What Stops Late Bloomers from Knowing

Source image by T.Kiya

This is a companion piece to When do People Realize They’re Trans. If you’re not a late bloomer, the other post may be more relevant for you.

A question that tormented me when I first discovered I’m trans was why I didn’t realize it until I was 45 years old. From what I see on Reddit, that question torments many late bloomers who don’t figure this out until well into adulthood. The pop-culture narrative says that trans people are supposed to have always known, right?

Well, I didn’t, and yet I was also definitely trans.

The torment only increased as I reflected back over my life, discovering one sign after another of my feminine identity. Some of them quite blatant. Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I realize? Was I just stupid? A clueless idiot, bumbling my way through life?

That explanation was not dismissed so easily: it aligned with many of the messages I’d been given about myself over the years. Further, I often felt like a clueless, bumbling idiot because I just didn’t understand how boys work or how to emulate what they were doing. So maybe that was the answer.

It took years, but ultimately I came to realize that I was asking the wrong question. I shouldn’t have wondered why I didn’t know sooner. Rather, I should have been asking “what stopped me from knowing sooner?” Because so far as I can tell, there are not one, but four separate factors that conspire to keep late bloomers in the dark about our own identities. None of which involve being idiots.

Late Bloomer

We were never taught

Our society does a genuinely terrible job of teaching kids about sex and gender. Most people only ever get the explain like I’m five version about penises and vaginas. It’s a monolithic, body-centric view which says that the body tells the whole story about who you are.

To me, that view seems quite bizarre. After all, your body is not you. You, the conscious entity currently experiencing these words on a screen, are not your body. You are the consciousness that arises from your unique brain’s pattern of operation. Your body is just the meat-sack that your consciousness drives around the world in. A body-centric view of identity that entirely ignores the conscious self seems deeply flawed: it ignores the part that actually matters.

Nevertheless, that flawed view works for cis people, for whom there’s scant day-to-day difference between body-centric and brain-centric views of identity; if both views say you’re the same thing, what does it matter which view is right? Bodies are obvious and visible, so they’re the easy thing to point to as the source of our gendered identity.

And since virtually everyone is cisgender, the body-centric view is what they indoctrinate children with. They tell us our body is all that matters, when we’re too little to have figured out how to tie our shoes or look both ways before we cross the street, much less to have existential thoughts that maybe there’s more to existence than just the body. They tell us about penises and vaginas; we know which one we have, so… the math checks out? At that age, how’s anyone supposed to know better?

The main reason why I absolutely hate that “trans people always knew” narrative is that it expects trans kids—no, preschoolers—to somehow independently formulate an entirely different theory of gender to account for their own feelings, rejecting the version given to them by adults. To me, that seems like an unreasonable and unfair ask. That’s too much to put on a kid who can’t even reliably get themselves to the potty on time. Especially since the adults seem to have the answers for everything else, why shouldn’t they have the answer about gender too?

As the companion piece explains, some kids do know even at that early age. To me, that seems like a minor miracle. For the rest of us, it’s not our fault that the adults around us didn’t teach us better.

We lacked the right concepts to understand our lives

Only being taught that flawed, body-centric view of human gender means that you’re not given some core concepts to work with: All the core concepts relevant to trans experience. We’re not taught about any of the core concepts of trans experience—gender identity vs. gender expression, what dysphoria is, and all the rest—nor are we given any language to use for thinking about them.

And when you lack the relevant concepts, it’s nigh impossible to properly understand your own life and experiences.

How are you to make sense of being uncomfortable about having to use the boys’ locker room at gym class, if you’ve been told you’re a boy and gaslit into believing it? How are you to make sense of being uncomfortable about growing breasts while your peers are excited about it, if you’ve been told you’re a girl and gaslit into believing it? Shouldn’t you be excited too? You “should,” but you know you aren’t, and it just doesn’t make any sense. You lack the concepts and vocabulary for making sense of it.

There’s even a concept for this lack-of-concepts: hermeneutical injustice:

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when someone's experiences are not well understood — by themselves or by others — because these experiences do not fit any concepts known to them (or known to others), due to the historic exclusion of some groups of people from activities, such as scholarship and journalism, that shape the language people use to make sense of their experiences.

