Am I a girl yet?

July 8, 2012 4:21 PM

Cuteypietiffany is a video blogger and Tgirl documenting her transition experience. She talks about coming out at work and to her friends, taking hormones, dealing with mood swings, and the anxiety of switching in and out of boy mode.
posted by Catchfire (7 comments total)

Good luck to her. I hope she has a very supportive home. I have always considered myself a very open minded person with respect to issues of sexuality and gender, but in recent years I have learned that a very close relative of mine is transgendered and it has really forced me to reevaluate myself in that regard.
posted by hwestiii at 5:14 PM on July 8, 2012

I once worked with a woman that had transitioned years before I met her -- I was a journalist and she was in the profession that I was covering. I'd met her in person a few times, and she was just a great person all-around.

But there came times when I realized that my views were pretty progressive in our shared community. The company for which I worked held chat sessions for fans, and in a few of those she would be a guest speaker. We actually had to have extra moderators in the discussion to keep the "SHE'S A MAN, BABY!!!1111" comments at bay. Yes, they were that original.

After a few years of dealing with that sort of thing, and coming to terms that our audience, even if they weren't in that gender or age bracket, acted like teen boys, I gave up on it. I have better things, and better people, to associate with.

Good luck to Cuteypietiffany. I applaud her resilience in putting these videos up on Youtube. Everything else must seem pretty easy in comparison.
posted by thanotopsis at 6:44 PM on July 8, 2012

Boy mode. Man, I do not miss that at ALL. Haven't had to do that since I was at my grandma's deathbed.
posted by egypturnash at 7:00 PM on July 8, 2012 [2 favorites]

I don't have terribly much to say aside from this is fantastic and I'm glad to see someone vlogging something like this so openly and frankly. I feel like this thread needs more comments. And it's some insight I might otherwise not get at all.

Fantastic post, thank you.
posted by six-or-six-thirty at 9:21 PM on July 8, 2012 [2 favorites]

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the great work that two MeFi users do with Miss Gender. (previously)
posted by inturnaround at 10:31 PM on July 8, 2012 [3 favorites]

The more I see things like this, the more I realise that my experience of coming out was unusual. I didn't do the whole part-time thing, ever. In fact, I came out to everyone around me (including family and so on) before I started transitioning, before I knew what that would mean for me. So things like worrying about being able to keep up the voice? Well, I just slowly started trying to do a girly voice more and more often. If and when I fuck up, well it's not like everyone didn't watch me go through the learning process anyway. I never really 'practice' anything much, never spend much time privately working on my voice, makeup, hair, anything - I just live as best I can, practice my voice when I speak, work on my makeup when I'm getting ready to go out, and so on - (hopefully!) slowly get better at things as time goes on. It occasionally makes me feel uncomfortable if I can't tell if someone's reading me a male or female, doing this, as I genuinely have no idea - it's really hard for me to know what people's expectations of me are, though in a sense that's very liberating.

Coming out before that really entailed anything made it a lot simpler for me to take the first steps I wanted to take. It also felt like everything I did was somehow 'honest' - little if any of what I do is to maintain cover, as it were, either way. I just sort of told everyone to start using female pronouns for me, and then started slowly making that job a little easier for them :P

I find this sort of thing (this post) really interesting, more because of how different an experience it is to mine than because of the similarities. It's always very heartening to hear stories of other people meeting acceptance also - I sometimes get struck by a feeling that my experience, in its relative lack of hardship and 'traditional' form, lacks authenticity in some manner, illogical as that is. It's nice to have that notion challenged :)
posted by Dysk at 4:09 AM on July 9, 2012 [3 favorites]

Thank you for posting this. I have two friends who are transitioning, both of whom became my friends in an academic environment where I was (and continue to be) in a position of mentor to them. I knew one of these friends for several years before his transition and recently met the other, whose transition is currently underway but not yet widely known (although that is likely to change soon). In addition to their both being amazing, brilliant people whom I am proud and happy to know, my friendships with them have also been very instructive for me as a teacher and just as a person, thanks to their extraordinary generosity, courage, and eloquence.

I regret that until I had the opportunity to get to know these friends, I did not know much about trans issues beyond the little that it is possible to "know" from reading academic scholarship. My areas of academic inquiry include considerable focus on gender and sexuality, so I am very interested in trans topics in that respect and thus appreciate the insights that Cuteypietiffany shares in her videos on that level.

But more important to me is to learn how to do anything I can to help non-trans people, including the non-trans students I teach, learn to foster and be part of a more accepting and welcoming culture that includes transmen and transwomen. And so I am grateful to courageous people like CPT and Dysk and my friends for their willingness to share their experiences and knowledge.
posted by isogloss at 2:15 PM on July 9, 2012