When I began my transition in 1994, one of the things I was well aware of was the famous quote by French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir on womanhood.
Women are made, not born'
A few days ago I had an interesting discussion on my Facebook page about this very subject which ironically started in response to this comment.
Some ignorant elements of the Black community really need to chill with the transphobia and 'that's a man' shade aimed at Black women.
It was in response to the post I wrote slamming the transphobes at Bossip about the 50 gallon drums of Hateraid Fierce they were drinking over Wendy Williams.
One of the things I realized pretty quickly was that French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wasn't kidding when she said 'A woman is made, not born.'
When some people transition, I believe they fail to realize just how much of femininity is internal. Anybody with the money, time and a good plastic surgeon can buy a slamming female body. But if you still carry around those masculine attitudes and behaviors, you'll get 'sirred' in a minute no matter how much money you spent on your feminization surgery or the neocoochie between your legs.
One thing many cis people fail to realize is that I and many transwomen take their transitions seriously. We wish to be compliments to womanhood, not detriments to it as our detractors try to slander us with.
And let's face it, it you want to be good at something, you observe and talk to the people who live those roles in everyday life.
Cis women are born into their bodies, get to develop in them from birth, get the chance to get comfortable in your skin, get to ponder what type of woman you wish to project to the world, make mistakes along the way while being encouraged and molded by their families and society into their feminine gender roles.
Trans women for the most part are fought every step of the way by society and our families in addition to getting shame and guilt piled on us for daring to morph into the bodies that match our gender programming and the types of women we wish to project to the world.
And that's the situation before we even get to grapple with the sexism, being a moving sexual target, and all the other societal baggage positive and negative of walking around on this planet in a female body.
It's enjoyable when I get to have those kinds of thoughtful interactions with cis women about femininity and what it means to them.
No matter how good they say you are, always keep working on your game.
That's a quote from Michael Jordan's 1999 NAACP Image Award acceptance speech, and it segues nicely into the topic of this post.
I have people in the community who think I'm all that and three bags of chips. Some consider me as one of the better activists on the national scene. Some international trans activists I admire have shocked me by saying to me that I'm their role model.
I have people who believe TransGriot is worthy of being considered an 'A' list blog, tell me I'm an excellent writer and a role model to many people inside and outside the TBLG community.
When I hear all those accolades, it would be easy for me to get 'big head syndrome' and start believing the hype.
Fortunately I have a saber wielding friend along with Ursa Maritimus Louisvillius and a host of other people in my friendship and sistahfriend circles who ensure I don't.
I also keep Michael Jordan's quote in mind to keep working on my 'A' game.
I am and continue to work towards being the best sister I can be. I'm constantly assessing my femme presentation, know what works for me hair, clothing, makeup and color wise and what doesn't. I'm looking for clothes and shoes that stylishly fit the image I wish to project to the world. I observe, watch and emulate the positive women I admire and take note of how they interact with the world around them.
Besides, the Phenomenal Transwoman ain't coming out of the house looking tore up from the floor up.
I'm constantly working on perfecting my writing skills. While I've become known for my non-fiction writing, I'm not too bad at fiction writing either. My dream is to publish one of my novel manuscripts one day.
As educator Marva Collins once stated, 'Readers are leaders'. So I do spend time on and off line reading as much current events material I can get my hands on, and perusing stuff that piques my intellectual curiosity.
I am a Trinity Award winner. That is the second highest honor that the United States trans community gives to a member of it or an ally. I see it as meaning that I have to step it up another level since I received that award for things I'd done prior to 2006.
I not only expect a higher standard of excellence for myself, I carry the perception sometimes that people expect greater things from me than the average trans activist starting out.
But I welcome that challenge.
If I say or commit to doing something, it's done. I'm doing a speech, it's going to be on point, well written and fitting to the occasion. When I do a presentation, I come armed with the most up to date information on the topic I can find prior to my on campus arrival and my PowerPoint presentations are regularly updated.
I am going to be in professional diva mode when I get there because I may be the lone African-American in the room or the first professional African descended trans person that particular individual, the group or the organization I'm speaking in front of has encountered.
Because the numbers of out African American trans activists are few in number, we have the additional considerations of having to represent our people and conduct ourselves in a morally upright and highly ethical manner.
Translation: I have to represent. Those may be 'old school' values to some people, but it's the way I strive to conduct my life.
So yes, in order to continue evolving into the finer specimen of womanhood that trans author Sharon Davis talked about, I definitely have to keep working on my 'A' game.
And by continuing to do so, in the long run it makes me a better person as well.
