Am I Trans for the Right Reasons? Does it Matter?

Self-doubt, denial, and the existential trans horror of I Saw the TV Glow.

I received this question in my Tumblr ask box the other day, and it got me thinking about the years I spent delaying transition, the damaging rhetoric of detransitioned TERFs that motivated me to do so, and Jane Schoenbrun’s excellent new film about trans longing and self-denial, I Saw the TV Glow:

Anon, your message touched my heart because I devoted many years to pondering this same question for myself — and doing so never did me any good. 

I turned the twisted knot of my gender dysphoria over and over in my head for years, looking at how I felt about my body, my social presentation, my voice, my job prospects, and my sexuality from all angles, trying to untangle the true essence of who I was from the pain of living in a sexist world that said I must be a wife and mother. I tracked every snarl of self-loathing and discomfort as far back as I could follow it, hoping to find its origin, the “root” that would explain why I didn’t identify as a woman. I thought that if I understood why I felt as I did, then I’d know what to do about it. 

Photo by Pascal van de Vendel on Unsplash

But no matter how much I reflected upon my childhood or my deepest feelings, I could only see the tendrils of dysphoria reaching further into the darkness, coming from some deeper place that remained unknowable to me. 

Was it something my dad said to me when I was too young to remember? Was it some strange miswiring of my brain as it grew? Was it my hatred of injustice rebelling against the oppression of women I saw everywhere I looked? It was impossible for me to say why I didn’t want to be a woman. I only knew I didn’t want to. 

Ultimately what I wanted was all that really mattered, but I would not understand this for a very long time. In my search for an objective gendered truth, I had found the narratives of many trans people, which I devoured ravenously. But I also found the accounts of TERF detransitioners, a vocal hate group of predominately cis women who said they made the “mistake” of transitioning because societal misogyny had curdled into internalized self-loathing.

Feeling Regret About My Detransition and Past Activism
Originally posted on Reclaiming Trans kyschevers.medium.com

These detrans TERFs said they had taken testosterone and removed breast tissue from their chests because they were traumatized rape victims and sexually harassed young girls fighting desperately to escape sexism —  but that transitioning had only left them feeling even more tainted by the patriarchy. Men had taken their sexual freedom, had taken their peace, and now had even taken their beautiful feminine bodies away. Now they believed that no one would ever love them. Some said they’d been ‘delusional’ for thinking they’d ever escape sexism, or for believing anyone would be attracted to their ‘mutilated’ trans form. 

Over time, these niche blogs written by bitter and hateful people would become the vanguard of a growing transphobic political movement, and inspire dozens of laws restricting access to transition-related care. At the time though, reading them was just my dirty secret. 

Nobody in my life knew yet that I had trans feelings. I believed that I had to interrogate my dysphoria thoroughly, and build a perfect defense against every objection that a transphobic person might raise. If I could not prove that my dysphoria was a reflection of the ‘true me,’ and not merely a strange side effect of the systemic misogyny that harmed everyone, then I didn’t deserve to transition. Like the detrans TERFs, I’d be doomed to ugly feelings and misery if I made the wrong decision, and I would deserve it. 

It was a waste of time for me to spend years sparring with detrans TERFs in my head, because in reality there is no separating a person’s sociopolitical context from their feelings, or how they make sense of their identity. Who we are is inextricably linked to our culture, our upbringing, the connections we make to other people, and our life experiences, just as much as it is our biology. 

Of course being subjected to sexism felt dysphoric for me. Sexism sucks for every woman to endure, and women fantasize about escaping structural misogyny and enjoying male privilege all the time. Lots of cisgender women ask themselves who they would be if they had been “born a guy.” 

But if you offer these cis women a sachet of your testosterone gel, most of them will recoil with obvious disgust. They don’t actually want to become “a man.” When they cringe at the thought of themselves growing chest hair and a larger clit, there are probably some social forces influencing them, such as feminine beauty standards. And that’s fine. They want what they want, for variety of complicated reasons, and they are allowed to avoid what they don’t. And us trans people are too. 

That some of our transitions have a social motivation behind them does not make them inherently suspect, or any less “pure” than the motives of someone with a clear sense of being “born in the wrong body.” That sensation was invented by cisgender clinicians, after all, then fed to many generations of trans people through depictions in movies and on reality TV. Everything we think and feel is societally tainted. How we interpret our feelings and make sense of them is influenced by our culture in massive ways. 

Today I look back and see that one of my motives for transitioning was escaping sexism. I hated that my boyfriend would not ever do the dishes or pick a moldy towel off the floor. I hated being viewed as physically weak, and random men offering to ‘protect’ me when I was walking home at night as a pretext to hitting on me. 

I hated that loved ones would cajole my partner for having not yet proposed to me, never asking me if I wanted to be married (I didn’t). I hated that whenever my boyfriend introduced me to friends or family for the first time, they would compliment him on having made such a good choice, as if I were a sports car he’d gotten a good deal on. I hated that jokes I’d cracked when we were together would find their way into my boyfriend’s plays without attribution, and that he truly could not remember I’d made them first. 

