Ahead of the publication of her debut memoir, Fairest (out today from Viking Books), them.‘s founding executive editor Meredith Talusan shares the below essay about the joys and perils of passing as cisgender, and how the internet has changed the nature of coming out.
I transitioned in 2002, a time when social media was still in its infancy, before the details of our lives weren’t routinely plastered onto walls or timelines for all the world to see. Back then, it was still possible to transition in your 20s in a city like Boston, then have the choice to escape your former life and adopt a new one, or going stealth, as it has come to be known to many in the trans community, a term that has come to be used more rarely because it’s a lot harder to do conveniently now. It’s a word that connotes weaponry and deception, as though one were a missile or a spy.
Looking back now, the feasibility of going stealth feels to me like the biggest difference between what it was like to transition in 2002 versus 2020, even though I used to think of the period of my life when I didn’t disclose being trans to the world as only hardship, only pain. Yet despite how much living stealth weighed on me psychologically, I now recognize that the seven-year period when I didn’t have to talk about being trans was crucial to my being able to live a more peaceful life, and prioritize parts of myself other than my gender.
Not that I embraced stealth voluntarily. Despite the general expectation in 2002 that trans women who can pass for cisgender would end up going stealth, I fully intended to be out after surgery that summer, right before I moved to San Francisco from Boston to start the visual arts MFA program at the California College of the Arts. Being trans was a crucial part of my art practice, whether in photographs that queried my relationship to my new womanhood or a performance piece where I knitted a full-length gown and unraveled it stitch by stitch as I danced around a victrola.
I was supposed to be questioning what was real and what was artificial when it came to our ideas of femininity, but I was also showing off a body that could no longer be identified as belonging to a man. That piece was my way of telling the world to get over it, that there was nothing to see here, that the blond waif with the penis was gone. My body was now within the acceptable parameters of people’s expectations, my breasts and hips sufficiently developed, my face adequately soft.
Yet ironically, passing as cis when you’re publicly disclosed makes you an even greater subject of gossip and wonder. When you’re visibly trans, you deal with a host of problems far worse than what I experienced, but you do know who your enemies are because you can see the animosity in their faces. It’s also easier to know your friends are truly yours, because they wouldn’t hang out with you otherwise, and don’t care about being around you even if the world judges them for socializing with trans people.
When you’re out and you pass, you just never know when you’ll find out that your oldest friend won’t let you sleep over at her apartment when you visit because it makes her roommate uncomfortable, or that there are times when you wouldn’t be invited to girls’ night out even when all the other girls are, or that a guy friend you thought was cool would take another friend of his aside and “warn” him about you after the friend hits on you at a party where you’re just minding your own business. For me, being out and passing entailed constant betrayals large and small, reminders that so many people in your life accept or even love you, but only so far, because they don’t care for you as much as they care about being cisgender and protecting others of their kind, that their regard for you is conditioned on you looking and acting cis.
It might seem unintuitive that my reaction to these experiences was to go stealth when I moved to New York in 2005. It was unintuitive to me; I thought of what I was doing at the time just as being more private about my past. But I didn’t expect how much those friends who knew me from before would take my cues and not talk about who I had been, and by the time I moved a few hours upstate in Ithaca for grad school at Cornell a year later, the shroud over my transition had been fully draped.
