Being with friends and associates who only know me as the girl Beverly versus being with old friends who knew me before transition is much more relaxed and enjoyable. Maybe that's me, and not them, but that's my perception. It's not that I mind telling new friends I'm trans. It's that I don't advertise it or make a big deal out of it. If I get really close to a new friend, I tell them when it makes sense to have that conversation. Before you ask, my boyfriend knows I'm trans, and he's not a ->-bleeped-<-.
Back to the subject at hand, the very worst is having a friend out you to a new friend and realizing you were their token trans friend to make them feel cool. This happened to me at dinner in a restaurant with a group of girlfriends. It was a real WTF! moment. This former friend is sitting next to me and just starts talking about how she explained to her boyfriend that I was once a man and how cool our little group was for accepting me, and blah, blah; the room started spinning at that point, and I don't know what else she said. All I could do was sit there in shock looking at my newer friends' jaws dropping and looking at me like I was from Mars. I panicked and cut her off and started babbling incoherently about never being a "man" and how I was a woman and shut the <not allowed> up.
Took me a while to get over that. My other friends jumped all over her as I left with a newer friend, who only knew me as a woman, and that was quite the ride to her house to drop her off. As a result, that newer friend and I no longer do things together even though she was classy about it. I realized I was that other girl's trans token, and that was a big kick in the head. The point is, it's nobody's place to out you and to respect that this needs to come from you. It's your life, not theirs. If someone starts bragging about having a trans friend and uses you as an example, there's your red flag that you're a token. Anyone else experienced anything like this?
