"Equal" rights

I've been thinking, lately, that there is a difference between demanding equal rights and just demanding attention. So many people out there - myself included - are constantly lobbying for equal rights. Equal rights for minorities. Equal rights for women. Equal rights for gays, lesbians, transgendered people, and everyone in-between.

It gets messy when you start thinking of "equal rights" as "special treatment."

This year, I came out as transgendered. I've known for a long time, although the discovery and beginning of what people refer to as "transitioning" are for another time, and possibly another place.

Coming out was a huge ordeal, but before I actually did it, I kept telling myself the same things over and over again.

I don't want special treatment. I just want to be recognized as male, and allowed the same things as other boys.

This involves a standard within music performance expectations that all but requires women to wear skirts or dresses and pantyhose. Nevermind that I seriously think that pantyhose are the single most uncomfortable clothing article ever invented. I kept thinking, again and again, that "the other boys don't have to wear skirts. Why should I?"

In all fairness, why should a woman be forced to wear a skirt if they don't want to? Men get to wear pants and ties, and women have to wear dresses and heels and makeup and pantyhose. Yeah, talk about unfair.

I didn't think I was asking for a whole lot. The ability to dress like the other guys seems like a tiny thing to anyone who hasn't been in a situation like mine, I'm sure. But it was everything. Nevermind that I don't bind my chest every day (again, another story). Nevermind that only my close friends have been calling me Tim for the past five years. Everyone else has had a different name - and I've gone through several - that they know me as. Hardly anyone had any idea what my real gender identity was.

But all I could think about was how much I hated myself every time I put on a motherfucking pair of heels.

Once I came out, the director of the program I'm in (I'm going to refer to her as Ursula for reasons known to me and irrelevant to you) and I reached an arrangement. I got pants and a tie like all the other men, except in one number where the character I was playing was distinctly female. But I also got eyeshadow and painted nails.

Does this count as special treatment? It's hard to say, isn't it.

I look at it as "not being any different from a gay man that dresses in drag." Which, you know, is what I am anyway - a gay man that sometimes pretends to be a woman on a stage.

I'm at a point where I no longer want to play women on stage, but I will if it's the only way to be on a stage.

There's an argument here about crossdressing, invalidation, and general ignorance that I've encountered, but it's late and I've said most of what I set out to say.

Coherence in writing these kinds of things used to be a stronger suit.

Everything changes.