it’s so comforting to read this. The pressure to feel perfect certainty kept me from scheduling top surgery for years! thank you for reminding us that grasping around in the dark is just the human condition 💜
Estrogen was a milestone for me in my transition. I was nonbinary for many years, then 4 years as a woman on on E, now closing in on 2 years off, or back on T, as I like to say. I'm still walking through the world as a woman, but changing my hormones without changing my identity has allowed me to renegotiate my relationship to my body and see her differently.
I appreciate you putting your thoughts and experiences into words, given the size of your platform within the queer/nd anglophone world. More needs to be said, more possibility space opened, socially, to allow "detransition" to be what it usually is anyway, just another form of the original impulse to transition--not to reach an imaginary stability, but to be a continuous participant in the process of becoming.
(The core of this is something I wrote a few days ago in response to a tumblr post you made that also strongly touched on this, so if it's familiar that's no accident, but I figured it might contribute to the discussion here.)
Oh gods, do I ever feel you. I really, really wish this whole gendered bullshit would just fuck off. It's so exhausting. I wonder how I would think about myself if I didn't have to go through a fuck nasty gauntlet of bullshit that forced me into a very, very small gender box. Or at least pretend well enough to pass their scrutinizing. The toll that took on top of the near lethal dose of societal background conformity radiation.
Also, for the longest time I had no idea that you could just... do that. Transition. Just say fuck it, we ball, and change all that shit about yourself. The ostracism and bullying started years and years before I even could begin to attempt to articulate where the feeling of *wrongness* came from, let alone act on it. Others could certainly perceive how ill-fitting I was. Perhaps an aspect of that trauma, of being that weird autistic kid who genders wrong, being *alien* fucked me up.
Like, if I'd had to describe how I feel about myself it'd be something like "none woman with left autism", but good fucking luck getting anyone to understand that. So if I have to put a label on it it would be (trans) woman, which isn't untrue in that it speaks to the experiences I've had and I share with those who identify strongly with that.
However, it's also not the whole picture, far from it. It's all a big fucking unintelligible mess, and I'd slap a non-binary label on it but a) I don't understand what actually makes a binary gender what it is, how people can have any sort of neatly circumscribed notion about what their gender is, and b) as if somebody embodied like I am is permitted the space for uncertainty or not upholding rigid ideas about gender if I want even a chance to be treated like a person. (While the latter can be because of malice, even well-meaning people often are like that because of ingrained societal patterns & prejudices.)
Your story reminds me a little of a friend, who transitioned one way, and after some time decided to change course. A myopic view would wrongly call it detransition, as for them it was nothing like that. More a display of changing understanding of the self.
idk, maybe I'm just too fucking autistic too get it. There's steps I've taken that I'm still glad with and wouldn't want to give up. Due to shenanigans I briefly had to stop HRT, throwing me back to the before times, and I did not like that feeling one bit, so I keep being on it. Just let me vibe in peace with people. Some of the most intense pressure to conform to some ungraspable idealized gendered performance has come from other trans and/or queer people, and that really disappoints me. Just let everybody fucking be.
It’s downright uncanny how perfect the timing on this essay is. I got my first prescription for E last month, and it was so easy and barrier-free that it triggered a legitimacy crisis. I had resisted calling myself trans for years even after I was dressing exclusively in women’s clothing and doing makeup more often than not. I could never bring myself to do it because I didn’t fit that perfect narrative of knowing from birth. That changed less than a year ago when I met a bunch of trans folks who were also very open about not believing that it was predestined, who were open and unashamed to have chosen this path of their own free will. The fact that I thought of myself as a boy for most of my life didn’t invalidate me because the same was true of most girls there. I had always been a little Judith-Butler pilled, but now with the help of thinkers/shitposters like @queercodeddividual I began to fully embrace it as a basis for identity. “Born This Way” is an arbitrary standard, and everyone ought to enjoy the freedom of trans-ing their gender for whatever reason they chose.
