The Young Turks recently covered a Foreign Policy article about trans women sex workers in the Middle East and the systemic abuse they face from authorities. Throughout the clip, Cenk Uygur is seemingly astonished that, whoa, men would interested in having sex with women? Steel yourself:
Highlights of the clip include:
– Uygur saying: “All these Arab Gulf countries, Persian Gulf countries, very conservative, being gay is totally and utterly wrong, unless I mean it’s like a really cute girl that happens to have a penis, in which case maybe we can make an exception”. (Of course, police do anything but make an exception when they arrest trans women for “homosexuality”.)
– Uygur saying: “But then, here comes the awesome part – now, it’s got a terrible dark side, but it’s got awesome hypocrisy – so, a lot of times they get arrested, and when they do, what’s the first thing that police do? Police arrest them because they are being immoral, and then immediately have sex with them.” (Hypocrisy or not, I don’t think police sexually abusing women in custody is particularly “awesome”.)
– Uygur saying: “And it’s not just the hypocrisy, right – it also shows you, by the way, the reality of sexual orientation in the world, right? It’s not binary, and I can guarantee you that if you ask those guys, at the very least nine out of ten of them would tell you, ‘Oh no, I’m totally straight.’ Right? But when push comes to shove, they pay a lot of money to have non-straight sex.”
Hoo boy. I can see – vaguely, distantly – how he might have been trying to be supportive or inclusive by pointing out that human bodies are not limited to men with penises and women with vaginas, and that people’s sexual behavior reveals that this widespread binary notion of gender – not sexual orientation – is simply inapplicable in practice. That’s the most charitable way I can plausibly interpret this.
But when a man has sex with a woman who’s trans, that is not “non-straight sex”. When a man and a woman are having sex, there is no conceivable way that any sexual act could be described as something other than straight. Calling this “non-straight” means claiming that there is some element of homosexual desire or tendency involved, simply because the woman is trans or has a penis. But this idea is not reflective of reality, either – it is inapplicable in practice. Why do men who display attraction toward trans women largely identify as straight? Because trans women are women, and because these men are straight. They are attracted to trans women because they are women.
This is not contrary to their heterosexual orientation – it is because of their heterosexual orientation. Men who are attracted to trans women typically display heterosexual patterns of attraction, not homosexual patterns of attraction. These men do not otherwise identify as gay, and do not exhibit attraction toward men or engage in sexual conduct with men. They engage in sexual conduct with women, including trans women.
If being attracted to trans women made these men “non-straight” or something less than heterosexual, we would not expect to observe this. We would expect to see them having sex with men. This largely does not happen, and this is why describing sex between men and trans women as “non-straight” is misleading.
It is not in any way inconsistent for men to be attracted to trans women while identifying as “totally straight” – there is no “but” there. If anything, these patterns of attraction reveal the hypocrisy of regarding trans women as anything less than women, and of prosecuting them under laws against homosexuality – not the supposed “hypocrisy” of being straight and also attracted to trans women. No matter how much anyone protests or moralizes, reality itself gives lie to the assumption that we aren’t women and that sleeping with us counts against a man’s heterosexuality. These aren’t the gays you’re looking for.
The Young Turks recently covered a Foreign Policy article about trans women sex workers in the Middle East and the systemic abuse they face from authorities. Throughout the clip, Cenk Uygur is seemingly astonished that, whoa, men would interested in having sex with women? Steel yourself:
Highlights of the clip include:
– Uygur saying: “All these Arab Gulf countries, Persian Gulf countries, very conservative, being gay is totally and utterly wrong, unless I mean it’s like a really cute girl that happens to have a penis, in which case maybe we can make an exception”. (Of course, police do anything but make an exception when they arrest trans women for “homosexuality”.)
– Uygur saying: “But then, here comes the awesome part – now, it’s got a terrible dark side, but it’s got awesome hypocrisy – so, a lot of times they get arrested, and when they do, what’s the first thing that police do? Police arrest them because they are being immoral, and then immediately have sex with them.” (Hypocrisy or not, I don’t think police sexually abusing women in custody is particularly “awesome”.)
– Uygur saying: “And it’s not just the hypocrisy, right – it also shows you, by the way, the reality of sexual orientation in the world, right? It’s not binary, and I can guarantee you that if you ask those guys, at the very least nine out of ten of them would tell you, ‘Oh no, I’m totally straight.’ Right? But when push comes to shove, they pay a lot of money to have non-straight sex.”
Hoo boy. I can see – vaguely, distantly – how he might have been trying to be supportive or inclusive by pointing out that human bodies are not limited to men with penises and women with vaginas, and that people’s sexual behavior reveals that this widespread binary notion of gender – not sexual orientation – is simply inapplicable in practice. That’s the most charitable way I can plausibly interpret this.
But when a man has sex with a woman who’s trans, that is not “non-straight sex”. When a man and a woman are having sex, there is no conceivable way that any sexual act could be described as something other than straight. Calling this “non-straight” means claiming that there is some element of homosexual desire or tendency involved, simply because the woman is trans or has a penis. But this idea is not reflective of reality, either – it is inapplicable in practice. Why do men who display attraction toward trans women largely identify as straight? Because trans women are women, and because these men are straight. They are attracted to trans women because they are women.
This is not contrary to their heterosexual orientation – it is because of their heterosexual orientation. Men who are attracted to trans women typically display heterosexual patterns of attraction, not homosexual patterns of attraction. These men do not otherwise identify as gay, and do not exhibit attraction toward men or engage in sexual conduct with men. They engage in sexual conduct with women, including trans women.
If being attracted to trans women made these men “non-straight” or something less than heterosexual, we would not expect to observe this. We would expect to see them having sex with men. This largely does not happen, and this is why describing sex between men and trans women as “non-straight” is misleading.
