Ugly? or just queer?

(This is going to be grotesquely self indulgent, self absorbed, and navel gazey. It’s not gonna be particularly profound or insightful. It’s mostly for me, it's basically just me coming to terms with the fact that I'm actually pretty hot. I’m going to discuss internalized transphobia and I’m going to use some less than fun language around it. You might find some value if you struggle with self esteem issues, especially if you’re transfemme, but if you don’t I’m not offering refunds.)

Backstory section

(You can skip past this, but it’s helpful in understanding where we’re ending up).

I’ve had intense self image issues starting in puberty and then just… lasting forever. Different kinds, layered and knotted and stacked on top of each other. I grew up vegetarian and like, anemically skinny, and I was a little nerd, and I was tremendously and devastatingly bullied from 5th grade to like… I dunno, 10th grade? I was getting sexually assaulted in the locker room (I actually don’t remember what precisely happened because I’ve successfully blanked it out, but my mom has mentioned it obliquely a few times). I was getting dropkicked by people I didn’t know. I think puberty/junior high is tough for everyone, but it felt pretty fucking bad for me. It’s like people could tell my body was wrong, more than I could. I was obsessed with ‘baseball shirts’ because the three-quarter sleeves hid my shitty skinny arms. By high school, the bullying had stopped, and I had emerged as a funny social butterfly, but I had internalized that I was profoundly unattractive. I was your average white nerd boy, with the host of weird complexes that came with that. No one will ever find me attractive, I’ll never be as hot as your average dumb jock, etc. I remember longingly thinking about how much easier it would be to be a scrawny nerdy girl version of me than it was being a scrawny nerdy guy. I was told repeatedly that girls do not, in fact, have it easier (very deeply true, especially in the mid 2000s and peak eating disorder among all the other shit), and the fact that I desperately wanted to be one was a stupid impulse that should be ignored (ended up being very incorrect in the long run). I ended my high school run as Homecoming King, but I was still convinced I was an ugly kid who was funny and friendly and had a lot of nice friends. I just thought everyone was being nice.

College didn’t help. I started eating meat. I began getting chubbier, but was still profoundly unable to put on any kind of muscle. I had the realization that I would be much much happier if I could be a woman, but transition felt unattainable to me. I didn’t know any trans people. My girlfriend did my makeup once or twice. I went to the MOA in full girl mode. This shot is from college!

But I felt like a boy in makeup. I was convinced that transition would cement my ugliness. The Internalized Transmisogyny told me that nothing is uglier than a clocky trans woman, and that was all I had to look forward to. Better to be a “mid nerdy guy” with a lot of shit going on (I can juggle! I can do close up magic! I’m funny! I can drink a LOT! I can hold a conversation on almost any topic! It’s ok that I’m not much to look at!).

I graduated from college and spent the next sixish years getting progressively more miserable. Looking back it’s pretty evident that it was basically just the twin strains of feeling miserable in monogamy and deeeeply in denial about being a trans woman. But from the inside, it just felt like slowly dying, lights flickering out and machinery grinding down. The things that animate me losing their appeal. Drinking more. Feeling increasingly distant from my girlfriend (who was going through her own shit, in her defence, but god she was unwilling or unable to remotely get on the same page as me).

We broke up. It felt abrupt but it also felt like it had been coming for a year and a half. I moved in with my younger brother. I made a fetlife account (I’d been privately perverted since I was 17 but I wanted to try the community proper). I entered into a dynamic with a trans person I met at a munch. Being around trans people who were living normal authentic joyful lives allowed me to imagine living a normal (I missed this mark a little but in a good direction) authentic joyful life. I was unable to ignore the fact that I needed to transition anymore.

I decided it was better to live as “an ugly trans woman” than to spend the rest of my life dying by degrees in the body of an average nerdy guy (the last few minutes from TV Glow hit me like a bullet to the chest because of how clearly it depicted the person I almost ended up as).

I’ve been on HRT for about three and a half years at this point. And it feels like I made some major breakthroughs on my self image shit in the last… four days.

Onto the actual point

Ok, the backstory is out of the way. Basically starting Monday, I’ve been having a kinda slow, rolling realization that I might be really hot and not realized it (I know I know, it sounds stupid, please hear me out). I’ve had one big realization and a few small ones but I think I’m putting the big one at the end like the potato chip aisle, and I’m going to make you walk past the fresh veggies I’m gently misting (the smaller realizations) first. But basically, here’s some pitfalls I’ve identified, and why it took me so fucking long to put together that I might be really hot, and how I’ve gotten away with being so fucking stupid for so long.