In the past few weeks, though, I confess my thinking has changed again. Gender is a social construct, sex is merely the gendering of the body, and everyone’s gender identity is uniquely a product of their own life experiences, but we have to keep in mind that there are, in fact, some people who are born this way. While most of us use some amount of theory to engage with identity, there are trans kids who know who they are as soon as they can know anything, and it’s increasingly evident that our theory is failing to account for them. I’ve also witnessed trans people who always knew who they were and don’t feel like they could be anything else get marginalized and alienated within ostensibly trans spaces because they are now dominated by a majority who are choosing to embrace gender autonomy. I really don’t know how to feel about this. It’s especially complicated because broader cis society still assumes most trans people conform to the old narratives. There isn’t even a good language to describe the problem, and it’s nearly impossible to convince someone if they haven’t already seen it. I often wonder if I’m gaslighting myself and making up a problem that doesn’t exist, but then I see it again. The trans people who are trans by virtue of embracing trans philosophy and exerting autonomy over their identity are growing to outnumber the trans people who don’t have a choice in being trans, and our theory is failing to accommodate the people who inspired it in the first place.
I think around 2014 I decided my gender identity would be a choice (whether it really was or not, that's how I would understand it from a political perspective) in order to stop the OCD-ish constant questioning of whether I was "really" trans and the fear of having my identity rejected I'd internalized. Then I started low-dose T in 2016 planning to get a few changes and then stop before I got too masculinized, but I ended up staying on it b/c it treated some of the symptoms of a genetic disorder I have and the couple attempts to stop I made led to chronic pain + low endurance and strength.
I was absolutely seen and recognized as nonbinary for around 6 years after the start of my transition. I would shave my face (but I have pale skin and dark hair so the stubble was still visible) and dress femme or punk and even people who didn't know about nonbinary people would be confused about whether I was a trans man or trans woman or weird cis person of either cis gender and therefore either would treat me as nonbinary, or would pick a different way to gender me than someone else in the conversation and end up passive-aggressively fighting over how to gender me, which was hilarious. I also have had mostly nonbinary and other trans friends since before I medically transitioned and while in the late 00s/early 2010s relatively few people (even trans men and women) respected my nonbinary identity when it wasn't supported by physical androgyny, I see the communities I live in having changed a lot to where even some cis people will remind people not to assume gender for people who "look" cis.
But after 6 years I grew out my facial hair and ended up liking it enough I don't want to shave it even though I dislike how it caused people to gender me as male quite consistently (even though I still wear dresses and such a lot, don't bind, and have never attempt to alter my behavior to fit any gender stereotype). Ultimately I prefer the chaotic gendering I'd get when I looked physically androgynous to being pigeonholed into any particular identity.
The physical changes have caused me quite a bit of dysphoria, though now that I take T less often so I can have a more feminine body shape and I have a full beard and long hair that's changed mostly to euphoria... yet then there's the social dysphoria of people calling me "he" -_- . But yeah I decided that it was still beneficial to have the autonomy to experience the sort of dysphoria I wanted to have. I'd much rather have dysphoria similar to a transfeminine person getting called "he" when they wanted "she" or "they" and feeling gross over their body hair and other physically masc traits because the image of myself in my head has always mainly been of a feminine AMAB person. And of course there is value in exercising the autonomy itself, regardless of the results.
The one thing I haven't recovered from since transitioning is never figuring out how to navigate the dating scene when people no longer approach me because I don't have the same gender role and body capital... Although I did have a straight boyfriend from before I transitioned decide to date me again after the transition (and after a marriage and divorce in the intervening years on his part), which coincidentally is part of why I grew my beard out for the first time when I did––I wanted to test to make sure he wasn't just seeing me as a girl, and it didn't bother him at all, in fact he enjoyed the physical sensation of it.
Wow. Having started T 14 months ago just before my 30th birthday and going through a current period of doubt this resonates so much for me. The idea of stopping T feels just as uncomfortable as continuing it does at the moment and each week is a full interrogation of self. The load has lightened over the last few months as I’ve made an effort to relax the pressure of ‘knowing’ my gender and the path I want to take. I cannot overstate how reassuring and comforting it is to see so much of my self, my fears, and my joys in this post.