One of the things I've discovered in this ongoing feminine journey is that every transwoman needs a group of sistahfriends in her life.
Roberta Angela Dee, one of my trans mentors once said, "I'm a woman in mind, heart and spirit. That's all that matters. They can cut things off, paste things on, or reconfigure my body parts. If you're a woman, you're a woman. Period."
But the problem becomes getting to that point in your life in which you get to that level of confidence that Roberta expressed in that quote.
And that's where your sistahfriends enter the equation.
Your cis and trans sistahfriends can not only help you learn, grow and deal with some of the issues currently affecting your life, they can give you a comforting hug when you need it or that swift motivational kick in the butt to get you going when you feel down.
They are your mutual support system. They help you celebrate your triumphs and are there to console you when life hands you momentary defeats. They help you confidently get through this journey we call life.
Your trans sistahfriends not only help kick knowledge to you about dealing with some of the issues we have to grapple with inside and outside the community as transwomen, but help us avoid situations that could get us severely beat down or killed if we're not cognizant about it at all times.
If you are fortunate enough as a transwoman to have a group of ciswomen as your friends, they are invaluable in helping you to understand what it's like to grow up female with a developing female body in a male dominated society.
They can explain or clue you in on the drama you missed growing up, share some of the good and bad times of their early feminine journeys, and help you make sense of various issues that crop up in your own life in terms of dealing with sexism, misogyny, and sexual harassment issues.
It's also crucial to get you to the point of understanding that the feminine journey is a lifelong and constantly evolving one.
A transwoman that has a network of sistahfriends around her made up of cis and trans women not only gets untold benefits from it, she emerges from that stronger in spirit and better equipped to take on a hostile world arrayed against her.
One of the things I gripe about on TransGriot is how the beauty of African-American women, be they trans or cisgender is disrespected.
It's also interesting to note how quickly African descended women are labeled as 'unfeminine' vis-a-vis the model of vanilla femininity that all are supposed to bow down and aspire to.
It happens far too often to the Williams sisters, and they aren't alone in that regard either.
Thanks to reader Lurlean I was advised of a thread occurring on the Food Network Humor Blog that illustrated this perfectly.
As usual, the folks that called out the disrespect of Sonia Williams were slammed as 'lacking a sense of humor' or 'overly sensitive'.
Ain't nothing humorous about a Black woman being disrespected. It's also playing into and perpetuating the 'Black women are unfeminine' stereotype that dates back to slavery.
Since it escaped these peeps in science class, or they graduated from 'Christian' private schools that teach Flintstones science, let me school y'all on something.
You get half your genetic material from mommy and half from daddy, and we are all blends of features from our parents.
Just as there are plenty of cisgender women who have 'masculine' body builds or combinations of features considered 'masculine', there are also cisgender men who have body builds and combinations of features that are considered 'feminine'.
Just an FYI, unless a person declares themselves to be trans, they ain't. Nor is it our business if they are.
TransGriot Note: Seems like in the last few hours, the Food Network Humor blog where that crappy post was housed is down for maintenance. Interesting.
"No person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal aid."
Ever since President Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law on June 23, 1972 it has had a far reaching effect on the numbers of women earning postgraduate degrees.
Before Title IX, many schools refused to admit women or enforced strict quotas in postgraduate programs. That was reflected in the fact that in 1972, the year Title IX became law, women only received 9% of the medical degrees awarded, 7% of law degrees and 25% of the US citizens receiving doctorates being women.
By 1994, those numbers increased to 38% of medical degrees, 43% of law degrees and 44% of all doctoral degrees awarded to US citizens were women.
One of the prominent effects of Title IX besides the increase in the percentages of women receiving postgraduate degrees is in the world of sports.
Athletics has also created the most controversy regarding Title IX, but its gains have also been noteworthy.
It's not unusual on any given day to turn on the television and see women's intercollegiate sports on TV. There's infinitely more attention focused on women athletes during the Olympics and on high school level girls sports compared to when I was growing up in the late 70's.
But one thing that bothers me as a sports loving person is the dismissive attitude some women have toward all things athletic. It gets to the point when in some cases, women who love or participate in sports are greeted with less than complimentary verbal epithets or have their femininity questioned.
Last year Seventeen magazine in conjunction with the WNBA partnered for a comprehensive survey that was published in the magazine's September 2008 issue.
WNBA President Donna Orender stated, "We are pleased to partner with Seventeen magazine on this important survey as we know first hand how the role of sports can develop young girls into leaders.
"The women of the WNBA are strong, passionate and determined individuals who exhibit these traits both on and off the court. As a result, we are true believers in the significance of participation in sports for all girls and women."
