One thing that kept me confused, even after I discovered trans people, was I thought the concept of transition was very binary. I had a lot of genuinely feminine feelings and mannerisms. Of course, so do some cis men - but if I felt feminine, and I was AFAB, why wouldn’t that mean I’m a woman? Why wouldn’t I just stay one?
I had to learn I didn’t have to be or feel 100% masculine to want to be a man. I didn’t have to be some hyper masc jock bro on the other side of transition (although I do have some of that in me too lmao). I didn’t like my “female”-coded body. I didn’t like she/her pronouns or my given name. That was enough. And I could be a femme, campy, f*ggoty man on the other side.
What I discovered too is that female femininity is WAY different from male femininity. Entirely different feelings, entirely different vibes. Femininity is expected in women, especially cis women. It felt like chains. It felt boring and not artful, not playful. Femininity as a gay man feels radical, subversive, fun, a thrilling mashup of genders. It feels the way I always wanted it to feel.
Anyway - excellent article. My egg sustained several large structural cracks all throughout my life, but didn’t break open until I was almost 35 years old. Better late than never, but I still mourn the youth I didn’t get to have.
Thanks for commenting! That's very interesting. So much of online trans discourse is dominated by trans women, I don't feel like I get to hear nearly enough from trans men or non-binary people about this stuff. I love your take on how femininity feels different to you from each side.
What's interesting to me is that for me, masculinity felt boring and constrictive when I was doing that, but now that I'm doing femininity (as much as I can, anyway), *that* feels playful and fun.
I wonder if the difference in feeling is about differences in how both masculinity and femininity are expressed by people of each gender, vs. just finally getting to be how we want to be.
I saw so much of my own journey in this article (I was 44 when I figured it out). Thank you for this. I often regret not cracking my egg sooner but my rational mind knows that it would have destroyed me. I'm glad the younger generations have more knowledge than we did.
I may be reading too much into your choice of the word "regret", and if so please disregard the following, but it makes me worry. Please, don't blame yourself for however long it took you to realize.
It helps me to be mindful of the difference between regret and grief.
Regret is for things I had any choice over, and blew it. Grief is for things I had no choice over. I don't think any of us have any choice over when our eggs crack (Doc Impossible has a really good article on this: https://stainedglasswoman.substack.com/p/lets-fly), so to me it doesn't make any sense to regret not having cracked my egg sooner. That wasn't up to me. Which leaves regret feeling like victim-blaming.
But I can still grieve for the years I lost. There's value in grief. Grief is not fun, but it is a good thing. It helps you heal.
A very well written article, and one I would have found immensely helpful a year or so ago. (Funny how I've aged a decade in the year before the century since January 21...) I had to remind myself when talking with my therapist a month ago that I had only been dressing gender appropriately for a year; it still amazes me to think that I had (and thought I loved!) a beard down to mid chest 18 months ago. The psychological defenses are hugely powerful, because they are a you note keyed to survival - they /really/ don't want you to do anything they've learned well harm you or potentially cause your social or physical death - like, y'know, actually admitting out loud you were never the gender you've been pretending to be since you first got smacked down for telling "trusted adults" as a very small child. It is absolutely a testament to our strength and resilience that we have survived decades in the wrong "box," and the more successful we have been the harder the defenses work initially to keep us from "blowing it." And, commensurately, the greater the relief and return of mental resources to our "spoon drawer" to just live and enjoy life - which is why even in the face of the rapidly escalating need for ever more "spoons," we /still/ choose reality over compliance, and we can be confident we've already been through the fire - we /know/ we have the strength to survive this, too... especially now that we're not alone. 💖
I definitely experienced the lack of concepts/words as a youth, and lack of safety as a youth and adult. It wasn't until my spouse fully deconstructed our religion and embraced their own queerness that I had the emotional capacity to come out to myself.
Another factor for me, as a late 30s NB transfemme, is that I personally don't have much dysphoria around my genitals or name, but rather feel like something critical is missing when restricted to traditionally masculine modes of expression, both socially, bodily (e.g. breasts) and sexually.
As a kid I think it just came out as awkward loner most of the time. After all I didn't _not_ feel like a boy, but if I'd known I could be a girl too, or take what I like from both and be bound to neither, wow would that have hit home. Now that I'm feeling the freedom to carve my own path of gendered expression, there's a world of difference.
