Bowties caught my fancy about ten years ago. I took every opportunity to wear them. People complimented me on them. A few men told me how they didn’t have the balls to wear them.
I don’t have any balls, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. Probably for the best, too.
What I never heard was anyone telling me the bowtie made me look fat. In fact, people stopped negatively commenting on my clothing after I lived as a man. As a woman they did it all the time.
Oh dresses would make you look more feminine
If you dressed differently people would treat you better
The fact that people treated me differently as a man than as a woman forced me to eat one of the biggest shit sandwiches of my transsexual career.
Chomping down on the nasty feces sandwich I got pissed. Like kind of transsexual pissed. Like where I hated the world and everyone in it kind of pissed.
99% of the time I got treated more badly as a woman than as a man. But as a man everybody thought I had something to say.
Like why do you want to talk with me now?!? You never did before, when I was a woman. When I was a woman you barely acknowledged me.
I felt the same inside, but my outside made everyone treat me differently. Now I knew this was going to happen. I knew as a female to male transsexual people would act like they were interacting with a man when they connected with me.
Of course. I wanted that.
What infuriated me was how shallow people were. I truly felt the same on the inside. My outside changed and wham!
Okay, sir
Whatever you want, sir
What do you think, Jay<–who had no expertise to answer the question at hand in a crowd of qualified women
The utterly disrespectfully execrable manner in which we treat women exploded in my face. Without me even trying.
I drew the cartoon below to explain the hard truth of male-female relationships.
It isn’t that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. It’s that women are on the ground and men keep crushing their face into the pavement.The crushing comes in all kinds of actions. Everything from rape to bad jokes about vaginas. I experienced a lot of double-standards regarding clothing and my gender.
So, does this bowtie make me look fat?
I originally published this piece in 2006 in a very different format in a place far, far away.