I have written before about my tense relationship with my own visibility. In the community the time before transition is known as living inside your egg, your identity often hidden from yourself as much as from other people. I have been reading The Third Person by Emma Grove and while dissociation is clearly a huge part of the main character’s experience, there’s a line that her therapist speaks that really caught me, she described how transgender people can dissociate from their own identity as a means of surviving being trans. Perhaps the eggshell, the boundary between knowledge and identity, is to some extent a kind of dissociation.
When your egg cracks, when that barrier begins to break, you are gifted some knowledge of your identity, and you’re left to then manage the dissonance between who you appear to be, and who you really are.
Transition, then, is the means by which we make ourselves in our own self-image. And we become visible. So very visible. Transition is an abrupt and startling movement across gender lines, boundaries so rarely crossed, so policed, that movement across them becomes obvious to all around. Many trans folk find meaning in this visibility, it makes space for those that come after. And this is true for me. When I transitioned I thought I would always be visible in this way, that I would always be seen as a gender revolutionary.
Vive la gender résistance!
But there is, at least to me, an aspiration toward something else. Something so rare, so precious, and so fleeting and vaporous, like glittering diamond smoke. You see it for its glint in the air, but the more you grasp at it the more it slips between your fingers. This is known in the community as ‘passing’ for the gender you are without the world either pumping a fist in your direction in solidarity, or waving one at you in fury. And this then opportunes something extraordinary, something I wouldn’t even allow myself to dream of, living a life where you exist just as the gender you are.
‘Stealth’
I know that these terms are problematic. You’re not hiding anything except your odd medical history, so ‘stealth’, ‘passing’ both carry some problematic connotations. But they are the words of my people, they are our words, and they were forged in the fires of our shared history, and so on this transgender awareness week I use them proudly.
This week I was invited to become part of a media campaign on behalf of Overcoming MS. I’ve never been in a media campaign before and this has been one of the very best experiences. My deepest gratitude goes to the OMS team for their support, both around MS of course but also their ceaseless protection of me as a transgender woman in this campaign. This group has had my back the entire way and I’ve honestly never felt quite so held by an organisation as I step somewhat into the public eye on their behalf.
The filming of the campaign itself was a wild ride. I got the train to London and instead of taking the tube (there aren’t really any accessible stations near the studio) I wheeled 2 ½ miles through the London streets, over Tower Bridge, and into the studio. So I arrived having just completed a pretty full workout to find that this was a much more serious endeavour than I had anticipated. There was a set, a crew, a director behind the camera, and a fair few folks watching and offering advice and guidance. So I wheeled quickly to the bathroom and tried to get my hair to conform to gravity’s expectation, and fix my makeup from ‘sweaty workout sheen’ to ‘lightly perspiring workout sheen’ before I headed onto set.
In the studio itself I met the incomparable comedian Rabiah Coon (check her out on her YouTube channel) and our first task together was to make each other laugh on camera, which was so much fun that we are now friends. I then had a solo interview, answering questions into the camera and telling the stories of diagnosis, relapse, despair, and overcoming.
While filming, periodically a kind soul would hop on set to adjust my hair. The director asked me to find my light, to brush my hair over my ear, to turn to the camera and smile. This is the closest I’ve ever felt to Hollywood.
Honestly this was a great experience, and seeing the campaign now, hearing the stories of the other folk involved, realising that I am somehow featured alongside them, is truly humbling and rather wonderful.
Wheeling back to London Waterloo station after filming I was beaming the whole way, largely heckin’ bamboozled at what just happened.
Was that a thing we just did?!
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what I’m doing with the blog, with podcasting, with the campaign, and periodically wondering whether it’s all just a very effective exercise in narcissism. When being filmed, every so often someone in the room would compliment me, and I can see how actors can become self-focussed, addicted to the effusion and praise. I know that I’m vulnerable to it, as a woman who has a weird gender history it is my deepest wish for that history to remain a mystery, to be totally ‘unclockable’, as much as I loathe that desire in myself. Being seen as beautiful is itself the most powerful shield to hide behind. Someone saying ‘you look amazing’ while you’re on camera is a hit of dopamine like few others, and I could easily find myself craving it.