Like other comments, this article is so spot on. Being a child of the 70's there was no general awareness of the trans community. After puberty and in the 80's I just thought I was the weird kid that didn't quite fit in, and was always more comfortable hanging out with friends that were female. Then a cycle of buy-and-purge femme items, because "it's just a kink".
It wasn't until the birth of my second child that I could definitively say to myself that I was trans, but then it was another 17 years before I could verbalize that to another person. I grieve the time lost being miserable trying to live up to what I felt society demanded of me, but I also am determined to enjoy my time left in the world just being myself.
This so precisely describes my experience, thank you for writing it. I only came to grips with my identity 7 months ago now, at age 41. My childhood home was physically and mentally abusive and my survival instinct was incredibly strong. I also felt like I could stretch the boundaries of what 'man' was far enough to include myself, and indeed I queered up every situation I was in as much as possible and surrounded myself with musicians, artists, punks, people with open views on sexuality and gender. But when I finally learned what a transgender person was in 2015, some part of me immediately knew. And I just shut that down immediately because I felt too old already at 31. I didn't let myself learn about HRT or surgical interventions. But I supported my friends who did those things and went out of my way to get to know every trans person I could. I was fascinated but did not want to seem creepy. And indeed, I watched some of my good friends live through and create chaos and disruption that seemed completely untenable to me, completely at odds with my calculus of 'safe'. For me that looked like buying land, building a home, being self-employed for years and being in a supportive long-term relationship. That's how much I needed to finally allow myself to crack and I am so goddamn lucky I was even able to achieve all that and have incredible friends to support me as I figured out what was wrong and why I had become such a wild alcoholic despite all my 'success' in life. So now that I am out and I so very much happier and at peace with myself, I am completely radicalized towards informed consent, widespread cultural awareness and early in life access to care. No one should have to live through what we all lived through, what I lived through. Society will let us be ourselves happily, or I will personally be at war with the culture that denies this, which I will wage with every form of art I can devise so that every person I can reach will have a chance to know the truth.
This perspective speaks entirely to my existence, except I also endured 5 years of complex trauma between the ages of 10-15 and self-medicated for another 15 years afterwards. We subconsciously do what we do to survive.
Your words could almost be a summary of the book I've written.
I see so many young people questioning, asking "Who am I, what am I?" And I have no answer for them.
The one advantage of coming out late in life is that when you know, you know.
There's no hesitation. Once the veneer of 'normalcy' is stripped away, and you see yourself for who you are, there's no going back.
Someone asked me if I could take a pill and be male, would I? My answer was rather explicit. But essentially, why would I want to return to being the broken shell of a human being I pretended to be for 60 years.
Some people can't process the existential concept of brain/body separateness.
Now if I could take a pill or two and be female, hell yes, In fact that's exactly what I'm doing LOL
It may not be magical, snap your fingers. But I'll get there slowly and I'm happy with that
Just for the record, Caitlyn Jenner is NOT a serious or respectable person. She is a selfish republican weasel who has repeatedly thrown the trans community under the bus. Most of the trans people I know consider her to be a traitor to the community.
Yes. The political direction she has leaned since coming out is... highly disappointing. But, ironic or not, it's difficult not to link her specifically-public coming out as an inflection point for trans awareness in our society.
Reading this article I really vibe with the concept of hermeneutical injustice. In my case it wasn't even that I didn't know that trans-people existed, I even know what being trans meant. I knew that I'd rather be a girl. But I also "knew" I wasn't trans: Because I wasn't trans enough. I hadn't tryed to self-srs aged 4 with the kiddy scissors, I hadn't been "one of the girls" as a kid, I didn't play with puppets (actually I did have a pretty normal cis boyhood all things considered).
In hindsight that's not too suprising since my female role models weren't girly girls either (my mom's an engineer, my aunt founded a company) and my dad was my main caregiver.
I only really discovered gender differences as a teen and then got horribly bullied for not being a proper boy. As a result I didn't dare do anything insufficiently manly in public until Corona, where I finally grew out my hair.
