Trans privilege
One of the things that took me a while to wrap my head around was the concept of trans privilege, especially in the ability to access treatment and have surgery. Given my personal history, where I have been on NHS prescriptions for hormones since 18 and had private surgery at 25, I have had a lot of good fortune come my way with respect to accessing the medical side of transition. Genetically I was also blessed with good looks and just slight above average height for standard cis white British women. In many respects I have degrees of privilege that other trans folk do not, yet all of those privileges are predicated on the other issues in my life that tarnish them.
I feel conflicted about privilege in a way that twenty plus years of transition has given me perspective on. On the one hand the fact that I am university educated, had a university educated parent, had a grammar school education, and was given many opportunities not afforded to many of my peers set me up with a personality that tends to tough it through. On the other, I have done much of my transition by myself outside any trans support networks or around people who had quite a specific ideas of what trans actually should be. It is only since starting my PhD that I have begun to fully unpack my thoughts and ideas on gender, seeing privilege as a multiplicitious thing and not a pain Olympics where more suffering equals more virtue.
Checking myself is something I do on a daily basis, both in my writing and in my interactions with others. I do sandbag certain aspects of myself because I do not want to intimidate or make others feel lesser. This is not me attempting to virtue signal or be humble for the sake of it, rather, it is an appreciation of how much other people have played a part in getting me to where I am today. My single biggest skill, in my opinion, is being able to navigate a room, read people, and make myself attuned to them, which my education and work environments all trained me to do. This is my real privilege, the self-confidence just to be myself, with a dash of knowing that if everything goes wrong I can pick myself up again.
My true privilege, the ability to reset, pick up the pieces and rebuild. When we talk of trans privileges often we are talking about the ability to be normative in a normal world, of being typical and to glide through un-noticed. Education counts for nothing if you do not have the skills to blend in, genetics means nothing if you find it hard to relate to the world around you. Being perfect is only in the eyes of the beholder, for even with all the privilege and moxy the world has a habit of showing why that privilege means next to nothing.
This is why pain Olympics are so unhealthy, why virtue signalling your privilege is a false dichotomy, and why under selling yourself will only lead to more devaluing of your self worth. One on my personal mottos is that I got this, challenge accepted. I always try to push myself. It is both a strength and a weakness, as on the one hand I push through, yet on the other when I invariably crash I feel utterly worthless. We as individuals cannot simply be something lesser than we are, and while there is place to understand and situate your privilege, it is what you actually do with your privilege that matters.
Given this, I have adopted a do not shit on others happiness philosophy when I am around other people. Given my education it is easy for me to pick apart ideas, concepts, fashion, beliefs etc, yet the reality is that my take on things is rarely wanted and even more rarely warranted. On the internet where anyone can be an anonymous keyboard warrior, actively choosing not to shit on someone’s day is a liberating concept. Many online trans spaces have trans timelines, coming out photos, fashion critiques, and other ways of getting others to judge your personal appearance. All of them are there to fluff egos, make people feel better about themselves, and generally boost confidence. It is easy enough to tear someone down or send someone’s emotions to the moon with the dash of keyboard and click post. It is harder to take a step back and consider why the person is posting in the first place. Will our voice actively help this person or make the situation worse? This is part of trans privilege that is hard to pin down and harder to reconcile.
I have been very fortunate to have been able to find employment throughout my transition, privileged to not have to resort to sex work to survive. One of my ongoing observations of trans Reddit, Twitter and Instagram is the proliferation of trans Only Fans accounts with all the switch and bait content associated with it. See a cute trans girl, click on her profile and 80% of the time she will be promoting her OF account. Mine is not to judge or comment, as I do not know her history or why she is using OF to survive. When we talk about trans privilege sex work is often taboo, or at best talked about in the quiet spaces. If you have to sell your body to survive, or simply because you enjoy doing it, then you do not need someone like me telling you anything. Privilege politics can warp out understanding of others, seeing sex workers as victims or folk in need of rescue. Potentially some do need help and support, but it is up to them to ask without us judging them.
This point of privilege being in the eye of the beholder is a strong one, as often our own privileges can blind us to the reality of how each of us overlap and shift. I have the space and time to write and engage with trans issues because I this is part of my job and research. There is no one way to talk, dissect, or engage with privilege, only that each of us needs to understand where our own lies and how we can better relate to others. I really do not want to shit on other people’s days, as their happiness matters to them. The first step is empathy, and then checking my own issues before making things better or worse for them. At least it’s a start.
