Crutches (1990)

The first thing I ever weaned myself of was false eyelashes. Having started crossdressing in the swinging sixties, I always wore false lashes. They were popular, and many women felt naked without them. But I was still wearing them after they were out of fashion. Realizing that other women rarely wore them, I went cold turkey on them back around 1976. it wasn’t easy. I hated my eyes; I felt naked, exposed, unfeminine, unattractive. But the world didn’t end, no one seemed to notice, and after a while I found I was comfortable with my own lashes.

The next thing to go was padding. So I wasn’t the most shapely thing ever; few women are shaped as they want to be. I went with what I had naturally, even before hormones began reshaping me. Soon I realized that I could on occasion appear with flats, and even bare-legged, and despite my hairy arms, with short sleeves. What heresy!

There were other things I thought I couldn’t do without, and I relied on them until recently. My beard required heavy coverup, and my thin, fine hair made a wig necessary—or so I thought. And I used the name Sheri, for I had always thought of my “real” name as too masculine. But all of those things gradually fell by the wayside. I discovered the name Dallas, even if and perhaps because it is unusual, works as a woman’s name. As my beard disappeared with electrolysis, I found I could do away with heavy foundation. And I learned I could do away with the biggest crutch of all—the wig. I didn’t even realize that was possible until I saw others wearing their own hair. In a way, losing the wig was the biggest step of all.

There’s a flip side to this story. Some of my advances as a woman caused changes in my appearance as a man, when I was still living my life as male. But like all transsexual people, I’m used to compromise, and I found that eventually I grew comfortable with things about my body that would have previously made me uncomfortable as a man. When I first shaved my legs at age 15 or so, I was absolutely terrified about being seen as a male with no hair on my legs; by the time I was 25, I didn’t give it a thought. My clean-shaven face, mildly tweezed brows, the holes in my ears, my feminine haircut, my nails—all of these would have made me uncomfortable in my earlier days, but I grew accustomed to the changes; they all became part of my image as a man. And they were of course a delight in the female role.

We all have crutches. Some of us could use our own hair, but we rely on wigs. Some of us use padding we could do without. We need to recognize our crutches for what they are and come to grips with them. Maybe we can even throw away some of them.

Of course, false eyelashes and wigs and weren’t  invented with transsexual persons in mind. They were invented for nontranssexual women, just as elevator shoes were invented for nontranssexual men and not female-to-male transsexual persons. It’s not totally inappropriate to use such aids on occasion. It’s our unnatural reliance on them that we must face and defeat. So now that I no longer need them, maybe I’ll wear a pair of false eyelashes some evening soon.