Should you transition?

Look carefully before you leap

The below is a fictional reflection piece. I imagine this is the voice of someone (probably a trans guy) who transitioned years ago and now looks back with a mix of regret, bitterness and fear for the future. It is informed by the very real fears I see online and hear around me, as trans people navigate a post-trans-tipping-point world. Part of it is informed by my own experience, but it’s not my voice. I’m not that bitter, thankfully.

As always, open to your feedback. Thanks for reading…

Photo by Zakaria Zayane on Unsplash

If you go online you’re likely to encounter someone who tells you that if you think you’re trans, you’re trans.

Don’t listen to them.

Thinking you’re trans is not enough reason to go down the path of full-on bodily and social transformation. We know enough now to say with some certainty that some people who think they’re trans, are not, and will eventually choose to detransition. At the very least you might want to be curious: When did you start thinking that you might be trans? What else was going on in your life at the time? Did you consider that these other events may have had an effect on your view of yourself as a man, or as a woman? How might they have influenced your self-conception? And is there an alternative path, where you don’t upend your life, and where you can access joy? If there is an alternative path, I seriously encourage you to take it.

But let’s say you do the work of self-exploration and you decide, fuckit. I’ve got nothing to lose. Well, let me tell you, you always have something to lose. Whether it’s the tenuous thread that holds your family together, or the public-facing job that claims it is inclusive but when push comes to shove looks to the bottom line. Whether it’s the landlord who doesn’t want any weirdness in their rental. Or the mother who pulls her kids away lest you corrupt them with your mere presence.

If you are seriously thinking about transitioning, you may want to consider what you can lose, and some of the following:

Perhaps you feel lonely right now, left out of social groups you’d like to belong to. Perhaps you feel and have always felt like the odd one out. Maybe you look at transition as a path into community, as a road into clarity. A righteous path. Perhaps you are in search of your elusive authentic self and believe you’ll find it at the other end of the hormone rainbow.

You might think transition will absolve you from being a failed woman or a failed man. That it will grant you access into a more authentic version of you. It’s understandable that you would want that. Who doesn’t want to be more authentically themselves? How nice it is to believe that you are special; that your awkwardness is the result of some internal, neurobiological difference you have no control over and can only really address through taking hormones or legally changing your sex marker.

But I challenge you to consider that your self, your authentic self, is not some neurobiological chemical balance you strive for. It isn’t a thing for you to excavate, fully formed, from within the faulty body you are trapped within. Your authentic self, whatever that means, is something that is constructed out of your life experiences and slowly built over time. It is not some inner gender soul but is formed, slowly like a mountain range, through the development of your character. You are the choices that you make, of how you behave towards others, towards yourself. You are what you focus on. And that is something you have agency over.

Focus on how imperfect your body is and you will develop a body identity disorder of some kind. Focus on how unfeminine you are and you may develop the notion that this makes you a man or nonbinary. Focus on how limiting the gender binary is socially and you may well want to identify outside of it. This is not surprising. It’s predictable. And it’s not innate.

And the next time you go online and see yet another person praise to high heaven how much more improved their life is since they took the leap into gender transition, you might want to consider that not everyone who transitions, thrives. And those who don’t thrive don’t tend to announce it on social media. Funny that. In fact, a lot of people who transition continue to feel lonely, struggle to connect with others, and experience a whole new level of anxiety associated with worrying that they will be rejected socially. In addition to the social anxiety, you will have the anxiety of not knowing the consequences of the medical procedures you are undergoing. Perhaps it will go smoothly and feel worth it. Perhaps not. Complication rates are high. And the complications can get ugly.

While the dream of having your pronouns respected is nice, it is not reasonable to expect everyone around you to bend to your desires based merely on your say-so. Most people have shit to do and just want to get on with it. Them respecting your gender beliefs isn’t a right owed to you; it’s a privilege that is earned through goodwill. Don’t get entitled. The world owes you nothing. Any goodwill you earn can disappear in an instant. Make yourself stand out as outside the gender binary and you will suffer the wrath of those who would rather you didn’t. Make yourself blend in and you better hope you pass, because if you don’t there’s no guarantee that you won’t get treated as a threat or a pervert. You live in the real world — and while that world can be and is wonderful, it’s also cruel and unfair. It just is.

A mentor of mine used to say hate kills. And by that she didn’t just mean physical acts of hate; like murder or assault. She meant the quieter kind of hate that eats at your soul. The kind of hate where when you walk in the room you can feel, palpably, that the people around you don’t want you there, don’t want you anywhere near. The kind of hate that is rarely openly acknowledged. Few people (unless they’re online) would openly say they want trans people to disappear. But if you press them, they might say they don’t want them in their bathrooms, as their neighbours, they don’t want them anywhere near their children. We are at the mercy of the majority. And the majority is fine with trans people as long as they know their place. Do you know your place?

If you are considering transition you might want to consider what happens if you get it wrong; wrong in the sense that you change your mind down the road. Will the people cheering you on right now still stand with you? Will they know how to? Will you be OK with the permanent bodily changes you set into motion? Maybe it’s all OK, just part of a gender journey for you. But if you’re trying to resolve some deep-seated psychic pain, a word of advice: don’t look for the solution in a vial of injectable testosterone. Initially you might find relief there. But life is long, and time has a funny way of changing your perspective.

If you are considering transitioning, don’t think your family doctor or therapist will help you sort out whether it’s right for you. They don’t know. They’ve never known. They are more concerned with protecting their licences than they are with understanding your gender. It doesn’t make them bad healers. It makes them human. They don’t even know what they’re treating. Do you have distress related to your gender? Or is your distress social; less about gender than it is about feeling awkward all round, gender merely being one component of it? Are you turned on by imagining yourself as the opposite sex? Or do you feel numb and are seeking a way to feel something, anything, again? People transition for all kinds of reasons. Some are reasonable, and some are unrealistic. Some are happy with their choice and some are miserable. You doctor can’t tell you which you’ll be, because nobody knows.

So, should you transition? I don’t know.

But you probably want to think long and hard, before you take the leap.