Harriet's Voice
by Daphne Garrido
Living as a woman’s spirit in a male body was an enormous weight to carry for Harriet Wiles, one which most people sharing this Earth as home would fail to understand the gravity of quite completely. Everyone managed to undermine the truth of it in one way or another. Being so unseen through life was a burden very few might even begin to understand. In a world split into simplistic dichotomies of gender, enforcing such limitations upon the heart, and training people to witness others from most superficial vantage points.
To be witnessed and honored for the truth of her spirit and treated in ways her heart always saw bestowed upon cisgendered women, even by simple means, called her holistically. It was the single most healing thing a transgender woman would ever experience.
Sharing space with women how she’d never been able to before, feeling truly included, held up by a sense of sisterhood long missed — was not something a person like Harriet would ever expect to receive, knowing better of the ways of her world, and fighting through a lifetime’s worth of imposter syndrome herself — yet seeking those moments all the same, and discovering their brief windows of felt acceptance as the single blessing which made life worth it. Every one of these precious seconds would heal the wounds from a youth spent forced to find comradery with boys who made her feel most steeped in self-betrayal to stand beside, providing such soulful affirmation to what she’d always known; who she was and where she really belonged.
Doubt was a literal killer of her people. So often made to suffer and lose their lives through means of misunderstanding and disregard, an entire civilization built as if to whisk this specific brand of person towards the guillotine, blame pointed squarely at them for it all, seen as confused men who were just trying their best to grapple with repressed femininity, never understood. Their souls were of a feminine nature, and on Earth they’d carry the very worst projections of all genders, at the same time. Seen as both one of the men who built this world so wrongly, changing sides to find peace from what they were perceived to truly be, and strapped with the judgement held quite firmly by both sexes towards feminine expression.
This world was built with such an unbelievably toxic skew towards warped masculine ideals — every single person suffered from it, and there were many here who’d fight over what expression was most repressed, each and every person so coded to be a victim — yet there was something true here which people didn’t often see.
Transgender women literally had it the very worst.
There was no class of people who deserved protection more, having so long been relegated to the gutters of countless patriarchal societies in history, nor one which would receive any less. They were scapegoats for blind hatred, misogynistic ideals, sexual repression, and misunderstandings in the nature of gender. People even blamed them for killing themselves, touting the high numbers of society’s greatest failure as means to deny their legitimacy as women, crafting stories of their sexual deviancy, teaching of their intent to infiltrate women’s spaces and their entire existence as some manifestation of mental instability in a world gone wrong. Well, there was one thing right in all that.
Still, doing your best to thrive as who you were, was better than the alternative.
Harriet had worked very hard to be seen as a woman, having started her transition at the age of thirty-four. Far too hard, in-fact. Her hope was to be seen more effortlessly as herself despite the many things she’d not been able to control, the extremity of the challenge to transform a body built upon a lifetime of lies was immense.
She’d done alright though, and felt really good about how she looked herself.
No matter that she was so tall it put her in the highest percentiles of women, or that parts of her face from certain angles would make it so apparent, she’d done quite well at abiding society’s expectations to become acknowledged most commonly as she would like.
There were a lot of hateful idiots around. Yet, Harriet now found herself near the completion of her transition, and even they were starting to warm to her outward appearance. Her energy was most important to it all, a confidence born into the way she moved through the world would call people to respect her, and her smile would reflect most clearly any biases which they’d throw her way.
Exceptions of most painful occurrence would still rear their head. It wasn’t the guys who just wanted to fuck her and so called her ‘man’ to make themselves feel better, that was almost always funny, except those occasions where she’d found herself so worn down by it all they’d actually get her to snap at them.
Those weren’t close to the worst. It wasn’t even the kindest people who just got it wrong and needed a quick correction to show most affirming energy — though, that was always really sad too — because it made Harriet angry and then she would feel bad after she’d find out how kind of a person they really were.
The very worst were her allies, and friends, and lovers who weren’t trans themselves or just didn’t understand her side of it. They would be so kind, always doing the very best they could, saying all the right things, really believing in the message of it all, but she could still tell how they saw her differently. How they’d have to make a real effort for her.
That was what hurt the worst.
When it came from the people she loved, and was able to feel that sisterhood with — which happens in all of these kinds of spaces — to then discover herself unseen as a woman by them in any way would be most apparent. It threw clouds of bitterness over those times where she’d felt that peace of acceptance at longest last.
Harriet knew exactly what the thing was, always the same, seen quite clearly from so many examples. It was her voice.
She’d tried her best to change it for people. It made her feel so stupid, like she was trying to play a character, and she knew it made other people feel that way too. Eventually, she found a healthy balance which felt right to her, where she’d allow her spirit to move in full through her words, not forcing effort to constrict her vocal cords like most trans women do, spending untold amounts of time re-learning how to speak against the nature of their body for the seeking of acceptance.
Harriet was jealous of their pretty voices, as all women’s, but that was bullshit.
That’s not what makes a woman, and she was done pretending it was, but that meant she had deal with the fallout. Which was that nobody really saw her as one.
Those energies in public of ease with her presence, would be completely reliant on her leaning into her most feminine expression of voice, and any time she coughed, or laughed, or said anything from her chest — she was immediately a boy in disguise to everyone — all people would be unsure how to gender her, thinking her non-binary because she wasn’t pretending that her Adam’s apple never dropped.
Sure, a pretty one, but that was a man. Listen to the voice.
She was afraid of coughing in public, or speaking without conscious effort, and seeing all those people who’d treated her normally snap their heads around in re-adjustment to their perception of her gender though most idiotic projections of superficiality.
It broke her heart.
Even more so for all her sisters out there, who’d not made the choice she had to just say ‘fuck y’all’, and know what it meant to be a woman herself.
Thank you for sharing, I've gained insight from this story. 💜