All the stupid reasons I didn't transition five years ago
29 November 2024 ·Earlier this year, I came out publicly as non-binary. I now use they/them pronouns.
Part of my story was coming to understand myself, and transness, in such a way that it was possible for those two things to intersect. Writing was a big part of that; I wrote a lot of things for myself to help clarify how I was thinking about something.
About a year ago I wrote this to explain one specific aspect of my story: the reason I waited so long to transition. Recently I shared this essay with a close friend — who said it was really clear and that I ought to make it public in the hope of helping someone on their way.
I decided not to soften the way I talk about gender before publishing this, but I understand that no account will be endorsed by all trans people. My goal in sharing this is to be liberatory, not exclusionary; if you feel that your self-understanding as trans or queer doesn’t fit within the vision I relate, I encourage you to interpret me as talking merely about how I’ve come to understand myself, and not giving a theory of gender that is true for all time and all people.
In 2018, I began to write about some of my struggles with gender identity. I believed at the time that I was likely non-binary or possibly agender. I said that I was uncomfortable with the way others gender me, and that I wanted to experiment with my presentation. For more than four years, I didn’t act on these feelings, even though doing so would have made me happier. Why not?
The primary reason is that I had accepted a view of gender that led me to assume that I couldn’t be transgender unless I had feelings of a particular, vaguely defined kind. I want to explore my wrong-headed ideas and say exactly what I think is wrong with them, in the hope that reading this will help someone else come to a better understanding of themselves.
The problem started with trying to distinguish sex and gender in a way that made sense of (and endorsed) transgender identities. I would have said something like “sex is a fact about a person’s biology, gender is how they feel about themselves.” So for someone to be female (gendered) is for her to feel herself to be female, for someone to be male is for him to feel himself to be male, and to be non-binary or otherwise gendered is to feel oneself to be something else. Likewise, I understood the term “agender” to indicate the absence of this internal sense.
How did this view of gender cause problems for me?
I believed that transgender people were those whose biological sex and gender were misaligned. On the view of gender identity described above, gender amounts to a complex of feelings, and so to be transgender is to live with an incompatibility between one’s self-concept and one’s biology. On this account, it’s easy to understand why trans people should experience “dysphoria,” a psychological condition where one fails to recognize oneself as the person one believes oneself to be. Dysphoria is the thing that traditionally makes a person aware of their “problem,” without which they would go on being happily cisgendered.
Cisgender people, especially cisgender men, may never notice any misalignment between their “gender identity” in this sense and their bodies (and the social meanings placed on their bodies). Gender therefore functions invisibly for many, appearing to be nothing more than the way other people perceive them.
This leads to a problem. When someone is questioning what they are, how are they to tell whether they are agender because they have no internal body of gendered feelings, or cisgender because they have a gender which functions invisibly for them?
I got stuck here. This may seem odd; after all, I did have feelings not typical of cisgender men — like wanting to experiment with my presentation — why didn’t these feelings settle the question?
I thought that gender had to be an internal fact about a person, not just a matter of how one wants to present. When a trans woman says “I am a woman,” she makes a true statement. Her statement is true (I believed) in virtue of the fact that she is accurately reporting her own self-consistent feelings. Feelings about what, though? This really gets to the heart of the problem. If I wanted to know what my feelings said about me, I needed to know what sorts of feelings counted as feelings of gender.
This is a hopeless dead end. It doesn’t work to say “I feel that I am a woman,” because that reflects belief. That someone believes she is a woman is a good reason for me to believe that she is a woman, but the belief itself does not make her a woman. Beliefs, even about oneself, are not usually self-evidencing. Well-founded beliefs are conclusions on the basis of some further facts. It’s these facts that we’re looking for, and highlighting belief misses the point. For the purpose of understanding myself, I need to know why she believes she is a woman, not just that she does.
Neither does it do to say “I feel like a woman”, because that assumes that I know what women essentially feel like, and that there is a set of things that all and only women feel. Almost certainly there is no such set.
Theories centering one’s feelings about presentation are equally disastrous. Wanting to wear dresses, while uncommon for cisgender men, is merely a preference about gender expression, and a culturally situated form of it at that. One can be male-identified and still enjoy wearing dresses, putting on nail polish, or engaging in other forms of feminine presentation.