In my early tweens I got obsessed with transgender fiction and actually started wondering if I might be trans, but the "trans tests" on the internet told me I'm a crossdresser and the only trans-stories I knew were those of early bloomers. Thus I concluded I'm probably a bit gender queer, but not really trans and coming out as gender queer is probably just asking for discrimination. So I once again buried my feelings under cope and isolated myself largely from society for more than the next decade.
In the end the truth set me free... I ended up reading some transgender fiction again and some story informed me that there were no necessary conditions for being trans and if I wanted to be a girl I probably was.
I don't need to be dysphoric (I mean which fish being born in shit, can tell the difference between shit and water?), I don't need early childhood experiences, I can actually feel sexually aroused at the idea of being female... it's just enough that I want to be a girl.
With that my egg was cracked and I'm on the path of transition now. Just that information was enough to turn my denial into certainty.
A LOT of that sounds very familiar, only I think I decided to (learned this from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, I think) "practice ninja, the art of invisibility"...only I had no clue why I'd been rejected, gotten in fights, etc. Concluded why bother actually "fitting in"? just show up, do the work, make the adults happy? Well eventually it's tough to get/keep jobs and a wife (I don't know how but it happened, for a few years) not wanting to act as expected for my AGAB.
Then one day in November at 46 all I can say is I woke up and felt girly (bonus assist fron gynecomastia) and here we are. Still not sure I'm 100% girl 100% of the time but I suspect "autism spectrum" features were more dysphoria related? Not sure but I definitely hardly vibe with men and seem to weirdly have women just open random bits of conversation. There are religious complications as well and sorting through everything (including the cis woman I'm trying not to crush on & probably gonna fail!) is gonna make my therapist earn his (I asked) paycheck!
Brilliant article. There are so many touch points with my life. When I came out as transgender, my sister replied "of course you are, you have always been, what took you so long"
I lacked the understanding, the words, and the courage. My life was one endless parade of everyone else telling me how my gender had to align with this bag of flesh, muscle and bone.
So much of what restricted me were ill formed notions of what it means to be trans:
I had always thought you had to be pretty and passable to even consider living life as a visibly trans woman. And yes, silly me thought I was not "transgender enough." Which is pretty funny because I am more femme than most cis women.
I had hoped that the world had evolved and we wouldn't be indoctrinating our children and their children into the same system that we grew up in and caused so much distress, but, I am not so sure anymore, the push back is disheartening. Anyway, thank you for the share and the fine writing.
Thank you for a brilliant article. I don't interpret "have always known" as directly knowing but as indirectly knowing that I have always been trans. From early age there have been signals that I didn't see in full context and hence didn't interpret them correctly of reasons you have brilliantly described in the article. Something where off early on and in that sense indirectly "have always known", but found the correct interpretation of these signals later on. And now fully aware of being trans that I "have always known" ❤️
You make some salient points and I can relate to much of them. There were a few aspects of my experience that I’ve discovered are rather commonplace with those who self-realized later in life.
My egg shattered shortly after I turned 40. It was a startling realization for me as I had lived all those years firmly planted in the cis-guy identity. The last two years since that awakening I’ve taken a lot of time for introspection and of course realized that there were signs and feelings of dysphoria (and gender euphoria) going back as early as I can recall. My dysphoria mainly manifested itself as gender envy, especially as things intensified through puberty.
I grew up through the 80’s & 90’s and as you noted, there wasn’t much discourse about trans identities at that time. Popular media often portrayed trans people as the butt of a joke, something a shy 11 year old doesn’t want to experience. There was also the trope that to be transgender MtF, that meant also being attracted to men, which I was not so of course what I am feeling isn’t that. The gender envy I experienced I also confused with attraction.
Repression through my teens, 20’s & 30’s was enabled by intense distraction to keep my mind from turning inward. I’ve had hundreds of hobbies which I would dive deep into that kept my brain busy and myself hidden. It was only when I allowed myself the emotional space to dive deep did I start to connect the dots on what my experiences and feelings meant. My whole life was like living in Plato’s cave. I was convinced I was happy, cis, and fully unaware of the outside world. Once that works became a known, the flood gates opened.
