Ginger HawthorneToday’s the International Trans Day of Visibility, and I’d like to give y’all some visibility into the current state of my life.
tl;dr: please call me Ginger.
I’m about 18 months into a journey that started when I ordered my first skirt. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve worn pants in the last 6 months. I have a pair of breast forms that I wear every day, as naturally as I wear glasses. I have over a dozen wigs, lots of clip-on earrings, and a growing selection of dresses and high heels.
I’ve never focused too much on a destination, which has started to cause some trouble recently. Specifically, my name and pronouns have been in flux and it’s been hard to manage that myself, and it’s even worse for the people around me. Y’all want to support me, and I love y’all for it, but when I don’t know the right answers, it’s hard to give you something simple to use.
I’ve been going over this a lot in therapy, because I keep getting stuck on the idea that Ginger has to be some complete thing before I can truly adopt her as my own. But I don’t even know what “complete” means. And what’s worse, I’m feeling more and more dysphoria when I call myself Marty.
So I’m going to take the plunge and start using Ginger everywhere I can, in order to accept myself as I am. I have a long way to go, but this feels appropriate for this stage. There will be some time before I change my name legally, because we have some stuff to work out as a family first. But socially, I’d like to be Ginger wherever I can.
So I’m changing my name here on Facebook, and I’ll start working on it elsewhere as well. I won’t be mad if you call me Marty by mistake, but if you refuse to even try, yeah it’s gonna hurt.