The Seventeen/WNBA survey revealed that 83% of teen girls play sports with basketball ranked as the number one participatory sport.
Girls play sports for a variety of reasons, but the top reason found in this survey is to exercise (68.4%). Other top reasons included forming friendships, competing and representing their schools.
Challenges that young female sports enthusiasts endure include insecurities; 33% of girls who don't play sports say it's because they're worried that they wouldn't be good at it.
In addition, 35% of girls also say their teams don't get as much equipment or field time as the boys' teams and 35% of girls have heard their peers make homophobic remarks about female athletes.
The Seventeen/WNBA survey also revealed that 66% of teen girls believe that cheerleading is a sport, not some sideline event, and 71% think female cheerleaders should cheer at girls' sports events.
Despite these factors keeping some girls from playing sports, teens today are able to look to inspiring women professional athletes and Olympians such as Lisa Leslie, Mia Hamm, Diana Taurasi, Serena and Venus Williams, Candace Parker and Florence Griffith-Joyner.
As young teens hone their athletic skills, they look upon these women as they endeavor to take women's sports to a whole new level and dismiss outdated stereotypes about the women who play them.
You also have young women such as Brittney Griner who are following in their role models footsteps and preparing to exceed even their lofty performance standards.
But despite the overwhelming evidence of the benefits of sports participation for girls and women, you still have mind-numbing fluff coming from women's magazines such as Cosmo that spout erroneous, outdated stereotypes.
In addition, women athletes in addition to having to battle feminine gender policing also have to contend with the sexist attitudes of male sports fans.
Led by the male dominated sports journalism world, the dismissive attitudes of sports talk radio and sports journalists about the level of play filter down to the potential male fan base and male athletes.
We should insist upon and demand consistent, professional coverage of women's sports from the male dominated sorts journalism culture.
Why am I so adamant about it? Sports teaches important life lessons that non athletes often miss out on. You learn that even if you practice hard and execute your game plan flawlessly, sometimes you come up short. You learn how to work well with others as part of a team. You learn how to lose with grace and win with class.
It's a pride builder when you come from a zero skills base to a higher skills level in your chosen sport and you see it translated into better performance on the field.
It's also a major self esteem boost when you kick the winning goal, get the key hit that wins the game for your team or you dig deep, pull yourself out of a love-40 hole in a critical game in a tennis match and come back to win, or run your personal best time to win a medal.
These are lessons that the male population has had ample opportunities to absorb (and some peeps need to reabsorb) and enjoyed through sports competition. The Women's Sports Foundation seconds my thoughts on the matter as well.
We should not only enthusiastically support the young girls and women in our lives who participate in sports, we should also take it upon ourselves to support women's club, high school, intercollegiate and professional sports as well.
I was a proud Houston Comets season ticket holder back home for several years during their championship run and it was the best money I've ever spent.
I saw the money I spent on my season tickets it as my investment toward keeping the WNBA viable and alive for future generations of sports loving girls. Those young girls who marveled at the play of WNBA pioneers such as Cynthia Cooper are now grown up and getting their opportunity to play in the league.
Even though I'm still pissed about the WNBA leadership not doing enough to give a local group enough time to organize and keep my hometown franchise alive, I still support the league.
Far from being something that women should ignore, sports and participation in them by their daughters should be embraced and encouraged.
This was one of those free ranging discussions that could have gone on all afternoon and all night. We only had an hour an a half to try to tackle the complex subject of Black femininity, and tackle it we did.
The podcast is now up along with links to various posts from all of our blogs that talk about the subject.
So if you didn't get to hear the live show yesterday, check it out at your leisure.
While doing the research and searching through YouTube video for the Brittney Griner post, especially the one in which she's being interviewed, I noted that far too many comments from the haters ensued which questioned her femininity and made snide references to the movie Juwanna Mann in doing so.
In light of that I have to ask the question, who died and made y'all the femininity police? Are you little boys feeling jealous because some of you are Brittney's height or shorter and don't have her hoops skills?
You haters need to take some remedial science classes. The bottom line is that you get half your genetic material from mommy and half your genetic material from daddy. In addition to that, all human life at conception is female. You don't come out as boys on the other end of that nine month developmental journey inside mommy's womb until certain things happen during the eight to twelfth weeks of pregnancy that put the fetus firmly on the male development path.
That means, for the scientifically illiterate, if the hormone wash doesn't happen, you haters would have feminine names, be wearing heels and hose and wouldn't have the Almighty Phallus to grab at regular intervals.