It is not in any way inconsistent for men to be attracted to trans women while identifying as “totally straight” – there is no “but” there. If anything, these patterns of attraction reveal the hypocrisy of regarding trans women as anything less than women, and of prosecuting them under laws against homosexuality – not the supposed “hypocrisy” of being straight and also attracted to trans women. No matter how much anyone protests or moralizes, reality itself gives lie to the assumption that we aren’t women and that sleeping with us counts against a man’s heterosexuality. These aren’t the gays you’re looking for.
I’ve been on HRT for about a month now, and so far it’s been awesome enough that I’ll probably continue for the foreseeable future. While some people have claimed that its effects shouldn’t be noticeable for quite some time, the physical changes alone are already obvious, which leads me to believe that the mental effects could be just as real. Even if some part of it is only placebo, I can honestly say I haven’t felt this calm, happy, confident, in control and well-integrated in years – if ever. And though I’m not sure what physiological or neurological basis there might be for the common trans metaphor of “running on the right fuel” (and I’d be interested to learn more about this), it seems accurate enough in my case.
Before I started, I wondered whether it might cause some kind of mind-blowing shift in my consciousness, sense of self and subjective experience of the world. While it definitely feels great for me and I have a strong preference against discontinuing it, I can’t say it’s been like any kind of bright line between before and after – alcohol has more of an immediate and significant effect, all things considered. I’m just the same person as before, but it does seem like whatever elements factor into my overall personality and mood have been tweaked just enough to improve things without outright destroying who I was. I mean, who I am.
What interests me is that some trans people do seem to draw a harder distinction between their lives before they came to terms with their gender identity, and after. At times, I’ve even seen women refer to their past selves in the third person, as entirely different people – such as “him”. This shouldn’t be surprising, since many people experience a massive gulf between where they are in terms of their gender, and where they want to be. It makes sense that they wouldn’t see much in common between the person they once were, and the person they sought to become. Likewise, I’ve heard from people for whom realizing they were trans was a relatively sudden epiphany, and something that simply hadn’t occurred to them before, which would make it a pretty convenient place to draw a line dividing their life into that of two separate people.
Personally, I can’t say my experience has been very similar to this. As Heather often reminds me, if I had started off as a bodybuilder with a beard and back hair, I’d likely feel much different. But I didn’t. And I was never struck by that abrupt epiphany, because the possibility of being trans has been on my radar for the past several years. For most of that time, I just didn’t think it was where I was headed, but it turns out that it was – and I was always comfortable with that possibility. I was also fortunate enough to start off in a place where I didn’t have to close very much distance to get my body to reflect my identity. Yet because the process has been so blurry, shuffled and gradual for me, to the point that the final step consisted of no more than choosing to say “I’m trans” rather than “I’m not”, I find it almost impossible to identify any sort of boundary between one life and another, one gender and another.
Although I’ve had to work extensively on training myself to think of my new name as the true one, it never took nearly as much effort to think of my new gender as the true one. I suppose that on some level, I was already open to it even before I knew what “it” was. I found it similarly easy to accept myself as queer when I was 14: if that was reality, then that was reality, end of story. Acknowledging that I’m trans was essentially the same, to the point that my earlier experience seems to foreshadow it neatly. For some people, recognizing their genuine sexual orientation or gender identity seems to require demolishing a large part of the foundation of their identity, leaving them with the burden of having to fill in that newfound empty space. I’m just not one of those people.
Even when I assumed I was straight or a guy, for simple lack of personal development or critical self-examination, it wasn’t a central part of who I was. Obviously, straight guys are rarely required by society to think about their gender or sexuality as something that stands out, or consider themselves as anything other than the archetypal “default” human. But having never identified strongly, or even weakly, as a man or as heterosexual, losing those presumed features meant losing very little of my core self. Since I hadn’t become attached to what these identities implied for me, it was only a slight course adjustment in the direction my life would take, and the destination was just as valid. Nothing about it demanded tearing apart my old self, marking them as obsolete, and constructing a new person in their place.
Yet this still seems to raise an unavoidable question: if I was once “him”, then when did I stop being “him” and start being “her”? Of course, when it comes to talking to other people about my past, I see no need to say anything to tip them off about me if they haven’t already been brought into the circle. It’s just a matter of consistency, because there’s no sense in referring to a woman as “him” when discussing her childhood. But if they already know, it isn’t personally significant to me whether they see my younger self as having been a “him” or a “her”, and in some cases there’s no way around this. For instance, if we were looking at any of my childhood photos, it would be pointless to try and avoid the obvious. And all my mom’s friends would likely find it hard to believe that the son they’ve always known never actually existed, and that she’s suddenly acquired a very familiar-looking daughter.
But at what stage should I regard “him” as over, and “her” as having begun? There’s just no easy way to pinpoint a particular moment. Was it when I started caring about my appearance for the first time in 19 years? Or when I switched to buying women’s shirts because I found I looked better in them? Maybe it was when I first decided to try on makeup? Or when I went out in public like this for the first time? When I told people either gender pronoun is fine with me? When I started calling myself Zinnia on a whim? When I first identified as genderqueer? When I put together the first timeline of my transformation? When I started dating a lesbian, and we both knew that I was undeniably her girlfriend and couldn’t possibly be considered a boyfriend – even while still saying, paradoxically, that I didn’t think of myself as trans? When I first attended a family function, her brother’s wedding, as a woman? When I found I was going “full-time” simply out of habit? When I finally did admit that I was trans? When I made the decision to pursue treatment for it? When I picked a whole new name for myself, for real this time? When I worked up the nerve to “make it official” and come out to my parents – as if they couldn’t tell? When I started wearing a bra, no matter whether it contained anything? When I actually got around to finding a therapist and a doctor? When I took HRT for the first time? When I ordered business cards to replace the ones that said “Z.J. OldName”?
