The Radical Honesty of Transitioning

Source image by Oleksander K

So the Republicans have picked trans people as their scapegoat minority du jour, and have lately decided that a good strategy is to brand us as liars. This started with the Tangerine Palpatine’s executive order about trans people in the military:

[…] adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle Source

Suddenly, being trans is not “honorable” or “truthful”. Marco Rubio follows up with guidance regarding travel visas in which he brands trans people’s updated documentation as “material misrepresentation” for purposes of eligibility to enter the United States.

And now Texas joins the mob with a bill that attempts to give Rubio’s bigotry the force of law with its gender identity fraud act.

All of this is, of course, pretext for stripping us of our civil rights.

Rights aside, I find this framing infuriatingly offensive and dismissive. Nor am I alone in feeling this way; hat-tip to Erin Reed for pointing this out.

They have it so backwards

I’m not here to pick apart their disingenuous, transphobic arguments. Anyone with half a brain will recognize the bullshit for what it is. You don’t need my help for that. Rather, I’m here to point out that the core drive pushing trans people to come out of the closet and transition is a drive towards honesty.

The realization that we’re trans—at whatever point in our lives when we realize that our inner self doesn’t match what’s showing on the outside—is simultaneously a tectonic shift in our view of ourselves but also an immediate secret: Suddenly we know something to be true about ourselves and are keenly aware that nobody else knows it. We get no superpowers to go with it, but suddenly we have a secret identity.

Source image by David Goehring

As we process what it means to be trans and come to terms with this secret, we also become aware of how critically central the truth of it is to our lives and our identities. And for myriad reasons I won’t go into here, the longer we keep this secret, the more it hurts to keep it.

The more we yearn to be seen. To be known by others as who we know ourselves to be.

The more we keep the secret, the more aware we become that every day we keep it, we’re lying to everyone around is. It’s a lie of omission, but a lie just the same. We didn’t start the lie, either. The lie was assigned to us at birth by people who looked at our bodies, assumed that was the whole story of who we were, and went about bringing us up that way.

We didn’t start the lie. But we can end it. We can come out of the closet. We can tell the truth about ourselves. We can reveal the secret identity we discovered. We can let ourselves be seen and be known.

We come out because the lie hurts too much. Because we need the people in our lives to know the truth of who we are.

Risk it all

It’s not like coming out is easy, either. Nor is it free.

For many of us, it’s the hardest thing we’ll ever have to do. Certainly, it has been the hardest thing I ever had to do.

It’s hard and it’s terrifying because while the truth is ours to reveal, the consequences are not ours to decide.

We can’t know how the people in our life will react. We may suspect, but we can never know. Will our spouses choose to stay with us, or ask for a divorce? Will our parents embrace and support us, or disown us and kick us out of the house? Will the roommates in our shared apartments congratulate us, or declare that they don’t want us living there anymore? Will our friends stand by us, or shout slurs at us and cut us loose from our social networks? Will our employers keep us on, or find excuses to let us go?

Coming out is fraught with these risks, none of which we can control. It is downright terrifying.

Why, then, would anybody do it if not for the strongest of motivations?

I can understand doing it for the truth. I’ve been there. But I cannot fathom the idea of doing such a thing for a lie.

They can’t understand

In the end, coming out and transitioning are acts of radical honesty.

Judging by their own tenuous relationship with truth, I think that the Republicans and other right-wing groups behind Project 2025 simply cannot comprehend the level of radical honesty required to come out of the closet as a trans person in 2025. Or to continue to be out of the closet in 2025.

I suspect the situation was entirely similar for gay people in the ‘80s and ‘90s. All the same risks applied.

The perverse irony here is that if they had their way, we would just continue hiding in the closet. It’s not like we wouldn’t still be trans or know that we’re trans, but they would never have to worry about knowing we’re trans or even knowing we exist. How close-mindedly convenient!

Given their way, they would have us live out a lie under the guise of truth. They call our truth “fraud”, demanding that we instead perpetuate a lie we didn’t even start.

It is peak Orwellian newspeak. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Truth is fraud.

Well, screw every single bit of that.

I know who I am, and I choose to share that with the world. No transphobic framing changes who I truly am. No politician can declare or legislate reality. I know how good it feels to finally be telling the truth.

They should try it sometime.