Monika: We are said to be prisoners of passing or non-passing syndrome. Although cosmetic surgeries help to overcome it, we will always be judged accordingly. How can we cope with this?
Chrissie: The dilemma and pain of being caught in the prisons of 'passing as female' or 'not passing as female' are obviously the result of societal stereotypical constructs about what constitutes the binary of female or male. It is one that bites and wounds most of us throughout our transitions.
Can we ever be free of this prison and torment? I think it works on two distinct levels, societal transphobia, and our own internalized transphobia.
As someone who was not free to transition when I needed to, I have watched all my close friends transition, flower, and flourish into beautiful women.
Monika: And?
Chrissie: How do I cope? Apart from pangs of jealousy, I have moved on in my own transition, living in a male body with a feminine spirit. I fully accept that I will never pass. Would I pass if I went through the full physical transition of hormones, laser treatment, and full gender realignment surgery? Probably, possibly not.
What is more important for me is my spiritual, mental, and emotional freedom, which means I reject the very notion of 'passing' or 'not passing'.
For some transwomen, who no longer consider themselves transwomen, but only women, I am a threat, they are very happy to throw me under the proverbial bus to protect the Gender Recognition Act and prevent at all costs, people like me from self-identifying as female, feminine, so it becomes a very bitter battle even within the trans community. By their standards, and many people's standards, I am not trans enough, and I am definitely not a woman. This reduction of sex and gender down to the theories of "gender essentialism" is laughable if it were not so tragic, as to result in butch lesbians and cis-gender women from being beaten up using the restrooms of their own gender - because they don't look female enough!
Monika: Nicely put!
Chrissie: So, firstly I reject the notion of 'passing' or 'not passing' as a game I'm not willing to play, even though I spend great effort on appearing femme, and many accept me as entirely female. I just stick my tits out and walk tall.
Secondly, I fully appreciate the modern and youthful embrace of non-binary beings.
I don't label myself, although I see myself as transfemme. It is my friends who call me she, her, Chrissie, female, woman, transwoman. So I am becoming ever freer of the burden and mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual torment of whether I 'pass' or not. I'm just me, and frankly, I don't give a flying duck about what people think about me. If God is love, which I believe with all my being they are, then I'm secure in that love, which is my third freedom from the prison of 'passing/not passing'.
For me, the transition is not from one state of being, (male), to another, (female), but a spiritual being and transition. Jan Morris is perhaps famous as a transwoman for stating this as her undergirding belief throughout her life. If I get to ever physically transition, that would be the cream on the cake, the champagne out the cooler.
Bob Marley sang, "No one but ourselves can free our minds." It's true. We are only prisoners to the prison and the torment of 'passing/not passing' is we subscribe to a belief system and accept its judgments. I choose not to, I'm just me, Chrissie, transfemme. I'm pretending nothing.
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| "I reject the notion of 'passing' or 'not passing' as a game I'm not willing to play, even though I spend great effort on appearing femme, and many accept me as entirely female." |
Monika: Are there any transgender role models that you follow or followed?
Chrissie: I feel closest to my friends and contemporaries, obviously, Mia, Mel, Nikki, Hannah, etc etc, but perhaps most closely identify with Kristen Beck, in that I tried for a lifetime to construct a mask, a defense shield of being a "Grade One Alpha Male." It's a hard road to travel from being uber macho (even in one's own eyes) to being female, feminine, womanly.
Spiritually, whilst she never claimed the Christian faith it would be Jan Morris, but then, neither do I claim a Christian faith, it is just a pigeonhole I get endlessly shoved into because I love/trust Jesus as a friend. Was Jesus Intersex? There, you see, immediately I am no longer labeled 'Christian', but rather 'heretic', which proves my point, it is a valid question. I certainly see Jesus as holding a safe space for me/us as trans.
For me, the bottom line is you make a role model of anyone and they'll let you down, we are only human, we all fuck up.
Monika: Do you remember the first time when you saw a transgender woman on TV or met anyone transgender in person?
Chrissie: Through life, I've lived, worked and visited London, even back in the seventies, sat on the tube train I would notice a woman and think,
"Is that a ciswoman or a transwoman?" (although those terms did not exist back then, that was still my thought process), and I'd be totally captivated and see them as the most beautiful people. I was desperate to talk to them, but then the train would stop, the doors open, and they would be gone. Fleeting glimpses gave me a clue as to who I was or might be. All I had was Lou Reed's album, Transformer, on my deck, and that is how I understand myself, but these women I occasionally saw in the Big Smoke made me realize maybe there was an existence beyond being transvestite, that was actually the real me?
