by Jaime Collins, President, Southwest Wisconsin Rainbow Alliance
My story begins one November evening in 1963. At the moment of my birth the doctor took one very quick look at me and informed my mother, “It’s a boy.” In that moment, that doctor was giving me a lifetime prescription for exactly what was expected of me. How I should behave throughout life. How I should talk, walk, act, and even THINK every moment of my life from birth through death.
But at an early age, I knew I was different. I vividly remember wanting to see a girl in my mirror. The boy reflected back at me didn’t fit my perception of myself, though as a child there was no way for me to understand or articulate that. I had no words. No reference points. No role models. Certainly no one who might listen to any such nonsense. Nor any permission to express such feelings.
A generation ago, even less, this was common. Back then, transgender people were seen only as deviants, unfit for the workplace and a humiliation to families. Transgender Americans have long been shunned, fired, disgraced, disowned, beaten, and murdered. Simply for who they are. Far too often and in far too many places, we still are. I have friends whose families vow never to speak with them and others who have ended their lives to escape the pain.
In her groundbreaking 1983 essay titled, “Oppression,” Marilyn Frye writes:
Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing, that the closest scrutiny could discover that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.
Frye’s powerful metaphor helps us understand why oppression is so difficult to recognize. Ultimately, my story is all about my own decades-long process of stepping back to finally see the wires. And find my way out.
Unknowingly caged and with nowhere to go as a child, I performed the role prescribed to me. Shyly and awkwardly I grew up a boy. Day after day, week after week, year after year I was taught how I was supposed to act, and I learned to hide and pretend. Through this indoctrination, my feelings about who I was turned to shame, and the shame I pushed down in order to survive.
Finally at 23, I set out to travel the world, though traveling for me was not a way to build my career. I was just trying to escape. With the anonymity afforded me by a city of seven million people and living a vast distance from anyone who ever knew me before, I began to discover… slowly… who I really was.
A mere six months into my new life living in Taipei, I dreamed what is still to this day the single most vivid and powerful dream of my life. I knew this was something I needed to remember, so I searched for a little piece of paper and wrote down a quick few words before returning to sleep in hopes the dream would return.
The words I had written down were, “girls for the mirror.” My dream was that I could look in a mirror and see a “girl” looking back at me. Just as I wanted to do when I was little. I knew it had been there all along, and I could no longer deny the truth inside me. Although I was finally seeing what I had so long and so diligently repressed, it still took MANY years for me to fully process all that dream meant.
Some months later, still in Taipei, my future set off in a new direction when Florence Vincensini walked into my life – a beautiful young French woman I am still with and still in love with today more than three decades later.
We soon moved to her hometown of Paris, France where we married. In love with our entire lives ahead of us, we eventually made the decision to trade the glamour of Paris for starting a family in Platteville. And for another quarter Century, I lived day in and day out working hard, loving my wife, nurturing our two precious children, and pushing down the feelings that threatened to make it all unravel.
Fortunately, Flo and I have enjoyed a fantastically honest relationship, and through those decades, we talked often about that dream I had in Taiwan and these complicated and profound feelings I could not deny.
Florence didn’t sign up so long ago to be married to a transgender woman. Despite our love for one another, my transition was incredibly painful for both of us. She ultimately had to say goodbye and grieve the person who had been her husband. I had to bear the tremendous guilt for having destroyed him, and in the process I destroyed that life for her.
I could argue that I am still the same person. And I did argue that. I am also, I know, a far better person for being truly me. But, I am also a completely different person with a different gender, and the man Florence had been married to for so long, the man who had always been there with her, the father of her children, would never be seen again. Together however, we grew. And we learned. And we eventually weathered the storm. And today she fully accepts me and loves me for who I am.
You might ask why. Why did it take a half Century to come out and live as my true self? The answer is only obvious to me now after so many years of sorting through it all. It begins with the fact I needed first to come out to myself. And to accept myself. And love myself for exactly who I am.
I had first to see the wires of my own cage.