I'm crying, Devon. I... I don't have words. just, thank you. thank you so, so much. I haven't lived your life but I relate so much to the feelings-- the uncertainty, the fear, the longing that comes with transitioning. when I came out as non binary in 2019, I remember that it was because I told myself that my identity doesn't need to be shaped by violence alone but by liberation. that non compliance with womaning was me being true to myself. and everything you described about labeling yourself enby followed. today, people generally do and say the right things. they use they/them and affirm my genderqueer identity, and yet it still feels farcical at times. the gender fluidity is being very fluid lol, and sometimes I just wanna be a girl. I think about random shit like doing drag but how I'd want to be a dragqueen because that's the gender performance that I feel most adept at, it feels the funnest to do and it is such a performance. all these feelings are contradictory and weird; and I haven't been able to truly articulate it. but I think that's due to the fear of being perceived as some idk clout chasing transphobic former-trans-identifying cis girl? idk?! idfk!! I know that it's okay to not know, but coming out is made out to be this passage beyond the point of no return and that's awful. this whole forced gender thing is suffocating.
This piece reflects how I feel about gender better than anything else I have ever read. I can't wait for the day where we can articulate ambiguous feelings about transition without the fear of TERFs weaponizing that.
This piece is so raw and powerful and amazing! I could feel the passion you brought to the writing. I identify with a lot of what you wrote, too, despite having never physically transitioned, though I suppose I somewhat superficially transitioned and then detransitioned (I just wrote about that the other day, but I didn’t use those terms). Thank you for sharing your journey and I hope you get some moments of peace away from all this gender at some point.
I have none words for how much this post spoke to me. There is no configuration of my body that will work in this particular incarnation for me, when I think of gender in my mind, its not even relevant. I tell my wife, I am actually a space or sea slug inside, that's what I see, just a beautiful Sea Dragon, turns out, they can change their gender at will. It makes sense to me, I can't be locked into a single gender if I have one at all. But since in this colonial world we seem to all be required to pick a gender, my wife and I call me Minessa gender.
This is an absolutely beautiful read, and I had the overwhelming sense, reading it, that gender might kind of be like religion?
That, say 500 years ago, not being part of a particular faith (at least superficially) would have been unheard of, but as people learned more about other options, tried different sects, kids became less and less raised in their parents faith, it became more and more socially acceptable to say "I'm happy for you that you believe, but it's really not for me". Maybe this is the direction that gender could be heading?
This is so beautiful. I appreciate the openness in your writing so much. I hope you get to do all the things you wrote you want to do in those last couple of paragraphs, and more!
it’s so comforting to read this. The pressure to feel perfect certainty kept me from scheduling top surgery for years! thank you for reminding us that grasping around in the dark is just the human condition 💜
Estrogen was a milestone for me in my transition. I was nonbinary for many years, then 4 years as a woman on on E, now closing in on 2 years off, or back on T, as I like to say. I'm still walking through the world as a woman, but changing my hormones without changing my identity has allowed me to renegotiate my relationship to my body and see her differently.
I appreciate you putting your thoughts and experiences into words, given the size of your platform within the queer/nd anglophone world. More needs to be said, more possibility space opened, socially, to allow "detransition" to be what it usually is anyway, just another form of the original impulse to transition--not to reach an imaginary stability, but to be a continuous participant in the process of becoming.
(The core of this is something I wrote a few days ago in response to a tumblr post you made that also strongly touched on this, so if it's familiar that's no accident, but I figured it might contribute to the discussion here.)
Oh gods, do I ever feel you. I really, really wish this whole gendered bullshit would just fuck off. It's so exhausting. I wonder how I would think about myself if I didn't have to go through a fuck nasty gauntlet of bullshit that forced me into a very, very small gender box. Or at least pretend well enough to pass their scrutinizing. The toll that took on top of the near lethal dose of societal background conformity radiation.
Also, for the longest time I had no idea that you could just... do that. Transition. Just say fuck it, we ball, and change all that shit about yourself. The ostracism and bullying started years and years before I even could begin to attempt to articulate where the feeling of *wrongness* came from, let alone act on it. Others could certainly perceive how ill-fitting I was. Perhaps an aspect of that trauma, of being that weird autistic kid who genders wrong, being *alien* fucked me up.
Like, if I'd had to describe how I feel about myself it'd be something like "none woman with left autism", but good fucking luck getting anyone to understand that. So if I have to put a label on it it would be (trans) woman, which isn't untrue in that it speaks to the experiences I've had and I share with those who identify strongly with that.
However, it's also not the whole picture, far from it. It's all a big fucking unintelligible mess, and I'd slap a non-binary label on it but a) I don't understand what actually makes a binary gender what it is, how people can have any sort of neatly circumscribed notion about what their gender is, and b) as if somebody embodied like I am is permitted the space for uncertainty or not upholding rigid ideas about gender if I want even a chance to be treated like a person. (While the latter can be because of malice, even well-meaning people often are like that because of ingrained societal patterns & prejudices.)
