Megan told Bibi she’d thought feminists were synonymous with manhaters, although as she typed the words she realized she’d never actually made up her own mind about it
O here we go! Bibi fired off, of course feminism isn’t about manhating! it’s about women’s liberation, equal rights and freedom from limiting expectations, you need to think for yourself instead of parroting the patriarchy, time to grow up, Megan!
I thought you were gonna go easy on me
er, yeh, okay, can’t help myself, I promise to be sweet as candy from now on
I just want to be myself, Bibi
wow, talk about low ambitions, don’t you want to change the world?
I wanna change my world first, Bibi, one step at a time
like like like like like ☺
now you’re taking the piss
nope, I honestly agree with you, we all just wanna be ourselves and make sure we’re okay in the world, hey, I’m a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious person, really
I’ll be the judge of that
ooooh, now you’re giving as good as you get, lol
Megan studied the photo of Bibi more closely, she was Asian, twenties, maybe? thick, square black glasses, thick black hair about her shoulders, serious expression
attractive
very
Megan already knew it was time to grow up, the whole point of leaving home was to find out where she began and her parents ended
tell me more about what you know about feminism and gender, and I know I should already know but I don’t, OK?
gotcha, so here goes: women are designed to have babies, not to play with dolls, and why shouldn’t women sit with their legs wide open (if they’re wearing trousers, obv) and what does mannish or manly mean anyway? walking with long strides? being assertive? taking charge? wearing ‘male’ clothes? not wearing make-up? unshaved legs? shaved head (lol), drinking pints instead of wine? preferring football to online make-up tutorials (yawn), and traditionally men wear make-up and skirts in parts of the world so why not in ours without being accused of being ‘effeminate’? what does effeminate actually mean when you break it down?
the thing is, Megan, much as I reject conformist gender bullshit as above, I still feel female, I’ve known it since like forever, for me it’s not about wanting to play with dolls, it goes much deeper than that
it’s what I’ve become these past seven years as I transitioned from Gopal to Bibi
oestrogen, breasts, vagina
now you know
so Bibi had been born a man and was now a woman, Megan had wondered, daren’t ask, she might bite her head off
and Megan was a woman who wondered if she should have been born a man, who was attracted to a woman who’d once been a man, who was now saying gender was full of misguided expectations anyway, even though she had herself transitioned from male to female
this was such head fuckery
she shut the lid of her computer to go to sleep, when she opened it again Bibi would be there
they were now messaging deep into the night and early the next morning, hardly sleeping in between, both admitting they daren’t Skype or meet just yet, in case when they came out from behind the deceptive smokescreen of social media, the chemistry wouldn’t be there
let’s keep the fantasy alive a while longer, Bibi wrote, I’ve been here before and when I met the person face to face we had nothing to say to each other
Bibi lived in Hebden Bridge, had grown up in Leeds
she worked as an administrator in a care home after getting a degree in Cultural Studies in Sussex, chosen to be as far away from her parents as possible who really didn’t get that she was a girl in a boy’s body
it wasn’t part of their master plan, Megan, which was to marry me off to a suitable girl from the right caste and produce the next generation of my family
instead they got a cross-dressing son who kept his alter ego inside his bedroom, until he started to venture to the local shops in dresses and make-up
in a Hindu community where everybody knew everybody
I was kicked out, don’t contact us again, you are sick in the head, you are no longer our son, and let’s get one thing straight
you will never be our daughter
Bibi said the old people at the care home accepted her as a human being, you’re our Bibi and we love you, they’d witnessed her transition to female
Bibi felt she’d finally got the body denied her at birth, which was also an eye-opener, Megan, once I started presenting fully as female, I realized I’d taken a lot of things for granted as a man
I miss sitting alone in bars late at night nursing a quiet pint, without feeling self-conscious or being hit on
and I can’t stand watching the plague of telly dramas where young women are butchered by psycho serial killers and end up on a slab with their torso slit open down the middle with a coroner holding their bloodied heart in their hands
I used to love those shows, now I feel they’re ultimately a way to wield power over women, to frighten them – us
I’m also wary of walking home late at night on my own, I miss being respectfully called sir when I’m in a shop or restaurant, and I’m definitely taken less seriously when I open my mouth
you see, Megan, I learnt first hand how women are discriminated against, which is why I became a feminist after I’d transitioned, an intersectional feminist, because it’s not just about gender but race, sexuality, class and other intersections which we mostly unthinkingly live anyway
right that’s enough of me talking (till the cows come home), hope I didn’t sound too preachy but I can’t help myself
what about you? Megan, where do you stand with all of this? time to spill the beans, love
Megan replied that she was working it out, taking her time, she’d recently been taken aback when she came across hundreds of genders on the internet, that, annoyingly, complicated the matter
she’d spent hours trawling, assessing, evaluating
genders like trans female or trans male and non-binary made sense to her, and she came across non-binaries in other countries like the Hirjas of India and the Two Spirits of Native Americans, others were total head fucks like quivergender – a gender whose intensity fluctuates, polygender – identifying as multiple genders, or staticgender – like fuzzy television static and how can your gender change multiple times a day as the synchgenders claim? Bibi, by the time I finished travelling into the batshit-crazy end of the Transgenderverse I was stressed with a capital S, I call it the Transloonyverse, lock ’em up and throw away the keys LOL!!
Bibi messaged right back, how dare you disrespect trans people’s right toself-define, weird to you not to them, you sound like an ignorant oppressor, don’t come into our world and make fun of us, fuck off!
Megan shot right back with fuck off yourself
hitting send in the heat of the moment
there was total silence for nearly four whole days, Megan worried she’d lost her, she didn’t want to be the first to make contact
Bibi did
three simple words
we should meet.
4
Megan and Bibi had their historic first meeting in Caffè Nero on a Saturday afternoon in Newcastle station, planned so that either party could make an easy getaway if they loathed the sight of each other, while thousands of agitated football fans poured back into the station through the barriers, escorted by rozzers in riot gear, at the ready if anything kicked off
Megan thought Bibi was as exquisite as she looked in her photograph – lustrous black hair tied back, no make-up, flawless skin, small-boned, jeans, off the shoulder fluffy jumper, trainers
she was like a dancer, compact, toned, it was hard to tell she’d once been male
Bibi explained over mocha that as tarting up in high heels, tight skirts and wearing a thick layer of face paint is all about gender and not biological sex, she wears what she likes and feels comfortable doing so, although other trans females might think that being a woman is all about adhering to a stereotyped version of womanhood, when clearly most women can’t be arsed with it all?