Which is not to say that we aren’t given any concepts for understanding ourselves. As a kid who looked like a boy but vibed like a girl, I gave off a lot of signs about my underlying identity. People saw my signs but inevitably mis-identified them. (Unsurprising, since they also lacked the right concepts.) Everyone, myself included, filtered what they saw about me through the concepts they had. Which were wrong.

Adults tried to be gentle about it, using concepts like “shy” and “awkward”. My peers were more blunt, preferring “weirdo,” “loser,” “freak,” and any number of other epithets.

Those were the tools I had for making sense out of my life, my experiences, and my feelings. And while those tools offered a certain perverse, circular logic, understanding myself solely through that lens was absolute murder on my self-esteem.

It wasn’t physically safe

The first two are bad enough, but this is the big one.

When your brain is wired for “girl” but everybody expects you to align with “boy”—or vice versa—you’re bound to mess up a lot. The gendered expectations you’re supposed to follow, the myriad unwritten rules, none of it comes naturally.

When I was really little, I always had an easy time making friends with girls. Which was fine. At that age, nobody cared. But by second grade or so, that wasn’t ok anymore. The girls exiled me from their side of the playground to go make friends with the boys. I tried, doing what had always worked before with girls, and failed abjectly: boys simply don’t socialize the same way.

What I learned very quickly—what basically all trans kids learn very quickly—is that when you don’t conform to all the secret, unwritten rules that everybody else seems to understand instinctively, you get punished. And as I had discovered, much of that punishment comes in the threat (or reality) of exile: from social groups. From families. From jobs. From homes. From all the things that enable you to maintain a safe, stable living situation.

When you’re a kid, you get called names on the playground. You get singled out. They grab your stuff and play keep-away with it, laughing while you struggle to get your stuff back. You get pushed to the margins, excluded. You get teased and bullied.

The adults around you, whose job is to give you wise counsel, are quick say, “Just be yourself! People will like you if they get to know the real you.” As trans kids, we learn very young this is true within the narrow world of fellow misfits but that in the wide world of everyone else it’s simply not safe to be ourselves. Those adults might just as well have been advising me to go play in traffic.

Depending on how rigid your family is about gender roles, you might get punished at home too. Spanked or berated. Told to “stop crying” or “man up.” I don’t know what kind of gender policing trans men get for not fitting in with feminine expectations, but I’m sure they get it too. When you’re a teenager, if you’re still acting too out of line with your assigned gender, or if you have the audacity to actually say you’re trans, you might get exiled from your parents’ home. Put out on the street. For late bloomers who are married with children by the time they realize, the threat is that your spouse will exile you from the home you yourself have helped make: cutting you off from the closest, most important relationships in your life.

Historically, there was no legal protection for trans people (or queer people generally) in the workplace. It was exceedingly common for people to get fired if they came out as trans. For a recent while, that was getting better. But now we have the fascist in chief’s executive orders rolling back DEI protections, as if somehow equality were a bad thing.

In every area of life, the threat of exile lurks behind the thought of coming out, with the potential consequences directly threatening the safety and stability of your life. It attacks the foundations of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

And if you know you’re trans, you will eventually have to come out. Your subconscious knows this too, and keeps you safe by keeping you in the dark.

It wasn’t emotionally safe either

Living with gender dysphoria that’s been misdiagnosed as “shy, awkward, weirdo loser freak syndrome” is hard enough. Living with it while understanding that it stems from an unalterable mismatch between mind and body would be torture.

“Unalterable?” you ask, “But if you knew you were trans, wouldn’t you just set your sights on transitioning?” Well, no. Because the hermeneutical injustice includes not knowing about transitioning, either. You could realize through introspection that you’re trans. But you cannot realize through introspection that hormone therapy and surgeries also exist. So no. Realizing that you’re trans without knowledge of transitioning would feel like a death sentence. Or rather, would feel like a life sentence for endless torture.

I don’t know how you’d survive that. When I look back on my life, especially at how emotionally difficult my high-school years were, I really don’t think I would have survived if I’d also understood that I was a girl suck living what was for me an awful boy-shaped life forever.