Your story reminds me a little of a friend, who transitioned one way, and after some time decided to change course. A myopic view would wrongly call it detransition, as for them it was nothing like that. More a display of changing understanding of the self.
idk, maybe I'm just too fucking autistic too get it. There's steps I've taken that I'm still glad with and wouldn't want to give up. Due to shenanigans I briefly had to stop HRT, throwing me back to the before times, and I did not like that feeling one bit, so I keep being on it. Just let me vibe in peace with people. Some of the most intense pressure to conform to some ungraspable idealized gendered performance has come from other trans and/or queer people, and that really disappoints me. Just let everybody fucking be.
It’s downright uncanny how perfect the timing on this essay is. I got my first prescription for E last month, and it was so easy and barrier-free that it triggered a legitimacy crisis. I had resisted calling myself trans for years even after I was dressing exclusively in women’s clothing and doing makeup more often than not. I could never bring myself to do it because I didn’t fit that perfect narrative of knowing from birth. That changed less than a year ago when I met a bunch of trans folks who were also very open about not believing that it was predestined, who were open and unashamed to have chosen this path of their own free will. The fact that I thought of myself as a boy for most of my life didn’t invalidate me because the same was true of most girls there. I had always been a little Judith-Butler pilled, but now with the help of thinkers/shitposters like @queercodeddividual I began to fully embrace it as a basis for identity. “Born This Way” is an arbitrary standard, and everyone ought to enjoy the freedom of trans-ing their gender for whatever reason they chose.
In the past few weeks, though, I confess my thinking has changed again. Gender is a social construct, sex is merely the gendering of the body, and everyone’s gender identity is uniquely a product of their own life experiences, but we have to keep in mind that there are, in fact, some people who are born this way. While most of us use some amount of theory to engage with identity, there are trans kids who know who they are as soon as they can know anything, and it’s increasingly evident that our theory is failing to account for them. I’ve also witnessed trans people who always knew who they were and don’t feel like they could be anything else get marginalized and alienated within ostensibly trans spaces because they are now dominated by a majority who are choosing to embrace gender autonomy. I really don’t know how to feel about this. It’s especially complicated because broader cis society still assumes most trans people conform to the old narratives. There isn’t even a good language to describe the problem, and it’s nearly impossible to convince someone if they haven’t already seen it. I often wonder if I’m gaslighting myself and making up a problem that doesn’t exist, but then I see it again. The trans people who are trans by virtue of embracing trans philosophy and exerting autonomy over their identity are growing to outnumber the trans people who don’t have a choice in being trans, and our theory is failing to accommodate the people who inspired it in the first place.
I think around 2014 I decided my gender identity would be a choice (whether it really was or not, that's how I would understand it from a political perspective) in order to stop the OCD-ish constant questioning of whether I was "really" trans and the fear of having my identity rejected I'd internalized. Then I started low-dose T in 2016 planning to get a few changes and then stop before I got too masculinized, but I ended up staying on it b/c it treated some of the symptoms of a genetic disorder I have and the couple attempts to stop I made led to chronic pain + low endurance and strength.
I was absolutely seen and recognized as nonbinary for around 6 years after the start of my transition. I would shave my face (but I have pale skin and dark hair so the stubble was still visible) and dress femme or punk and even people who didn't know about nonbinary people would be confused about whether I was a trans man or trans woman or weird cis person of either cis gender and therefore either would treat me as nonbinary, or would pick a different way to gender me than someone else in the conversation and end up passive-aggressively fighting over how to gender me, which was hilarious. I also have had mostly nonbinary and other trans friends since before I medically transitioned and while in the late 00s/early 2010s relatively few people (even trans men and women) respected my nonbinary identity when it wasn't supported by physical androgyny, I see the communities I live in having changed a lot to where even some cis people will remind people not to assume gender for people who "look" cis.
But after 6 years I grew out my facial hair and ended up liking it enough I don't want to shave it even though I dislike how it caused people to gender me as male quite consistently (even though I still wear dresses and such a lot, don't bind, and have never attempt to alter my behavior to fit any gender stereotype). Ultimately I prefer the chaotic gendering I'd get when I looked physically androgynous to being pigeonholed into any particular identity.