Fuck, this was tough to read. So damned familiar. Except I built my walls too strong, my mask so convincing it even fooled me. And I’m still eyeballing that overpass. 😢
One thing that kept me confused, even after I discovered trans people, was I thought the concept of transition was very binary. I had a lot of genuinely feminine feelings and mannerisms. Of course, so do some cis men - but if I felt feminine, and I was AFAB, why wouldn’t that mean I’m a woman? Why wouldn’t I just stay one?
I had to learn I didn’t have to be or feel 100% masculine to want to be a man. I didn’t have to be some hyper masc jock bro on the other side of transition (although I do have some of that in me too lmao). I didn’t like my “female”-coded body. I didn’t like she/her pronouns or my given name. That was enough. And I could be a femme, campy, f*ggoty man on the other side.
What I discovered too is that female femininity is WAY different from male femininity. Entirely different feelings, entirely different vibes. Femininity is expected in women, especially cis women. It felt like chains. It felt boring and not artful, not playful. Femininity as a gay man feels radical, subversive, fun, a thrilling mashup of genders. It feels the way I always wanted it to feel.
Anyway - excellent article. My egg sustained several large structural cracks all throughout my life, but didn’t break open until I was almost 35 years old. Better late than never, but I still mourn the youth I didn’t get to have.
Thanks for commenting! That's very interesting. So much of online trans discourse is dominated by trans women, I don't feel like I get to hear nearly enough from trans men or non-binary people about this stuff. I love your take on how femininity feels different to you from each side.
What's interesting to me is that for me, masculinity felt boring and constrictive when I was doing that, but now that I'm doing femininity (as much as I can, anyway), *that* feels playful and fun.
I wonder if the difference in feeling is about differences in how both masculinity and femininity are expressed by people of each gender, vs. just finally getting to be how we want to be.
I saw so much of my own journey in this article (I was 44 when I figured it out). Thank you for this. I often regret not cracking my egg sooner but my rational mind knows that it would have destroyed me. I'm glad the younger generations have more knowledge than we did.
I may be reading too much into your choice of the word "regret", and if so please disregard the following, but it makes me worry. Please, don't blame yourself for however long it took you to realize.
It helps me to be mindful of the difference between regret and grief.
Regret is for things I had any choice over, and blew it. Grief is for things I had no choice over. I don't think any of us have any choice over when our eggs crack (Doc Impossible has a really good article on this: https://stainedglasswoman.substack.com/p/lets-fly), so to me it doesn't make any sense to regret not having cracked my egg sooner. That wasn't up to me. Which leaves regret feeling like victim-blaming.
But I can still grieve for the years I lost. There's value in grief. Grief is not fun, but it is a good thing. It helps you heal.
A very well written article, and one I would have found immensely helpful a year or so ago. (Funny how I've aged a decade in the year before the century since January 21...) I had to remind myself when talking with my therapist a month ago that I had only been dressing gender appropriately for a year; it still amazes me to think that I had (and thought I loved!) a beard down to mid chest 18 months ago. The psychological defenses are hugely powerful, because they are a you note keyed to survival - they /really/ don't want you to do anything they've learned well harm you or potentially cause your social or physical death - like, y'know, actually admitting out loud you were never the gender you've been pretending to be since you first got smacked down for telling "trusted adults" as a very small child. It is absolutely a testament to our strength and resilience that we have survived decades in the wrong "box," and the more successful we have been the harder the defenses work initially to keep us from "blowing it." And, commensurately, the greater the relief and return of mental resources to our "spoon drawer" to just live and enjoy life - which is why even in the face of the rapidly escalating need for ever more "spoons," we /still/ choose reality over compliance, and we can be confident we've already been through the fire - we /know/ we have the strength to survive this, too... especially now that we're not alone. 💖
I definitely experienced the lack of concepts/words as a youth, and lack of safety as a youth and adult. It wasn't until my spouse fully deconstructed our religion and embraced their own queerness that I had the emotional capacity to come out to myself.
Another factor for me, as a late 30s NB transfemme, is that I personally don't have much dysphoria around my genitals or name, but rather feel like something critical is missing when restricted to traditionally masculine modes of expression, both socially, bodily (e.g. breasts) and sexually.
As a kid I think it just came out as awkward loner most of the time. After all I didn't _not_ feel like a boy, but if I'd known I could be a girl too, or take what I like from both and be bound to neither, wow would that have hit home. Now that I'm feeling the freedom to carve my own path of gendered expression, there's a world of difference.