And now I’m due to be interviewed for ITV Meridian, which is always daunting, being exposed to the scrutiny of a fair few viewers. Again I find myself wanting to be beautiful, to fit in on set, to hide in plain sight of the camera. I start to look to the gaze of folks in the studio, hang on their compliments as evidence of my own worthiness, evidence that people can’t tell that I’m trans…
… as evidence of the legitimacy of my womanhood.
But I think I need to remind myself of what I’m doing, and how visibility is an important, possibly necessary part of my motivation. In every episode of the Classroom Psychology podcast, and in a good few articles I’ve published in scientific journals, I finish with the line ‘together, we’ll make a world where everyone can find a place to belong’. This is my fundamental motivation I think. I want to move beyond my own self-focus, though I do love a stage I’m not going to lie, but I want my work, my advocacy, my visibility, to make space for those that come after. Those with MS, those who are trans and gender diverse, and especially those folk sitting at the intersection of the two. I want them to see me. And I can’t be visible and invisible simultaneously.
So I have resolved to be open about my gender, should the opportunity arise. I will be out and proud and disarmingly charming. I am ok if ‘stealth’ remains a dream. If I am visible, if my gender history is legible to those watching, then I will make it count. I will let them see me, and I will let them stare.
So here I go, off to my taxi to take me to the studio…
Wish me luck…
The interview (opens in a new window)
OK I’m back. I am genuinely now writing on the day of filming just after I rolled in the front door.
This was one of the most fun experiences ever. I met everyone on set, had a pre-interview chat, got hooked up to a microphone, and cameras started rolling. We had a conversation about multiple sclerosis, about overcoming, about the kindness of strangers, and about the opportunity for psychological growth even in the context of physical deterioration.
And my transness didn’t even come up.
I was worrying about visibility and revelation and controlling the narrative and the possibility of a cold reception… and it just didn’t happen. I didn’t mention it. It wasn’t relevant.
And this is the beauty of this moment. As a full circle from the start of my transition to now. From walking to a wheelchair, from able bodied to disabled, from scared to brave, from isolation to telling friends I love them regularly, from man to woman. I have arrived.
Of course I do acknowledge that without saying ‘I’m trans’, if people can’t tell, if I’m just a girl to viewers, then I sacrifice the opportunity to make space for those that come after to some extent. But for me, in this moment, the opportunity to exist as myself, without my transness really even being in the room… it was wonderful. This is what being trans can be. When transition is complete, when there is no battle to fight in the moment, just being a woman in the room, wholly and completely. I will not take these moments for granted.
I hope that my embodiment in the world is positive for my community despite the possibility that my transness wasn’t obvious. I’m generally very open about my gender history. I have a whole collection in this RollingForInitiative blog called ‘diaries of a trans girl’. But we’re reaching a point now where it just doesn’t always need to be in the room. It isn’t relevant. And I can just… live.
I guess I really am entering that hallowed phase of my transition where I’m just another girl in the street, truly. And a phase of MS where the big relapses and chaos are, for now, mostly behind me. I had another dose of Ocrevus on Friday, shields raised for another year. I’ve now been in remission for nearly four years.
It is an extremely strange experience, rolling into the studio and just being seen as a girl in a wheelchair. I realise that is what I am. But when I started I would never have believed that I would ever reach a point where I could enter a TV studio, be on camera, and have my gender not be the subject of conversation, not even be something we mention.
If I met myself 20 years ago, the young girl who looked abundantly like a guy at Uni in London, and told her that this would be her future... she would not believe me. ‘You’ll be interviewed about overcoming MS, as a woman in her wheelchair ‘the Rocinante’. The future will be profoundly uncertain. But I can tell you now, take a deep breath my girl...