and dishonest, sometimes.

I’m memory tripping twenty months ago, recollecting a shopping trip (one of many) with my GF.  We’re sifting through racks of maxi dresses (she really wants a maxi and she’s tall enough that it won’t do the shapeless sack thing) and the palpable relief on her face breaks my heart a little.  She feels so much safer and less self-conscious when I’m with her; my presence seems to dull the voices in her head that make her feel like everyone is suspiciously staring at her.

When we started shopping for her, I would rationalize her still very boy presence amidst flowy, lacy, short and tight things by saying things like, who are they to know you’re trans?  You could be buying clothes for- STOP.  What kind of stupid am I talking?  Why am I considering other people’s hate and intolerance?  Why do I have this compulsion to accommodate their discomfort?  I don’t like this tendency within myself.  It makes me feel like a coward and that I’m not a true supporter of my GF.

So I work on permanently shifting my perspective.  My instinct to justify behavior that highlights her transness through other people’s lenses is to protect us from hate, I tell myself.  Transsexuals are on the very bottom of the LGBTQ totem pole (that there is a hierarchy is so maddeningly ironic); they are and have always been targeted by everyone else because apparently it’s okay to be completely (and violently) not okay with transsexuals because they’re so fucking weird (huge, exasperated eye roll over here).

But I’m not being completely honest.

I give hateful people an iota of consideration because focusing on them deflects and delays my acceptance process because a part of me is still holding onto him.  Because the shameful truth is that I’m not yet able to be 100% supportive.  Yes, I’m absolutely her best friend and biggest cheerleader but I’m dragging my feet- big time- at fully accepting that BF is not coming back.

But…tick tock…tick tock enables me to ultimately accept that my BF is part of my past, which further enables me to unabashedly retail therapy with GF whilst making judgmental and ignorant fools ridiculously uncomfortable- that’s right, we’re buying dresses for him, thank you/fuck you very much.