For a boi who sometime passes summertime brings a different wardrobe, and with it, different dilemmas. I like to look crisp when I travel. I find a jacket, shirt and jeans offset the ridiculousness of having to balance a plastic tray on my knees and eat plastic food with plastic cutlery. When I arrive after a long, cramped journey I don’t want to look like I’ve just popped out to take the dog for a walk in the worst and most unfashionable clothes I could find screwed up at the back of my wardrobe. In luggage collection areas I find myself peering disdainfully at other British male persons while thinking: “There is no occasion that can justify the combination of long shorts and a polo shirt.”
On the other hand, hot, beach destinations do cry out for vests, shorts and swim wear. All of which reveal a lot of flesh. For a sometime passing boi like me, when I strip down, the truth really is out there. Take my recent vacation for example: due to a mix-up and a gross trades description violation the Meet & Greet service neither met nor gret, leaving me to keep going round the block at Gatwick Airport and my good lady wife heading inside to “hold a place in the queue. Now I in her shoes, would be a most peculiar sight, but also would content myself with an occasional smile and perhaps a quip or two about the progress of the queue. My wife, on the other hand, who could chat amiably for England (and in fact may enter that category for the 2012 Olympics where she will most certainly be going for gold). My wife shared our predicament with her queue neighbours and was roundly teased about being stood up. I breezed through the queue in my jacket, shirt and jeans to knowing smiles and general pre-holiday joviality. As we made our way through the now familiar shoe-removing security my wife shared how everyone had assumed I was male. I’m not especially trying to fool anyone, you understand. But once I’m assumed male at what point do I come out that I’m not a bio but a boi? My lovely lady is drawn into this dilemma whether she wants to be or not as people make assumptions about her when they make assumptions about me. She becomes straight when I become bio.
I don’t set out to pass. There’s a moment when some folks realise I’m bio female and sometimes that moment is unpleasant. Every once in a while it’s dangerous. So I fret about it a little. Even in pleasant conversation a part of me is grey with bleak anticipation. Even as I’m telling myself to just be who I am, that natural, human, humble self is sure I won’t be liked if only they knew… And yet, I also feel in my heart, only if they and all the world know, only by me being out as butch, as masculine bio female, only by truly being myself will prejudice be challenged and people just damned get used to me, us, difference.
We were both aware of this irony on the evening of our arrival at recent holiday destination. It was a tiring and cramped journey and a ridiculous checking-in procedure but the bar was open and the caipirinhas were going down nicely. We were joined by Deni’s former queue neighbours and both the conversation and pronouns were flowing. The chap is referring to me as ‘he’ while Deni calls me ‘she’: so he’s heeing and she’s sheing and I’m thinking: “Geezer, you’re in for a poolside surprise.” Cos when a butch is standing before you in a bikini there’s nowhere to hide. Ironically we didn’t see this couple for almost a week. We did then meet by the pool but just after the clouds had covered the sky and I had covered my bikini top with a t shirt. I was wearing trunks, which were as flat fronted as a Georgian house, but chap didn’t seem any the wiser. For some people, even when the truth is staring you full in the loin area, folks will see what they wanna see.
Showing posts with label butch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label butch. Show all posts
Monday, 4 August 2008
Friday, 11 April 2008
Gender Neutral?
Hurray for the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. If I wasn’t already happily civilly partnered I’d marry them. And why – they introduced Gender-Neutral toilets at the BFI for the duration of the festival. This single radical act transformed my experience of the festival. Using the GN convenience I felt the weight of Gender Neutral. I normally feel so very not in the right space, whether using the Ladies, the Gents or Babychange/Disabled toilets. At the festival finally I was right where I should be.
Single acts inform changes that transform lives. The BFI provided all the usual facilities: gender segregated and unisex disabled spaces, in addition they TRANSformed one of the women’s toilets to Gender Non-Specific. (Transforming the Gents would mean women having to walk past urinals in use and women after all are used to the privacy of a cubical). Gender Neutral is not a new issue for the LBGT communities and its right such a forward thinking act should happen at the LLGFF. When lesbians take over spaces women use the mens and Trans girls slap on the slap alongside femmes in the Ladies. It’s a Gay thing.
Binary gender locks people into boxes defined by their biology. Segregated toilets provide safety for women, and it’s likely women-only conveniences will be needed for the foreseeable future. For those of us not passing, the pain and anxiety of being challenged in our own bio gender designated space is a daily burden. I can be needing the toilet and be too intimidated or just plain too tired to run the gauntlet of the straight world’s confusion and disgust.
The gay world has always pushed beyond binary gender stereotypes. Women and men can be masculine, feminine or varying degrees of inbetweenee, and most of us love us all, wherever we are on a gender scale. It’s the beloved exchange of culture and perspective that rocks my world. It’s hard to imagine then that anyone gay would question such progressive thinking, like the Guardian columnist who questioned why ‘transgender folk need a gender neutral loo at a gay film festival’. Where in the Guardian was the voice of transpeople, butches and all the dykes I spoke to who loved the GN toilets? And where was the reporting on the rest of the festival? It’s no accident that the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival organisers were the festival organisers that pioneered Gender Neutral toilets at the BFI. Ironically it was assumed the Gay communities would be on board.
At the film festival’s closing gala this uninformed column was widely talked about. And that’s a good thing. So many more people will now hear about the BFI’s progressive action. Maybe that’s the most beautiful thing of all.
