When do People Realize They're Trans?

Spoiler: any time! But why?

Source image by Ruth Hartnup

The other day, Doc Impossible† skeeted this:

She’s probably not wrong, but to me the important question is not so much when you realized that you’re trans, but why it took until then. If you’re one of those lurking eggs feeling excluded for not knowing young, read on.

Doc Impossible is putting her finger on on the pop-culture myth that “real trans people knew they were trans since they were toddlers.”

I use “myth” intentionally, because being trans and knowing you’re trans are wholly independent things. There’s plenty of proper science-based evidence that being born cis or trans is down to the interplay of genetics and hormone stuff that happens during fetal development. (That’s a deep subject for a different article, but here’s a good one-shot paper if you’re curious.)

TL;DR: if you’re trans, you were born trans, literally before you knew anything at all. Thus, being and knowing must be different things.

The Timelines of Knowing

I’ve seen enough other trans people’s stories to observe that most people’s experiences fit with one of three major timelines:

1. There’s the ones who always knew

2. The ones who figured it out in puberty

3. Late-bloomers like me

Here’s the kicker: simply because there are multiple timelines, they can be—and often are—wielded against one another in denial of trans people’s identities. We see kids who express their transness pre-puberty, only to be told, “You’re too young to really know.” We also get puberty and post-puberty people coming out only to be told, “You can’t be trans! If you were, you would have known since you were little.” Well, which is it?

It’s any of them. All the timelines are valid.

Image courtesy Maureen Barlin. Used with permission.

What those denials ignore, and the point of this whole article, is that there are reasons why people realize they’re trans at different ages. It’s not just random. Realizing your identity at one particular age rather than another doesn’t mean you’re not trans for not figuring it out at some mythical Right Time. Rather, your particular timeline of knowing says more about the circumstances of your life than anything else. It is a window into the forces that were—or are—active in shaping your life.

I should caveat that what follows are my conclusions about why people fall into these different timelines. I don’t have clinical studies or published research to back them up. What I have is many, many trans people’s stories that have been shared online, my own understanding of gender identity, and the ability to see patterns in all of it. I will not claim that these suppositions are capital-T Truth. But they make a great deal of sense to me.

“I always knew”

The first timeline is the pop-culture myth. But just because being and knowing are different things doesn’t mean that nobody knows at very early ages. Some kids recognize they’re not the gender everybody thinks from as soon as they can put words together well enough to tell their parents that the stork made a mistake.

This doesn’t mean they can sit their parents down and say, “Mother, Father, I’m transgender.” All they know is that when people treat them as boys or as girls, some part of themselves speaks up to insist no, that’s not right! The kid whose mom made the How to Be a Girl podcast is one of them, and her story is well worth listening to.

Because of what gender identity does in our psyches, I suspect that most trans people have some level of this experience at those young ages, when they’re old enough for their gender identity to come online and start doing its job. I further suspect that whether that experience rises to the level of a consistent and strongly-asserted sense of cross-sex identity depends strongly on the environment one lives in at the time. Specifically, the environment as regards gender policing.

If you’re a trans kid whose community of family and babysitters and daycare or preschool teachers and other kids at the daycare or preschool are pretty chill about gender norms—that is, if nobody is particularly bothered by whether a bunch of preschoolers are demonstrating “correct” gender-coded behaviors and mannerisms—then the trans kids find themselves relatively free to explore what they like to play with or wear or who they like to be friends with, and are thus more likely to see the connection between their innate preferences and the “boy” and “girl” categories around them.

But if you’re a trans kid whose community really freaks out when a boy wants to play with dolls or a girl refuses to wear a dress, you’re rapidly going to realize that your innate preferences only get you in trouble. That you’re better off just doing whatever everybody else expects. If you experience gender policing strongly enough, you never get the chance to see that connection.

For example, a trans girl constantly being told that she’s a boy and that “boys don’t cry,” etc., is receiving a clear message but that message is not “you’re a girl.” It’s “you’re doing boy-ness wrong”. She never has the chance to recognize that what she’s doing is right for girl-ness before those behaviors are beaten or yelled or disapproved out of her.

Some kids do know from a very young age. And my bet is that the ones who figure it out are the ones who aren’t pressured to fit into neat little boxes before they can even tie their own shoes.

“Puberty kicked my ass”

The second timeline should be no surprise: a lot of trans people, especially today, are figuring it out as they go through puberty. Or more broadly, in the puberty-adjacent years. Let’s call it early teens through early 20s.

Pre-puberty, and with clothes on, there’s honestly not a lot of difference between boys’ and girls’ bodies. Everybody’s basically flat-chested and straight-waisted. That is, there’s little to trigger physical gender dysphorias. And for the first half or so of our pre-puberty existence, even socially there’s not a lot of pressure for boys and girls to segregate into opposing camps; few people care whether male and female kindergarteners play together. Especially the kids themselves. Hence, minimal social dysphoria either.

This changes somewhere around age seven or eight, when suddenly members of the opposite sex have “cooties” and trans kids learn that they’re supposed to playing with the other group: with the half of the schoolyard who they never understood. That’s hard, socially, but does not usually seem to to trigger an actual identity crisis.

But fast forward another few years and you’re hitting puberty. All of a sudden, your body is changing. It’s changing in ways people have warned you about. Ways you’ve known were coming, but now that they’re here you’re discovering you extremely very much do not like! In other words, you’re confronted with serious physical gender dysphorias for the first time.