You see, I was raised in the 60s and 70s in rural Wisconsin and during my entire young life was bathed from head to toe in the same soup of prejudices and assumptions and misconceptions none of us ever had the courage to question in those days. Society pounded into me at every step – in family life, in school, in our media, and in our many institutions – that boys were boys and girls were girls. And that each comes with a preset, permanent, and totally separate set of physical characteristics, mannerisms, and other traits. These were unspoken laws that dictated what emotions were expected of me, what things I could like and what I was expected to dislike, what words I could use, how I could talk, and what I could talk about, as well as what I was required to look like each day, from my haircut to my shoes.
If that weren’t enough to unlearn, I had throughout the course of my indoctrination absorbed into my own unconscious the commonly accepted delusion that what is male and masculine is naturally superior to what is female and feminine. The most common way to humiliate a man or a boy (in this decade or any other) is to say they are weak. Or feminine. The threat of being labeled a sissy was so horrifying as a kid, it forced me to conform. No one needed to overtly judge me or call me names because I was already busy internalizing my shame and making those same harsh judgements about myself every day of my life.
In the face of an entire world operating under this rigid set of rules, how could I ever take my feelings and my dream seriously? The effect of this world on me was to persecute myself. For decades. And that is how some of our fellow humans like myself are forcibly caged… imprisoned… in a gender that isn’t theirs. Throughout the decades and throughout my life, to step outside this system of long held gender rules was to exile oneself to a life of ridicule and discrimination and loneliness. This was my cage.
This broken old system produces in us completely irrational fears of transgender people. I am personally very familiar with society’s aversion to people like me because society had implanted in me those same irrational fears. The nearly unshakable falsehood that transgender people’s genders are not only inferior but also downright phony, was always part of my prison.
But I have come a long way toward UN-learning those ancient and stubborn beliefs. And I am still unlearning.
The very fact that I am transgender is what enabled me to eventually see through society’s nearly impenetrable fog of fallacies and finally accept and love myself for the first time. In the process I learned the most important lesson of all – that I can, in fact, stand tall in the face of judgement of others.
To be able to live authentically, I had to reject society’s firm and harsh and stark judgements about what or who gets to be labeled beautiful. I had to learn to see my true self as beautiful before I could love my true self. I had to begin to see my deepest, longest held secret as a source of power and strength instead of hiding it in shame.
Ultimately, we all want the same things no matter who we are: opportunity, safety, dignity, and equity. We all want these for ourselves. We all deserve them. We want them for our children. And we want them for the people we love. For many in the LGBTQ community, however, these basic human needs either do not exist or are under attack. And the results are devastating. Poverty, poor health, denial of education, injustices of all kinds, and death by suicide are some of the horrific everyday realities for many of us.
The reality of life as a trans person has made me acutely aware of the many privileges I enjoyed for so many years before I came out. Privileges which previously made my life easier than many others’ lives. After all, I had the good fortune of navigating the world as a healthy, able-bodied, professional, white, middle-class male… also one who was to all outward appearances both straight and cisgender (in other words, not transgender). And each of those identities comes with advantages.
Straight and cisgender people are the most visible people on planet earth… by sheer numbers and because their lives are seen as normal. As society’s default, every aspect of straight cisgender lives is uplifted and repeated in every community around the country. Straight, cisgender people hold hands as they walk down the street without fear of getting accosted. They watch TV shows and movies, listen to music, and read books all entirely centered on THEIR relationships and THEIR gender expression. Advertisements everywhere on billboards, TV, and the web all center on heterosexual and cisgender people. Our institutions the world over, including our government, is set up to privilege and favor heterosexual relationships above all others.
Being openly transgender in this world means in many ways I am still in that old oppressive cage. According to society I simply no longer deserve the same protection and opportunity and experience in life as the next person. I used to hear us talk about tolerance. Now, we talk in terms of acceptance. But we need to move beyond that, too. To a place where we all have full equality and equity and are CELEBRATED (every one of us) for who we are as unique human beings. We have a long way to go.
Indeed, I have personally lost many privileges. But the whole raft of old privileges does not compare to a new one I now own. It’s been said that the privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. Indeed, I am incredibly grateful after all these years to wake up every day and finally see that girl in the mirror. Though I would not wish being transgender on anyone, I also would never choose to be anyone other than exactly who I am.
No one should be forced to hide in shame all their lives for who they are. It is my great honor to to stand tall and be counted. To be visible to all. To live as the woman I am. And to help forge a better, kinder, more loving future for all LGBTQ people and for all who care about them.