Like other comments, this article is so spot on. Being a child of the 70's there was no general awareness of the trans community. After puberty and in the 80's I just thought I was the weird kid that didn't quite fit in, and was always more comfortable hanging out with friends that were female. Then a cycle of buy-and-purge femme items, because "it's just a kink".
It wasn't until the birth of my second child that I could definitively say to myself that I was trans, but then it was another 17 years before I could verbalize that to another person. I grieve the time lost being miserable trying to live up to what I felt society demanded of me, but I also am determined to enjoy my time left in the world just being myself.
I love this! It’s so inspiring. It prompted a lot of reflection about my gender journey. Thank you for sharing!
This so precisely describes my experience, thank you for writing it. I only came to grips with my identity 7 months ago now, at age 41. My childhood home was physically and mentally abusive and my survival instinct was incredibly strong. I also felt like I could stretch the boundaries of what 'man' was far enough to include myself, and indeed I queered up every situation I was in as much as possible and surrounded myself with musicians, artists, punks, people with open views on sexuality and gender. But when I finally learned what a transgender person was in 2015, some part of me immediately knew. And I just shut that down immediately because I felt too old already at 31. I didn't let myself learn about HRT or surgical interventions. But I supported my friends who did those things and went out of my way to get to know every trans person I could. I was fascinated but did not want to seem creepy. And indeed, I watched some of my good friends live through and create chaos and disruption that seemed completely untenable to me, completely at odds with my calculus of 'safe'. For me that looked like buying land, building a home, being self-employed for years and being in a supportive long-term relationship. That's how much I needed to finally allow myself to crack and I am so goddamn lucky I was even able to achieve all that and have incredible friends to support me as I figured out what was wrong and why I had become such a wild alcoholic despite all my 'success' in life. So now that I am out and I so very much happier and at peace with myself, I am completely radicalized towards informed consent, widespread cultural awareness and early in life access to care. No one should have to live through what we all lived through, what I lived through. Society will let us be ourselves happily, or I will personally be at war with the culture that denies this, which I will wage with every form of art I can devise so that every person I can reach will have a chance to know the truth.
This perspective speaks entirely to my existence, except I also endured 5 years of complex trauma between the ages of 10-15 and self-medicated for another 15 years afterwards. We subconsciously do what we do to survive.
Your words could almost be a summary of the book I've written.
I see so many young people questioning, asking "Who am I, what am I?" And I have no answer for them.
The one advantage of coming out late in life is that when you know, you know.
There's no hesitation. Once the veneer of 'normalcy' is stripped away, and you see yourself for who you are, there's no going back.
Someone asked me if I could take a pill and be male, would I? My answer was rather explicit. But essentially, why would I want to return to being the broken shell of a human being I pretended to be for 60 years.
Some people can't process the existential concept of brain/body separateness.
Now if I could take a pill or two and be female, hell yes, In fact that's exactly what I'm doing LOL
It may not be magical, snap your fingers. But I'll get there slowly and I'm happy with that
Just for the record, Caitlyn Jenner is NOT a serious or respectable person. She is a selfish republican weasel who has repeatedly thrown the trans community under the bus. Most of the trans people I know consider her to be a traitor to the community.
Yes. The political direction she has leaned since coming out is... highly disappointing. But, ironic or not, it's difficult not to link her specifically-public coming out as an inflection point for trans awareness in our society.
Reading this article I really vibe with the concept of hermeneutical injustice. In my case it wasn't even that I didn't know that trans-people existed, I even know what being trans meant. I knew that I'd rather be a girl. But I also "knew" I wasn't trans: Because I wasn't trans enough. I hadn't tryed to self-srs aged 4 with the kiddy scissors, I hadn't been "one of the girls" as a kid, I didn't play with puppets (actually I did have a pretty normal cis boyhood all things considered).
In hindsight that's not too suprising since my female role models weren't girly girls either (my mom's an engineer, my aunt founded a company) and my dad was my main caregiver.
I only really discovered gender differences as a teen and then got horribly bullied for not being a proper boy. As a result I didn't dare do anything insufficiently manly in public until Corona, where I finally grew out my hair.
