5 - “What happened to my body over the past decade?” Trans masculine ageing and embodiment in a cisgenderist and ageist society

Summary

Introduction: subjective affects and experiences of embodiment in cisgenderist and ageist contexts

“Hey girls!” said one of my colleagues, a few years ago, as he walked past my office while I was working with a female colleague. This greeting would have gone unnoticed if I was a woman. But as a binary trans man who transitioned 15 years ago, who has not been misgendered for over a decade by people who didn't know me before my transition, and who is always correctly gendered in my interactions with strangers based on my masculine appearance and gender expression, this interpellation left me speechless and unable to defend myself against this violent act of misgendering. “Hey girls! …” “Hey girls! …” To this day, I am still haunted by those two simple words, echoing in my head and heart, pounding, always louder, to the point of not hearing my own thoughts, to the point of sometimes not feeling the euphoria that my transition brought into my life, numbed by the weight of those words that shattered my masculinity.

It must be said that this incident was part of a series of several misgendering instances that happened suddenly, around four years ago, in my department of social work, a small department composed of 15 faculty members and a few administrative staff. At the time, I had been employed there for over a year. While I cannot know for sure what propelled those unexpected occurrences of misgendering by approximately a third of the department, I can say that this arrived after some fraught discussions on equity, diversity and inclusion issues during which I expressed disagreement with colleagues. It must be said that these colleagues also know that I am a trans, bisexual and disabled/ Mad man, since I was hired as a specialist of queer/ trans and disability/ Mad studies, and I have always been transparent about my identities. Contrary to the strangers I encounter in my public interactions – be it at the grocery store, mall or restaurant – who read me as a cisgender man based on what Julia Serano (2007, p 164) calls ‘cissexual assumption’, presuming that I was assigned male at birth and granting me cissexual privilege – my colleagues knew that I was trans and, based on that fact, took away those cis privileges from me.