All of that has been spread out over the past four years – and not one of those changes feels like an appropriate place to divide myself in two. So is it just a matter of when you finally do feel like a different person, if ever? That, too, seems like a standard I may never be able to meet. I’m certain I’ve changed more just by aging throughout my life than by transitioning, and yet I still don’t think of myself at any age as a distinctly different person, no matter how little we would have in common. Some part of me was always there, and some part of them is still with me. I would see no point in referring even to 4-year-old me as being a separate person, different as I was.
Of course, gender is typically regarded as much more fundamental to identity than age, and that idea likely helps to fuel the inclination – or perceived need – to conceptualize yourself as a different person just because you were (presumably) a different gender. And for all I know, maybe there will come a day when I feel I’ve changed so much that I have nothing in common with “him”, and I’ll be more comfortable with classifying a part of my life as belonging to someone else. But for now, I’ve always just been me, even as a “boy” who rarely thought of “himself” as a boy. The unvarnished and fuzzy reality of things like identity, time, change, and people don’t always fit the concepts of “boundary”, “box”, “before”, “after”, “them”, or “me”, and it would be a mistake to try and map them onto the world when in some cases they’re just inapplicable. Transitioning wasn’t a soul-ripping, spacetime-rending event that cleaved my past and future apart. Like every other change in my life, big and small, it wove them together. What do I call my pre-transition self? The same thing I call myself now, because that’s who we are: I.
I’ve been on HRT for about a month now, and so far it’s been awesome enough that I’ll probably continue for the foreseeable future. While some people have claimed that its effects shouldn’t be noticeable for quite some time, the physical changes alone are already obvious, which leads me to believe that the mental effects could be just as real. Even if some part of it is only placebo, I can honestly say I haven’t felt this calm, happy, confident, in control and well-integrated in years – if ever. And though I’m not sure what physiological or neurological basis there might be for the common trans metaphor of “running on the right fuel” (and I’d be interested to learn more about this), it seems accurate enough in my case.
Before I started, I wondered whether it might cause some kind of mind-blowing shift in my consciousness, sense of self and subjective experience of the world. While it definitely feels great for me and I have a strong preference against discontinuing it, I can’t say it’s been like any kind of bright line between before and after – alcohol has more of an immediate and significant effect, all things considered. I’m just the same person as before, but it does seem like whatever elements factor into my overall personality and mood have been tweaked just enough to improve things without outright destroying who I was. I mean, who I am.
What interests me is that some trans people do seem to draw a harder distinction between their lives before they came to terms with their gender identity, and after. At times, I’ve even seen women refer to their past selves in the third person, as entirely different people – such as “him”. This shouldn’t be surprising, since many people experience a massive gulf between where they are in terms of their gender, and where they want to be. It makes sense that they wouldn’t see much in common between the person they once were, and the person they sought to become. Likewise, I’ve heard from people for whom realizing they were trans was a relatively sudden epiphany, and something that simply hadn’t occurred to them before, which would make it a pretty convenient place to draw a line dividing their life into that of two separate people.
Personally, I can’t say my experience has been very similar to this. As Heather often reminds me, if I had started off as a bodybuilder with a beard and back hair, I’d likely feel much different. But I didn’t. And I was never struck by that abrupt epiphany, because the possibility of being trans has been on my radar for the past several years. For most of that time, I just didn’t think it was where I was headed, but it turns out that it was – and I was always comfortable with that possibility. I was also fortunate enough to start off in a place where I didn’t have to close very much distance to get my body to reflect my identity. Yet because the process has been so blurry, shuffled and gradual for me, to the point that the final step consisted of no more than choosing to say “I’m trans” rather than “I’m not”, I find it almost impossible to identify any sort of boundary between one life and another, one gender and another.
Although I’ve had to work extensively on training myself to think of my new name as the true one, it never took nearly as much effort to think of my new gender as the true one. I suppose that on some level, I was already open to it even before I knew what “it” was. I found it similarly easy to accept myself as queer when I was 14: if that was reality, then that was reality, end of story. Acknowledging that I’m trans was essentially the same, to the point that my earlier experience seems to foreshadow it neatly. For some people, recognizing their genuine sexual orientation or gender identity seems to require demolishing a large part of the foundation of their identity, leaving them with the burden of having to fill in that newfound empty space. I’m just not one of those people.
Even when I assumed I was straight or a guy, for simple lack of personal development or critical self-examination, it wasn’t a central part of who I was. Obviously, straight guys are rarely required by society to think about their gender or sexuality as something that stands out, or consider themselves as anything other than the archetypal “default” human. But having never identified strongly, or even weakly, as a man or as heterosexual, losing those presumed features meant losing very little of my core self. Since I hadn’t become attached to what these identities implied for me, it was only a slight course adjustment in the direction my life would take, and the destination was just as valid. Nothing about it demanded tearing apart my old self, marking them as obsolete, and constructing a new person in their place.
Yet this still seems to raise an unavoidable question: if I was once “him”, then when did I stop being “him” and start being “her”? Of course, when it comes to talking to other people about my past, I see no need to say anything to tip them off about me if they haven’t already been brought into the circle. It’s just a matter of consistency, because there’s no sense in referring to a woman as “him” when discussing her childhood. But if they already know, it isn’t personally significant to me whether they see my younger self as having been a “him” or a “her”, and in some cases there’s no way around this. For instance, if we were looking at any of my childhood photos, it would be pointless to try and avoid the obvious. And all my mom’s friends would likely find it hard to believe that the son they’ve always known never actually existed, and that she’s suddenly acquired a very familiar-looking daughter.