Single acts inform changes that transform lives. The BFI provided all the usual facilities: gender segregated and unisex disabled spaces, in addition they TRANSformed one of the women’s toilets to Gender Non-Specific. (Transforming the Gents would mean women having to walk past urinals in use and women after all are used to the privacy of a cubical). Gender Neutral is not a new issue for the LBGT communities and its right such a forward thinking act should happen at the LLGFF. When lesbians take over spaces women use the mens and Trans girls slap on the slap alongside femmes in the Ladies. It’s a Gay thing.
Binary gender locks people into boxes defined by their biology. Segregated toilets provide safety for women, and it’s likely women-only conveniences will be needed for the foreseeable future. For those of us not passing, the pain and anxiety of being challenged in our own bio gender designated space is a daily burden. I can be needing the toilet and be too intimidated or just plain too tired to run the gauntlet of the straight world’s confusion and disgust.
The gay world has always pushed beyond binary gender stereotypes. Women and men can be masculine, feminine or varying degrees of inbetweenee, and most of us love us all, wherever we are on a gender scale. It’s the beloved exchange of culture and perspective that rocks my world. It’s hard to imagine then that anyone gay would question such progressive thinking, like the Guardian columnist who questioned why ‘transgender folk need a gender neutral loo at a gay film festival’. Where in the Guardian was the voice of transpeople, butches and all the dykes I spoke to who loved the GN toilets? And where was the reporting on the rest of the festival? It’s no accident that the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival organisers were the festival organisers that pioneered Gender Neutral toilets at the BFI. Ironically it was assumed the Gay communities would be on board.
At the film festival’s closing gala this uninformed column was widely talked about. And that’s a good thing. So many more people will now hear about the BFI’s progressive action. Maybe that’s the most beautiful thing of all.
Thursday, 23 August 2007
Public Inconvenience
This is the launch of the new column Butch About Town. Today’s top topic is Public Toilets.
OK, so I look like a man. That is both a style and a lifestyle choice on my part. I am what I am, and down with being butch. But what to do when a boi is out and about and nature calls? What choice is there, for a butch like me, between the Ladies & the Gents?
Tha Ladies: Nothing gets my palms sweating faster than a hot femme in a short skirt. Whoops, did I say that out loud. I meant to say - Nothing makes my palms sweat and my heart beat more than the prospect of pushing open the door with a little picture of a silhouetted woman with strangely square shoulders and a very triangular skirt.
Why? Because women in the Ladies ask me to leave. Worse, there’s a moment of fear, and I never want to see fear in a woman’s eyes.
I’ve tried smiling. I’ve tried a hearty “Hello!” I’ve never resorted, as a butch friend of mine used to do, to flashing my breasts. (She never got arrested but she did get a few phone numbers). Strangely in this situation I’m embarrassed. Having been asked to leave often, redirected occasionally and once hauled out of a cubical by a male bouncer and marched to the Gents – my top tactic is to scurry straight in, wait till I can’t hear anyone at the dryer and dash out again (washing my hands first).
Tha Men’s: I don’t feel any happier going into the Gents. There’s something of a hygiene difference. I have not yet felt unsafe, though it lurks in the back of my mind that I could be. As it is, straight men don’t seem to stare at a guy dashing head-down into a cubical. I get out as quick as I get in. I’m butch but don’t feel like embracing the masculinity of the Gents. I rather like the women’s toilets. It’s like sitting round the kitchen table with all your aunts while they put on make-up and share their most intimate confidences.
Hurray for train toilets, plane toilets, gender-neutral disabled toilets. Can we have more unisex toilets like on Ally Mcbeal please? I don’t even mind line dancing to Barry White tunes if that’s required. For women’s safety and while male hygiene remains dubious we still need the Ladies, and the long queues that accompany them. Men are truly welcome to their urinals and the strange disinfectant blocks that float in them. But please please please, can’t we work something out so us poor butch bois can go in peace.
OK, so I look like a man. That is both a style and a lifestyle choice on my part. I am what I am, and down with being butch. But what to do when a boi is out and about and nature calls? What choice is there, for a butch like me, between the Ladies & the Gents?
Tha Ladies: Nothing gets my palms sweating faster than a hot femme in a short skirt. Whoops, did I say that out loud. I meant to say - Nothing makes my palms sweat and my heart beat more than the prospect of pushing open the door with a little picture of a silhouetted woman with strangely square shoulders and a very triangular skirt.
Why? Because women in the Ladies ask me to leave. Worse, there’s a moment of fear, and I never want to see fear in a woman’s eyes.
I’ve tried smiling. I’ve tried a hearty “Hello!” I’ve never resorted, as a butch friend of mine used to do, to flashing my breasts. (She never got arrested but she did get a few phone numbers). Strangely in this situation I’m embarrassed. Having been asked to leave often, redirected occasionally and once hauled out of a cubical by a male bouncer and marched to the Gents – my top tactic is to scurry straight in, wait till I can’t hear anyone at the dryer and dash out again (washing my hands first).
Tha Men’s: I don’t feel any happier going into the Gents. There’s something of a hygiene difference. I have not yet felt unsafe, though it lurks in the back of my mind that I could be. As it is, straight men don’t seem to stare at a guy dashing head-down into a cubical. I get out as quick as I get in. I’m butch but don’t feel like embracing the masculinity of the Gents. I rather like the women’s toilets. It’s like sitting round the kitchen table with all your aunts while they put on make-up and share their most intimate confidences.
Hurray for train toilets, plane toilets, gender-neutral disabled toilets. Can we have more unisex toilets like on Ally Mcbeal please? I don’t even mind line dancing to Barry White tunes if that’s required. For women’s safety and while male hygiene remains dubious we still need the Ladies, and the long queues that accompany them. Men are truly welcome to their urinals and the strange disinfectant blocks that float in them. But please please please, can’t we work something out so us poor butch bois can go in peace.
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