There was a freeway overpass about ten blocks from where we lived in Phoenix. Sometimes, I would sneak out late and walk those ten blocks through the warm night air, out of our quiet neighborhood and into the sleazier part of town by the freeway. I would walk out to the middle of the overpass, cars and semi-trucks whizzing by below me, knowing that only a teenager’s impulse control stood between me and the plunge. I’d stand there a few moments, steeping in the feeling of danger, then walk back home. Sneak back in through my bedroom window as if nothing at all had happened.

Emotionally it’s a lot safer to simply believe you’re a loser. Emotionally, it’s safer if you don’t understand who you really are. Your subconscious isn’t just keeping you safe from other people’s gender policing; it’s keeping you safe from yourself, too.

Building our disguise

So our subconscious hides this self-knowledge from us while guiding us through a different game than everyone else is playing. Everyone else gets to play “be yourself,” while we play “fit in or die”. What we need is a disguise. A mask made of carefully-constructed persona that matches the expectations created by our gendered bodies. The better we build this disguise, the better we fit in, the less punishment we receive. The less danger of exile we face.

So, without even noticing that we’re doing it, we pull back from engaging with people. We observe more and do less, trying to figure out the unwritten rules. We over-think the heck out of every situation before we try anything, working out our best guess as to how we’re supposed to behave.

We mess up a lot. We accidentally cross lines we can’t see. Break rules we don’t know exist. That’s how we discover them. We take whatever punishment the gender police mete out and learn not to do that again.

Through painful trial-and-error, we piece together the vocabulary and grammar of our assigned gender. We learn to “speak boy” or “speak girl” as a second language. We learn how to pretend to be our assigned gender well enough that eventually nobody can tell that we’re not. Until they stop calling us weirdo loser freaks or worse. Until we become invisible to the gender police.

Until we’re finally safe.

Fitting in, for trans kids, and trans teens, and trans young-adults, is a survival mechanism. And you better believe that our brains absolutely do not give up their survival mechanisms easily. Especially not when learning them came at such a high cost.

A common thread with late-bloomers, myself included, is that we came into our self-awareness when we were finally old enough, finally secure enough, finally in-charge enough of our own living situations that the potential fallout from discovering we’re trans no longer threatened the basic safety and stability of our lives. Bluntly: “even if the shit completely hit the fan, I’d still be ok.”

The deck was stacked

That’s a lot to overcome. A lot of social and psychological weight pressing against your ability to know yourself. It’s no wonder I didn’t figure it out sooner, and no wonder so many others don’t either. Once I understood all that, the conundrum of “why didn’t I know sooner?” shifted to “well of course I didn’t know sooner!”

My egg cracked about 10 years ago. Not coincidentally, 10 years ago Caitlyn Jenner came out as a trans woman and made the cover of Vanity Fair.

Suddenly, the media was talking about trans people, and treating trans people as something more than a joke, and blowing the doors off of the hermeneutical injustice prison. Not that there weren’t still jokes, but this was an Olympic gold medal winner! A serious, respectable person! It went beyond the media. For a while it felt like everybody was talking about it, having opinions about it, saying “yeah, I had an uncle once”—or a cousin or a sister—“who was like that”.

Through the noise, I finally found the concepts I needed to process my experiences and feelings and the vocabulary to talk about it. As well, this happened at an age where my safety no longer depended on successfully pretending to be a man. I no longer needed the survival mechanisms—the disguise or the self-unawareness—because my subconscious understood that I would survive the shit hitting the fan.

All the factors that had kept the door to my mental basement firmly closed were gone. Finally, that door opened and I discovered myself—my true self—behind it. In that light, of course it took that long. Of course I didn’t know sooner.

Everyone’s life has its own trajectory. The pressures keeping each person’s basement door closed will ease on their own schedules. But if you’re someone who has also been tormented over not figuring it out sooner, it’s ok. It’s not your fault. The deck was stacked against you. And you did incredible work just to survive long enough to figure it out.

I’m so glad you did. And I’m so glad you’ve found yourself now.