L: Maybe, if you’re comfortable, we can also talk about navigating the day-to-day being in public space where you don’t necessarily have the time to establish a long-term thing but you’re just going shopping or taking the bus or things like that.
Well, for me, sort of the biggest issue is always how I’m being read as, because I have a lot of privilege, I don’t have to feel threatened if someone misgenders me, for example, because I’m still within the… I mean, on a day-to-day basis, in a store or something, I’m a transmasculine person assigned female at birth, but I’m also a lot of other things, white, able-bodied, etc. etc. So, for me it’s not a question of threat, it’s a question of comfort.
I think the clearest example is how I think about bathrooms. I can technically use gendered bathrooms, any one of them, but when it comes to choosing which one I want to use, it sort of becomes this question of do I want to make other people uncomfortable maybe or make myself uncomfortable? So, it’s this sort of trade-off between the two, and then there are also spaces that are completely not accessible for me like at all… Gyms, I don’t remember the last time I’ve been to a gym, because of the changing rooms.
Especially here. I feel like it’s different in Poland, I feel like there’s more cabins and stuff? I’ve never seen those, I mean I’ve also never seen the inside of a gym in this country, but like from what I heard from people you just undress right there, and I just don’t understand that to begin with, but yeah, specifically in gendered changing rooms, like, I think it’s the same thing as in bathrooms, just 100 times more intense, and there the physical threat is actually more possible, so that’s also something that I have to keep in mind.
So, how do I make spaces in everyday live? I think if you just consider a space around me a space, it’s stuff like… I have this one scarf that is currently in the washing, but it’s there, and for me it’s like my dysphoria scarf. It’s something that I will always have on when I’m not binding⁶, sometimes even when I am binding and just don’t feel super comfortable at the moment. So, for me that scarf is sort of a safe space.
Like when it comes to just day-to-day life, if people here in the Netherlands misgender me, I don’t know that, I don’t speak their language, I don’t give a shit. I’ve actually felt very good about my gender since moving here, because if people misgender me, probably 90 % of the time I don’t understand what they’re saying. I will never know, and that’s fine [laughs].
“I’ve actually felt very good about my gender since moving here, because if people misgender me, probably 90 % of the time I don’t understand what they’re saying.”
The trade-off is that sometimes you will get groups that you sort of hang out with but you never came out to or you didn’t have a chance to state which pronouns you use, and then half a year in, someone misgenders you in a conversation when you’re smoking outside, and you’re like ‘Oooh… oh, this is happening now, huh?’
Again, I want to make it very clear that I think I’m very privileged in being able to exist without this feeling of being threatened in most spaces, because worst case scenario for me is that people just assume I’m a lesbian.
Although for some reason, when I paint my nails, people no longer assume that. And I have that theory that it’s because nail polish has become such a statement of gender that it almost fits into this archetype of a nonbinary person that cis-people create when they start thinking about nonbinary people, it’s like this skinny person with painted nails and colourful hair. So, I actually pass⁷ better when I have nail polish on.
“I actually pass better when I have nail polish on.”
But most of the time people will just assume I’m a lesbian, which, again, is a huge privilege, because the worst thing that has ever happened to me in that regard was that someone just shouted ‘Gay!’ behind me and my ex, I guess because we were holding hands. And we were just like ‘you’re not wrong, yeah, that’s what’s happening, good job’, you know? How perceptive!
⁶ pushing the breast tissue down with binders or tape to create the appearance of a flat chest.
⁷ passing: being read as one’s gender.