What prompted this, and keep in mind this was a long time ago, was the fact that I requested people stop referring to Zachary, probably the first other trans man I ever met in person who I knew was a trans man, as a lesbian and using female pronouns.
Allow me to mention a few things before I continue. First off, the woman on the far left in this picture from eleven years ago is me:
So when I turned into this three years later:
What people were seeing was a butch woman with hair only butch women in that area had wearing clothes no cis male in that region would wear unless they were high (A yellow T-shirt and plaid seafoam button-down? Yuck!). I wore girly glowing Miracle Ball earrings and loads of jewelry.
Also, substantially higher body fat percentage I am remembering now, but that's just a side note.
The point is that I looked terrible. And people did not take me seriously because everybody just saw some butch woman looking for attention by referring to herself as male. People who knew me from earlier didn't see much of a difference and totally dismissed it, thinking I'd just come out as a lesbian or grow out of it.
This was a couple of years before I came out on campus. In that time I'd learned that the way I was dressing, acting, and wearing my hair did not come off as "man" so much as "lesbian." I'd learned what I really did need to change and what I didn't have to change. Because I'd already had that time, most people never knew me as anything but what I am now. It also helped in no small way that I was gay at the time, so I didn't even have the opportunity to come out as a lesbian; I never was one.
Had any of them known me as Jackie, they would have had a hard time taking me seriously, too. But because they never met Jackie, and they never met Jack-in-Progress, to them it was as if I magically and seamlessly emerged from the manly version of Aphrodite's seashell from woman to man. Beyond a few first-meeting kerfluffles and a few particularly bigoted individuals, none of them ever treated me as anything other than a man... but Zachary, "she" was a lesbian.
No.
This is something I need to stress. It's flattering that so many people think that I'm so legit, but other trans men are also legit, yes, even when they don't know what they're doing yet, or, Gods forbid, they just happen to do things differently. I mean so what if they're frosting their hair and wearing crappy layers? There are cis men who do that, too.
And what if they decide it isn't right for them? That's fine. People change their minds. I knew a person who lived as male for three months before she realized, no, she really is a lesbian. That's their decision, though, not yours. If you really don't think he's legit, at least fake it. If not for him, than for the rest of us who feel offended by proxy at your insensitivity.
