Or rather "Cameras and Mirrors"—but it makes for a better title, doesn't it?
One thing about coming out of the closet and starting to live full-time as yourself is that bit by bit you begin to understand certain things about yourself. In recent days I've come to understand two small but significant things about myself.
(1) On this forum I recently came across a list of personality traits that transgender people have in common. One of them immediately caught my eye: we transpeople don't like having our photo taken. Now how true this is of all transpeople I can't say, but I know that it's true of me. All my life I've had a serious aversion to cameras. It has actually made me angry on occasion when somebody was pointing a camera at me, and there have been times I was quite rude to someone who wanted to take my photo.
Now that I'm out, this has changed. I've had my photo taken any number of times lately, and it doesn't bother me at all. But one thing that bothers me is how much it used to bother me. A few years ago I was forced, much against my will, to get in on a family portrait—mom, dad, us kids, the in-laws, the grandkids, the whole crowd.
Everyone else was relaxed and smiling at the camera, and there I am sitting at the end of the front row, fidgeting in my chair and looking off into the wings. My brother-in-law remarked on this, how I obviously was wishing I could be somewhere else. The photo is disturbingly similar to this one from the 1950's:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_neT8fdNk1Ls/SUBKgldmr1I/AAAAAAAALzw/oNRxMUZ97dI/s320/Pauline+Parker+%28foto+escolar%29.JPGThe girl indicated by the arrow is Pauline Parker. Not terribly long after this photo was taken she murdered her mother. If you've seen the film "Heavenly Creatures", you'll know what this is all about. It's fairly sobering to see yourself looking not entirely unlike a mother-murderer.
(2) All my life I've had a fascination with mirrors. I don't mean that I'll sit in front of a mirror staring at myself for hours. But, e.g., when I brush my teeth, as I'm finishing up, if I happen to glance at the mirror, I'll freeze, studying myself intently for a few seconds. Or if I see a mirror in a public place—a shop or a hotel lobby, for instance—again I might stop and take a long look (then remind myself to move on: if somebody saw me staring at myself like that, they might find it rather odd).
I still look in the mirror quite a bit these days, a trait that I think I have in common with lots of transpeople. But things are different now. When you're trans, sometimes you feel a bit unreal. You have a hard time believing what's happening to you. This can't be real. How is it possible that things could have got so badly screwed up?
You look in the mirror and you seem surprised to see anything at all there. Then you react with suspicion: Who are you? How did you get there? Where did you come from? What exactly is going on here? Or it might be: Is that me? No, that can't possibly be me!
Whereas nowadays, now that I'm out, when I catch my reflection in the mirror, I smile—and often start laughing with delight. There you are! So nice to see you again!
A mirror, like a camera, is a major challenge to your soul because it captures your body, your exterior, and insists that that is you. It cannot capture your soul, which is the real you. It sees no more than the hosts of cisgender society who insist that you are no more than meets the eye.
Your gender is one of the main building-blocks of your soul. There are others, which can vary in significance, depending on the individual. Others might be your family, your nationality, your ethnicity, your religion, and so on, depending on what is deepest in your heart. But your gender is among the most important of those building-blocks, and in fact might be the most important of all.
When your gender is under attack, your very soul is under attack. This is something that cisgender women often feel. Not too long ago I heard a woman complaining about how some people were trying to make her feel uncomfortable about the fact that she enjoys reading history. To some, history doesn't seem like a proper pursuit for a woman. And many a time you'll hear women complaining about how often they heard something on the order of, "You're a girl! You can't play baseball!" Or a long list of other things a girl supposedly can't do.
Women often find their gender under attack. They feel the force, the reaction, the rebellion of their gender identity. They may not articulate to themselves the resentment of their gender identity in the same terms we do, or perhaps not as keenly as we do. But they feel what we feel, even if the specifics of the event are somewhat different.
You must be true to yourself. You must live according to your nature, a major part of which is your gender. When our cisgender enemies try to force us to ignore our gender and live according to our bodies, they have no idea what they're doing. They're trying to undermine the very foundation of our souls—the result of which is such profound anxiety and discomfort that you can come to take on the look of a murderer. And that's a very serious matter.
