Becoming normal in a world of the ordinary
Sitting in the coffee shop you look across the chattering twos and threes, the ones on their laptops buried in work. Oblivious to you, the one who feels yourself, yet different to this multitude. In the midst of your train of thought you catch yourself, aware of your gender dissonance, the thing that sets you seemingly apart, noticing all the small things that make them ordinary. This is as much an ingrained habit as it is their obliviousness.
Slipping slowly into your mood, the one that comes on when the world just is yet you are not quite there, you observe and see ordinary. Talking strangers drowned in your headphones, their haircuts, cut of their clothes, the things that make them them. You notice it all, yet somehow never quite feel that you reflect them. Do you even want to? Or is that even the right question. Is the ordinary really a thing, or just a mirage because you are drinking expensive coffee down town.
Is becoming ordinary a trans desire, to be seen are a normal part of the tapestry. As Cinderella, one minute to midnight forever hanging in the chime, blowing out the last candle in the dark, waiting for the lights to come back on to show a deviance. Always on the edge of them knowing, the extraordinary a breath away from being told. This is gaze you give, sat cocooned in music, knowing that the coffee has spiked all your senses, anxiety pricking your eyes with tears that streak no other reason that a desperate need to work and think.
Normal, what ever that may mean, is something you churn over. Am I the ordinary one, off on this gender adventure galloping through the hinterlands beyond the cis city? Or is this extraordinary self something that is never pinned down, explainable, because words are not there yet to fully account for your totality? Ordinary, the ability to walk through life without slings and arrows, is there at your fingertips, the conversation never breaks as you walk past. Yet, deep down, you know that once midnight chimes the ordinary evaporates and you become other.
Otherness, the need to tell lest others discover and confront, is perpetual. You are always coming out, always explaining a version of your truth that skips the messy parts of youth and valour. You become other not because you feel other, but because they see you as such. So you sit and drink your coffee, reading a great book, smiling and sharing a joke with yourself. Knowing that your personal truth is intensely personal to you, that you are normal, you are the ordinary self that you cannot otherwise be. It is the world that needs to catch up with your normal. Their eyes need to see you in the ordinary, not just you theirs.
Normality is not about paring back the personal self, it is about understanding the extraordinary as part of the tapestry, each colour adding threads to the vibrant whole. Normal is what we choose to make it, the we of society, not just the ones and twos. Gender variance is not some extraordinary thing because it is inherently extraordinary, it is so because society makes it that way. Ordinary is mundane, workaday, a part of who we are. Gender variance in all its colours should be ordinary, should just be something Mark or Carol do because it fits them, not a splashy set of gossip because it is weird or deviant. When you stare out over your coffee, thinking about the world and yourself, ordinary is just part of the flow, mundane is the usual. Being trans should not be unusual, should not be extraordinary.
You read your book, knowing in yourself that the personal truth is mundane, that the gender you inherently are (or reject) is no more special or extraordinary than the chatty folk next to you. It is their gaze that makes it so. You are normal in the minds eye, and it is for the world to catch up and make it ordinary. You pack your bag, set the empty coffee cup down, get up and leave, ordinary in self, hoping that normal will follow in your footsteps.
