I feel shame at not being enough of a man. When I can’t pull off a male-coded task, I fear a man glancing at me with the “don’t you know this?” look. I feel like a pig with lipstick when I femme up. I feel emasculated when I lose my cool. I replay a moment from gym class in high school. I dread correcting my bank for the umpteenth time that it’s miss not mister. It’s shame inherited from my youth.
I also feel shame at being too much of a man. When a woman is ahead of me on the sidewalk for more than a few seconds, I’ll deviate to a longer route to avoid being clocked as a threat. I avoid entering the women’s clothes section and instead walk on glancing at items from the aisle. I beeline in and out when I spot what I want. God forbid there’s a child entering a public washroom ahead of me: I might sacrifice my plans outright to use the toilet at home.
This shame I inherited from the news and social media that frames trans women like me as predators. Even sympathetic coverage starts from this framing. I’ve witnessed malevolent fabrications poison the attitudes of strangers around me.
Topping it all is this other layer where I entered adulthood believing my needs were too much – the same message being told to trans women everywhere.
How do I undo this shame when my shame isn’t just the perceived disgust of others, but how this disgust moves them to violence. Where my world is a minefield and simple tasks like going to the washroom has to be paired with asking myself whether this is the time, because other times were that time. Where I remember not just the perpetrators, but that no bystander ever stood up for me.
Every self-help book around shame promotes self-acceptance as the way out. But none of them discuss how to deal with shame when self-acceptance accomplishes nothing. The problem isn’t whether I accept myself, it’s whether others do, because they’re the difference between whether I’m going to be hospitalized or not.