It feels like being a teenager all over again in the most confusing and disorienting way.
Arys was a beautiful child, angelic-looking with golden locks, big blue eyes, and regular features. But Arys didn’t care: “she” played with the boys (after all, “she” was a boy “herself”, wasn’t “she”?!), tumbling around after soccer balls, climbing trees, and tying up the long, wavy, blond hair in a practical pony-tail.
When high school came around, though, the world started sending Arys new, and wholly unexpected, signals: ‘You’re a pretty “girl” and boys like you’. Arys still kept playing rough with the boys maintaining platonic relationships but it started entailing shooing off or ignoring their crushes on “her” and putting up with the uncomfortable feeling of being seen or looked at differently, almost devoured by stares, when “she” entered a space. For several years, Arys’s instinctive response was to hide: not indoors, not by stopping the activities “she” enjoyed with friends, but by cutting off all the long hair, wearing a boyish (and rather unattractive haircut) and baggy clothes. It wasn’t until college & grad school that Arys started feeling relatively, or partially, comfortable with “her” looks: and not because “she” really felt aligned to them — that didn’t happen until very recently, more than fifteen years later. Arys just learned to ignore or put up with or play along with some of the social norms connected to being a pretty “girl” while still always maintaining a good dose of anti-conformism that was always — indeed, still is — one of their innate, defining traits.
Now, in their early forties, Arys is visiting one of their friends from the Ragnar race (& his wife) in Salt Lake City. These people are not queer but they are wonderful allies, very open-minded and full of relatives & other friends who are queer. Moreover, this couple is also going through a period of renewed self-discovery and self-definition, which is one of the reasons Arys connected quite instantaneously to this new friend at Ragnar. So these people were very happy to go to a gay bar with Arys last night.
Arys’s first time at a gay bar.
And there it was all over again: that sense of walking into a space and having everyone’s eyes on you, eating you up with their stares. If Arys had walked into that room undressed, he would barely have felt more naked.
As much as Arys feels like a gay boy, walking into a room with plenty of gay men (but not packed & chaotic, and thus as anonymous as a gay club) is a completely novel experience that still feels scary and uncomfortable.
All of a sudden, it’s been happening to Arys, to be noticed by gay guys on the street and being looked at like he wasn’t before — which is an explicit measure of how Arys’s exterior looks have, indeed, changed. And last night’s experience at the gay bar brought it home clearly to Arys: how much this phase feels uncomfortably like high school, when people, “the world”, started seeing or noticing or looking at Arys as a “physically attractive person”, as the ugly duckling suddenly turned into a swan.
But there are also some important differences. Back then, in high school, despite looking like a girl, Arys didn’t feel like a girl (they never did) — so that made the experience harder. But they had all the information and social cues on how to act or respond — which made it easier, at least on the surface, at least to mask. Whereas now, there is a good amount of alignment between how Arys looks and how he feels. But there’s still some dis-alignment (at least perceived) as Arys probably looks like a cis gay guy while they are a non-binary trans gay boy, which causes a huge impostor syndrome for him — “What if they discover I’m trans? What happens then? Am I even allowed in this space, in this room full of gay men? Am I really one of them?”. And then there’s the lack of information or cues on what to do: Arys wasn’t socialized to deal with this, they don’t know what to do, they don’t know how to read cues or what to do with them.
Admittedly, part of this is flattering and affirming: to walk into a room of gay men and realize they are looking at him as an attractive gay guy (& how liberating not to be seen as an “attractive young woman” anymore!). But it’s also scary, disorienting, and extremely uncomfortable. It feels so objectifying.
Something that the nerves can only take for a short while, like the scariest parts of being a teenager but with the experience and additional awareness of an adult, that in some ways makes it even harder…
The Little Prince and the Fox 