Zee

"I think that’s a problem a lot of trans people have. I think they’ve internalised transphobia. You don’t accept yourself even though you’re openly trans and you shout about it."

Coming out
I came out to my parents when I was 14. It was bit of a crisis that day. I decided to shave my whole head and when I came home, I told them. They weren’t particularly accepting but they didn’t understand it because they have never met a transgender person before. They still don’t quite get it. I’m not like fully out. I’m like somewhere in between.

Expectations
I am the only child, I think that was also bit of a problem for my parents because you’ve got this plan of what your child is going to do and I didn’t really fit into that. They expect me to get married and be a straight girl with a husband and do all of those kind of things and I haven’t fit with that plan at all. I’m not going to be a woman, I’m not necessarily going to have a husband, or be a parent and that’s sometimes difficult for people to accept. 

We kind of build up this idea of what we are going to do with our life. It was a little difficult for me to accept as well because inside you’re conditioned to have a certain kind of life plan. If you watched princess films or disney channel, that’s always the idea of a perfect family and that’s how you think you’re going to grow up. It was weird for me too, to think that I wasn’t going to fit into that. I just had a lot of conversations with myself and assured myself that its going to be alright. I still find it quite difficult to accept sometimes. I think that’s a problem a lot of trans people have. I think they’ve internalised transphobia. You don’t accept yourself even though you’re openly trans and you shout about it. You can still have that worrying fear that you’re not going to have a “normal” life.

Struggles
My struggle as a trans person is the ignorance of people. Knowing how to really  interact with you is an important thing. People ask very invasive questions about my body, and who I am. People do that quite regularly. If you tell them your pronouns, they disregard it. You tell him that your pronoun is ‘He’ and five seconds later in a conversation, they use “she” and that’s kind of hurtful. They completely disregarded who you are and a big part of your personality. Not being “trans” enough is also one of my struggles. Not appearing visibly ‘trans’. I’m not on hormones and I won’t be in the foreseeable future. I look feminine and people don’t take me seriously. People have told me I’m not trans enough, which is stupid because I don’t know how you can judge somebody else’s gender or their representation of themselves. My gender is quite masculine, people expect you’re going to be like a man, but I’m not a man. I’m just not a girl and people don’t really understand that concept. I think it’s because there’s this mentality that you’ve to be a boy or a girl, they don’t really get it.

Drag
Rupaul uses the word tranny, even though he’s a drag queen. He’s not a trans person. When people watch Rupaul’s Drag Race, it gets to me so much because he’s really harmful to the trans community. He uses the T slur, he has been very transphobic on the show and within wider media. It really upsets me when people watch it. I don’t particularly like drag that much because I feel like people don’t understand the concept of drag. They confuse drag with being trans. There are people who watch Rupaul’s Drag Race and they think they know all about trans community. Obviously, they don’t. There has been only  one openly trans person in Rupaul’s drag race. Drag is just a performance, they don’t do drag all the time. It’s only just an hour or whatever on stage and then they go back to being a CIS gay man. They don’t face discrimination that trans people face all the time. They’re only women for an hour, then they get to take off the make up and go home and not experience the kind of discrimination that trans people go through. I respect people who do drag, they do face some sort of discrimination, but my feelings on drag remains complicated.