Judging by Appearances

Aamera Jiwaji

Special to the G21

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Aamera Jiwaji

Melody* has beautiful hands. Her fingers are long and tapered and her nails are the softest pearly pink shade. They are perfectly suited to the graceful, slightly hypnotic, gestures that she makes with them while talking.

Her eyes are her second best feature. Almond shaped, they glow with a pale green light and have long curling lashes.

But these are the only features, apart form her long hair, that reveal Melody as the woman that she is. The rest of her is male. In fact, she is distinctly masculine. But that is because Melody has the body of a man.

Melody is a transsexual or a transgender. She was the victim of a birth defect that traps the mind of one gender in the body of another.

Transsexuality is not about sexuality. It does not hold connotations about the sexual preference of the person. It is merely about identity, according to Jennifer Reitz, a transsexual who uses the Internet to educate the ignorant about transsexuality.

A transsexual thinks, feels and reacts to situations as one gender but is seen by the world as another. It is like having one's mind trapped in a body that cannot be related to, controlled or understood in any manner; a body that causes endless pain, frustration and embarrassment.

Statistics claim that one in 30,000 men and one in 90,000 women are transsexuals.

Melody is a face from the statistics. She lives the pain. Throughout her childhood, she had a niggling feeling at the back of her mind that something was not right. "I never really fitted in," she said.

Now at 23, she knows why. "I'd been thinking about it a lot and I guessed I was just a transvestite or a cross-dresser or something," she said.

A transvestite is someone who has a fascination with the clothing of the opposite sex and develops a transgender-like persona, whereas a cross-dresser merely has a fascination with the clothing aspect. Unlike transsexuality, these two cases are strongly focused on sexual reasons.

"It eventually just hit me and all the pieces fell into place," Melody continues. All the confusion and embarrassment of her childhood suddenly made sense. "It's like being at a party where you don't know anyone. You wander around, feel more and more uncomfortable and out of place. You don't fit in -- you're not being related to properly," she said.

But realising what it was and facing it for herself was only the first step for Melody. The second, and more challenging, step was "coming out" to her family and friends.

Melody recalls her parents' reaction: "At first they didn't believe it was happening," she said.

They acted as if, "This is our decision. This should be a family thing. But it's not," Melody continued, "It's my decision."

But clearing the first two hurdles of self-admission and coming out did not make Melody any more comfortable. There was still the need to hide her real identity from society, for the sake of her parents' embarrassment.

But however numerous the difficulties of coming out have been and promise to be Melody is confident that, given the chance, she would not want to change her gender at birth. Her struggle with her own gender-identity and the progressive realisation is an integral part of her character, she believes. Realising that her true gender is female, and not male, will not affect how much she enjoys reading fantasy novels or scuba diving. While it may affect the way she is viewed in society, her character will not have changed since she has always had the mind of a woman.

But expressing herself as a woman in contemporary society is not a simple step. And so, Melody has decided to keep her true identity a secret while completing her Masters in Computer Science at a South African University. "I try and keep my female mannerisms suppressed as much as possible," she said.

Dressing as a woman and attending a University in a town where she has been seen as a man for the last eleven years could have too many complications.

Further, Melody believes that it isn't fair to force her research partners and other professional colleagues to deal with issues that could be potentially disruptive to the work environment, particularly in view of the retro reaction that is a common response to alternative lifestyles. But that does not mean she is going to suppress her true gender forever.

Fact Box

Main issues that transsexuals must consider (courtesy of http://www.tsroadmap.com): - Hair removal - Voice exercises - Hormonal treatment - Genital electrolysis - Face surgery - Employment - Legal issues - Sexual reassignment surgery - Breast augmentation - Labiaplasty

On completing her Masters thesis at the end of this year, Melody plans to go to the UK for a period of two to three years, during which she will begin the hormonal treatment and go "full time." Going full time means that she will live life as a woman for those three years. This is a sort of real life test for Melody to see whether living as a woman is what she wants. If it is, then she will go to the United States for sexual reassignment surgery (SRS).
SRS is a very expensive process both in monetary and emotional terms. It costs between US$ 9,000 (South African Rand/SAR 72,000) and US$ 15,000 (SAR 120,000), and can take up to eight different surgical operations.

Another important procedure for transsexuals is that of hormonal treatment (often referred to as ėmones in the transsexual community because it is like experiencing all the rigours of puberty in a year and will often give rise to emotional "moans"). Melody experimented with the hormonal treatment a few months ago to test her body's response to estrogen.

"It's like being pre-menstrual the whole time," she said, with her legs folded neatly to the side, her fingers toying with some blades of grass on the lawn, and a smile playing on her face. It's difficult to imagine anyone enjoying the tetchy, sensitive pre-menstrual period. But for Melody, it meant having her mind and her body working in harmony for the first time ever.

"I had access to my emotions and was able to express myself," she explained.

And according to Melody, expressing emotions is an integral part of being a woman. "Men don't feel emotions -- they think emotions," she said.

For her, "Being feminine, being a woman, is a lot more than appearances and assuming gender roles." It is the way you feel inside, the way you experience a feeling and express it.

Having experienced what it was like to be a woman physically, Melody was keen to learn. So she tried to accentuate the feminine aspects of her character and suppress the male ones.

One of the ways in which she tried this was through the use of make-up to enhance her feminine characteristics. But the art of applying make-up is not something that a person can pick up easily, particularly not a person who has lived as a man for the last 23 years. Melody visited a professional make-up artist who taught her about the natural colours of her skin and how to accentuate her features. Melody is now proficient in a day and a night look, a skill that boosted her confidence in her own appearance.

"It was really liberating," she said.

But, while trying to look more like a female, Melody reached an important realisation.

Gender is not something that can be divided cleanly into male and female polars. Everyone has both male and female characteristics.

But her experiences as a transsexual haven't been all negative. A strong advantage that Melody holds over most women is that she has an understanding of both sexes, having been both. "I understand why men do the things that they do," she said, "things that women will never understand."

Having insights like this into the personality of both sexes does not compensate for the loneliness and feelings of inadequacy that Melody has felt. "I often feel all alone (as if) there's nobody quite like (me)," she said.

With cross-dressers and transvestites, she explains, there are two completely different personas. But with transsexuals, there is one persona: a mind of one gender is trapped inside the body of another. There is one appearance, and it does not change for societal presentations. A further complication is that according to the gender that the transsexual is presenting, he/ she needs to tailor his/ her behaviour to suit that particular gender. This can be extremely emotionally taxing. "There's the male persona that is present, and then there's the real me," said Melody.

(* AUTHOR'S NOTE: Name has been changed.)

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AAMERA JIWAJI is a 21 year old student currently reading for her Bachelor of Journalism at Rhodes University in South Africa. She has written for the Grahamstown Arts Festival, the South African National Science Festival, the multi-media conference Highway Africa, and the National Sanlam Business Festival. She has freelanced for iafrica.com, and was one of a group to represent her university at the recent UN Racism Conference.

She is also a published short story writer and her interests include travel, language, and writing for the marginalised communities of the world. This is her first article for The World's Magazine.