Following Christianity and the church, I was taught that 'gender bending' was a sin. For twenty-five years I lived in total denial, simply trying to repress, suppress, crucify and annihilate any trace of femininity within me.
I was fifty-five and I had never met anyone transgender in person to talk to. 2014 Laverne Cox hit the cover of Time magazine, Caitlyn Jenner was headlining globally, in the UK the famous boxing promoter Frank Mallone had become Kelly. It was like a bomb going off in my hall of mirrors. It precipitated my breakdown and coming out, I could no longer live in denial, transgender was the trending phenomenon of 2014.
Monika: What do you think about the present situation of transgender women in your country?
Chrissie: The whole world is going through a major and total cultural shift that is pretty seismic, total. Social, political, economic, and personal values are all undergoing major conflict and re-evaluation. Climate, poverty, pandemic, and the influence of social media, exposing particularly the brutality of white supremacy in policing, dictatorships, racism and persecution of minority groups, etc etc. Our lives as transgender are lived out against this backdrop.
As in Hungary, Russia, the US, the UK, where I live is experiencing violent backlash as conservative values are threatened and conservative politics and religion lash out at anyone perceived as a threat to national, social, and 'family' values. We as transgender are certainly perceived as a threat.
In both our religion and politics in the UK we are seeing trans people scape-goated, stigmatized, vilified, pathologized, and demonized, in a systematic way by right-wing religious and political leaders. Here in the UK, we as trans people watched in horror as 81% of white US evangelicals voted Trump into power. We knew what was coming, for the four years of his presidency, Trump systematically did the bidding of conservative evangelicals and tried to remove all rights for transgender people. Since his defeat and Biden's election, the backlash against trans people has actually got worse. The poison of this scapegoating is religiously driven and politically manipulated to create fear, hate and promote misinformation and ignorance about who and why we are as trans. Sadly the poison of US religion and politics flows directly and almost unfiltered into the UK church and government.
Professor Paul McHugh was the most prominent transphobic Christian Leader to advise the Trump government, his toxic legacy is quoted in almost every anti-transgender Christian book, without anyone checking his credentials and history. He used manipulated statistics and corrupted 'scientific' studies to create transphobic rhetoric and theology that the evangelical church has gorged itself on without either discernment or accountability. This is the source and root of so much of the scapegoating of trans people in the UK Christian religion and politics today, and the two are far more closely aligned than most people ever realize. Most folks have never even heard of the infamous McHugh.
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| "Existing as a male in society I tried my utmost to be anonymous and hidden in a crowd, I always wore drab colors and seldom succumbed to any sense of fashion or style, just jeans, t-shirts, and hoodies, but as femme, I love color, vibrant colors and creating a visual splash of color." |
Monika: What is the result of this situation?
Chrissie: The result is that there is no political will to help or improve the lot of transpeople in the UK. Since I came out in 2014, the average wait at the few Gender Identity Clinics we have, has risen from eighteen months to as much as seven years! The numbers have increased ten-fold, from on average 300 on the waiting lists at most clinics to over 3,000 today. This has nothing to do with 'social contagion' as our enemies are portraying the phenomenon of trans people 'coming out', but is rooted in a wider social acceptance of trans people. Exactly the same thing happened when society (and religion) stopped demonizing people for being left-handed, lo and behold, all of a sudden it seemed everyone knew someone who was left-handed.
UK politics has fallen to the right-wing capitalist ideology that demonizes and scapegoats vulnerable minorities who have no power to 'fight back' or even speak out and be heard. We, as transgender have become a political football, to point score and secure a conservative and fear-bound voter base. Ignorance, prejudice, and rhetoric against and about us are calculated and deliberate.
Until trans folk in the UK can create a national body, collective, and organization that will fight to be heard, recognized, and fight for our rights. I don't see how we can overcome the religious and political will aligned against us. For my part, I am embedded within conservative evangelical church and advocate as hard as I can to help the church gain an understanding of who, and why we are, as transgender. Hence my book, Heaven Come Down.
