So in one of my earliest posts I talk about my 'egg cracking' moment - and now I'm going to go ahead and deconstruct that narrative. When you first suspect you are trans on a conscious, rational level - its extremely traumatic. It feels like something you just discovered, some horrible terrible truth that changes the world and makes you reevaluate everything in terms of 'before' and 'after'.
But after a few years to reflect on it, I'm now no longer certain that narrative is true. Its not false, but its more complicated than that. It was how it *felt* at the time, and so it was how I explained it when processing it was fresh. But...now with some distance, I see that I was processing it both before, *and* after that moment.
People who are cis sometimes see this in terms of a road trip; at some point your 'normal' or 'normal presenting', then you start the transition, then you stop, and at the end of it your 'normal' again. That’s a transphobic narrative spread largely by cis-gendered pop culture, and it both erases our experiences and...really shoves into rather narrow boxes the complexities involved.
Because the truth is I was always trans. I always *will* be; I'm in a different category than cis. Right so like you can have red haired <gender> or dark haired <gender> or Black <gender> or Latino <gender> or an autistic <gender>, and so on. Trans is simply another category someone can fit into, a type of thing. Some people experience their transition as inherently beyond categories (like xenogenders) - but I'm not going to delve into that here, as that’s not my identity or experience.
So I think I've already documented (some) of the many ways I was 'different' before, so I won't go into that again. But while I only realized something was wrong a few years ago (again, see egg cracking moment) - part of me was processing this from the very beginning.
Right, because like I didn't know I was trans - but I knew by the age of 5 not to mention I was a girl in my dreams. I knew by the age of 3-4 to be careful of what I wanted to play with and whom and how, lest my mother go into a rage. I knew by the age of 9-10 to keep my mouth shut about thinking dance lessons would be amazing, I knew by the time I hit puberty to not mention that I found it traumatic and wished I'd had the other one. I knew by third grade that if I was caught reading 'girls books', the librarian or the teacher would call my mother. Physics was fine. Babysitter's Club was not.
I never associated any of that with being trans. I never thought I *was* a girl - but on some level, I was processing. So at what moment did I become trans?
Was it the first time I wished I was a girl? Was it when I wished my voice wouldn't deepen? Was it when I cried myself to sleep because being a guy would keep me from the sort of female friendships I wanted?
Was it when I realized, a year or two before my 'egg cracking moment' that I, at some level, wished I *was* all the female characters I was writing, as had been apparent for *decades* to others?
Was it when I met the trans couple and saw they were normal, beautiful, happy, intelligent, and so much like me, and saw transition was a real thing and not terrifying?
Or was it when my egg cracked and I realized I had gender dysphoria? Or was it the time I cried to my wife after a car ride, realizing that I wasn't just dysphoric, I was trans and wanted to transition into a girl? That I wasn't going to be able to hide it or minimize it?
At what moment did I become trans?
I was always trans. I always had coping behaviors for it - and now that they are not necessary, I'm trying to unlearn them. And no matter how I look or how others perceive me...I'll always *be* trans, not because of my experience or history (though that's a big part of it!) - but for the same reason a queer woman isn't the same thing as a queer Latino woman, or a queer disabled woman. Their active experiences of the same category are different.
But when I didn't know my 'category was possible, when it was demonized, villainized, when all I saw on tv were people saying *terrible and evil* things about us...I couldn't conceive of it. I had to have that conception, while being in a safe atmosphere, with time to reflect, and to see that *I* could do it, before it really sunk in.
But the longer time goes on, the more I reinterpret my old memories. I was always a girl...I just was forced into a role as a boy, and didn't know how to escape it.
So this is going through my head. Because the difference in who you are is…pretty dramatic, depending on how you interpret the same memories. A few years ago I would have sworn up and down I was cis, and would have meant it. So how that person looked at those same memories…well, I’d argue he was wrong, but he would have said he just had ‘insecurities’ or ‘slightly different interests’ or, at worst, that he was a ‘gender traitor’. But increasingly, I don’t see him at all – I see a girl who had to hide her desires, had to hide her identity, even from herself. Because if I had known I would not have survived. Period. No ambiguity there. I wouldn’t have. I nearly didn’t as-is.
