Yesterday we went to a party, thrown by a friend who is TG for his wife’s birthday, and at some point people started telling stories about how a groom or bride went missing at a wedding – in this case, it was because the bride was fixing the headpiece for the cake. At our wedding, Betty went missing to go “hang out with” her best man for a while, and I sat there for a bit, trying to figure out in my head how I could say that, & then realized this group knew Betty was trans anyway, so I just told the story with the “best man” bit in.
But I had a moment where I thought: what do you do with stories like that? Just resist telling them? Re-gender them (so that “she was hanging out with her maid of honor”?) The whole event made me kind of sad, because after we brought it up we ended up doing Trans 101, which is not the worst thing in the world, but we really didn’t feel like it (because sometimes even we want to just be normal folks who go to parties to eat & drink & talk & tell stories).
& I woke up this morning thinking: this is what I hate about transness.