Being OK is Not Enough
It's your one, precious life. Don't settle.
Stop me if you’ve seen a trans people saying things like this, or if you’ve felt this way yourself:
“i don’t necessarily feel like a girl and im just fine being a guy” [Source]
“I [don’t] mind too much if people call me by male pronouns” [Source]
“i don't know if i mind having a penis or not” [Source]
“A fleeting moment of feeling grounded caused me to temporarily feel okay with being [a man]” [Source]
I mainly frequent transfemme spaces, where the “fine with being a guy” perspective predominates, but I’ve seen enough trans men posting similar feelings of feeling “ok with” living as a woman to recognize it as a general pattern. The other clear pattern is these feelings arising alongside wondering whether one should transition, or needs to transition, or if transitioning is even worth the bother at all.
I get it. When I first realized I’m trans, I thought I was ok with living as a man too. I’d done it for a long time. I’d built the kind of life I’d always envisioned for myself. “Transition now!” was not an obvious conclusion at all, and not rocking the boat seemed like the overwhelmingly safer choice. Later, I became very much not fine with it, but it sure felt that way at the time.
I’m not here to tell anybody what to do; these are intensely personal decisions that each of us has to make for ourselves, within the full context of our own lives. I’m only here today to offer a perspective on feeling “ok with” our assigned-genders that I hope will help people resolve the question.
Why do we feel ok at all?
I’m also not here to say feeling ok with your birth-assigned gender isn’t real or isn’t valid. It is. If that’s how you feel, then that’s how you feel. That’s just how it is for you right now.
But I believe there’s value in digging into why we feel “ok with” or “fine with” living as our birth-assigned gender at all. I mean, think about it. Isn’t that a little strange? If your true identity doesn’t match the way your life is, then why should you feel even remotely ok living that way? Living the wrong kind of life certainly doesn’t sound ok.
I suspect it comes down to familiarity and practice.
Most people wrestling with this feeling seem to be in their adult years. Not always, but mostly. Which means that we’ve lived in this mode for a really long time. We’ve grown up practicing doing what people expect: dressing the way people of our birth-assigned gender typically dress, and behaving according to those gendered expectations. We don’t always do it well–none of it comes easily, when it’s not what our brains are wired for–but regardless, practicing this conformance-to-expectations is what we do all the time.
With enough practice, we get pretty good at it. We may not exactly like it, but we can do it. Putting on all these learned gender-role-based behaviors and mannerisms, is the only way we know how to get by in the world. It is, after all, the only thing we’ve ever practiced.
We may not like it, but it’s familiar. It’s a known quantity: “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” right? There’s a certain dysfunctional comfort in familiar practice, even when you suspect something else might actually be better for you.
Not to mention that the thought of wildly upending our lives for transitioning, of walking away from that familiar practice, can be incredibly scary.
When you add it all up, it’s easy to say to yourself, “Yeah maybe I’d be happier if I transitioned, but I don’t know for sure, and I don’t mind it too much the way I am.”
And you’re not wrong! I don’t debate that you genuinely don’t mind living the way you are. The question I’d put to you is this:
Yes, but are you thriving?
Is “ok” really all you want for your life? Or would you prefer to be doing better than ok? Would you prefer to be thriving?
Sure, maybe you don’t mind your assigned-gender life too much. But why should you have to mind it at all? This is your life we’re talking about!
I told myself I didn’t mind it, that I was ok with the world believing I was a guy. That I didn’t mind everything that came with maintaining that illusion. I was, too, for a long time. Until I wasn’t. The main thing that made me realize I was not ok was recognizing that most cis people didn’t seem to be merely ok with their identities.
They seemed to have bodies they genuinely enjoyed. Even if they weren’t perfect, they seemed to appreciate their masculinity or femininity in ways that made them feel actively good about themselves. They had lives that they seemed to genuinely enjoy. No life is perfect, but despite the challenges and problems they had, they seemed to find a genuine fulfillment from the gender role they held.
And it struck me that I wanted that too. That it was simply not fair that I couldn’t have that, just because of some mistake mother nature made before I was born that mis-aligned my body from what my brain is wired for.
I didn’t do that. I didn’t choose that. It’s not my fault. But I’d been living with the consequences of it since the day I was born. And those consequences, the physical, social, and existential dysphoria that comes with it, are collectively incredibly shitty. They made life far, far more difficult than it needed to be.
