On Acceptance

I originally wrote this in 1998, when I was first in transition. I still find it to be largely true.

Between W______ and L______’s posts, I think there may be a unifying factor: we each look for data in our environment that confirms our beliefs about the environment. Can it be that W______ can look around her and say “I am completely and astoundingly accepted, and it seems to get better every day” and L______ can say “I’m still not completely accepted, and it never seems to get any better” and yet they inhabit the same larger world? It seems one might be able to make something more of one’s subjective perception of reality. Presuppose you are accepted and you will be? Is it that simple? Or is it just that hard?

For me, acceptance comes in spite of my fear. I go out, and people very willingly treat me as I present myself. In my work, where people know me the best and longest, I have enthusiastic acceptance and inclusion, as a competent colleague that happens to be female. In social situations with people who knew me before, I have cordial relationships, sharing of stories, and a co-joining in the small celebrations of our families’ lives. My girls accept me as their parent, not so much any more as their dad, but as a woman; they enjoy the changes as well, and the growing relationships and shared experiences.

I have changed my own presuppositions about myself; I am no longer a man, with confused mixed-up feelings, and in a perpetual state of alienation from self and others. I am a woman, and I presuppose that others will see me as I am. I don’t go about testing whether it is true, I act as if it already is true, and it works. When I act as though the opposite is true, that is how it ends up.

There is little doubt that transsexuals lately are getting a lot more positive press than we have in the past. Does this make a difference? It has to me– I find that when I encounter people who do know, or who learn that I have changed, it often takes me far, far fewer words to explain to them what happenned to me, and why I’m changing. There are still jokes about transgendered people; there are still jokes made about all kinds of people in all kinds of situations. We are on a cusp, perhaps, between populist acceptance, perhaps even reconciliation, and between popular ridicule of the unknown. Things are better than they were 10 years ago; how much of that perception is due to my own shifts in acceptance of myself, I don’t know.

May 18, 2010 by imnotaboy

Categories: MentalHealth