Screaming at Men in Carparks, Female Rage and Being a Transgender Paragon of Virtue.

I've let everybody down.

I lost it. 

I completely fucking lost my cool in a shopping centre carpark. Something in me snapped, broke, burst. I don’t know what exactly, so just pick any word you like for the sudden dissolving of personal restraint.

Sat in the passenger seat of a car at the top of a one-way ramp to the parking structure. Waiting for the man idling in the intersection and blocking access to the space his BMW just vacated. But no, he didn’t want to move. No, he was intent on us getting out of his way, because he wanted to drive down the ramp. The one-way ramp. That we just drove up. That was signed with a million fucking signs that said, ONE WAY, NO ENTRY, DON’T BE AN IMPATIENT PRICK AND TRY TO DRIVE DOWN THIS RAMP.

Okay, okay I made that last one up.

There may not have been a sign in the carpark that said that, but there was a frustrated trans woman who ended up bellowing it. Yep… me. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to move I was out of the car and stomping over. “Move your car.” I firmly told him. “No, I want to go down the ramp…” I honestly don’t remember the rest of it. Stuck behind him was the minivan shuttling people from the community centre, stuck behind us more cars coming up the ramp. My brain broke.

My voice dropped deep into my chest, “MOVE YOUR FUCKING CAR!” 

The levels of shame and embarrassment that followed have been forever imprinted on me. That unshakable smirk on his face is burned into my brain. Sitting there in his BMW, it doesn’t matter that he was wrong and actively trying to do the wrong thing. Doesn’t matter that he was holding everyone up and blocking off a van of old folks waiting to get by. During the entire encounter there was a tiny voice in the back of my mind telling me that this isn’t worth it. That this boomer will get to drive away confident in how unreasonable transgender people are. Confident in how “unlady-like” trans women are and only a few heartbeats away from transforming into a vile, monstrous, “angry tranny”. He only needs to load up his dash cam footage and he can see this wild-haired, bra-less “it” screaming at him. 

Yeah, he pointed out that he was recording it. 

Pretty sure I roared something back like “I don’t fucking care if you’re recording it, MOVE YOUR FUCKING CAR!” I carry the dread that the video will pop up on some message board. That an army of smirking trolls will latch onto it and claim it as more evidence of “dangerous gender ideology”. 

God, I want to crawl into a hole and die. 

I’m starting to understand that thing that women talk about so much. How the second you raise your voice you are “shrill”, you are “getting emotional” and as a result, you can be dismissed out of hand. The word “hysterical” leaps to my mind. The common inoffensive parlance to mean simply “overcome with emotion” but in reality, the word is loaded with so much more. It’s the word to describe the particular sort of “madness” that overcomes women. Women who have held in their frustrations and their indignities, women who have sat by and held the roiling, burning urge until they cannot hold it any longer. We know it’s not actually “madness”.

But I went past that point. 

I skipped “shrill” and “emotional”, somersaulted over “hysterical” and went straight to “fucking rabid”. Right now, I don’t give a fuck about the feelings of that smirking boomer (he was in the wrong after all), but I do give a fuck about how he will come away from the exchange. I give a fuck about how his butt-hurt at being spoken to without due deference by a trans woman will make him resentful of other trans women. I wonder about who that trans person is who will suffer some negative consequence of my actions? After all, I was the one who dumped more vitriol to the swamp of negative rhetoric on “trans people living publicly”.

So, now someone will have to pay the cost cause I sure as hell can’t rely on this guy to see anything other than his own self-righteousness. I wonder if the person to suffer the consequences of my behaviour will be a trans woman or a trans man? I wonder if they will be young or if they will be old? Maybe it won’t be someone specific. Maybe the cost of my moment of lunacy will simply be manifested in this asshole ticking a box under the candidate that’s “just asking questions about all this gender nonsense” at the next election. Or maybe they’ll go home and be colder, less kind to a grandchild who’s struggling with the question of who they really are. In one of my worst moments, will I have ultimately harmed people like me because I wasn’t a shining example, able to rise above it? 

I feel like I’ve let us all down, trans and non-trans women alike. 

