Becoming invisible without noticing

“It’s queer how gradually I’ve become invisible.”

That line from one of the more self-reflective Pet Shop Boys songs hit me. Transition may begin as a feeling of flowering, but it becomes a deeper wish: to both change and be able to fade into obscurity. It’s nice to be lauded for being “your authentic self,” whatever that means, but it’s not easy to keep up the sense of euphoria when emails go unanswered, weekend invitations lapse, and assumptions are made.

Adult friendships are a kind of tectonic drift, good people moved apart by children, childlessness, family, workplace tensions, life changes, and comments forgotten by one and long-remembered by the other. The circle contracts, the affection sharpens into more defined boundaries, and before you know it, you’re wondering where the old you went, defiantly surrounded by people, as if maintaining a barrier to the advancing of time.

For a while it felt as though that barrier would hold. It was another kind of life change that highlighted how much around me is different. The announced phasing-out of a long-running work contract, that was so much more than that for me emotionally, held up a mirror to my true situation: I had maintained normality to all externally while changing massively internally. The announced pulling of an agreement that had lasted more than a decade brought me a kind of grief few could understand or empathise with. It’s clear it was nothing to do with my transition; the client had been consistently supportive - indeed in many ways exemplary - and I had continued to deliver reliably.

What, then, does this have to do with transition?

Like many of my human relationships during my transition, it’s an example of a connection I feel is difficult to replicate. When I won that contract, I was literally a different person. I was in some ways the model of what people wanted to represent them and stand up in front of people. I had no doubt in my abilities, filled with the cis male privilege I didn’t notice, but now miss.

Now I have to weigh what my new first name on my CV means to people who open it; what the additional weight of “having a trans person do that task” means when the task is devising slides and carrying a script. The bias from recruiters is never open - and it may not even exist in reality - but I no longer pitch fearlessly. I stop and think before sending the tailored resume, wondering, “what chance is there that I get judged the way I hope I will, by people who haven’t had the chance to get used to me?”

“It’s too late and it’s no excuse, the party’s over and I’m not much use.”

It’s hard to pin a reason on why I stopped going out. It began as an attempt to keep what money I had, but it became a habit, to stay home with a pizza, go out for long solitary walks, and occasionally join friends’ Discord servers. I have been starving myself of real-world contact, and that makes maintaining adult friendships so much harder. It used to be that when I saw trans people staying in their homes and rarely venturing into bars or any kind of social event that I wondered if transition had affected their confidence.

Now I see it’s more nuanced than that: once you deprioritise display, and the big shows of identity in public don’t seem as necessary or appealing, the same can be said for what surrounds those nights. It’s a trope of queer socialising that almost everything revolves around clubbing or parties, but when you take that out of the equation, all of a sudden everything else - the coffees, the quiet evenings at the arty cinema, feels superfluous too. It’s very easy to turn into a hermit without trying to or realising.

That may help to explain the slow drift of friendships that had anchored me during my early transition. The ghosted social media messages and missed emails to friends from the ‘before times’ are easy to rationalise: I’m not the person they used to correspond with, and though I think I’m better now that what preceded, I can’t control others’ reactions.

What has surprised me, not only about transition but about growing up, is how delicate and breakable friendships can be. Though I may have railed against the drift, I can see now that a plant without nourishment withers. Some friends have gone underground, looking to be more private, while others have found love, or found a new meaning in their work. This is something I crave, and maybe now I am learning to truly understand myself, I can gently push to make this happen. I should have done more to nurture the friendships I had, but it’s not too late to change the story. Let’s go out.