Why Don't I Feel Like a Girl?
Note: this is written from a transfemme perspective for clarity, but the logic should apply to anybody. Gender swap as necessary. See also part 1 of this series, What does it feel like to be a girl?
The other reason I commonly see trans women get stuck in their gender questioning is because they “don’t feel like a girl.” They reason that if they were trans women, then surely they would feel like one, right? Yet, they don’t. These are people who have read through the gender dysphoria bible, have looked at their lives and seen all kinds of past experiences that point very clearly towards a transfemme identity. People who understand in their heads that they’re trans women, but who don’t feel it in their hearts.
My heart goes doubly out to them. First, because that’s an easy path to doubting our conclusions about ourselves. I know I’m a trans woman, so why don’t I feel like one? Second, and more so, because I struggle with it too.
I know it’s counterintuitive, but the message I want to share is this: “but I don’t feel like a girl” is not actually a reason to doubt your gender identity, because your identity isn’t where that feeling would even come from.
Head, Heart, and HRT
Understanding in your head that you’re a trans woman and that transitioning is something you need in your life to have any chance of being happy is a completely different thing than understanding it in your heart. Especially after a lifetime of living as a man, and especially if you believed you were a man for most of that time, too.
One of the hard lessons for me with HRT has been that it does not magically “make you feel like a girl” in your heart. Don’t get me wrong, it’s doing all kinds of other great things for me that I’m very happy about. But it is not casually bestowing upon me the internalized sense of my own womanhood that I crave.
Intellectually, yes, I understand 100% that I am a woman and I’m aware of all the reasons why that is a factually correct thing to say and am aware of all the life experiences that back it up. But emotionally, I’m not there yet. As a day-to-day thing, my internalized sense of how I am in the world is still that I’m a man. And I hate it.
I hate it so much. It was hard to get this far. Coming out of the closet was the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do. And I don’t need to explain to other trans women how hard transitioning is. I have a long way to go yet, but I’ve made so much progress. So it’s just a really bitter pill to swallow, having my own day-to-day sense of myself in the world still be that I’m a man. Even after all this. Even though I know better.
Looking back at it, I can see now that I went into HRT naively believing that the “feel like a girl” thing would somehow just… happen. But that’s not how it seems to work. I’ve talked about this multiple times with my therapist, but she doesn’t have any magical epiphany from therapy land to unlock it either.
Hold on a minute!
But wait: how did I ever end up feeling like a man in the first place? I’m not a man, so how is that the day-to-day sense of self I ended up with? Where did this internalized (but incorrect) sense of being a man even come from?
Well, I know it didn’t come from an intellectual understanding, or else it would have been replaced once I understood myself to be a woman. Nor did it come from the endogenous hormones male puberty gave me, or else again it would have gone away upon getting my hormones into the normal adult female ranges. Neither of those things fixed it, so neither of those is where it comes from.
So where, then?
There is one blindingly obvious possibility: this internalized (but incorrect) sense of masculinity comes from having lived as a man for a really f*cking long time first.
In other words, this day-to-day feeling of being a man doesn’t come from our gender identity. Rather, it comes from the longstanding, repeated practice of masculinity, wearing deep grooves into the neural pathways of our brains. The human brain is highly adaptable and plastic, but even so, something like that doesn’t just go away overnight.
The Empress’ new groove
Not feeling like a girl doesn’t mean I’m not a girl. It just means that I practiced the wrong thing for way too long.
Which also means that if I want to establish an internalized sense of femininity, I need to practice femininity. Day in, day out. I need to add as much to my feminine presentation as I can, and maintain it, day after day after day.
Wear new grooves into my brain, and stay off the old ones so they can fade away.
The solution is just to practice, practice, practice. Be who I know I am. Do it out in the world. Do it relentlessly. Do it until my heart feels what my head knows. Until I finally feel like the woman I am, and this Empress finally gets her new groove on.
Thank you for taking the time to write this article. It really helped me today. As a late in life MTF 6 months into my transition, I experience this feeling daily. Understanding why, and more importantly, a pragmatic approach to change this feeling is wonderfully liberating! I cannot thank you enough. Time to get out and practice! ❤️
"People who understand it in their heads that they're trans women, but who don't feel it in their hearts."
I've never seen a sentence sum up my experience as a cracked egg so directly. Thank you for your articles on this topic. It's been very helpful for me to reflect on.