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Pass it forward, somehow.

by Kirstin Storey


I’m walking back to the office after getting some lunch. ‘Looking good babe’, he says loud enough for me to hear and then laughs as the Ute truck, in who’s passenger seat he’s sitting, reverses into the street as I walk past. He laughs like it’s the funniest thing anyone has ever said. I don’t look, but I imagine he’s got that shaggy blond hair that young Aussie blokes have that’s not quite a mullet, a wolf cut, I think it’s called. By the sound of him, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, though probably younger. I’m not even sure he was talking to me, but I don’t see any other ‘babes’ on the street, let alone babes like me, so I assume I’m his target.


I’m confused though, I’m not even presenting femme. I’m waiting for my hair to grow out; I inherited my hairline from my father and although the hormones are trying their best, their best comes second to glaciers slowly advancing down the mountain side. It’s grown maybe three centimetres in the last eight months. I went to the salon a few days ago for laser on my face, so there’s also a few days’ worth of stubble while I wait until I can shave again. While my beard is less dense than it was and now mainly white, it’s still very noticeable, I know because I notice it a lot.


I ignore what he says and keep walking, knowing I’ll replay the incident in my head several times, trying to work out whether he was talking to me. I remember back to when I was I a kid, maybe thirteen or fourteen and some guy messed up on drugs got up in my face. I was walking through town with my brother and this guy thought I’d said something to him. I hadn’t even noticed him up until he was right in front of me, but there he was threatening to fuck me up. I kept calm and said nothing and eventually he tired himself out and we walked off. My brother said something about doing a good job not backing down or whatever and so saying nothing or ignoring hecklers has been my default for dealing with conflict ever since.

*

‘Can you believe that dude, bruh’? Lachy, sat in the passenger seat, asks Jase once they’re back on the road. Jase is a third-year sparky, whereas Lachy has been on the tools just under a year, because Jase’s got the years under his belt, he’s driving.


‘Fuck no, what an absolute idiot. Deserves a punch just for that handbag it was carrying’.


‘Hundred per cent!’ Lachy is only too eager to agree.


Secretly though, Jase wishes he could be as free as that thing, person, woman, whatever the fuck it was, looked. They hadn’t flinched as Lachy had called out his oh so witty dig, just kept on walking.


Something like that would have crushed Jase, if he’d ever allowed himself to taste the freedom, she looked like she possessed. The freedom that comes from being brave enough to show the world who you really are. Jase quietly wondered what that felt like as he drove on. Working on jobsites, he felt like he always had to be on guard, always had to chime in when the old blokes were taking the piss out of the new apprentices. It was an extra layer of protective equipment that he could never risk taking off and was heavier and more uncomfortable than any of the other things like hard-hats, safety boots or respirators he had to wear while he was on jobsites. He remembered one apprentice who hadn’t lasted long, and they were merciless with him, endlessly taking the piss. Sure, these days there were company policies for everything, but he didn’t want to be the one to find out the value of the paper on which they were written.


That evening, Jase was in the pub with his brother and his mates. His brother, Drew, had an easy public service job and had the baby soft hands to prove it. He’d picked a pub in the next suburb over from where he’d been working that week. It was one of the oldest suburbs in town and filled with old workers’ cottages on quarter acre blocks. The original vision for the suburb was for it to be a working-class suburb, housing the immigrants that had to be cajoled and shipped in to build the country’s capital. Nowadays, due to its proximity to the city, the cottages had either been extensively renovated or those ones that weren’t heritage listed had been torn down to be replaced with miserable mansions built so big they stretched boundary to boundary as if the people who lived in them were afraid of being outside.


Jase felt uncomfortable the moment he walked into the pub. Given the catchment of the place, he knew the clientele here wouldn’t give a second thought to paying twenty dollars for a pint of some shitty craft beer that tried to combine mango, banana and coffee, or some bullshit like that. Since when had beer become the new wine? He just wanted a fucking normal beer that didn’t cost half a day’s pay. He was still thinking about that thing that Lachy had shouted at when they were getting lunch, for some reason, couldn’t get it out of his mind, and here it was standing in front of him at the bar.

*

I’d gone climbing after work, there’s a bouldering gym not far from where I work, and there’s a bunch of us that regularly go. It’s fun, and the gym runs queer friendly nights, so I know I’m not going to get harassed there. We usually go get beers and burgers afterwards, which honestly is main reason we go. Tonight, we head to a bar nearby where I live, it’s about twenty minutes’ walk from home. The bar is jostling as we get there, but we manage to find a table outside which is wafted by a fan misting cool moist air, a welcome reprieve from the hot dry night air. Honeysuckle flowers bloom nearby in raised planters and the sweet smell floats by the table. 


