LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back

This post is part of Julia Serano’s planned-action effort.

I am queer, and I am not going back. For me, this is personal.

I am a transgender woman, and I am not going back to pretending to being a man. I tried that for over 50 years--you can’t say I didn’t try!--and it didn’t work. All it did was leave me in such a place of bleak misery that it almost did me in. There is no amount of money you could pay me to go back, because I simply cannot live that way, and I want to live.

I hope a thousand, ten thousand, people join this planned-action. I hope the world hears us roar in numbers too large to ignore. In their ten-thousand blog posts and TikToks and YouTube videos, all the trans-101 topics will inevitably be covered: gender identity vs. gender expression, the reality of gender dysphoria, transitioning being the only effective known treatment for gender dysphoria, and many others.

This is good. Those things need to be said. But I don’t need to tread that same ground.

Instead, to the families, friends, and other loved-ones of trans people, and I want to ask you a question:

What does love mean?

We all know the feeling of loving someone, but what follows from that feeling? I’ve thought about that a lot in my own life, especially once I had kids. What does it mean to truly love my children? Or my wife? Or anyone else? What do we want for the most important people in our lives?

Easy answers come readily to mind. Society gives us a script for them, a Standard Life Plan. You know the one. It’s the script that has them staying in school, staying out of trouble, getting a good education. The one in which we want them to get a good job and save money and buy their own home. The one where we hope they find love, get married, settle down, have some kids. Maybe a dog. Where they’re successful in their careers and make something of themselves.

We want our loved ones to have a good life, and the Standard Life Plan script fills in our imaginings for their lives with a million hypothetical details that are supposed to give them one.

But why? What is even the point of having a good life? Why is that our wish for them?

Ultimately, because we want them to be happy. A good life is supposed to bring happiness. That’s why we want a good life for our loved ones, and why we imagine for them all the things we believe will bring them a good life. We just want them to be happy.

A deep and abiding wish for our loved ones’ happiness: That is what it means to love someone. That’s the root of it all, so that is our answer. To want them to be happy, no matter what. Try to imagine loving someone but not wishing them to be happy. It doesn’t work, right? A wish for someone’s unhappiness, misery, or suffering is the opposite of love.

To claim to love someone without also wishing their happiness? To me that does not seem like love at all.

What’s love got to do with it?

Obviously, you want your trans family member or trans friend to be happy. You love them. Of course you do.

But many loved ones find themselves balking at the idea that their trans person might want to transition. (Those other ten thousand people will no doubt talk a lot about what’s really involved there, as opposed to the “scaryotypes” the politicians have been pushing lately.) If you have a trans loved on in your life, you may find yourself balking at the idea that they might want to start wearing dresses or makeup. Or stop wearing dresses or makeup. Or grow their hair out, or cut it short. Or start hormone replacement therapy. Or even get any of several gender-affirming surgeries.

And, look, I get it. I am not here to attack you. I understand how weird or strange it can seem for someone to transition. I understand how unfathomable it can be to people who aren’t transgender. I understand how afraid you might be for them, for the possibility that they’re making a mistake or ruining their lives. After all, these transitioning activities are very off-script relative to the Standard Life Plan that society says will bring our loved ones a good life, and therefore happiness.

Your concerns are reasonable. You might not expect me to say that, but I do. Not because you might be right--odds are you’re not--but because those concerns come from a place of love. A place of wanting the best for this person in your life. A person who has come out as trans and is now wants to do things that, to you, seem entirely unfathomable. Things you cannot imagine producing the best for them.

You love them and want them to be happy. Of course you’re concerned!

The Possibility of Happiness

If you have not experienced gender dysphoria, then I don’t expect you to understand what it feels like or what it does to you. And the truth is, I can’t explain it to you either. I can’t make you understand, truly, what it feels like any more than I could genuinely convey the feeling of an orgasm to someone who’s never had one, or describe the color red to someone who has been blind from birth. I could put adjectives on these things--dysphoria feels bad, orgasms feel good, red is a warm color--but that’s not the same as knowing.

So if you yourself have never experienced gender dysphoria before, you’re going to have to trust me on this: it is the bleakest misery. It may start small, but it only grows worse the longer you live with it until it becomes unbearable.