Likewise, the feeling that one doesn’t want to take on (or be perceived as taking on) traditionally masculine gender roles doesn’t mean that one is not male. After all, feminism rightly asserts that some gender roles are harmful, and that compulsory roles for women (in particular) are part of a system of gendered oppression. Men and women who don’t desire to participate in their respective gender roles, as traditionally understood, do not by that fact become less legitimately male and female.
The way that gender seemed to come apart in my hands as I played with it left me feeling rudderless. When you start with the assumption that gender is an internal sense, thinking about your own gender critically becomes problematic because attempting to pin down the component elements of that sense runs aground on the fact that they all turn out to be inessential. The things you might want to do and the feelings you have about how others perceive you are elements of personality that anyone is allowed to have, regardless of how they identify.
Taken one way, this might be liberating. If I knew that my voice bothered me and that I wanted to change it, that I wanted to wear nail polish, and style my hair differently, and that having these desires didn’t make me any gender in particular, then why didn’t I just do those things, and stop worrying so much about what “gender in particular” I was?
Truthfully, the reason I didn’t do those things is that like most people I usually do not want to be perceived as gender non-conforming. I don’t want people to look at me and say “there’s a man who’s doing gender wrong, someone breaking the rules.” There are social rewards and punishments for conforming more or less to one’s gender which discipline behavior even when one’s identification with that gender is only marginal. If I was a man, at the end of the day, then I felt I needed to behave as one.
I believed possession of a bona fide gender identity would grant me the right to do these things, perhaps even the responsibility to do them in order to live authentically. To grasp such an identity, by hook or by crook, would make me “legitimately” transgender and thus one of the people allowed, in some situations, to dress how they wish, use public restrooms, or take hormones. Someone could assault me for my identity or reject it as the aberrant expression of psychological abnormality, but they would have a tough time denying that my outward appearance was the unfeigned production of a genuine inner self.
I went looking for my inner self, failed to find one, and in the process missed what my outer self was telling me all along.
The problem with looking for a combination of attitudes, desires, and sentiments that would collectively make me my gender is that the search inevitably ends in failure. To look for a locus of gendered emotions is to seek an essentialist definition of gender, but gender disintegrates in essentialist language.
This fact has been useful for conservatives claiming they oppose “gender ideology” because if you can get your opponent to accept that gender must have an essentialist definition, you can easily talk them into a circle and make them look foolish. If you say “a man is a person who thinks he’s a man,” for example, that’s only useful if you can elaborate on the idea of thinking yourself to be a man in a way that eliminates the circular reference. As I’ve already suggested, I don’t believe that can be done.
Eventually I discovered that many trans people do not describe their experiences this way. Rather than employing concepts like authenticity and metaphors like “born this way,” they emphasize the roles creativity and agency play in determining gender. Poet J. Jennifer Espinoza memorably described her gender as “an idea I carved into the side of the world with fire.” Kate Bornstein wrote “it was the absence of a feeling, rather than its presence, that convinced me to change my gender.”
Trans women often advise questioning people that “if you want to be a girl, you can just be a girl.” I interpreted this metaphorically, much as one does “I used to be a boy, but now I’m a girl,” which one still occasionally hears. On the metaphorical reading, the statement means “if you are a (trans) woman and want to live as one, you can simply transition.” The statement promises you that you’ll see the changes you want on hormone replacement therapy, for example.
I believed that becoming a girl is beyond the remit of mere mortals. If one “becomes” a girl, it is because one was already one. One’s inner self was always tinted pink, so to speak, regardless of how long it took to detect this or what one’s genitalia look like or whether one decides to transition. To be a woman (or man) was to have a set of feelings of that obscure species I never managed to locate within myself.
I don’t accept this reading anymore. I think identity itself is within your grasp, that it is yours for the taking, that if gender is preventing you from living the life you want, trans women want to make clear to you that identification as a woman is available to you if it would help you. They want to tell you that they possess no sine qua non of womanhood that you cannot also have, if you choose. Gender can be seized.