But at what stage should I regard “him” as over, and “her” as having begun? There’s just no easy way to pinpoint a particular moment. Was it when I started caring about my appearance for the first time in 19 years? Or when I switched to buying women’s shirts because I found I looked better in them? Maybe it was when I first decided to try on makeup? Or when I went out in public like this for the first time? When I told people either gender pronoun is fine with me? When I started calling myself Zinnia on a whim? When I first identified as genderqueer? When I put together the first timeline of my transformation? When I started dating a lesbian, and we both knew that I was undeniably her girlfriend and couldn’t possibly be considered a boyfriend – even while still saying, paradoxically, that I didn’t think of myself as trans? When I first attended a family function, her brother’s wedding, as a woman? When I found I was going “full-time” simply out of habit? When I finally did admit that I was trans? When I made the decision to pursue treatment for it? When I picked a whole new name for myself, for real this time? When I worked up the nerve to “make it official” and come out to my parents – as if they couldn’t tell? When I started wearing a bra, no matter whether it contained anything? When I actually got around to finding a therapist and a doctor? When I took HRT for the first time? When I ordered business cards to replace the ones that said “Z.J. OldName”?
All of that has been spread out over the past four years – and not one of those changes feels like an appropriate place to divide myself in two. So is it just a matter of when you finally do feel like a different person, if ever? That, too, seems like a standard I may never be able to meet. I’m certain I’ve changed more just by aging throughout my life than by transitioning, and yet I still don’t think of myself at any age as a distinctly different person, no matter how little we would have in common. Some part of me was always there, and some part of them is still with me. I would see no point in referring even to 4-year-old me as being a separate person, different as I was.
Of course, gender is typically regarded as much more fundamental to identity than age, and that idea likely helps to fuel the inclination – or perceived need – to conceptualize yourself as a different person just because you were (presumably) a different gender. And for all I know, maybe there will come a day when I feel I’ve changed so much that I have nothing in common with “him”, and I’ll be more comfortable with classifying a part of my life as belonging to someone else. But for now, I’ve always just been me, even as a “boy” who rarely thought of “himself” as a boy. The unvarnished and fuzzy reality of things like identity, time, change, and people don’t always fit the concepts of “boundary”, “box”, “before”, “after”, “them”, or “me”, and it would be a mistake to try and map them onto the world when in some cases they’re just inapplicable. Transitioning wasn’t a soul-ripping, spacetime-rending event that cleaved my past and future apart. Like every other change in my life, big and small, it wove them together. What do I call my pre-transition self? The same thing I call myself now, because that’s who we are: I.
It’s been a few months now, and my newly adopted real-life name has become much more natural. Our families and friends know me by it now, and it’s no longer something I have to remind myself of just to get it to sink in. I sense I’m quite a ways into the arbitrarily-designated third phase, incorporating it as a part of myself, but not quite at the point where it’s just as deeply and thoroughly entrenched as my previous name was. It’s still a notable thing in my mind, whereas a name that’s become natural to you is a non-thought.
Regular usage for a lengthy period, by myself and others, seems to be crucial to accepting it as actually being my name – there’s no way around that. Everyone changing my name to it on their phones, listing it as “parent 2” in the contact information for our son’s school, signing it on his behavior sheet every day, registering a new Gmail account under it, generating a PGP keypair for it, filling it out on forms for my doctors, drawing up papers for a legal name change, all of these otherwise mundane instances are small pieces helping to bridge the gap between an old label and a new one. But there are also ways to nudge the process along.
It’s sometimes helped me to run through my very early memories and visualize them as being revised to include my new name. My mother asking me if I want to help mix the cookie batter. My kindergarten teacher calling on me when I raise my hand. My grandparents getting me a bicycle with training wheels and a custom “license plate”. Slowly typing my name into the crude word processor of ClarisWorks for Kids. And learning how to sign it.
That last one is significant. After spending a few days in the first grade, I was subjected to a battery of tests, and then placed in the third grade for the remainder of the year. One problem, among many others that would eventually manifest, was that we were supposed to learn cursive in second grade. Of course, they were used to making special accommodations by now, and I was given two weeks of individual instruction so that I could catch up. The teacher for the gifted students spent an hour with me every day as I scrawled words nearly half my height onto a chalkboard. For me, the result of learning cursive in two weeks was forever adopting a writing style that closely mimicked the look of the archetypal examples of all the letters, filtered through a slow and unsteady hand. I honestly have no idea how people like my partner can let the words flow from their fingers in such graceful, swooping, personalized, soulful arcs. My writing has scarcely improved since I was 6 years old – it’s still the same process of slowly and deliberately drawing out the loops and lines.
This is why I rarely bother writing by hand, except when it’s unavoidable. One such instance would be my signature. The concept of a signature was initially explained to me as nothing more than writing your full name in cursive, which is basically accurate but fails to capture its purpose as a personalized mark. My signature is no more special than anything else I write in cursive; nothing about it stands out, and it could just as easily be anyone else’s name that I’m writing. No barely legible split-second scribbles for me – it’s as drawn-out and deliberate as ever. Years of practice have not changed this, and cashiers probably imagine I’m sending coded messages to terrorists through the banking system or something. Of all the challenges that have accompanied taking a new name, learning to sign it hasn’t been one of them.
But there was one thing I found that, for a short time, made writing by hand almost fun: Gelly Roll pens. Sakura Gelly Roll gel pens were the thing to have when I was in the sixth grade. If you’re too young or old to have experienced these as a milestone of your upbringing, they were right at the apex of the hierarchy of needs when it came to pens. Yes, they wrote, and they wrote very smoothly – but they didn’t just write. They wrote in pale blue, chartreuse, pastel pink, deep purple, mint green, teal, gold, silver, and almost any color you could imagine. Colored pens? What’s the big deal? Well, these had glitter in the ink. I loved them, and so did everyone else.
Some people might interpret an intense interest in multicolored sparkly pens as an early sign of feminine identity on my part. But this wouldn’t really be indicative of anything like that, because we all had these pens, boys and girls alike. It wasn’t even about actually writing with them most of the time – sure, it was nice to have so many options, but the teachers strongly discouraged using glittery ink on our work. Instead, they were more of a status symbol, bridging the trend gap in our little town between Tamagotchis and Pokemon cards. The more Gelly Roll pens you had, the higher your social standing. These things take on an inordinate importance when you’re in sixth grade.
