yonmei

06:23 pm: Remembering Kaija Seifert
Today I went to a seminar for employers and service providers to discuss how best to oppose transphobia and anti-trans discrimination.

It was a good day, and I hope a productive one.

It ended with two people, Jo Clifford, whose name used to be John Clifford, a Scottish playwright, who got up and talked passionately about the wonderful changes since she was a 15-year-old who knew she was a boy who wanted to be a girl and didn't have a name for what that was: and Nick Laird, who works for Fair for All NHS, talking about his experience as a trans man - Nick is younger than Jo, and came out/grew up/transitioned in a more supportive environment, but still had those moments.

I was thinking, as you do, about gender identity: Nick told a story about a small boy - an utterly innocent small boy - asking him, back when he was living as an uncomfortable teenage girl who knew she wanted to transition - "Are you a boy or a girl?" and Nick not knowing what to answer, and finally answering with what his birth certificate said then, and how he was living then: "I'm a girl." And the wee boy asking, in all innocence "Are you sure?"

When I turned 40, I began the experiment of growing my hair after 20 years of keeping it short. It's now long enough to be inconveniently girly - I have to go to a hairdressers more often than I used to go to a barber's, and I pay six times as much. Set against that, I think my hair does look quite nice, and I'm kind of speculating how long it would take for me to be able to do it in a ponytail or a braid at the back.

But the weirdest difference: No one calls me "sir" on buses any more. Or shops. Anywhere where a casual interaction, the person not really looking at me but wanting to politely acknowledge my existence, sometimes got me "sirred": I don't get that any more.

Nothing else has changed. I still wear jeans, no make-up, plain glasses: but evidently the sweeping glance that says "Female" or Male" and addresses the recipient as "love" or "sir" accordingly, was sweeping for hair length. Nothing else.

This is interesting, because I always used to wonder exactly what it was that triggered the "sir" - it happened most often when I was wearing my black leather jacket, but it could happen even in summer when I was just wearing a t-shirt.

My mum used to be afraid I was trans, I think, though she was never brave enough to actually ask. If she had, I could have told her: no, I am a butch dyke. I like jeans and biker jackets and I prefer the cheaper, better-made, more comfortable shoes - and other clothing, too, shirts, jeans, socks, etc - on the men's side of the shop: I do not think of this as "cross-dressing", though technically I suppose you could say it is, because I don't think of it as wearing men's clothing: I'm a woman, and so as I choose it, buy it, and wear it, it becomes women's clothing. It just happens that clothing manufacturers are idiots.

My gender, and my physical sex, match. Nick described rude people yelling at him "Are you a boy or a girl?" and his first reaction of confusion and hurt, and then learning to respond simply "Yes." (I told him afterwards that my reaction is to ask "Which are you?" and then depart briskly while they're still confused.) When I was a little girl and wanted to "be a boy" or was pleased when someone mistook me for a boy, it was because I had absorbed straightforwardly that boys get privileges girls don't - that it's better to be a boy than a girl, and I wanted to have those privileges. (It didn't help that my mum flatly refused, ever, to buy jeans for me or permit me to choose shoes from the boy's side of the shop - I wanted those strong, tough shoes in dark colours, and hard-wearing jeans that were warm and comfortable, and bitterly resented being bought skirts - and woolly tights if I complained about the cold. Or to cut my hair short, which I longed for.) But I have always had the privilege that you don't think about until you see someone doing without it - if someone asks me "Are you a man or a woman?" I have no doubt and never have had that I'm a woman. When I came out and found that the young LGB group I joined accepted me readily and instantly as a babydyke - as a girl who liked to wear jeans, was short-haired, could be mistaken for a boy by someone who wasn't looking close enough - it was the most comfortable/comforting experience I'd ever had then, in my life before I came out, about how I looked.

So when challenged, I'm amused. I know the person who challenged my gender has made a stupid mistake, and I can look down on them a little bit and make a tiny bit of fun of them - and walk away briskly while they're still figuring out how I was making fun of them. If someone asks me "You do know this is the ladies' room?" I can grin a bit and stick out my chest just a little and say in my definitely-female-sounding voice "Yes?" and watch them get embarrassed.

When a trans person is challenged, the challenge can be real and dangerous. True, it could for me too, if I ever make fun of the wrong person at the wrong time, but privilege counts: it is impossible for me to be quite as afraid of that as a trans person can be, because there never was a time in my life when I was not legally the gender I know I really am.

Trans men and butch dykes have at times an uneasy relationship, because we can be mistaken for each other by a casual and unthoughtful observer: because many trans men have probably believed they were (or have been told by others that they were) "really" butch dykes - especially heterosexual trans men: and many butch dykes have been told by others - I know I have - that they are "really" trans men. We have even told each other that, though both groups should know better. But listening to Nick, I could relate to a lot of what he said, and see how my gender identity privilege had made it easier for me to be a butch dyke than it had been for him to be a trans man.

Jo Clifford, though: she was astonishing. I'd like to see one of her plays performed: she was performing, though it was sincere and heartfelt. She talked about how wonderful it had been for her to be able to go to the Post Office when she was applying for a new passport, to have her photo taken and to tell the counter assistant "I'm applying for a new passport because I'm changing my name - I'm transitioning" and to have the counter assistant react pleasantly and positively. And how great it had been when she told her manager at work and he said "Great, now how best can we make sure everyone knows how to refer to you from now on? We don't want to have anyone using the wrong pronoun, that would be hurtful." This was within the last few years, when the gender recognition legislation was in process, when discrimination against trans people was still legal in some areas - but, she said, the difference from when she was a scared confused 15-year-old at school in the 1960s in England.

And listening to her, I remembered Kaija. I looked down after a few minutes and realised my hand had written Kaija Seifert Kaija Seifert Kaija Seifert, in different parts of the sheet of paper I'd been using to take notes earlier. The name no one knows - I and one another, the only American friend Kaija was out to about being a girl. Kaija would have loved to hear Jo Clifford speak: would have loved to hear about this event, as she would still have been in Iraq, probably, would still have been trying to work out when and how she could transition.

I was crying a little bit as I sat there: shedding small tears and wiping them surreptitiously, listening to Jo: Jo told how a couple of years ago she'd been asked to speak at the Peace and Justice festival at St Johns in Princes Street, and she had been on a stage on a throne, with a Catholic bishop enthroned at one side and an Orthodox at the other, the Orthodox one with a fantastic curly beard, and how she'd thought "Here I am, on a throne, with a bishop at either side - that's how it should be!" and how heterosexual women would come up to her, biological women, she said, who would find Jo's talks spoke to them about their experience of having femininity imposed on them, or of being the only woman in an otherwise all-male office (as I am, right now). "We are struggling against the patriarchy," Jo said: and I loved her for it, and wished I could tell Kaija.

But she's dead: an Iraqi shot her, months ago. One of a million and more who've died, and every one of them was a source for grief to their friends. Most people who knew her knew her as a man: I have been reading tributes to her for months, by people who thought they knew a man. Some of them - maybe most of them, I hope - would still respect and mourn her if they knew she was Kaija. Some of them might not, but then their respect was worth nothing if it could be so easily lost. I still want to tell them. I can't: Kaija was married, her wife seemed to be in the state I remember being in when a close friend tried to come out to me as trans, back twenty years ago, and then I literally could not hear/comprehend it. Kaija wouldn't have wanted her wife upset: it's not for me to out her when it can accomplish nothing.

Kaija Seifert Kaija Seifert Kaija Seifert. Remember.

Tags: being queer, feminism, hair hair hair, i am an angry feminist, kaija seifert