on being stared at


I am a non-binary* trans woman** which is cool I guess but I get stared at a lot which is less cool.

Handsome Squidward
fig. 1: Handsome Squidward.

Conservatively I would say about a quarter of the people who pass me in the street stare at me***, based on one particular walk through town where I tried to distract myself from being stared at by counting the number of people I passed who stared at me vs. the people who did not stare (or only glanced****) at me. For those of you aren't aware (i.e. the cis men), it is very obvious to tell when someone is staring at you.

I'm trying to get used to it! I'm 6'1 (thought I was 5'11 but no, turns out I'm 6'1, which was a real shock) (if you want that in metric google it I guess), my voice is a sonorous baritone and I have the profile of Handsome Squidward (fig. 1), so there isn't really a lot I can do about being stared at. But I have tried a number of things:

These provide some degree of satisfaction I guess. But there is some tendency to backfire. A guy stared at me when I was taking the bins out once so I Stared Back, but instead of looking away in embarrassment, he said 'hey...' and turned around and followed me back to my house (a move universally considered 'not on') (it was proper horrible tho).

Aside from that and a few jeers and shouts and heckles from passing cars, that's the worst of it, touch wood. I'm still a white person who got to spend the first 20+ years of their existence walking safely wherever they wanted at any time of day and I'm only now having to reconsider that assumption. I have become marginalised, marginalisation has not informed my existence from birth. And I'm still vastly less likely to be harassed than black trans people and other trans people of colour, and I will probably never receive anything worse than verbal abuse.

It's going to become apparent in these blog entries that I don't really have a point a lot of the time and my thoughts just sort of fizzle out once I reach the five or six hundred word mark. You ever notice how writers in The Guardian (don't read The Guardian they're terfs) create a set up in the first paragraph to deliver a punchline at the end of the article? Does my head in. I wonder how that's phrased in The Guardian's style manual.

Anyway, don't stare I guess. Sometimes I stare at hot people tho I'm sorry I can't help it

*ideologically speaking,
**I guess?
***my definition of 'stare' here is they keep looking at me for longer than could be considered a glance
****just kidding haha. you know what a glance is

31st january 2021