Dear Beekeeper,
I’m a trans man in my 40s. I’ve been on testosterone for over a decade, am married to a woman, have a child, and most people who meet me assume I’m a cis man. Some people in my life know I’m trans, but many don’t, and I don’t always volunteer the information.
What I’m struggling with is that even after all these years, I still feel, and this has led to a lot of social anxiety. Part of me is always wondering: Can they tell? Are they noticing something? Are they looking at my height, my voice, my body, my history? I often feel like I’m scanning for signs that someone has “clocked” me, even when there’s no evidence they have.
At the same time, people frequently assume I’m a gay man. I’m actually bisexual and mostly attracted to women, but I have a softer presentation and mannerisms that seem to lead people to conclusions about me. Intellectually, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being perceived as gay. Emotionally, though, I notice it can make me anxious because it feels like another example of being seen inaccurately.
I sometimes wonder whether this is less about gender and more about a lifetime of being misunderstood. Growing up before transition, I spent years feeling watched, judged, and out of place. Even though my circumstances have changed dramatically, my nervous system may not have gotten the memo.
How do you know when you’re responding to present reality versus old hypervigilance? How do you stop monitoring yourself in social situations and trust that you’re allowed to simply exist? And for those of us who spent years being misread, how do we become less attached to being understood correctly by everyone we meet?
—Still Scanning
Dear Still Scanning,
Each time I do a hive inspection, I’m trying to get into the hive and find the story that is told by the whole of it. I lift a frame, spin it around, check what I can see in the sun, and what the wax tells me. Frame by frame, scanning for signs of the queen, patterns of laying, and ratios of pollen cakes and honey stored.
I’m looking out the window now, as I write, and I have no idea what’s happening in the hive. I’m holding the honeybees in my awareness, in my prayers, but mostly holding out faith that they are fine. They’re bees, after all. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They are probably fine. Schrödinger’s beehive? They are fine and not fine.
As I read your letter, I’m (tenderly) imagining your inner life, and all that you’re holding. I want to acknowledge that writing in was a brave step of knowing, and that your self-awareness is likely both a curse and a blessing. Your world has held so many walls and shields out of necessity, and I imagine that there are parts of you that want to go fully “under the radar” and other parts of you that want to be fully seen. Honey, you’ve gotta be tired.
It makes me think about how much happens in the darkness of the hive. How bees attend to their young, communicate where resources are, regulate their environment, and more. The queen moves cell to cell only in the dark. Bee cognition, navigation, and labor are all oriented by mechanisms that don’t require being seen, at all. The richness of the hive is all internal, out of sight.
Even still, I can’t actually know what’s going on fully, even through an inspection. That’s true for honeybees and that’s true for humans. Each one of us (all carrying different weights of assumptions) are moving through the world misunderstood: in intention, in leadership, in decision making. The only one who has access to your full, entire story is you. You have been doing the essential work of your life in the dark, in conditions where being seen wasn’t possible, and that work is real regardless of whether any beekeeper ever read it correctly.
Except for the Divine.
I believe that through the presence of the Holy, you are known, witnessed and held in Love. All of you. All those memories. (yes, even that one.) All those anxieties and worries and secret shames. You, in the way you know yourself: Trans and Holy, Father and Partner, still training the recesses of your inner life to be as you want them to be.
When I’m in a place of incredible discomfort of feeling misunderstood or unknown in leadership and intention (which happens more often than I’d like to admit), I pray:
Search me and know me, God, and know my inmost thoughts.
…It’s ironic, in its own way, praying Psalm 139.
Even before I speak, God, you know my words.
…Mostly because they’ve tried to use that one against us, a lot.
For it was You who knit me together in my mother’s womb,
…But the words become instead something that affirms us: our loves, our choices, our bodies, our power.
I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
I imagine the opening of my life, my heart, my ribcage, and submitting to an inspection only from God. Sometimes with a challenge: HERE I AM. Sometimes with a whimper. here.i.am. While it doesn’t make me more understood by the people, it does center me in who I am, and WHOSE I am. Praying clarifies who and how I want to be, and sets me up to choose how to move intention forward.
For the bees, there is no way that a beekeeper could know the full story of the hive. Sometimes I get all up in there and am fully surprised about what they’ve done. I can’t know what is happening in the dark of the hive, before the lid comes off and after it goes back on. The inspection is a moment. The hive is a life.
Honeybees need a place to retreat. So do you. A place to just bee, outside of the gaze of inspection. I suspect you may already know what that is, and have organized it into a sanctuary of rest. I’d also offer that you may need considerable time to structure into that sanctuary to ensure that you’re able to do the work you’re called to do when you leave the hive. It lets your nervous system re-set and move forward held in the strength of the hive with intention.
Discernment about who and how you show up will be a lifelong sidekick… a true, but not necessarily bad thing. I’m not sure the vigilance really does go away. It served you faithfully once, and will be an easy pathway of response to any circumstance for a long time. Even asking these questions shows that you’re noticing the shifts within you, and offers you the pause point to choose how to show up. The self-preservation and vigilance fires in the body, and you notice (!amazing!) and then you get to choose.
When bees leave to go foraging, if they meet another bee on a flower, they’ll know if that bee is part of their hive. Even out and about, the primary sense of recognition is smell. The scent is there, offered by the pheromones of the queen. You are not alone. You, too, are part of a hive of community in the liminal places of gender, of knowing.
I pray that you can feel it, especially in moments where our visible hive is so present in celebration, Pride, community resilience and resistance. Happy Pride, fam.
May you find those who are able to see the parts of you that you want seen. May you tend to your inner life with reverence, and may the overflowing ongoing work of self-alignment be gentle upon you.
P.S. Dear Reader— yes you! Are you holding something close for which you might need a little honey? Then write in and and join alongside this ever-growing hive of hope and care! 🐝