As a woman, I loathed feeling both eternally invisible and forever pawed over by everyone. I wanted people to assume absolutely nothing about me. I wanted a gender egalitarian relationship where I didn’t have to constantly guard against the ways that I was being swindled. I wanted to stop processing my every action through the lens of fucking gender — was I conforming, was I being a feminist, was I attractive still, was I a freak.

I also romanticized the feminine boys of anime, video games, and fanfiction, believing that once if I could pass through the veil to the other side of identity, then I could be tender and beautiful but respected. I could be adored for what I was, rather than expected to become someone’s mother or wife. I imagined myself being exactly the person that I was, only more confident, and without all the sexist baggage. 

Harboring desires like these is completely fine, anon. It’s okay if part of your motives for transitioning are to escape sexism or to reenact Destiel fanfiction with your boys. It’s a poorly kept secret that trans people do what we do because we want to, that we are motivated by desire just as often as by misery. 

Andrea Long Chu writes: 

I doubt that any of us transition simply because we want to “be” women, in some abstract, academic way. 

I certainly didn’t. I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my makeup in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts. 

But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should.

Chu’s dysphoria is not the kind that grimaces in the mirror, pushing and prodding at anatomy that shouldn’t be there. Instead, it’s all wrapped up in the social and cultural notions of what being a woman means today. 

Chu’s desires are even a bit politically inconvenient, she acknowledges, because sexism does influence what we determine “womanhood” to be. She knows she wants to be a woman because she longs to gossip, and I know that I am not one because I long to be an eternal bachelor. It’s problematic that we’ve been taught to link these qualities to gender, but we do all the same. We want what we want. 

A want being politically inconvenient does not make it any less appealing to us. Ask any feminist woman who eroticizes being overpowered. Our wants reflect our deepest fears as well as our most outlandish fantasies, all of them threading back to times and places we cannot change. What’s right for us might only be so for the wrong reasons. 

And so, Chu writes, it’s almost inevitable to want something that feels unattainable, and is all tangled up in cultural baggage: 

Call this the romance of disappointment. You want something. You have found an object that will give you what you want. This object is a person, or a politics, or an art form, or a blouse that fits. You attach yourself to this object, follow it around, carry it with you, watch it on TV. One day, you tell yourself, it will give you what you want. Then, one day, it doesn’t.

Transitioning did bring me a life free of sexism, and it did so shockingly quickly. I started getting paid more and people listened to me. I got book deals and speaking gigs. I had hookups in backrooms of gay bars without fear of predation. I stopped getting cat-called on the street by men. But then women began touching me, calling me slurs, and insulting my body. Strangers stopped being warm to me. I felt increasingly foolish in eyeliner or skirts. And then, as my body continued to morph, I stop recognizing the person in the mirror. 

I had stopped being a woman exactly as I’d wanted, but I had not become the cool anime pretty-boy of my fantasies. With transition I could escape sexism, but I could not escape the actual world. And so that world continued projecting gendered qualities onto me — this time as a man rather than as a woman. 

Bilateral Dysphoria

There are limits to chasing a fantasy. I was reminded of this watching I Saw the TV Glow, a heartbreaking new film directed by Jane Schoenbrun that is all about transness, fantasies, and being stuck in the suburbs. 

The protagonist of I Saw the TV Glow is “Owen,” a closeted trans woman who imagines that she belongs in the world of a TV show from her youth called The Pink Opaque. She shares this comforting illusion with a lesbian friend of hers, Maddy. 

Both girls live in a world that is painfully cruel. Their parents are physically abusive, controlling, and emotionally withholding. Death and illness haunt their lives and their community is the picture of suburban blight. Other than one another, the girls have zero friends, and even in their most vulnerable moments they fail to connect. Owen describes herself as feeling scooped out, lacking some essential quality that normal people have. Maddy has an obsessive intensity that drives others away. 

The girls dream of escaping into the world of The Pink Opaque because they cannot envision their current reality ever becoming hospitable to them. Maddy spends hours catching “Owen” up on the lore of the series, copying each aired episode onto a VHS tape and leaving it out for her in the photography classroom, scribbled with notes. They draw the insignia of The Pink Opaque on one another’s skin, dress up as the characters, and eventually get the facts of their own lives and the characters’ backstories crossed. 

Chasing the fantasy upends Maddy’s life. She drops out of high school and disappears suddenly, leaving an old cathode ray TV burning in the lawn. She is presumed dead. Afterward, she spends years in the desert working in a mall, the years flashing by quickly, unable to accept that this is all that life is. Eventually she attempts to enter the world of The Pink Opaque for real, going to extreme measures in order to do so — whether she succeeds or not depends on the viewer’s interpretation of the rest of the film. I won’t spoil that part. 

If Maddy is destroyed by the pursuit of an impossible-seeming fantasy, then “Owen’s” life is destroyed by the refusal to pursue it. She stays in town, never moving out of her parents’ house, caring for them as they grow old and die despite their inability to accept her. They limit her freedom and self-expression at every turn, preventing her from every getting comfortable with herself or finding new friends. She lurks in the dark at night furtively watching her favorite show. 

