Dear Polly,
I’m a trans woman who came out just over three years ago, in my mid-40s. I lost my marriage and almost all of my friends, but I’ve made a new life in the city. I have a much better relationship with my children now that I’m not seeing them through a fog of depression. The friendships I have now are so much deeper, more joyful, and more rewarding than the ones I had in my old life, and despite all the awfulness that comes with being visibly trans — and there’s a lot of awfulness right now — my life now is so much better than it was before.
Or at least, it is as long as I keep moving. I feel like a shark: if I stop swimming, I’ll sink. So I’m constantly filling my time with concerts and films and creative projects and freelance work and volunteer work because if I have any downtime, all I feel is lonely and miserable. I feel that by coming out I’ve pretty much guaranteed that I’ll be alone for the rest of my life, and that terrifies me.
I didn’t date from my early teens until I met my wife in my very late 20s. I was convinced that my terrible secret, which at the time I thought was just that I liked to cross-dress, would mean instant rejection. I decided to be up-front when I met my future wife, and I told her that I cross-dressed very early in our relationship. She was fine with it, and when I finally worked it all out and realized I was trans, she tried to be fine with that, too. It didn’t work out. What initially began as a lack of attraction to me quickly turned into disgust.
My father rejected me when I came out, too. He wrote me deliberately vicious emails that were thousands of words long. There was nothing feminine about me. Who was I trying to kid? What was I doing to my children’s lives? Had I lost my fucking mind? Those were the nicer things he said, and I’ve heard his cruelest words in my head on a loop pretty much ever since. Whenever I consider even trying a dating app, it’s his voice I hear.
And it’s not just him. It’s our entire culture. I’ve spent most of my life being told that people like me are monsters, and seeing trans women portrayed as deceitful and dangerous and disgusting. For four decades I’ve been told again and again that people like me are broken, dangerous, hideous, unlovable. Just last week at a comedy show I had to sit through a routine where the comic shared his disgust at a dream in which a woman turned out to be trans. That was the entire joke: Trans! Ugh! I’ve heard that one a lot.
I feel like decades of that have poisoned me, and made it impossible to believe that anybody could desire me.
I know trans people are beautiful, and I try to remember the nice things my friends who are women tell me: that I’m pretty, that I’m charismatic, that I’m funny, that I’m kind. But all I see is what I’m not. I’m terrified by the prospect of dating because under the wig and the makeup and the too-small breasts there’s a body I hate, a body that isn’t feminine enough, a body stuck in limbo between man and woman.
In the rest of my life I’ve made peace with and even drawn strength from being trans: I stand up and perform on stages under bright lights, confident and comfortable in my own skin, sometimes looking pretty fierce. I’ve lost the stage fright that plagued the old me.
But when I imagine dating, I lose all that confidence. I can’t bring myself to swipe right because I expect rejection. Maybe it’ll happen when she discovers that I haven’t had surgery, or when she sees my height and build, or when she hears my too-deep voice, or when she finds out my hair is a wig, or…
I know that maybe someone out there won’t mind any of that. But I also know that the chances of finding her are slim, and the chances of being rejected by other women are high. I’m tough, but I don’t know if I’ll ever feel tough enough to deal with that, because the rejections I’ve had in the last few years have been the cruelest kind and I don’t think I can take many, or any, more.
So I keep swimming, because if I don’t, I’ll sink. But each day I feel like I’m getting lower.
Help me, Polly. How do I rise?
Trans and Tired
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