luna naumer mateos

TRANSGENDER BEAUTY

Transgender beauty falls into the same beauty standards as cisgender beauty; it is validated when the person looks and passes as cisgender.
But I want to pass as trans. I want to pass as the trans femme person I am. I don’t want to eradicate that from my identity.
Transgender is seen as a problem, as an abnormality, as a failure from being cis. But I see my own being as my default.
Society misgendered me for most of my life but that doesn’t mean that I am NOW transgender and BEFORE I was cisgender. I was always transgender but it took me years to find out that non binary identities existed. And that was a journey by itself, without mentioning what it was to discover that also I was non binary and let go of the structures I was built into as a gay cis man.
I had to rename my queerness not regarding my sexuality but my identity. To navigate the world as a different gender, to be aware of me being misgendered, mistreated, mistaken. I think this way of seeing my gender might be similar to the way other non European cultures see other genders that are not cisgender. I compare my gender to the likes of the Hijras from India; Ihamana from New Mexico; Māhū from Hawaii; Bissu from Indonesia or Fa’afafine from Samoa. Before the colonial imperialism, these identities were part of society and existed in multiple expressions. Their bod-
ies and their physicality was seen as natural. Though many indigenous communities are trying to reappropriate these identities and decolonize themselves there is still a lot of negative connotations that might lead to some people to separate from these words. From all the pain that they carry after all the harassment and abuse they suffered. I do not use these words to refer to everyone from those communities that don’t identify as cisgender but to exemplify the broad and natural and cultural examples of the rich variety of identities across the world.
I embrace the fact that I am born in the body I have. My body is the one matching my gender and I don’t need to try to pass as a cis woman, that would only lead to different misgendering. I am aware that existing in a binary society- I need to find what it means to navigate this world in my non binary body and the spaces I have to let go of and the ones I have to fight be visible. The only need I should have is to match myself as much as I would like to my kind of femininity.
Furthermore I want to bring awareness to not only that but also to the fact that experiences, my puberty (or puberties) are different from cis people. We have to acknowledge also that transgen- der bodies are fully independent from cis bodies. I believe in both the facts that we should love
our bodies as they are and also be free to change them, and those two things go hand in hand.We should love it as a transgender body, as an independent entity that goes through different experi- ences and changes but also, we should own our bodies and be able to do with them what we want, to be political with them. There is a lot of transphobia against “not passing” transgender people (which I think its a very complex and terrible terminology), making changes in their body can alleviate a lot of the traumas and violence a transgender person can experience on a daily basis. But that would mean to deal with trans-misogyny (in the case of femme trans people) and/or what’s ex- pected of a body to perform as. The will and intention to be seen and perceived as you are and also the body you want to have has to be balance with the possibilities and safety of existing. All these factors will influence a transgender experience.
I work so hard every day to love my body the way it is but also give myself space to love the de- cisions I make to change it too. I struggle with my voice a lot, and I find myself every single day teaching myself and learning that my voice is femme, that it’s beautiful. I am also soon going to have facial feminisation surgery and I’m not doing this out of spite of my look (which I feel priv- ileged about, because other trans people do suffer a lot of pain because of gender dysphoria.) But
I do this so I can feel my beauty and my body is more aligned with who I see myself as. It was the same with hormone therapy. I decided to go through all this changes to feel more home within me (and again this is my experience only). But even though I decided to go through medical changes, I also decided to not change things of my body because I want to love them as they are. They are signalling that even though I’m femme I’m not a cisgender woman. Thus my shoulders, my voice and my penis are for me as important as my newly grown breasts, my soon to be new face and my growing hair. All those signifiers are representing the wholeness of my transgender identity.
I fear many transgender people might go through hospitals, doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists

that are not transgender and try to organise people’s experience in their book knowledge and in their gender boxes that they already established before they got to know you. They treat you as a patient with mental and physical problems that they can solve. The number of clinics that promote themselves as ‘the best place if passing is your goal’ or other similar sentences is scary because they want you to pass as binary and as cis as possible. They teach you how to fit in the gender of a 5’2 girl that is size 2, big breasted, small nosed, tiny footed, light skinned and blond, and that we should try to hide our body in its natural way.
That leads to multitudes of cases of transgender people who believe only the trans medicalised are transgender, that only trans binary are transgender, that everyone should be cispassing and that genderqueer people are not transgender either. All this is learned from cis experience, from the categorisation of cisgender people for transgender people. It’s another sign of transphobia which I experienced internalised from other transgender people that had been boxed in cis binary roles to be a ‘successful’ trans person.
A friend of mine shared with me how they knew two transgender girls that gossiped and were mean towards transgender girls and women who, according to them, were ugly and could never pass as cisgender. And I do not blame them for this behaviour because it’s transphobia learned from cisgender experiences. It’s true that, we should seek shelter on our own trans community but there’s this human learned behaviour to be mean, and it’s unfortunately also to be an expected experience inside the trans community. I believe that it should be changed, of course, but even though these kind of responses toward non passing, non binary, not medicalised and genderqueer transgender people exist, there is a vast number of transgender people who recognise every transgender identity as real (not valid, but real) and that’s where my hope and interest goes to, into building a big, safe net of transgender people supporting each other.