Simultaneously, your peers who are going through the same stuff seem to like it. Look forward to it, even. The boys discover working out and getting swole, reveling in muscles to go along with their nascent moustaches. The girls have rites of passage around bras and cycles.

For trans kids, the stark contrast between one’s own horror at bodily changes that our peers are reveling in can often be enough to make someone realize that they are not the boy or the girl they’d thought they were.

Knowledge plays a role here too. In the 10 years or so that since I’ve been participating in trans spaces, I’ve seen a substantial uptick in this timeline. This should be no surprise: the amount of media coverage on trans issues has absolutely skyrocketed in that decade. And with it, kids today are growing up in an environment where “gender identity,” “gender expression,” “gender dysphoria,” and “transgender” are concepts they’ve encountered. Concepts they more or less understand, even if all they have is the often-inaccurate cisgender world’s view of trans existence. At least they know it’s a thing!

Today’s kids don’t suffer from the same hermeneutical injustice that past generations did. And since they understand those concepts, once they start having physical gender dysphoria about facial hair or muscles or breasts or periods, they’re a lot more able to recognize what their dysphoric feelings mean. It might take a few years and a bunch of denial before getting there, but for tons of kids these days, puberty is ultimately the thing that cracks their eggs.

There’s an irony here that bears mentioning: Various voices in conservative and transphobic circles love to wring hands over the “epidemic” of kids “turning trans.” They look everywhere for explanations—video games? The internet? Peer pressure?—as if by figuring out what’s causing it, they could make it stop.

News flash, you idiots, this “epidemic” is not of kids becoming trans. Once again, for those in the back: If you’re trans, you were born that way. Rather, it’s just that kids have a higher degree of awareness of gender identity issues now versus kids 10 or 15 or 50 years ago, and thus the few who are trans have an increased ability to recognize themselves as trans.

And why do they have this increased awareness? Because those same conservative and transphobic voices won’t shut up about it! They’re the ones keeping trans issues in the media, yelling and screaming about trans kids in sports and bathroom bills. However unintentionally, the transphobes are doing phenomenal work in eradicating the knowledge gaps that kept so many trans people of the past in the dark about their identities for so long.

There aren’t more trans kids than there used to be. There are only more out trans kids than there used to be. Some of those kids—the lucky ones whose parents are supportive and have the means—will be able to transition earlier and live happier lives than they otherwise would have. An irony, to be sure, but a good one!

“I’m a late bloomer”

The last timeline is the late-bloomers. Those who don’t figure it out until well into adulthood.

What explains them? The answer to that is involved enough to require another article. Read it for the deep-dive, but it boils down to this: not being taught that transness is a thing, misinterpreting your own life because you lack those concepts, and the dynamics of gender policing all combine to make it physically and emotionally unsafe to understand our own identities.

I was a late bloomer. Like I says in the other article, I didn’t figure it out until I was 45. In a world without gender policing and transphobia, maybe I’d have figured it out during puberty. In a world where people bothered to explain to little kids about the existence of trans people, how to spot gender dysphoria if they ever feel it, and made self-identity a safe thing to explore, I might even have been one of the “always knew” kids too.

Everyone who is old enough to be a late bloomer today, including myself, grew up in a world vastly ignorant about trans issues and rampant with brutal gender policing that manifests itself in the threat (or reality) of exile: from families. From jobs. From homes. From social support networks. From all the things that enable you to maintain a safe, stable living situation.

Deep down, we recognize the danger inherent in other people’s unwillingness to accept that we were born trans.

My decades of self-unawareness were the product of survival mechanisms and coping skills: psychological defenses that kept me safe—housed and employed—despite the absolutely soul-crushing pressures of gender dysphoria and self-esteem destruction that comes with it.

The myth of “always knew”

Earlier I called the “always knew” trope a myth. This is justified: plenty of perfectly real trans people didn’t know until much later.

But I also think that in a world that was far more woke about gender identity vs. gender expression, a world that was far more woke about personal autonomy and self-determination, that myth might well be true. But that is not the world we live in. In this world, the ways in which society is insufficiently woke about those things work directly against trans people’s own self-realization.

I hope we reach that world someday. It will be a better world for everyone. But in the here-and-now, if you are trans, don’t let your own timeline be used against you. Don’t let it undermine your confidence in who you know yourself to be. Rather, let your own timeline serve as a window into understanding your own life and how the different forces in it have shaped you and the experiences you’ve had.

Addendum

Since publishing this, I have received many comments on Reddit, Blue Sky, and here, regarding the intersectional ways in which neurodiversity dogpiles onto the difficulties written about here, making it even harder for neurodiverse transfolk to knokw their own identities. I am sure they are right, but I wouldn’t know; seeing things through my own neurotypical lens, I am in no position to understand—much less write about—those intersectionalities. I would love it if someone with that lived experience would write their own take on this, both so I can lean and for the benefit of the gender diverse community as a whole. If that person is you, please get in touch so I can read your work and link it here.

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†I would be remiss not to give a plug for—and confess a modest Substack author crush on—Doc Impossible. Her articles are the stuff of epiphanies. Her “Ground Glass” series of seven articles, starting here, was indescribably helpful to me early in my coming out, and her advice on coming out at work made that process far more comfortable. If you’re not already reading her stuff, you’re missing out.