At the bar, I’m waiting to order drinks, I’ve lived here ten years or more and I still can’t get used to how people line up at the bar. Back home, it’s everyone for themselves, the only place where Brit’s aren’t happy to queue, and you must jostle and make yourself seen to get served. Here, there’s an orderly line in front of each bar tender, it makes me smile every time. Only tonight there’s three lines and only two bar staff so it seems, so the service is slow. I’m waiting while a young guy in the line next to me says something about the wait.  Not sure if he’s talking to me, I look at him and say ‘sorry what?’ We get talking and he ends up complimenting me on my leggings with a bright floral pattern on them, that I’m still wearing from climbing.


‘You’re so brave’, he says after we’ve been talking a little while.


I barely tolerate friends calling me brave, let alone strangers at a bar. If I was brave, I would have started to transition when I was much younger. If I was brave, I’d have continued seeing the psychiatrist who had diagnosed me with gender dysphoria five years ago. The psychiatrist that I’d had to take a day off work to travel to Sydney to see. To whom I was referred by the GP that I had sought out specifically because she’d listed trans health care as an interest in her bio. If I was brave, I would have tried to get to know the trans woman my girlfriend at the time worked with, instead of sitting in awkward silence as I picked her up from work and gave them both a lift home. Barely acknowledging her presence as I drove because I was afraid that if I did, it would open pandora’s transgender box that would carry me along with the wave of transness that would come flooding out. If I was brave, I’d have kept continuing to explore those feelings that became more intense during university, the time when you are supposed to be finding out who you are instead of suppressing who I was even deeper, where the pressure and heat is so intense your hidden self is turned to coal. If I was brave, I would tell my homophobic and almost certainly transphobic parents who I am and wait for the inevitable disowning, better they hate who I am than love what I’m not.


But I’m not brave, didn’t want to be, shouldn’t have to be. I’d done none of those things, I’d waited until the last possible moment, where the choice had been between self-deletion or being myself. And even then, I’d chosen the delete button, only I had woken up. I was forced to at least try the only thing that might keep me alive, knowing that I could always press delete again later. I don’t tell anyone, but I envy those who’d been successful in choice I’d made. I envy the peace I believe they have found, a peace I believe I won’t find, while grieving the lives they should have had.


I shake my head gently, “Please don’t say that, I’m not brave” I reply. “If I was brave, I wouldn’t have tried to kill myself and then spent months in a psych ward before doing, this”, waving my hands over myself, so as not to have to say the word ‘transitioning’.  


I’ve read lots of people say that the process of transitioning itself should be savoured, with each new change or development in your mind or body a cause for celebration. Something to be documented and kept as a memento for posterity or placed in a transition album to coo over in the future. Fuck that, like a petulant child asking for an ice-cream, I want it done and done now and will stamp my feet if I don’t get it. The seemingly endless waiting for it to be done is so damn awkward. I’m in between worlds, neither one thing nor the other. I can’t stand it; I wish I could embrace the non-binary no man’s land I find myself in like others can. But I’m still filled with shame for what I’m doing to myself, the shame is sometimes almost as hard to bear as the dysphoria.


“Woah, intense” he says, visibly recoiling from me.  


“It’s ok”, I lie, “I’ve told the story so often it feels like it happened to someone else”. 


After a brief silence, he starts asking questions, the way I maybe should have done to my former partner’s colleague when I’d had the chance. I find it difficult to get out of conversations I don’t want to have with people I don’t want to know, I guess it’s my fear of not being liked. So, I answer his questions, ‘how did I know?’, ‘when did I first feel like a woman’, ‘what were the first changes you’ve noticed’, ‘what have people’s reactions been’ the usual questions people ask. I’m surprised by how frank I am, but the kid is cute and honestly, it’s nice that someone is interested enough to ask me. Mostly, my friends just ignore my transition, steadfastly acting like nothing is changing, like life will go on as it was before. But everything is changing, I notice it most with male friends; I don’t get invited out to stuff as much anymore, they text me less and less. I don’t know if that’s because they don’t know what to say and are scared that they’ll offend me or if it’s too weird for them.  


Then he says quietly ‘I wish I could be brave like you’. 


My heart drops, so I overlook him calling me brave again. I put my hand on his arm and simply say ‘It’ll be ok’, knowing I still need people to say this to me.


 

Kirstin is a trans woman living on the Ngunnawal and Ngambri lands of the Australian Capital Territory. She works in protecting the environment for future generations and loves cats, though her living situation doesn't allow for one so she can often be found cat-sitting.

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