Trans Woman Privilege: Expecting as Much From the World as a Mediocre Man.

Where do I get the AUDACITY?! I stole it.

We’re doing our bi-monthly catch-up and smashing espressos like our ADHD depends on it (it does btw). Being a pair of busy girlies means scheduling dates where we take turns excitedly dishing out a single piece of interesting news. Back and forth we go until we’ve caught each other up on the fun, weird, sad, delightful, stressful, glorious details of our hectic lives.

“They broke their finger in a professional pillow-fight?!?”

“I think I’m falling in love with an old friend!”

“I’ve cut way back on shifts and god, I’m so much happier!”

“I applied for a fellowship on a whim and won it so I guess I’m writing a novel now?”

“I’ve got three years left in my degree, but I can’t quit another one!”

I ask how many degrees she’s started and quit halfway. Eyes cast to the middle-distance, she starts ticking off fingers. “Oh, honey,” I think “you have to count it out on your fingers?” But instead, what comes out of my mouth is the Stephen Stills lyric “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”

She wants this qualification so bad. Her background in community organising, her careful and deliberate compassion into the world, she’d be magnificent. But I can’t help but ask why she, this extraordinary woman who looks like she sprung from the pages of a Swedish crime thriller (dragon tattoos and all), is still diligently ensuring that she met the standard when others aren’t? “Honey, why are you still ‘doing your time’ when others who are far less impressive than you are parleying their inexperience into established roles?”

And then, as it always does, Patriarchy enters the chat.

Cause somewhere right now, an unqualified man who only did a couple years of a degree before throwing in the towel is working in a field above their formal qualification. I’m not saying that this man isn’t good at it, I’m just saying that women are groomed to wait, while men are urged to “throw their hat over the wall”.

It’s a great idiom. Born of Frank O'Connor’s anecdote of committing oneself to a task without knowing it’s even possible to succeed it. The act of committing, the risk of personal loss propelling you forward in ways that you otherwise wouldn’t have. The whole thing tickles my ADHD need to be under the constant pressure of deadlines, even arbitrary ones, even deadlines that I inflict on myself.

It’s how I’ve suddenly, surprisingly become a novelist.

A fellowship for trans writers popped into my feed, but I didn’t have a novel to submit. With a two-week deadline for a 5000-word excerpt of a manuscript that didn’t yet exist, I got cracking. The seemingly impossible happened and now I have this magnificent opportunity, born from my overreach. Am I less impressive than the other recipients in the cohort? Possibly. But I was daring and my dear friend, suitably congratulatory, wished she had that drive.

“Honey, there’s nothing special about me. I threw my hat over the wall because I’ve had the privilege of being raised as a man.”

From boyhood I was instructed to take chances, instructed to ask for more than I deserved, and if I didn’t get it? I should take what I wanted. Just because the government updated my pronouns and I grew some excellent tits, doesn’t mean all the conditioning (the good and the bad) instantly evaporated. I still have the drive, no… I still have THE AUDACITY of a man, despite now living as a woman. And my friend? My dear, talented, magnificent friend? She’s being left behind. Why? Because from birth she been told to play it safe, play it small, do the labour, don’t cut corners…

Cause the world doesn’t want women to be in the habit of cutting corners when they’re still expected to do all that free labour.

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My wife was taken aback at my outrageous flamboyance at a galley opening.

The invite said “Post-apocalyptic Chic” so to me that means looking like an end-game boss fight in a Mad Max video game. My towering loudmouth form striding through the crowd, boots and spikes and mesh that left friends startled enough to ask, “did you even think about wearing nipple covers?”

No. I didn’t.

I’m not ashamed of my obnoxious opinions bellowed into the room, much less this unusual body. Great for me, right? Shame that I absolutely set off my wife’s anxiety. From girlhood the world has pressured her, explicitly taught her that it isn’t SAFE for a woman to behave like this, it is inherently DANGEROUS to do what I was doing.

Here is was again, a magnificent, powerful woman, feeling the downward pressure of the conditioning, she’d grown up with. Where I’ve been lauded from childhood for being boisterous and bombastic, loud and outspoken, she’s been trained to be small. Trained to take up less space. Trained to be less visible.

So, when I stand out in a room, her fear uncoils.

That glorious protective spirit that resides in her, honey badger wild and furious, unleashes and her urge to protect me from harm kicks in. Testament to how she absolutely and unequivocally sees me as a woman… even the faint traces of internalised misogyny, that inescapable brainwashing that all women are subjected to, sees me as being the same as her. Even when her nervous system floods with panic, to her I’m still seen as needing to be protected from the potential punishments that patriarchy dishes out to women.

Turns out being raised to expect more from the world isn’t the only blessing I have.

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I still carry some of the “male privilege” with me.

When I chose to transition, when I fled the encampment of that gender, I tried to leave as much behind as possible. No, I don’t need to bring the ingrained stoicism, I don’t need to bring self-inflated ego. But sadly, some things just couldn’t be left behind. Some privileges are buried so deep I didn’t even know I had them until living as a woman showed me just how out of the ordinary it was for my new gender to behave like this.

Sure, not all trans women are like me. Some never had an ounce of ‘maleness’ seep into them. Some never learned entitlement or dominance. Some never learned to speak from the chest and demand the attention of the room, regardless of if they actually had anything important to contribute. But not me. Just as women are groomed into thinking they’ll have value if they’re small, I was groomed into thinking I’d have value if I was large. Some days I hate this part of me, the bone-deep reminder of all the things that I no longer wish to be. But other days?

I realise I smuggled a weapon out of that encampment of ‘maleness”.

Because I’m not just comfortable being large, I’m compelled to take up space. I owe it to my trans siblings to be as loud as any man, to be as visible as any man. But more than that I owe it to cisgendered women, to anyone who gathers under the banner of “minority”. I owe it to all who reside in this camp to demand as much from the world as mediocre men do. This weapon, that I smuggled out in the dead of the night, the sword that I now get to wield?

Entitlement.

I’m entitled to safety. I’m entitled to respect. I’m entitled to live my life how I want.

I owe it to my community to always be visibly “other”, always strange and outspoken, always wanting more. I’m going to perch myself on top of this wall and reach down to hoist as many of you up here with me as I can. Anything less would be a waste of this privilege, a waste of this gift to have the sheer audacity to demand more.

–S