Posing

I'm often reading bits and pieces of people's life story, usually post in a blog, articles, chapters in book, wherever, and like to find interesting nuggets of ideas, for me anyway, to think and write about. I was struck by one recently about a woman who born, raised and lived male for a long time before transistioning.

That's not new as there are more late (post-40) transpeople transistioning than ever, as the publicity about them eases and the medical community is more understanding to help those going through a transistion. There is a higher proportion today for young, even children and teenagers, transistiong as it's better for them then and in their future, and because the medical community finally got smart enough to treat them.

But that's not the point here. I was struck with the biography of one who said she "posed as a man" throughout her adult life. And that's probably the best word to describe it, posing. Because that's what transpeople do in the life before their transistion. They live a lie and they transistion to be true and truthful. True to themselves and truthful to the world.

And all the time before was just posing as their birth sex and gender. They simply passed to get through life. Sometimes they tried hard to live as that sex and gender, as you read in some of the biographies, but always in the end found it too much to live a lie. They transistioned into themselves.

And that is what's often not understood. Many ask a transwoman, "So you were a man and you switched sex (or gender) to live as a woman?" Well, that's the wrong question because they never really were a man, but only posed as one. It's the wrong question because they never saw themselves let alone believed themselves to be a man.

They simply posed as one. They acted it out, maybe partly to try to convince themselves they're not a transperson, but mostly to hide themselves from the world. They didn't want the world to see and know, so they posed. Until it overwhelmed them. The posing, the charade becomes a weight so much if crushes them mentally and emotionally.

The posing slowly kills their heart, soul and spirit. And when they shed the identity under the posing, they find their freedom, to be themselves, no posing, no acts, nothing but themselves. So don't judge a transperson from their past, judge by their present, because before it was all just posing.