Yesterday I finally did something I've wanted to do for a while and gone momentarily stealth.
In the last few months, 3 years after starting transition, I must have had about a dozen people, who'd known me before, coming into the shop. Berlin tends to be a lasting magnet once you've spent some time here.
Sometimes it gets a little awkward when they ask directly where I've gone to. In this case it happened like that, and they also queried the whereabouts of other people who are / were fixtures here.
So this time I answered only about those others, and they went off saying they'd be in one friday soon, when no doubt someone will enlighten them.
It's not, after so many hundreds of meetings , that I'm exactly shy about being out. It's just that I am so weary of the comments afterwards about how they thought I was me but didn't like to ask to confirm. In some cases it may be true, and I'm sure it's not meant as a variant of the 'deceiver' meme.
But equally I'm sure that several really had no idea at all and simply want not to feel as if they've failed a recognition test.
Thinking about it afterwards and actually I can only remember one time when someone came in, didn't react like that and weren't shy of expressing astonishment. They were a trans couple. Figures.
Of course I do have a particular reason why people don't recognise me readily.
Because this was how I looked before...
In the last few months, 3 years after starting transition, I must have had about a dozen people, who'd known me before, coming into the shop. Berlin tends to be a lasting magnet once you've spent some time here.
Sometimes it gets a little awkward when they ask directly where I've gone to. In this case it happened like that, and they also queried the whereabouts of other people who are / were fixtures here.
So this time I answered only about those others, and they went off saying they'd be in one friday soon, when no doubt someone will enlighten them.
It's not, after so many hundreds of meetings , that I'm exactly shy about being out. It's just that I am so weary of the comments afterwards about how they thought I was me but didn't like to ask to confirm. In some cases it may be true, and I'm sure it's not meant as a variant of the 'deceiver' meme.
But equally I'm sure that several really had no idea at all and simply want not to feel as if they've failed a recognition test.
Thinking about it afterwards and actually I can only remember one time when someone came in, didn't react like that and weren't shy of expressing astonishment. They were a trans couple. Figures.
Of course I do have a particular reason why people don't recognise me readily.
Because this was how I looked before...
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