seemed to drop away. Then I hit my sixties, when it should just all been a memory.

I was finally diagnosed as a transgender female. As part of my “cure” I was put on female hormones which resulted in 38DD breasts. I have been out in public as Emma in a limited public way and never attracted any comments but I got to experience the internet creepy guy. By posting photos of my female self, some guys felt, that by sharing their disturbing sexual suggestions, I would find them attractive.

That really creeped me out.

I now learned about a new type of aggressor. Fortunately, this time it was only words on the internet in an environment that I could control . I could easily defend myself in it but it opened my eyes to a new vulnerability, that of being a woman. It made me all the more uncomfortable. I started to understand physical vulnerability.

I have a lot to learn.

So, here I am at the latter part of my life learning to deal with a new aggressor, in a gender role that I still don’t fully understand. I need a new awareness, a new threat alertness, and a new set of defensive social armor.

I better get used to it.

I share all of this because being transgender, part of my experience has been the full gamut of sexual aggressiveness that encompasses the entire gender spectrum.

It isn’t a gender exclusive.

Emma Holiday

Thank you for reading my work.

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Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.

My writing has three specific goals:

1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.

2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.

3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.