It Hurts To Be Alive and Obsolete
Often when men are attracted to me, they feel ashamed and conceal it. They act as if it were ridiculous. If they do become involved, they are still ashamed and may refuse to appear publicly with me. Their fear of mockery is enormous. There is no prestige attached to having sex with me.
Since we are all far more various sexually than we are supposed to be, often, in fact, younger men become aware of me sexually. Their response is similar to what it is when they find themselves feeling attracted to a homosexual: they turn those feelings into hostility and put me down.
Listen to me! Think what it is like to have most of your life ahead and be told you are obsolete! Think what it is like to feel attraction, desire, affection towards others, to want to tell them about yourself, to feel that assumption on which self-respect is based, that you are worth something, and that if you like someone, surely he will be pleased to know that. To be, in other words, still a living woman, and to be told that every day that you are not a woman but a tired object that should disappear. That you are not a person but a joke. Well, I am a bitter joke. I am bitter and frustrated and wasted, but don’t you pretend for a minute as you look at me, forty-three, fat, and looking exactly my age, that I am not as alive as you are and that I do not suffer from the category into which you are forcing me.
A concluding excerpt from It Hurts To Be Alive and Obsolete: The Ageing Woman by Zoe Moss, included in Sisterhood Is Powerful, edited by Robin Morgan.
Moss is writing about cissexual, heterosexual women here, but she could just as well be writing about transsexual women, and the core of her plea - Listen to me! - isn’t specific to heterosexuality.
Passages from this essay are also featured in the new film 20th Century Women which I saw today. We are intended to consider the words in relation to the experiences of Annette Bening’s character Dorothea, a 55-year-old cissexual, heterosexual woman, but I could not help but contemplate their relevance in relation to my own life as a transgender woman, as well.
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