Decades later “Owen” finds herself working with the same people she always has, in the same dingy fun center, crying and apologizing to customers for her asthmatic coughs. She imagines that if she could only just cut herself open, she could claw out the powerful magical girl she was always meant to be. But whether she actually ever does is, again, up for the viewer to interpret. 

I Saw the TV Glow’s poster, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

This movie meant a lot to me, as someone who spent years denying the call of my dysphoria because I was wrapped up in an elaborate fantasy about what being trans meant. 

I used to fantasize that transitioning would solve all my problems. The imagined, future transitioned me felt so distant that it was easy to push him off. The less like me I supposed that he would be, the less capable I seemed of reaching him. He was both a comfort, and a specter that haunted me.

After the years passed and my resistance broke down and I finally reached out to claim him, I discovered the transgender me was just as awkward, lonesome, insecure, and unhappy as I was, because he was the person I had been all along. If I’d always been transgender, then I’d always been unhappy for deeply transgender reasons, and I’d already known a whole lot more about what it meant to be me than I’d thought that I had. Life sucked not because I was the wrong person, but because I was living in the wrong world — a world filled with heteronormativity, abuse, deprivation, and the forced assigning of gender. 

Fantasies had been a way to lock myself away from the present world, and they suffocated me whether I denied them or believed in them. Like “Owen,” I could have pretended to be someone I wasn’t for all my life, remaining miserably passive and disconnected. Instead, I eventually became an unhinged, self-destructive Maddy type, taking big risks that made me look downright crazy to others, and not exactly winding up happier for it, but at least having my freedom and some understanding of the reality in which I was living. I found the courage to desire something, and to go after it, even if I sometimes failed. 

Life on the other side of knowing that I’m trans is more livable, but I can’t explain why. It didn’t make things better. It wasn’t the great escape I had hoped. But it did force me to confront who I was, and how many monsters there always had always been all around me in this world. And that is better than living in a fantasy.

Anon, I don’t know exactly how much of your gender dysphoria is caused by enduring sexism, or trauma, or because you have internalized societal misogyny. But the key, for all of us, is to stop living in the world of conjectures and fantasies. 

You will never know if your dysphoria is caused by sexism or by you harboring a male or nonbinary soul. In this life, you’ll never even get to know if souls exist. You’ll never get to restart life over from the day of your birth with your chromosomes switched or a different letter written on your birth certificate to see how that might change things. You won’t get to see how a person with your body or your genetics might have matured in the Middle Ages, or Ming Dynasty China, or in the city of Cahokia in the Mississippian Valley before it fell. 

There will never be a control group for your life, and so you will never be able to separate the person you have come to be from your body, your upbringing, your traumas, your favorite TV shows, or your culture. Practically speaking, every single one of those influences is you. In this timeline you are inevitable, and in your life, this world and all of its problems is inescapable. 

It hardly matters how a version of you who didn’t grow up under sexism would have identified. They might share eye color with you, or a cleft in their chin, but they are not you. The you that is reading this right now is the only one that you’ll ever get to be, and you can’t shake off the pains that he’s endured. 

So the real question is, what do you wish to do with this life? 

Transitioning won’t rid your life of all sexism or cissexism, but it can certainly change things quite dramatically. Hormones and surgery can change how you look and how you feel in your body, which for many people unlocks new ways of relating to others socially, romantically, and sexually. It might make your dysphoria significantly better. It could potentially make it worse. It might soothe pains that you didn’t even know that you had, because you’ve been lugging them around for so long. You won’t know if you don’t attempt it. 

Detransition is Gender Liberation, Too

Transitioning will also force you to contend with the restrictive, sometimes even violent transphobia of powerful institutions — schools, government offices, police departments, employers, and so on. Confronting these systemic biases makes some people’s dysphoria worse. But it also helps many trans people recognize that their problems have an external source they can combat, rather than some brokenness from within.

Anon, what will help you cope with these changes and challenges? Do you have a robust support network? Do you have ways of escaping the capitalist grind and the eyes of the state, if only for a few precious hours per week? Are you surrounded by trans people, feminist women, gender non-conforming people, disabled people, and proud “freaks.”? Being trans isn’t just a question of how you might want to look, but also how you want to live. So how would you like to change your life?

Sexism, transphobia, capitalism, the construction of the suburbs, the institution of straight marriage — these are all social forces that conspire to trap us. But when we understand how they exert influence upon us, we find the power to imagine alternatives. 

“Owen” can’t even conjure an image of the woman inside him. She’s nothing but colorful static and media references that some corporate network gave to her. I know what the “man” inside me looks like because I see him in the mirror every day. I don’t always like him, but he is tangible. I can cut his hair, switch out his meds, take him on a walk, make him call his friends. He lives in reality, with all its manifold problems. And that means I can do something about what troubles him, instead of just dreaming that I was a different person in an alternate world.