Indeed, they were so important that someone – still unknown all these years later – was compelled to steal them out of my starry cloth pencil pouch. It really did hurt. For all of their meaningless, artificial social value, they made it seem like my crude cursive squiggles were alright, like it didn’t matter how wobbly they were. They sparkled just the same. It wasn’t long before holographic Charizards were the new rage and everyone had moved on from those strange and frivolous pens. But they stayed with me. Their unmistakable translucent cases revealing the color inside, rounded glittery caps and bar codes on the side would be recognizable for life.
After the stores stopped selling them, I gave up hope of finding them again. What else can you do when you’re 9 years old and it’s 1998? Your world is pretty small, and your reach is even smaller. Where would you get them from? How would you know where to look? We didn’t even have the internet at home, not that finding something like that online would have been very easy at the turn of the century. People remember 9/11, but they sometimes forget how primitive the web was back then. (It was that long ago? Yep.) After enough time without seeing them anywhere, I accepted that they were nothing more than a memory now – and one that hardly anyone else seemed to cherish.
I rarely thought about them until earlier this year, when I took my new name. In an attempt to brute-force it into my identity, I would sign it over and over, filling sheets of paper with it, trying to get used to the feeling of it coming out of my hand. You can only write the same thing so many times before it starts to lose all meaning, but that wasn’t really a problem – it was supposed to become instinctual, something I didn’t have to think about. Still, something occurred to me as I watched my fingernails in motion, an iridescent blue against the dull, flat black of the ink. Didn’t there used to be some way I could feel like my handwriting was truly mine?
On a recent trip to Target, we stopped in the office supplies aisle to look for more of the composition notebooks my partner uses – when penmanship comes easy to you, filling hundreds of pages with artful cursive must be a joy. Then I caught a glimpse of something buried on the bottom shelf. Those rounded caps, sparkling: “Gel ink pens. Fashion and glitter pack. 10 assorted colors. Lovely lines.” No, not real Gelly Rolls, but the closest thing I’ve found in the past decade.
I couldn’t wait to try them out, and the lovely lines were just as incredible as I remembered.
The same old sparkle was still there – tacky, childish, and completely awesome. At last, it flowed right out of my fingertips and onto the page. This is how we rewrite history: in hot pink glitter.
Well, it’s National Coming Out Day once again, and I think I’ve finally run out of things to come out as. It seems like every year since I’ve been on YouTube, there’s been some serious coming out going on. First, I came out as gay to my family, which is probably the simplest and most basic form of coming out. The next year, my best friend came out as lesbian to her family, including her husband at the time. The year after that, it turned out that we were much more than best friends, so I had to tell my family that I wasn’t so much “gay” as “whatever”, and that I’d be moving across the country to stay with her and her kids. And most recently, I came out as trans – as in stepmom, not stepdad.
At this point, I’m pretty sure I have the most understanding and supportive family in the world, or at least the most polite. And having run through pretty much the entire gauntlet of coming out, I can say it doesn’t necessarily get any easier. Sure, I have more experience with it now, and I don’t think my family can really be all that surprised anymore, but it’s still just as difficult as it’s always been. There’s that lengthy period of dread in the back of your mind as you keep putting it off, the point where you finally get sick of this and commit to getting it over with, the adrenaline-fueled anxiety leading up to it, and the heart-pounding moment of uncertainty when you actually tell them and hope that they won’t freak out. And, if you’re lucky, there’s the most extraordinary relief when it turns out not to be a big deal at all, and you wonder why you waited so long to get it done.
I’ve usually come out incrementally instead of to everyone at once, because it feels like less of a single, enormous step, and it kind of snowballs in a way that makes it seem a little less scary as you come out to more and more people. It’s always helped to start with one person I trust, like a sibling, so that when I come out to more people, I can tell them about everyone else who already knows, and hopefully it won’t seem like such a big “thing” to them either.
I still haven’t come out to most of my extended family, but that’s because I don’t always know them very well and we haven’t seen each other in years, and I generally save the stress and anxiety of personally coming out for people who are really, really important to me. At the same time, I realize this information is no longer fully within my control once I start telling people, and everyone else could find out at any time if they go asking around or if someone decides to tell them. For me, being out is about being comfortable with that reality – after all, why out yourself if you don’t want to be out?
Of course, coming out will be different for everyone depending on their circumstances. Even for me, every time I’ve come out has been a unique experience. When I first came out as gay, there was the uncertainty of not knowing how my family would react to anything that had to do with the general LGBT cluster. And let’s just say that moving to Florida to live with a married woman and her kids can sound a lot more ominous than it actually is. But that really had nothing on coming out as trans, which actually required some explanation. Most people don’t fully understand what it means, and I had to gauge their knowledge and tailor the message accordingly. People know what it means to be gay or in love, but wanting to live as another gender? They might not even realize that this is possible, or real, or not like something you’d see on Jerry Springer.
Ironically, coming out as trans was more of a formality than anything. Almost nothing had actually changed about me at all, except for how I identified. I’d been slowly coming out for the past few years without even realizing it. No one could really claim to be shocked, and everything went better than expected. I had already gotten there, and now it was just official. At the end of the day, I was still me, and everyone knew that.
It’s easy to say this because it hasn’t ever gone poorly for me, but I’ve never regretted coming out. Not only was it a huge relief, but this is the truth of my life, and I believe it deserves to be shared with the people I care about. They’ve earned it. And I only hope that all of us can have someone in our lives who’s earned this invaluable trust: the trust that they’ll listen even if they don’t always understand, that they’ll see you as a human being first, and that they’ll love you just the same.