The physical changes have caused me quite a bit of dysphoria, though now that I take T less often so I can have a more feminine body shape and I have a full beard and long hair that's changed mostly to euphoria... yet then there's the social dysphoria of people calling me "he" -_- . But yeah I decided that it was still beneficial to have the autonomy to experience the sort of dysphoria I wanted to have. I'd much rather have dysphoria similar to a transfeminine person getting called "he" when they wanted "she" or "they" and feeling gross over their body hair and other physically masc traits because the image of myself in my head has always mainly been of a feminine AMAB person. And of course there is value in exercising the autonomy itself, regardless of the results.
The one thing I haven't recovered from since transitioning is never figuring out how to navigate the dating scene when people no longer approach me because I don't have the same gender role and body capital... Although I did have a straight boyfriend from before I transitioned decide to date me again after the transition (and after a marriage and divorce in the intervening years on his part), which coincidentally is part of why I grew my beard out for the first time when I did––I wanted to test to make sure he wasn't just seeing me as a girl, and it didn't bother him at all, in fact he enjoyed the physical sensation of it.
Wow. Having started T 14 months ago just before my 30th birthday and going through a current period of doubt this resonates so much for me. The idea of stopping T feels just as uncomfortable as continuing it does at the moment and each week is a full interrogation of self. The load has lightened over the last few months as I’ve made an effort to relax the pressure of ‘knowing’ my gender and the path I want to take. I cannot overstate how reassuring and comforting it is to see so much of my self, my fears, and my joys in this post.
I'm crying, Devon. I... I don't have words. just, thank you. thank you so, so much. I haven't lived your life but I relate so much to the feelings-- the uncertainty, the fear, the longing that comes with transitioning. when I came out as non binary in 2019, I remember that it was because I told myself that my identity doesn't need to be shaped by violence alone but by liberation. that non compliance with womaning was me being true to myself. and everything you described about labeling yourself enby followed. today, people generally do and say the right things. they use they/them and affirm my genderqueer identity, and yet it still feels farcical at times. the gender fluidity is being very fluid lol, and sometimes I just wanna be a girl. I think about random shit like doing drag but how I'd want to be a dragqueen because that's the gender performance that I feel most adept at, it feels the funnest to do and it is such a performance. all these feelings are contradictory and weird; and I haven't been able to truly articulate it. but I think that's due to the fear of being perceived as some idk clout chasing transphobic former-trans-identifying cis girl? idk?! idfk!! I know that it's okay to not know, but coming out is made out to be this passage beyond the point of no return and that's awful. this whole forced gender thing is suffocating.
just. thank you. 🫶🏼
This piece reflects how I feel about gender better than anything else I have ever read. I can't wait for the day where we can articulate ambiguous feelings about transition without the fear of TERFs weaponizing that.
This piece is so raw and powerful and amazing! I could feel the passion you brought to the writing. I identify with a lot of what you wrote, too, despite having never physically transitioned, though I suppose I somewhat superficially transitioned and then detransitioned (I just wrote about that the other day, but I didn’t use those terms). Thank you for sharing your journey and I hope you get some moments of peace away from all this gender at some point.
Fucking brilliant.
I have none words for how much this post spoke to me. There is no configuration of my body that will work in this particular incarnation for me, when I think of gender in my mind, its not even relevant. I tell my wife, I am actually a space or sea slug inside, that's what I see, just a beautiful Sea Dragon, turns out, they can change their gender at will. It makes sense to me, I can't be locked into a single gender if I have one at all. But since in this colonial world we seem to all be required to pick a gender, my wife and I call me Minessa gender.
This is an absolutely beautiful read, and I had the overwhelming sense, reading it, that gender might kind of be like religion?
That, say 500 years ago, not being part of a particular faith (at least superficially) would have been unheard of, but as people learned more about other options, tried different sects, kids became less and less raised in their parents faith, it became more and more socially acceptable to say "I'm happy for you that you believe, but it's really not for me". Maybe this is the direction that gender could be heading?
Fuck gender. This sounds like freedom.
This is so beautiful. I appreciate the openness in your writing so much. I hope you get to do all the things you wrote you want to do in those last couple of paragraphs, and more!
Let’s bake!
This struck so many chords for me. Thank you for sharing this 🙏