So I’m listening to a supervisor at work (not mine!) talk about her nephew. He wanted fairy wings. His parents were “terrified he might be gay”. He’s like 5 or somesuch, is my impression from the supervisor in question. FIVE. So the supervisor was telling someone how she told them it didn’t mean anything at that age – that if he still wanted the fairy wings at ten, that’s when you “find him some really good treatment before it gets out of hand.” Now, I’m in an extremely conservative area, but this is how literally everything was when I was a child. The villain of every Jerry Springer episode, of Silence of the Lambs, of Ace Venture – all trans or trans coded. And as previously documented, all of society seemed hyper-fixated on ensuring I had the ‘right’ interests, the ‘right’ presentation, the ‘right’ methods of communication. Because if I was anything else, it was an attack on *their* identity.
So yeah, my memories are changing. The physical memories are the same (though I have some swiss cheese from cPTSD due to childhood abuse) – but how I view them is so different. I still have a *lot* in common with him; continuity of memory, of consciousness, continuity of our simple lived history. But its like the ship of Theseus.
“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
– Plutarch, Vita Thesei, 22-23
It’s a bit like a catch-22 for trans people, as are many things. No matter how I interpret my history, someone is going to take a dim view of the interpretation. Just like with presentation. If I enjoy doing makeup, I’m “performing femininity”, but if I don’t do makeup, I’m “clearly a man” and will get the shit beat out of me. As far as “society” is concerned, the only answers that are acceptable are ones that fashion us in their image; not ours. Right? I saw it in my mother, and I see it in the unnamed supervisor above. They were discussing if a FIVE YEAR OLD NEEDED TO GO TO CONVERSION THERAPY.
So it’s interesting, because even as my memories are changing to reflect the reality that I was always a girl – I still occasionally go ‘WTF’ at myself, because the ingrained cultural transphobic programming is so strong. I don’t validate it by stressing over it, and I don’t deny it, I just observe it and move on – because it doesn’t come from me. So many of my problems as a trans woman don’t come from me, they come from our extremely bigoted, hegemonic society - and no one can escape it.
If we took a cis girl, and told her she was a boy, and forced her, at pain of violence, to act like a boy, and dress like a boy, and were EXTREMELY RABIDLY PARANOID about how this was handled, she’d eventually commit suicide, or she’d get the #@!#!@ out and resume being who she wanted to be. This is what happens with trans women, it happens with many intersex people – it happens with the countless ways society invalidates marginalized identities.
So this is what I’ve been processing lately. And its interesting, because it has ramifications for my own identity, as I continue the process of adjusting and rewiring myself, psychologically speaking, and trying to deprogram myself from all the indoctrination that’s been drilled into me. But its also interesting because society sees my answers as extremely hostile and threatening to their hegemonic patriarchial worldview.
They can tolerate an (supposed) woman whom says he’s a man. After all, the unspoken assumption men have is – men are better. (Though many conservative women think this too!). But a (supposed) man who says she’s a woman? It goes against how they define all of reality around them, every assumption they have. So they react to it with unrelenting hostility, because they can’t face the assumptions it questions about who they are and what life means and why we think and act in certain ways.
And if they react with that much hostility to *my* identity, what does it imply about theirs? Can someone who despises the very idea of introspection really be said to know who they are? Its quite ironic considering how often conservatives pull the “just asking questions” card, isn’t it? How often they project their fears onto us, call us “snowflakes” for not wanting to be harassed or murdered, while exploding at even the hint of thoughts they don’t want to think.
So…I’m learning to be strong. Because my identity, my sanity, my life - requires me to know who I am, to defend it against the unrelenting hostility of the world around me. And sometimes against myself, because I’m a product of that world, too.