Among the many issues people have with transgender identities and the process of transitioning, one especially mystifying notion is that this is somehow selfish or vain. This is a difficult accusation to counter, because the concepts of “selfishness” and “vanity” are slippery things. In common usage, whether something is seen as selfish or vain is largely based on an individual’s subjective opinion, something which can widely vary. This makes it hard to refer to any kind of objective standard of selfishness or vanity and show them, “no, it’s not.”
But it often seems like they don’t even really intend to demonstrate how this is selfish or vain. They don’t actually bother to explain why it must be so, they just declare it to be so. Rather than making a serious argument, they may simply be using these labels to signal disapproval. They have some kind of problem with people being trans, and to justify this, they have to come up with a reason for why it’s bad. So they just pick any random thing that’s commonly seen as bad and which sounds vaguely plausible. They think being trans is wrong. Being selfish is a thing that’s wrong. Therefore, they’re going to argue for the bad-ness of being trans by saying that it’s selfish. In this process of thinking in reverse, they overlook the need to identify which aspects of being trans actually coincide with the distinguishing features of selfishness or vanity. They’re just trying to pass off a hollow imitation of a reason as though it were a real basis for their claims.
But despite how subjective people’s standards may be, there is still generally some minimal – if vague – consensus on what actually constitutes selfishness or vanity. Selfishness is typically understood as an excessive focus on the self, at the expense of concern for others. Someone’s gender identity and the process of transitioning are necessarily focused on the self, but that alone is not enough to make this selfish. Not everything that has to do primarily with the self is selfish just for that reason. There must also be some kind of negative impact on others as a result of that emphasis on the self.
It’s common for people to lower the threshold of selfishness on a situational basis so that they can attack almost anything for allegedly being “selfish”. For instance, someone might decide that my daily medications, which cost less than a cup of coffee, are a selfish indulgence because I could have sent that money to developing nations. Of course, we probably wouldn’t see them going to a Starbucks to berate the patrons for their “selfishness”. At some point, we have to recognize that it is often acceptable for us to do certain things for ourselves, and most people understand this when they aren’t trying to use the accusation of selfishness for dishonest purposes.
Things we choose to do for ourselves rather than others, but which are not actually selfish, might be better described as self-centered, self-focused, or self-oriented. But even this still carries the connotation of being selfish in a bad way, because the choice to describe it as pertaining to the self at all is often perceived as being in contrast to an unspoken baseline standard of appropriate balance between self-interest and concern for others. Any emphasis on the self thus implies that this is now out of balance, which makes it difficult to talk about anything that has to do primarily with the self without this being read as some kind of transgression.
But regardless of the difficulties in discussing this, it’s still not clear what exactly about being trans must be selfish. For this to be selfish in a bad way, there would have to be some element of it which adversely impacts others to an unacceptable extent, and which is disregarded so that the individual can pursue their own desires. Again, merely choosing to work toward their own goals is not enough to make this selfish.
So, does this cause any harm to others? If so, what are these harms? And are they genuine harms, or just harms that have been imagined and constructed? Finally, are these harms so substantial that they should outweigh the need for trans people to live as their true selves? Only then can we conclude that being trans is unacceptably selfish. So what might these supposed harms be? When might someone have such an important obligation to others that it overrides their own need to identify and live as they wish?
Many of these supposed “harms” seem to be of the same nature as the harm suffered by a Catholic mother who must endure the presence of gay people holding hands at a public park where her children can see, or the injury inflicted upon a Muslim who is exposed to an illustration of Muhammad. These are not actually harmful things. Plenty of people are able to be in the presence of gay people or drawings of Muhammad without acting like this constitutes some kind of real damage to them.
Those who pretend that this is a genuine harm seem to think that because they hold particular beliefs, everyone else is obligated to live their lives in accordance with these beliefs, and if they don’t, their unwillingness to let someone else’s beliefs deter them from living the life they want must mean they’re selfish. But this is not a legitimate obligation that anyone else is required to accept. The fact that you’re prejudiced does not mean that anyone is actually harming you by being part of a group that you’re prejudiced against. And the fact that you follow a certain religion does not mean anyone is harming you just by not following that religion.
People object to these things, not because they’re really causing injury to anyone, but because they choose to be bothered by them, and they believe the rest of the world must therefore honor that choice and tiptoe around it. But being gay, or doing something the religion of Islam wouldn’t approve of, does not deprive these people of anything other than their desire to control the lives of others to a clearly unacceptable degree. And the only burden it imposes upon them is one which all of us must already learn to live with: being part of a world full of people who won’t always agree with you.
It is not selfish to be gay, or to disagree with Islam, just because some people don’t like that. And likewise, it is not selfish to be trans merely because some people may vigorously disagree with it or claim that we’ve offended their delicate sensibilities. But considering the serious burden they seek to impose upon trans people by discouraging them from being themselves on the grounds that this is “selfish”, it truly is selfish for them to prioritize their personal comfort and inexplicable need for everyone not to be trans over another person’s identity and self-fulfillment.
It’s difficult to fathom how someone’s strong feelings on the matter could be important enough to obligate someone else to closet themselves, silence themselves, and disguise themselves every day as a gender they don’t identify with. Our choice to live our lives as we wish does not inflict any real harm upon those who demand we do otherwise. But their expectation that our life decisions should never stray from their standards would cause unacceptable harm to us. Such expectations really are selfish in a bad way.
There are certain situations where there could be more concrete harms tied to being trans, such as circumstances where it might have a significant impact upon someone’s partner or children and their relationships with them. This won’t be applicable to every trans person, and it isn’t something I have much experience with, because my partner and her entire family have always known me as a woman. At this point, it would be a surprise to everyone if I came out as a man! And again, it’s possible for people to be tempted to exaggerate the harm of someone close to them being trans in order to make it seem unacceptably selfish.
But when this does come out of nowhere, and nobody is sure of how best to work through it, the effects can potentially be similar to any other disruptive or destabilizing event that changes the nature of the family. Families are supposed to be a place where love, stability, and being there for each other are paramount, and choosing to be a part of a family represents an implicit agreement to maintain this and further these goals. To that extent, the feelings of one’s close family can be somewhat more relevant here than the opinions of random people.