In the classic Inside-Of-You-Are-Two-Wolves world view, both of mine are furious (and trans). One is furious that there’s such immense pressure to not be furious. And the other is furious that I can’t tell if my rage is justified or not. Friends keep thelling me “it’s just Female Rage, it’s fine!” Is it? Is this burning want to shoot lasers from my eyes and split his BMW sedan (that cost more than my entire household income) right down the middle, justified? Is this yearning to see him sitting there clutching the remains of a steering wheel, wafts of smoke around him, after I used my white hot rage to peel his car open like an orange, reasonable?

God I hope so.

In another time, in another place this man’s family would have begged the forgiveness of the temple priestess; that person blessed by the gods to be both gender enlightened and diverse enough to be their emissary. They would have supplicated themselves lest this man’s entire lineage be damned to never raise a crop or breed livestock again because of HIS impertinence… Or maybe I’m just mad about it and wish that I wasn’t so I’m justifying it all to myself?

I don’t know. I don’t know, because I don’t feel entitled to “Female Rage”. 

That roiling churn in the belly one feels? Like the spirits of ancestors past, the linage of women inhabiting your guts? That fire that courses in your cells? Fire that branches like lighting that we all inherited from that tiny population of pre-humans two hundred thousand years ago? The lineage that all humans share that goes back to that community of a few thousand individual poised on the evolutionary cliff and by the smallest chance survived? All the rage gathered up from two hundred millennia of oppression, of wrongdoings, of subjugation and abuse. Rage stretching from that Mitochondrial Eve, down thousands of branching lines to reside in you… that… that RAGE. I struggle to own it.

That wolf that sits inside me, the one who is furious cause they can’t parse the source of their urge to howl into the night, they might be wrong. I’m only now discovering my Female Rage, or my version of it at least. This newly found name for that deep injustice of the world that I’ve always felt in my bones. That downward pressure to not speak out, to not draw attention, to always conform. The voice inside me telling me that I shouldn’t have shouted, that I shouldn’t have sworn. The voice telling me I should have been polite and well-spoken and not made such a fuss. I pray that is what this feeling is and not the lingering entitlement of “manhood” at having my authority challenged. Oh, please fucking god don’t let it be that. I already have deep discomfort of having lived as a man. Discomfort at benefiting from the power structures that men have built over millennia. In that moment of shouting and ranting I felt more like a man than I have in years.

Please let this feeling of rage be my stifled femininity and not MY butt-hurt manhood.

I’ve lived for so long with so much privilege, benefiting from being perceived as a man. Regardless of how uncomfortably that weighted upon me I still benefited from it. But I can feel the shadow of what women have been telling us all for years. I can feel that intersection, feel the way a set of standards for me are now higher, not just because of the mantle of “woman” but also the mantle of “trans woman”.

I talk a big game about how important representation is. I talk so much about how as a child there was no trans people in media for me to admire. The only tran people i ever saw on TV were serial killers or the victims of serial killers. There’s a core wish of mine to be the trans person I wished I’d seen when I was a child; to embody that person who’d have made the child version of me feel at ease in the world. Someone who’d inspire hope in teenage me, hope that I’d grow up safe and happy and loved.

I owe this to myself and I owe it to my community, to trans people and to women alike.

So, maybe if I don’t feel entitled to “Female Rage”, I can find my footing with “Trans Female Rage”? After-all I am remixing and reconstituting notions of gender in my everyday life, so why not this too? Take the parts that apply to me and fill in the blanks left by the things that don’t. I’ve never been diminished in the workplace, but I’ve absolutely have been assaulted in the street. I feel the pressure to be submissive and polite because of the high likelihood of my transgressive breaking of the social-pact-of-silence-and-compliance will be used against me. Yes, I’m allowed to have moments where I’m less than the female (trans or otherwise) paragon of virtue that I aspire to be. We all are. I’m not responsible for changing the world. We’re all human and flawed and deserving of compassion. And as much as I wanna sign off with “except when you are trying to drive the wrong way down a one way fucking on ramp like a dick head”, I won’t. Cause even this smirking boomer, who I’m sure wouldn’t give me the compassion, should have received it from me. Not because he doesn’t deserve to be shouted at, but because I deserve it to myself to be more than just my feelings of rage.

–S