Monika: Do you like fashion? What kind of outfits do you usually wear? Any special fashion designs, colors, or trends?
Chrissie: For me, all of life is art, and art is life. Existing as a male in society I tried my utmost to be anonymous and hidden in a crowd, I always wore drab colors and seldom succumbed to any sense of fashion or style, just jeans, t-shirts, and hoodies, but as femme, I love color, vibrant colors and creating a visual splash of color. I find Brits, the UK can be so lazy in their dress, excused as 'casual', when in reality it's just boring as hell, even if the excuse is it's practical. So I love bright dresses, scarves, and accessories.
It took a few years to understand and work out what colors and dress shapes work and don't work for me.
Coming out in your late fifties, having lived a life in drab leads to a profound sense of adolescence as a transwoman; heels too high, dresses too short, colors too loud, fortunately, I have some good friends, both trans and cis, who have guided me into finding my own style and expression of femininity.
I love bodycon and wiggle dresses, I've worked so hard all my life to keep a healthy and in shape body, and so I can get away with dresses that hug me. They make me feel a million dollars too!
I don't buy expensive clothes, but you don't need to spend big bucks to look good.
Looking after your body is the most basic and simple form of self-love, positive, healthy self-love, not the narcissistic kind. It's more important than the clothes we wear, and I do think they are important.
If the poorest women in India, Africa, and all around the world often wear the most gorgeous colors, if they, in their poverty, can make the world a brighter, more joy-filled place, simply by putting on a dress, then I, sure as hell, am going to make the effort. In my travels around the world, they have inspired my sense of fashion, style, and color more than anyone else.
The grey treadmill of life can all too easily suck all the life and color from your soul! Resist and rebel!
Monika: So you find your dressing as something liberating, right?
Chrissie: All that I have just said may make you think I'm contradicting myself when I said earlier in the interview that I don't give a flying duck about passing.
I probably need to explain my perspective on the 'passing' issue.
Personally, I don't agree with the myth, yoke, and burden of having to pass. I think it is extremely oppressive and causes untold misery for transwomen.
Each of us must decide how we negotiate with society. Some feel they have to 'pass', that's fine, but don't ever inflict those dictates on everyone else.
No transwoman should feel obliged to perform to a stereotypical hyper-femme cisgender role model or image.
My own heart and belief about myself are that I expect no one to see me as a cis-gender woman; I'm sixty-two, male-bodied, muscled, square-jawed, wide-shouldered, big hands, nose, and forehead. I fully expect many will see me at worst as a 'man in a dress', and at best as a ciswoman, but, I fully expect most to see me for exactly what I am, a trans woman. The clues in the name, trans, between, I'm neither fully male nor fully female.
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| "Personally, I don't agree with the myth, yoke, and burden of having to pass. I think it is extremely oppressive and causes untold misery for transwomen. Each of us must decide how we negotiate with society." |
I'm proud of being transfemme. or a trans woman, an 'inbetweenie'. Goodness, transwomen can end up taking their own lives, simply because they do not pass. Let's stop loading this horrific burden on each other. If me being me, helps others accept themselves, as they are, then my life will have been well-lived. I'm not going to play the 'do I pass game', it's a killer. literally. We have to fight to be accepted in this world, not for 'passing' as female, (or male), but simply for being ourselves; trans. We could save an awful lot of trans lives if we committed to this instead of the obsession with passing.
Yes, I understand totally the desperate desire to become invisible to the transphobes and haters, it's real. I feel it. I get the hate too, but I'm not going to succumb to hate to determine how I live my life. I love trans folk who are happy to be seen as trans, that takes real courage and a blazing love for our enemies, to live it out and be proud to be trans. Sometimes I feel the desire to pass can actually be internalized transphobia, and no amount of surgery, hormones, and praise can deliver us from that, we have to choose to love ourselves for who we are, as we are. Day by day, moment by moment.
Monika: Do you often experiment with your makeup?
Chrissie: A dear friend who is a makeup artist for film and a college tutor in makeup, gave me a few lessons on how to use my makeup. It made a huge difference and gave me confidence. I often get complimented on my makeup skills, but I'm never sure if that's a 'back-handed' compliment?
I tend to use the style of makeup and absolutely love Urban Decay palettes.
END OF PART 2
All the photos: courtesy of Chrissie Chevasutt.
© 2021 - Monika Kowalska
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