For example, Dan Savage once claimed that it was selfish for a woman not to postpone her transition until her son was 18, because he was greatly distressed about this. If someone has children, how they’re affected by such decisions is certainly something to take into account, although it’s hard to see how the supposed harms that were previously compelling enough to demand that she delay her transition would suddenly cease to enter into the moral equation as soon as her son turns 18. If its impact on her children warrants such a delay, then isn’t it possible that she might be obligated to postpone this indefinitely? And if not, why would it necessitate such a delay now?
If transitioning were to lead to a breakup, then the effects this would have on one’s partner and children need to be considered as well, but to argue that this is unacceptable just because it would cause a breakup is essentially the same as arguing that divorce is always too selfish to be permissible. But sometimes divorces and breakups do end up being the better option once everything is taken into account. Similarly, each family’s situation is different in ways that make it impossible to issue blanket pronouncements of when being trans is or isn’t okay, or how it should be handled. This is something to be worked out on an individual basis.
And while it may seem easy to say that one person should be expected to make sacrifices for the sake of the rest of their family, it’s also important to consider the negative effects of having a member of the family repress and closet themselves for a lengthy period of time, in terms of how this impacts the health of the individual and everyone else. This is not something that can be simply ignored out of existence. Just imagine what kind of difficulties could arise from forcing a cis person to identify, present, and live in the role of the opposite sex for years at a time, in order to avoid disrupting their family. The very idea would likely be offensive to many people. And no matter how noble the intention might be, this could end up being quite unhealthy for themselves and the rest of the family.
All of these factors need to be weighed against one another, and many of them can be too complex to quantify in a straightforward way. This decision isn’t easy enough to be made by advice columnists and other amateur ethicists. It’s a deeply personal matter to be worked out by the individual and their loved ones. And if someone does choose to make a personal sacrifice in terms of hiding who they are for the sake of their family, that’s their choice. But it doesn’t mean that anyone who chooses otherwise is necessarily selfish. Being trans is not something that’s reliably harmful to one’s family. Not everyone finds it to be so flagrantly unacceptable, and not everyone believes their own needs are important enough to compel someone to pretend to be something they’re not. And if they do, there’s still the potential for selfishness in their belief that the individual’s need to live openly is not important and can be disregarded. In any case, people outside of these situations probably don’t have enough information to evaluate whether the impact of someone being trans is so severe that they should have kept it secret in order to please their family.
And just as with selfishness, the concept of vanity is usually misunderstood, misused, and mostly subjective. Most people care about how they look to some extent, so the accusation of vanity can easily be used to criticize anyone for caring about their appearance at all. Given that presenting as a certain gender is closely tied to how we look, it’s no surprise that trans people are often singled out and accused of being vain for altering our appearance. But simply caring about how we look is not enough on its own to conclude that we’re vain. Just as how selfishness describes an excessive fixation on the self, vanity describes an excessive fixation on one’s appearance – not simply caring about it at all.
At first glance, it’s easy to see why people might think that changing your appearance to that of another gender is so drastic that it can only be described as excessive. But the magnitude of that change on its own does not mean that it must therefore be in excess of what’s reasonable. In the case of someone who’s trans, the desire to live and present as their preferred gender is entirely reasonable. This is only excessive if people wanting to be seen as their gender is excessive. Do we call cis men and women vain for getting haircuts or buying clothes and makeup? Most of the time, we see nothing wrong with this. So how vain is it when I wear women’s clothes, compared to a cis woman wearing women’s clothes? If you consider all of the trappings of gender that people spend time and money on over their entire lifetime, it might start to seem pretty incredible no matter whether they’re cis or trans. Yet in the case of cis people, this isn’t usually treated as an excess focus on their appearance, but an acceptable focus.
Of course, one key difference is that trans people often take certain steps to present as their gender which most cis people will never have to. But this is simply the nature of the condition, and the various procedures associated with transitioning are considered by medical authorities to be necessary treatments as part of the standards of care. When cis people have to correct their appearance due to a medical condition, this generally isn’t seen as objectionable. If a cis woman with PCOS seeks to remove her excess facial hair, does anyone have a problem with that? Do they have to rock that beard or else risk accusations of “vanity”? So why should we consider it vain when a trans woman wants her facial hair gone? If a cis man with gynecomastia wants to have his breast tissue removed, is he just being vain? So why would it be vain for a trans man to have chest surgery? Sure, these can be major, costly procedures. But again, that doesn’t mean they’re excessive or unwarranted given the circumstances.
In the case of genital surgery, some people may consider it an act of vanity to operate on organs which are undesired but otherwise functional. But the need for genitals that match their body image is no less legitimate in trans people than it is in cis people. Consider the case of male combat veterans who have suffered disfiguring injuries to their genitals. If it’s easier to construct a vagina rather than a phallus, as it very well may be in some cases, would it be mere vanity for these men to prefer a functional phallus – or for them to have any preference at all? Should they have to settle for whatever they can get regardless of their desires, or else be considered vain? Whether people seek genital surgery because of their gender identity or because of involuntary disfigurement is immaterial. Just as in the case of undesired facial hair or breast tissue, the legitimacy of their preferences is what matters, and if these preferences are legitimate for cis people, they should be considered legitimate for trans people as well.
Simply living as your identified gender is not normally considered an example of selfishness or vanity. Yet this is all too often considered an outrageous act of self-absorption when trans people do it. The expectation that anyone should have to abandon their gender to avoid being seen as selfish or vain is never applied to cis people, because it’s plain to see how unreasonable this is. I’m entitled to my gender, just as you’re entitled to yours. But I’m not entitled to anyone else’s gender – and you’re not entitled to mine. One of the most important things my mother shared with me was her realization that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life living purely for other people just to keep them happy. Is that selfish? No. They have their own lives to live, and I have mine.
