By Anonymous
I wish I had something positive and uplifting to say about my experience of gender today, but I don’t. I realized today that I sometimes squash my own feelings and reactions because I just couldn’t cope if I let it sink in how f*cked up something was that someone said to me.
For example, a coworker said to me when I first started my job, “I’m glad to get the chance to work with you. I’ve never met a functional trans person.”
Stop.
Right.
There.
That’s what I didn’t/couldn’t do at the time. I ignored the comment, took it as well-meaning, revised it in my head to be less offensive, told myself the person didn’t mean it the way it sounded, and in general shoved it down somewhere deep inside me, out of sight.
Unfortunately, today it popped back up.
It makes sense to me that I deleted the interaction from my awareness. I mean, what would it be like to work with someone who thought that every single other person they had met who was like me was dysfunctional? What does that even mean? Defective? Disordered? Disgusting? Where could I go from there with that person? How could I not wonder how I measured up in their eyes, whether I still qualified as an exception, if they had changed their mind at any point about me being “functional”? How could I move forward?
How can I?