Many people in the ten-thousand will explain the ins-and-outs of dysphoria. All that matters here is that to experience gender dysphoria is to suffer, and to suffer all-pervasively: Gender dysphoria stems from a mismatch between our bodies and our innermost sense of ourselves, our true selves. And because virtually every aspect of our lives is gender-coded in one way or another--that is, it is affected by the way people perceive our membership in either the male or female genders--the net result is that everything in our lives rubs the wrong way against our fundamental identity.

Everything constitutes a micro-aggression against our identities. Every time we speak and the voice is wrong, every time someone calls our name, every time we get dressed in clothes that mis-present our identity to the world, every time we look in the mirror, even every single interaction we have with another human being. All of it.

Nobody means it. Nobody even knows they’re doing it. There’s no malice intended. People are just treating us according to how we look, same as anybody else. They can’t read our minds. They can’t see inside us to see our true identities. We can’t expect them to somehow magically know to call us “ma’am” when there's an obvious beard shadow all over our face, or to call us “sir” when we have obvious breasts and an hourglass figure.

Nobody means it, but that doesn’t change how it feels. That doesn’t change that each little thing is another impact. Another painful reminder that the world cannot see us for who we truly are.

You can tolerate this for a while. Some people can tolerate it for a very, very long while. But eventually it wears you down. It burns through all your emotional reserves. It hollows you out, demanding more and more of your daily energy just to keep functioning in the face of it. It leaves you no room for anything else but enduring the suffering.

It strips away the possibility of happiness.

To have gender dysphoria is to suffer. You may not understand it first-hand, but I tell you first-hand that it is true.

Transitioning and the Standard Life Plan

A trans person can follow the Standard Life Plan all they want, but it won’t bring them happiness in the same way as it will for a cis person. It can’t bring them happiness. That possibility is blocked.

I know this first-hand, too. I tried it. I followed the Standard Life Plan for over fifty years. And I did really well at it. Doing under my mountain of undiagnosed gender dysphoria was extremely hard, but I did it. I stayed in school, stayed out of trouble. I got a good job, bought a house. I found love, got married, had kids. No dog though. Allergies. I did the whole plan, start to end, just like everyone expected me to.

By any normal measure, I had a good life. I had it all!

Here’s the real kicker: all those elements of the Standard Life Plan? I actually wanted them. I wasn’t just blindly following that plan because that’s what the world expected. No, the whole comfortable suburban family life thing actually sounds good to me. It’s what I genuinely want for my life. And I got it!

But it hadn’t brought me happiness. I came into my fifties riding a knife’s edge. Barely able to continue holding together my life, my career, my family and my obligations to my family. I knew by then I was trans, but I thought I could just keep following the plan. I had not yet realized that dysphoria was robbing from me the very possibility of happiness.

I had everything I ever wanted, only to realize that I couldn’t enjoy it because dysphoria was overwhelming me. Dysphoria was the problem, and stemmed from the mismatch between my inner self and my outer self. My female insides and my male outsides.

To have the possibility of happiness, I needed to fix that. I needed to transition. Re-shape my outer self to match my inner self, so that the world can see me and treat me for who I really am. So that every moment of my life is no longer a micro-aggression against my identity.

I’m doing that now. Will it get me happiness? There’s no guarantee. Life never guarantees happiness, whether you’re cis or trans. But I’m not going back because I at least deserve a fair shot at it, unburdened by gender dysphoria. Which means transitioning, since that is the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria.

Love your loved ones

If someone in your life is trans, someone you love and care about, keep loving them. Keep wishing for their happiness.

But understand that for them gaining the possibility of happiness is going to mean transitioning. Doing things that, for a cis person, would absolutely not bring the possibility of happiness. Things that, for you, would push your body out of alignment with your innermost self, but that for your trans loved one whose body is already mis-aligned, helps correct that problem.

For their sake, I need you to engage with your humility. Accept that you do not live inside their head. You do not know what it feels like to be them. You are not in a position to judge what truly will, or won’t, bring them happiness or even just give them a fair shot at it. Trust them when they tell you how they feel and what they need.

Love them, yes. Wish for their happiness, yes. But understand that for the trans people in your life, that means transitioning, even if you don’t understand it. Support your trans loved ones in their transitions, because when you love someone, you do not wish for their unending suffering.

Besides, it’s the only way your wish for them might ever come true.