A queer writer named Stel said “you’re trans if you want to be, that’s really it, it’s hard to understand how your intent can shape your life if you’ve never let it but you should try.” I resolved my own difficulties by deciding that what I was didn’t matter; I was going to “do the non-binary thing” because life as a queer person felt more livable to me than than the one I had led prior, and I craved the potential for liberated expression it offered.
The question “what is a man?” has no scientific or objective answer: when I say “a man is anyone who identifies as a man,” I am not making a factual claim but a political one. I am advocating that we confer gendered recognition on a class of people (trans men) whose existence is in doubt. If I identify as a trans man, it is with the hope of receiving exactly this sort of recognition from my friends and neighbors.
So when I say that you can just be a girl, or that I decided I was going to be non-binary, I don’t mean that we can make ourselves a gender by simply choosing it at will. If I ask who the non-binary people are, I’m not asking (at least not directly) who identifies as non-binary. I’m asking who counts as non-binary, and that is a question that can only be answered in a social context, and nothing you or I can bring to the table as individual queer people will settle it.
On the converse, there is nothing you can lack which would (if you had it) make you the gender you want to be. If you’d like to be a man, or become a man, or call yourself a man, there is nothing that cis men have which makes them unquestionably “men” and overrides the role that social determination plays in their identities. This can be liberating; you may have no power over whether others will give you the recognition you want, and you cannot dictate the norms by which trans people are accepted (when they are at all), but you can decide what to do with the situation you face. My decision to identify as non-binary reflects my determination to make use of the limited agency afforded me under a broadly oppressive system of gender that I do not control.
The trans assertion to be one’s gender stakes a claim in an uncertain future. It is an attempt to carve out for oneself a space of greater freedom, a flag-raising that signals to others what one is trying to achieve.
All options, even the one I’ve chosen, have downsides and can be traps in their own ways. I did not continue in my previous identity because I judged this the least happy alternative. A world that rejected transgender identities would harm me not because I’m incapable of performing masculinity but because that performance would be a forced and unhappy one. Transphobia is ultimately about getting to tell people which set of rules they’ll be judged by, even if they choose to break those rules.
One of the complications of non-binary identity is that it does not yet exist in the conceptual apparatus of the English speaking western world. Few people today understand how a non-binary person performs gender. When you introduce yourself as non-binary in most places, you are likely to be read as a more-or-less non-conforming member of the gender that is associated with your presumed “sex”. In queer spaces you may receive recognition, but outside these, you are likely to receive the same treatment that a non-conforming person would. If you’re lucky, and your environment is liberal, a grudging attempt will be made to use your preferred pronouns (as doing otherwise is now considered rude).
As a result, my existence as non-binary is something contentious, something fraught. The transgender movement aims to establish ways for us to achieve recognition from others as people who are neither male or female, but we have not yet succeeded.
Binary transgender identities have slightly more traction because they are not the prospective work of a program to establish new ways for people to be gendered. As someone who understands the sociocultural implications of “male” and “female”, you already possess most of the rules you need to grasp someone’s binary transgendered performance. Binary transgender identities are nevertheless reliant on the political struggle to cement them as viable options for individuals. The success conditions of a gender performance can change over time and may vary intersectionally; the requirements for recognition as a black transgender woman are likely to differ from the expectations placed on a white cisgender woman.
Accepting this account of gender made the difference for me because I found myself unable to take up a label like non-binary when I lacked an understanding of what it meant to do so “authentically.” I couldn’t accept the feelings I did have as determinative without a theory of how those feelings constituted a “truth” of gender. I suspect younger people are less likely to have this problem. You don’t need a theory of gender or sexuality to be trans or gay. You merely need examples of how it is possible for you to live in the world, and feel empowered to imitate them if you find them desirable. I didn’t meet openly trans people until I was in my twenties; for most teenagers, transgender identities are a banal fact of life, one path through their social worlds among many.
I believe questioning people should try to stop worrying about what they are, a search that only leads in circles, and instead ask themselves, perhaps for the first time, what they want. You have agency in this process. Your desires for how you’d like to live matter. Listen to what your body and heart are telling you, and if you’d like to try out being trans, you just can. You don’t need anyone’s permission, certainly not mine, but more importantly maybe not even yours. Policing yourself until you think you’ve earned being trans will drive you to despair. Set fire to your prison and go live.