Talking About Your Past Self

Source image by oatsy40

Language is hard, even at the best of times. And like seemingly everything else, for trans people, it comes with a whole layer of extra challenges.

How do you tell stories about your past, when past-you doesn’t have the same name as now-you? How do you talk about yourself back then, when you held an entirely different role in the world, gender-wise, than you do now? For those of us whose eggs didn’t crack until much later, how do you talk about things that happened and how they made you feel when, at the time, you completely misunderstood your own identity?

How especially do you convey these nuances to listeners, usually cisgender, who don’t understand “all this trans stuff” particularly well to begin with?

This whole issue comes to a thorny point over the question of whether you refer to past-you according to your birth-assigned gender or by what you understand your gender to be now.

Should you tell your stories according to your gender presentation at the time of the event, or according to the true identity you had? Do you misgender past-you to make it easier for others to understand your story, or do you honor who you truly were even though that makes the storytelling harder?

Every time I tell the stories of my own past, I run into this. I’m often telling some story precisely because of how that experience and my feelings about it were shaped by being an undiagnosed trans girl. A girl stuck pretending to be a boy, not even knowing she was doing it.

The nuances of those situations, the subtle ways this dichotomy between inner and outer self played out, are critically important to me. To how I understand my own life. And I really want to be accurate about it because I need other people to understand.

Well. Let’s be clear. I need cis people to understand.

English doesn’t make it easier

Annoyingly, English gets in the way. English uses the “to be” verb in its many conjugated forms for discussing both states of being and personal identity. We say “I am a student” or “I am hungry” or “You are wrong about that” just as readily as we say “I am a woman but you are a man.”

Many languages don’t do this, but English does, painting aspects of radically different importance with seeming equivalence simply because they use the same verb. This linguistic quirk of how English overloads its copula verb greatly obscures the subtle nuances that are the key to understanding me, my life, and my lived experiences.

Worse, that obscuration can re-enforce misunderstandings cis people often hold about trans people. Especially about the difference between being trans and transitioning.

What to do about it

First, I can’t tell you what to do about it. How you talk about your past is up to you. I can only tell you how I have chosen to handle it, and what leads me to that choice.

It’s true: for 45 years, I genuinely believed I was a man. Thankfully, I understand myself better now. That rather sudden awakening came almost 10 years ago now, and since then I’ve had two really important realizations about my past:

What I was and what I thought I was were different things. What I was and what I was only pretending to be were also different things.

In my view, it is essential to be mindful of these differences.

The truth that matters most

It is absolutely true that a huge part of my life was shaped by existing in the world in the role of a boy, and later, of a man. But my role was not my identity. I understand my identity now, and I can see all the reasons, all the signs, that show me my identity was girl all along. If “all the world’s a stage,” then my casting director did a shitty job.

So when I talk about my pre-transition self, I strive to keep that distinction clear. I won’t mis-gender myself in when telling my stories because that would be a lie. And the honest, simple truth is that I never was a man. I never was a boy.

I had a lot of people fooled for a long time, including myself, but I wasn't one.

This distinction, at least for where I am right now in my life, is what matters. This is what I need cis people to understand. I was a girl all along.

Role vs. identity

This distinction between role and identity is the truth that matters most. At least to me. But it’s a truth that, in my experience, a great many cis people don't understand. I don’t blame them; why would they? They never have to think about it.

But for me, it's critical. It's not so much that my life was shaped by the role I was playing, but that my life was shaped by the difference between the role and the identity inside. Without that difference, the role would have been fine. No different than any cis boy’s.

But I had that difference, and it affected everything.

That difference was why I had such a hard time learning my lines for the boy-roles people expected me to play. That difference was why I had gender dysphoria. That difference explains all the difficult and confusing shit I endured before understanding who I really am.

Source image by Abhimanyu

I choose to honor my identity

How could I possibly gloss over that difference? I can’t, which means honoring my identity by emphasizing that difference instead.

So I will always look for ways to talk about my past self that tell the story, yes, but that also recognize, affirm, and honor the identity of the poor little girl who was trapped in an impossible situation, just doing her best to survive.

I'll say “when I was living as a man,” or “when everyone saw me as a man,” because those are true and accurate. But I won’t say "when I was a man". Fie upon the lying copula!

I’ll refer to childhood me as “Little Sonja”, because that re-enforces the identity that was hiding, scared and alone, inside that boy-shaped shell. But you won’t hear me using the name my parents gave me. That name simply isn’t me. Not anymore.

You know what Little Sonja did? That brave, strong little girl?

She survived. It wasn't easy, but she did it, and here I am. She deserves respect and honor for that. She got precious little of either back then. Far less than she deserved, too, so It’ll be a cold day in hell before you hear me disrespect or dishonor her now by talking about her as if she ever actually was a boy or a man.

She worked too hard to survive that lie, and I’ve worked too hard to rectify it, for either of us to deserve anything less than the full, nuanced, complicated, and beautiful truth of our identity.