When I first saw the song title Real Girl, my mind naturally leapt to the Mutya Buena song. But the topic of this song is quite different - rather than an affirmation that “I never pretend to be someone I’m not,” it's an outcry against the Manic Pixie Dream Girl stereotype and its ilk, and a warning and plea to a partner who is unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the speaker is a real human, with all the messiness that entails. To quote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: “I’m not a concept. I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind.” And that... really hit home for me, way more than Mutya’s song - which I related to enough to put in a recent selfmix.
I have talked at great length about my recent breakup from my ex-partner, and guess what motherfuckers, you’re going to hear about it some more. But I have deliberately kept very quiet on PJ up till now about another part of myself, because I’ve seen more than a biT of bigotry on here around the topic. But some people here already know it or have deduced it, and I talk about it at length on my Twitter and Tumblr and my “identities” essay linked to in my signature, so I may as well open up about it now.
I say in my signature that I’m PJ’s token lesbian, which is true. But the part of that I've never explicitly stated - though I’ve talked around it in a plug.dj session or two - is that I am, specifically, a trans woman.
I’ve been on hormone replacement therapy for about nine months now, and though I have breasts, and my legs have changed shape, I still mostly look like a boy, which is a real blow to my self-esteem, because I've always hated the way I look, and I think if I could just look more like the girl I really am, I’d be happier about it. Moreover, as a consequence of that, I still present as male at work and in most face-to-face situations (and for my classes, even though they’re online, as they're tied to my name on record). In other words, I’m treated as a boy when I’m anything but, and I’m always afraid that people who do address me as female see me as less female than a cis woman, when I’m truly as much a girl as any other. “All I really need, I wanna stop pretending ... Could you treat me like a real girl? Won’t you tell me that I'm worth more?”
That lyric goes double for my ex. By the time we got together, I'd been questioning my gender identity for a while, and at the time I identified as genderfluid: occasionally male or female, but usually agender. (Looking back, I think that was a period I had to go through to arrive at who I was meant to be.) About two months into the relationship, I realized that I was much more of a woman than a man, and I needed to chemically and socially transition. She was the first person I told, even before my family or my counselor. And for a very long time, she was my #1 supporter. She treated me like a girl even more than I did, at times catching me off guard when she casually referred to me as “she” when I was still correcting myself with my pronouns.
Then that began to unravel as I came closer and closer to my coming out on National Coming Out Day, this past October. She’s panromantic and refuses to come out of the closet (or even to open the damn door), and was terrified about being with me as a woman. And I believe that, on top of our other problems (miscommunication, differing life goals, wanting different levels of emotional intimacy, different priorities...) was what led her to leave me just over a week after I came out. Although we’d been talking about breaking up for four months at that point, it was really abrupt, just forty minutes after she’d asked if we could spend the weekend together as we often did, and with no prior warning the days leading up to it. I’d thought we were doing great and starting to overcome our problems.
So along with everything else I lost when she left me – my best friend, my “life” partner, my surrogate family, my confidante – I lost the person who had given me the most support and affirmation around my gender transition. “Could you treat me like a real girl? Isn’t that what you're here for?”
But somewhat ironically, in other ways – many of the ways the song describes – she hadn't treated me like a real girl. She admitted that part of why she'd wanted to get with me had been to prove to the world that someone could find her attractive. “I’m not a fantasy, I’m not some kind of Holy Ghost.” She had assumed that I wanted just what she wanted and thought just the way she thought, because she thought everyone did. “I didn’t promise I’d be perfect, didn't promise that I’d play the game.” She had thought we could avoid ever having a fight, because she expected the relationship to be perfect, and was totally unequipped to have to put in any work. “Were you hoping I’d be flawless? Were you wishing on a movie star?”
Now, I finally got around to listening to Working Girl two or three weeks after the breakup, as I recall. And there was Real Girl, packaging up all these troubles in one song - and it was a bauxp to boot. It was, and is, exactly the right song at the right time for me.
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