It also means that you get a blend of physical characteristics from mommy and daddy and some interesting combinations as well. I know women who have deeper voices than Brittney does, and have you ever heard Toni Braxton sing certain notes? I also know men with feminine facial features and body builds, and women with big hands, long arms and big feet.
But this speaks to some of the larger issues I've talked about. The fact that Black women's images have been under attack for several centuries and we are considered less than beautiful and feminine. Too many times Black men, who are supposed to be our swords and shields in standing up for us and calling out the haters have aided and abetted in that image destruction. If you are a woman above 5'7" tall and have what are considered 'masculine' features, you're automatically assumed to be a transwoman or insultingly called one as Ciara and a depressingly long list of Black women have been.
Even the so called 'proof' of bearing children doesn't end that negativity hurled at them. Just ask our 5'11" First Lady, who was disrespectfully called 'Stokely Carmichael in a dress' by Faux News conservaidiot Juan Williams.
There was even a scene in one of my fave movies Love & Basketball that illustrates this. Sanaa Lathan's character Monica Wright is a high school superstar baller in this movie who could really care less about the feminine pursuits like her mother and sister until other women start chasing her love interest, her longtime next door neighbor and basketball prodigy Quincy McCall.
At her high school spring dance during her senior year she reluctantly gets glammed up for the event after losing the city championship game earlier in the day. She's enjoying herself, and while taking a dance break she's comfortably leaning forward in her chair with her legs spread instead of sitting ruler straight on the back of the chair with her knees together while wearing her dress. Two boys walk by and you hear them say loud enough for her to hear it "I'm a man" as they chuckle to themselves. Monica then instantly snaps into 'feminine' seating position.
It ain't just 'the menz' who are guilty of femininity policing. Women can be just as bad or even worse in some cases. Be a girl who is interested in sports or who isn't in their judgment 'feminine enough' for their tastes and watch the catty remarks come flying off their tongues.
The point is that it's arrogantly ignorant of men to think that they can and have the power to make that judgment call on who is and isn't feminine based on your exposure to the Jet Beauty of the Week, rap videos or Playboy and King magazine photo spreads and it needs to stop.
There's one issue we transwomen must come to grips with just before we begin our transitions.
We have to realize that we must go from whatever rudimentary knowledge of femininity we still have that wasn't suppressed out of us by our attempted masculine upbringings to an almost encyclopedic age appropriate knowledge of everything we should know as women.
Oh yeah, unlike our biosisters, we don't have the luxury of time to get to learn it, we have to do it in a year. While we're doing that, we're being reviled by almost everyone around us in society from disapproving family members to fundamentalist religion adherents and people who hate us enough to violently erase us from this plane of existence.
Being transgender is serious business and even if I'd had the opportunity to look into my future and see how my life was going to turn out, the only regret I have about it is that I didn't do it sooner.
Yeah, sometimes it's aggravating as hell. I get my feelings hurt from time to time. Every time I run into a narrow minded jerk or a person wallowing in unenlightened ignorance, I have to remind myself of the blessings that I have of having family and friends who love me and value the fact I'm in their lives.
So how do you go from zero to femininity? Practice, practice, practice and lots of learning and observation. Getting in touch with your spiritual and emotional side. Having biowomen school you on some of the points and lessons they learned growing up. Figuring out what type of woman you want to project to the world and working endlessly to become that finer specimen of womanhood.
And also realizing that society sees you differently. You are considered a target if you are attractive. If you're African American, even if you are beautiful, you're considered 'ugly' and 'unpretty'. You are considered less intelligent.
You also have a heightened risk not only to have potentially fatal physical violence and sexual assault visited upon you, you also have a heightened risk for breast cancer thrown into the mix as well.
But despite all that, the feeling of peace that I have every day I wake up because I did transition is one money can't buy. I know that despite the title of this post, femininity is a lifelong learning process that I enjoy learning something new about every day.
I absolutely revel in being me and living on this side of the gender fence, even if the first year of it can be chaotic.
When I began my transition in 1994, one of the things I was well aware of was the famous quote by French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir on womanhood.
When some people transition, I believe they fail to realize just how much of femininity is internal. Anybody with the money, time and a good plastic surgeon can buy a slamming female body. But if you still carry around those masculine attitudes and behaviors, you'll get 'sirred' in a minute no matter how much money you spent on your feminization surgery or the neocoochie between your legs.
Trans women for the most part are fought every step of the way by society and our families in addition to getting shame and guilt piled on us for daring to morph into the bodies that match our gender programming and the types of women we wish to project to the world.
