“I ask this question without judgement, but… do you think you might be trans?”
Speaking from experience, if someone you are close to ask this of you, it might be worth taking the time to honestly consider it.
Some three months ago, I was returning from a long road trip where a partner of mine and I (along with a potential prospective partner of hers, who, incidentally, I have a several-year friendship and past-tense romantic relationship with) had spent the weekend attending a very anti-normative philosophy-laden (and occasionally, although — by decision — not-for-me, sexually-charged) queer gathering where sexuality, gender, and neurodivergence were front-and-center in both discussion and the character of the attendees. Coming off being basted in this environment by these ideas and normativity-challenging idea made it easy — or perhaps inevitable — that much of the 13-or-so-hour car ride Involved reflection and self-discovery.
For me, this meant a lot of introspection and interlocution about where I had doubts about myself, how my vision of my place in the romo-sexual-desirability landscape differed so dramatically from my partner’s vision of me, and to whom I looked up as models for what I felt were ideals I wish I could strive for (spoiler: these ideals did not align with my performed gender at the time).
Perhaps because of taking to time to dive so deeply into my inner being, or perhaps in an effort to provide a punctuating end to the seemingly-endless and progressively hopeless expulsion of self-doubt I was bestowing upon my hapless partner, she asked that pivotal question: “do you think you might be trans?”
In the moment, I was unsure. But I didn’t reject the idea outright. In fact, I responded on the better-side of 50/50, saying something to the effect of “… I don’t know, I might be…” In retrospect, there was enough evidence that the chance of there being any other reasonable explanation was vanishingly small.
The popular narrative about trans people assigned male at birth (that is to say, people who are believed by others to be men who then assert themselves as women) is pretty singular: they always felt like a girl since they could remember; they snuck their way into wearing their mother’s makeup, jewelry, and clothing, even at an early age; they never felt they fit in with any of the other joys growing up; they always seemed more flamboyant than not; and, finally, when they did transition to womanhood, they did so with affectations and stylings that seemed theatrical and, perhaps, uncomfortably per formative.
I identified with none of these stories.
Which, perhaps, it was so hard for me to connect the dots prior to being asked, unambiguously, if I could be trans by someone who I trusted to see me for who I was (even when I perhaps couldn’t), would say what she thought without undue curation for the sake of palatability, and who understood the range of queer experience far better than I.
The dots in question were thoughts I have had, sometimes continuously for years, all of which, in retrospect, are hardly ever the domain of cisgender people:
“it would have been cool if I happened to have been a girl, but I was a boy so oh well.”
“It sure is lucky of [any given young trans girl] to have access to gender affirming care prior to puberty. It would have been neat if that were me, but it isn’t.”
“Maybe if I save enough money in my lifetime they will be able to transplant my brain into a female clone of myself instead of having me just die when I’m super old.”
“It would be really cool to be able to be in a relationship with a woman while also being a woman. But, like, not in a pornographic ‘hot lesbians in your area’ kind of way.”
“I wish I could be included in women’s communities, groups, or spaces. But I have no interest in the male equivalents.”
And so on.
These were, of course, further galvanized by (frankly transphobia-steeped) ideas like “I would never want to be seen as just some man in a dress,” or similar. I always felt that anyone was deserving of respect and affirmation, even if they were clearly demonstrating an incongruous performance blending body and aesthetic. Somehow I was able to reconcile this blatant transphobia with my belief in myself as an ally, but it is hard to access that un-complex (and ironically dissonant) worldview now.
So, there I was in the following days, scouring forums, blog posts, articles, and anything else I could find online while lying in a hotel bed at the start of three consecutive weeks of work-related travel, trying to find affirmation that everything was fine and that I didn’t need to upend my life… but only finding accounts of “I, too, was where you were before I admitted I wasn’t cisgender. Cisgender people do not seriously consider these things.”
Generously, many of these same resources exposed the validity of understanding one’s own gender as trans but choosing to take no further action. Being trans, according to many of these people, is something you are, not something you do. The only qualifying characteristic is not identifying with the gender assigned to your person by the legal mechanisms present at the time of your birth (typically doctors who, through no fault of their own, are expected to predict a lifetime of social gender roles through a brief examination of less than a square inch of genital tissue)
Of course, this left me with more questions, all of which didn’t have easy answers available through simple google searches. Plainly said, the answer to “so you realized you’re trans: what do you do now?” isn’t something someone was going to answer for me. And, frankly, I don’t know if I would have been wholly comfortable abandoning my own agency for the sake of an easy out. Especially if the answer was “now you come into life as a woman.” Especially given that most everyone, despite not literally saying “do this,” did happen to be saying various versions of “the only treatment found to be consistently effective for addressing gender incongruence is transitioning.”
And so began my rediscovery of self. Or, perhaps, my reckoning of selves. Considering family, community, work, relationships… everything weighed on me. I’ve since found hope in almost all of those places (in truth, I have found such hope in all of the places I have openly discussed deconstructing and rebuilding my gender in a new image).
If, in navigating all of my regular life, I find space to invest myself in recapitulating how I’m working through my now-since-begun transition, I will continue to do so here. I already have so much I’ve begun working through, whether it be medication, insurance, or other access to care issues, or if it is identity, performance, or the strange nature of gender as something shared between the one who holds it and those who are spectators of it… there’s a lot I hadn’t taken the time to ruminate on until now.
And maybe these new windows into my self and the selves of others is my new normal. And maybe it’s worth sharing.
"it would have been cool if I happened to have been a girl, but I was a boy so oh well"
This has been a persistent thought of mine, and it led me not to the idea that I might be a girl – although I had been mistaken as one many times – but to the rejection of gender for myself. While I've never felt that my male-presenting body matched my internal sense of gender, I suspected that a female one would be equally ill-suited. Instead I wanted to be able to swap bodies as the mood struck.