I’m unable to perceive myself

I think this is a combination of factors. I’ve never photographed well, in a kinda self-perpetuating way. I had the weird dysmorphia/bullying shit in junior high. I have the internalized transmisogyny. I have a lot of intense dysphoria. I have the body image/diet culture issues women have to deal with. AND SO I’m basically incapable of seeing myself objectively in the mirror. I’ve shed tears over this. I’ve wondered since fucking forever how I look from outside of my fucking body. That desire has only intensified since coming out as trans. But I truly cannot tell what the fuck I look like. I can tell if my eyeliner wings look cool. I can tell if my outfit looks sick as fuck. But the body underneath? My face, my tummy, etc? All I can see is the parts I’ve always hated, the changes I still want to make.

It feels like I’m driving a car I can’t see. Everyone else claims they can see it but I can’t. It’s easier to go along with it because if I explain I can’t see it, they tell me I’m running over their foot, or look at me like I’m ridiculous, and give me all these car details that I can’t make sense of in my mind. It’s easier to pretend like I can see it, and then compliment their cars, that I can see, and then try and parallel park by guesswork and by watching the faces of onlookers. It’s a tremendously inefficient system, but difficult to change or fix.

I will say, meeting and falling in love with other trans people has helped me unlearn the self hatred. Internalized Transmisogyny is still transmisogyny, and the best cure for that has always been falling in love with beautiful incredible charming gorgeous heartbreaking trans women. The way I love my trans sisters is slowly eroding my capacity for self hatred because it becomes increasingly more gratingly logically inconsistent to constantly be saying “it’s hot when she looks like this but it’s hideous when I look like this”. So, thank you all the amazing hot trans women in my life, I would probably be dead without you.

Hot is different than “gorgeous”

For a variety of reasons I’m reading “Sex and the Single Girl” by Helen Gurley Brown (the editor in chief at Cosmopolitan from the 60s to the 90s). As you would expect, it is equal parts: insane batshit, a fascinating time capsule of femininity, clever and funny prose, and interesting (if still slightly insane) musings on how to be a sexy woman. She has a whole chapter on “how to be sexy” but right at the beginning of it, she writes “What is a sexy woman? Very simple. She is a woman who enjoys sex.” I’ve been discussing a similar concept with my boyfriends, that I’ve been referring to as “looks like they give good head”. Fundamentally, someone who looks like they know how to fuck well, enjoy fucking, and fuck often is going to be a hot person.

And as far as like, changes I’ve made in the last couple years, I grew an amazing set of tits and I got a lot better at fucking and giving head. I have a hard time trusting people about the way I look, but when someone is in my bed, shaking and panting and moaning under my careful focused attention, it’s easier to trust how I make them feel. Hips don't lie, etc. I fuck well. I enjoy fucking. I fuck often. And I like to think I do an ok job presenting like that’s the case. I like to think people can tell what a massive slut I am. I hope I carry that energy with me.

But it was all slow changes. I think I failed to consider how big of a change it was to go from “mid nerdy guy” to “great tits, looks like she gives good head” until, yanno, the recent revelations.

Queer hot vs straight hot

This was the big one for me I think, and undoing this did a lot for me. Consider the following scenario:

When I go out in public, to buy groceries or pump gas or get an oil change, I am generally met with a mixture of disgust, disinterest, confusion, and pity. The only people who tell me I look good are my friends.

The natural conclusion to draw from that is “I am fairly hideous, but I have very kind friends”, right?

Now consider:

What if the only people capable of finding me (as a clocky trans woman) attractive are queer people, and I rarely run into queer people in public, and all my friends are queer? Does that additional information change the above conclusion?

I went from a mid guy to a clocky trans girl, and as I was made painfully aware all throughout the rest of my life, straight society thinks that’s one of the worst things you can be. I am not “conventionally attractive”. Straight men don’t like the jaw, the throat, the cock, and straight women don’t like the tits. Neither group really like the lip rings, and honestly the “looks like she fucks well, often, etc” is probably also off-putting to them, when it’s on such a visibly queer person.

BUT THAT DOESN’T FUCKING MATTER. I’ve never really wanted to fuck straight people! I don’t need to be straight people attractive! I only wanna fuck queer people! The fact that I only really hear from my friends that I’m hot makes sense because they’re the only queer people I interact with day to day!

I JUST THOUGHT EVERYONE WAS BEING NICE, but it’s just that all the nice people are queer, and I’m queer hot.

I think that’s most of the revelations I have to share with you all. I’m sorry I didn’t believe any of you when you said I looked good. I promise I’m working on it. I hope I wasn’t too annoying, I just truly cannot see the car. I will try and do a better job of trusting people when they tell me things! Love you all.