In my early tweens I got obsessed with transgender fiction and actually started wondering if I might be trans, but the "trans tests" on the internet told me I'm a crossdresser and the only trans-stories I knew were those of early bloomers. Thus I concluded I'm probably a bit gender queer, but not really trans and coming out as gender queer is probably just asking for discrimination. So I once again buried my feelings under cope and isolated myself largely from society for more than the next decade.
In the end the truth set me free... I ended up reading some transgender fiction again and some story informed me that there were no necessary conditions for being trans and if I wanted to be a girl I probably was.
I don't need to be dysphoric (I mean which fish being born in shit, can tell the difference between shit and water?), I don't need early childhood experiences, I can actually feel sexually aroused at the idea of being female... it's just enough that I want to be a girl.
With that my egg was cracked and I'm on the path of transition now. Just that information was enough to turn my denial into certainty.
Hi!
A LOT of that sounds very familiar, only I think I decided to (learned this from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, I think) "practice ninja, the art of invisibility"...only I had no clue why I'd been rejected, gotten in fights, etc. Concluded why bother actually "fitting in"? just show up, do the work, make the adults happy? Well eventually it's tough to get/keep jobs and a wife (I don't know how but it happened, for a few years) not wanting to act as expected for my AGAB.
Then one day in November at 46 all I can say is I woke up and felt girly (bonus assist fron gynecomastia) and here we are. Still not sure I'm 100% girl 100% of the time but I suspect "autism spectrum" features were more dysphoria related? Not sure but I definitely hardly vibe with men and seem to weirdly have women just open random bits of conversation. There are religious complications as well and sorting through everything (including the cis woman I'm trying not to crush on & probably gonna fail!) is gonna make my therapist earn his (I asked) paycheck!
Brilliant article. There are so many touch points with my life. When I came out as transgender, my sister replied "of course you are, you have always been, what took you so long"
I lacked the understanding, the words, and the courage. My life was one endless parade of everyone else telling me how my gender had to align with this bag of flesh, muscle and bone.
So much of what restricted me were ill formed notions of what it means to be trans:
I had always thought you had to be pretty and passable to even consider living life as a visibly trans woman. And yes, silly me thought I was not "transgender enough." Which is pretty funny because I am more femme than most cis women.
I had hoped that the world had evolved and we wouldn't be indoctrinating our children and their children into the same system that we grew up in and caused so much distress, but, I am not so sure anymore, the push back is disheartening. Anyway, thank you for the share and the fine writing.
Thank you for a brilliant article. I don't interpret "have always known" as directly knowing but as indirectly knowing that I have always been trans. From early age there have been signals that I didn't see in full context and hence didn't interpret them correctly of reasons you have brilliantly described in the article. Something where off early on and in that sense indirectly "have always known", but found the correct interpretation of these signals later on. And now fully aware of being trans that I "have always known" ❤️
You make some salient points and I can relate to much of them. There were a few aspects of my experience that I’ve discovered are rather commonplace with those who self-realized later in life.
My egg shattered shortly after I turned 40. It was a startling realization for me as I had lived all those years firmly planted in the cis-guy identity. The last two years since that awakening I’ve taken a lot of time for introspection and of course realized that there were signs and feelings of dysphoria (and gender euphoria) going back as early as I can recall. My dysphoria mainly manifested itself as gender envy, especially as things intensified through puberty.
I grew up through the 80’s & 90’s and as you noted, there wasn’t much discourse about trans identities at that time. Popular media often portrayed trans people as the butt of a joke, something a shy 11 year old doesn’t want to experience. There was also the trope that to be transgender MtF, that meant also being attracted to men, which I was not so of course what I am feeling isn’t that. The gender envy I experienced I also confused with attraction.
Repression through my teens, 20’s & 30’s was enabled by intense distraction to keep my mind from turning inward. I’ve had hundreds of hobbies which I would dive deep into that kept my brain busy and myself hidden. It was only when I allowed myself the emotional space to dive deep did I start to connect the dots on what my experiences and feelings meant. My whole life was like living in Plato’s cave. I was convinced I was happy, cis, and fully unaware of the outside world. Once that works became a known, the flood gates opened.
Fuck, this was tough to read. So damned familiar. Except I built my walls too strong, my mask so convincing it even fooled me. And I’m still eyeballing that overpass. 😢