Cis people weren’t enduring what I was enduring on a daily basis in the maintenance of that illusion. Why should I have to? Especially when all that cumulative dysphoria was actively preventing me from finding any true happiness in this life.
I didn’t ask for any of it. I certainly didn’t deserve it.
Is “ok” all you deserve?
It struck me that “not minding” my life was not the same as liking it. And I really, really wanted to like my life. To embrace my life. To find joy in my one, precious life.
After all, didn’t I deserve a name and pronouns that felt right for me? Didn’t I deserve a body I could be excited about, rather than one that gave me physical dysphorias so bad I had trouble sleeping? Didn’t I deserve a face I could stand to look at in the mirror, versus one that was too painful to see? Didn’t I deserve a hairstyle that wasn’t just settling for whatever felt feminine but not so much it would out me? Didn’t I deserve clothes I felt good in and liked the look of? Didn’t I deserve some colors beyond the muted, brutalist palette of standard-issue men’s clothes? Didn’t I deserve for people to see me and treat me as a woman? Didn’t I deserve to be able to talk with and befriend women, as a woman, without the instinctive “Red Alert! Man nearby!” shields going up?
Even if I lived to 100, I’d still have spent over half my life maintaining that damnable illusion. Didn’t I deserve to be able to live the rest of it making memories that wouldn’t be soured with regret over lost time? Didn’t I deserve to actually like my own life?
Yes. I deserve all of that. I deserve to thrive.
You do too.
We shouldn’t have to settle
We all deserve to thrive. Merely “ok” is not enough. Not nearly enough. For what we’ve gone through? For what we’ve endured and as hard as we’ve had to work just to survive?
Life owes us a lot more than just “ok”. I am choosing not to settle for that anymore. I am rejecting any sense of obligation I once felt for living my life according to other people’s expectations.
Transitioning comes with no guarantees and an absolutely huge pile of unknowns. But transitioning also offers the promise of deep fulfillment that is simply not available in our birth-assigned lives.
It offers a chance at happiness and plateaus of joy, wholeness, peace, and satisfaction that we’ve never experienced before.
It offers a chance at thriving.
Thriving is not a guarantee. Plenty of cis people manage not to find happiness or to thrive either. But the way I see it, we at least deserve a chance—a fair chance, unencumbered by the staggering weight of dypshoria—to go after it.
That’s what transitioning offers, and why being ok is not enough.
I was indeed surprised to learn most people actually like their bodies. I just thought of mine as this awkward contraption that was needed to carry my consciousness around. ;)
This is my exact experience with transition and I think a lot of people who transitioned in their 30s or older will resonate with this. I was “okay” with living as a woman because it was a mask I had become conditioned to wearing. And of course, I didn’t have any other experience to compare it with. You can’t miss what you’ve never had, right? By the time (late 20s) I had even discovered FTM transition was possible, I told myself I didn’t want it badly enough to actually do it, it was just a curiosity in the back of my mind. Plus I had all kinds of misconceptions like it would take years and years to pass, etc (I passed within 6 months of starting T lmao)
It was during the pandemic that I started following lots of trans guys on Instagram who documented their transitions and I got to see what the process actually looked like in reality. I got intensely jealous of what they had. By then I was 33 and had an established happy relationship with a straight man, a high-paying but conservative job, etc. I stood to lose a lot from transition, and indeed I lost both my boyfriend and my job (well, quit both pre-emptively).
It was only through writing my novel, which features two gay male protagonists, that I realized I couldn’t put the mask back on. I wrote for as many hours of the day as I could, because I was in a world where I could *be* these fictional men, but when I closed my laptop I had to go back out there and engage with the world as a woman. There came a day in 2022 when I broke down because I could no longer do it. I could no longer pretend I was okay with a reality that demanded womanhood of me. And I started T about 6 weeks later.
Now, even despite the political environment, I’m thriving. The man I have created in myself, the man others around me have gotten to know, is joyful and adds value to every situation he is in - instead of just floating through life like a ghost. People love the man I am. They were more or less indifferent to the woman I was. I used to identify so hard with that song from Chicago, “Mr. Cellophane”, even despite the pronouns, because I felt invisible prior to transition. Now I’m real.