I’m usually very private about my medical history, but many of you have been with me for the duration of my whole “project”, and I just see this as another chapter of our journey together. I started hormone replacement therapy a little while ago, which means a lot more estrogen, and a lot less testosterone. And plenty of people have asked me: What’s it like? This curiosity is completely natural – I wanted to know, too! – and I would love to tell them about it. This is something the vast majority of people will never experience, and there’s a lot for all of us to learn from it. The problem is that there are so many issues that can get in the way of discussing this and distort it into something completely divorced from reality.
Talking about how it feels seems like it should be the simplest thing in the world. Unfortunately, it’s far more complex than you might expect. First, I haven’t been on HRT long enough to experience any physical effects, aside from softer and clearer skin. It’s not magic – most of this won’t happen in a week, or a month, or maybe even a year. At this stage, almost all of the effects are mental. And paying attention to what’s going on in your mind is hard enough already, whether you’re transitioning or not. Trying to pick out what might be due to your shifting hormones is a whole other level of difficulty, and it’s really easy to fall prey to the placebo effect. Sure, maybe I’m in a ridiculously good mood because of estrogen, but that could just be the elation of finally getting started. Did I cry at a movie on the Oxygen channel because of hormones, or was the movie just that good? I can’t tell, because there’s no way to blind this sort of thing, and having a sample size of one certainly doesn’t help.
I’ve also relied on those around me to point out any differences they’ve seen in me, such as being somewhat more expressive. If these changes are real, I might not always notice them. We don’t “have” brains, we are brains. And likewise, we don’t just have hormones – we’re made of hormones. It’s not easy to examine a phenomenon within yourself as though it were distinct from yourself, because it really is a part of you. Of course, the people around me aren’t blinded either, and they might also be highly attuned to any apparent differences, and inclined to attribute them to hormones. And we might also only notice what seems to be new, while failing to look for things that haven’t changed. People pay more attention to the times you cry than the times you don’t.
But figuring out what’s actually changing is only half of the problem. Talking to other people about it presents a whole new array of difficulties. We live in an incredibly gendered world, where so many behaviors are classified as inherently male or female. Even when those behaviors are obviously and unavoidably shared by both sexes, we still find ways to create artificial distinctions of gender. Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that women are naturally drawn to the kitchen, but when men grill up some steaks with their friends, that’s a “manly” thing to do. And when dolls are dressed in G.I. Joe outfits, it suddenly stops being so “girly” to play with them.
Because certain behaviors are seen as being male or female in themselves, people look for ways to connect this to male and female biology. And that’s where hormones come in. When I describe how I feel now that I’m switching from testosterone to estrogen, it’s disturbingly easy to fall into the trap of talking about it in a way that’s based on the common mentality of “men do this, women do that”. And even if I do my best to avoid that, everyone who’s listening will still be inclined to view this in terms of common stereotypes about men and women – whether they know it or not. This is the result of all of us spending our entire lives in a society that conditions us to think that men and women have a fundamentally different existence.
Just look at how the Nashua Telegraph described one woman’s transition:
Cynthia, now 48, has developed a new love for chocolate and ice cream – possibly a side effect of the hormones. And a half-hour isn’t enough time to get ready anymore.
Yes, because women spend all day eating Dove bars and taking forever to do their hair. “Men, eh eh eh eh, women, doo doo doo doo!” No. That’s not how the world works, and if we continue to believe this, we’ve got a problem.
Even just saying that I now feel more in touch with my emotions comes with an absurd amount of gendered baggage. Not only will I be more inclined to attribute this to HRT because of everything I’ve heard throughout my life about the supposed essential natures of men and women, but those who hear it will take it as yet more evidence of “Ah, yes, women are emotional creatures tossed about on the winds of their feelings, but men are cold and rational!”
If I didn’t make a conscious effort to think more deeply about this, I might not have realized that what I’m actually sensing is a greater control over my feelings – an ability to see them more clearly, observe their features, and not be as unduly influenced by them as I used to be. If I hadn’t been able to put aside those crude stereotypes about men and women, I wouldn’t have been able to communicate all of that nuance to everyone who wants to know what this is like. So, is this a “male” or a “female” phenomenon? If I’m a man, a greater grasp of emotions might mean I’m diplomatic, understanding, and good at handling conflict. If I’m a woman, it makes me “sensitive”.
Likewise, if I were to point out that I now find it much easier and less stressful to deal with cooking, cleaning house, and taking care of the kids, most people wouldn’t be able to avoid seeing this as further evidence that women are somehow optimized for domestic life and men are just naturally lousy at household duties, as illustrated by every commercial ever. These beliefs are so pervasive and occluding that it would be easy to stop at that shallow observation and ignore the fact that this just happens to be what I spend all day doing, and maybe it only feels easier because everything feels easier for me now. Is it male or female to be happy? If I’m a man, it makes me a stronghold of enduring optimism. If I’m a woman, it makes me “perky”.
This is why talking about HRT is such a minefield. Switching from male to female hormones provides an ideal example that people can grab hold of and plunder for anything they can use to reinforce their ideas about the attitudes, behaviors and abilities to which men and women are “naturally” predisposed. Transitioning is about many things, but it’s not about going from one stereotype to another. Hormones don’t do that, because no one is that one-dimensional, trans or not. It doesn’t do us any good to pretend that this reflects reality. The darker side of the assumption that a certain set of behaviors and preferences define manhood and womanhood is the belief that the absence of these features makes someone less of a man or a woman. When cis people don’t fit into this model, people use these standards to strip them of their worth. And when trans people don’t meet these standards, we’re stripped of our genders. This isn’t helping anyone.
Perhaps because of the implication that manhood and womanhood are inherently different modes of existence, I’ve been asked whether I feel “like a new person”. I feel different, but that doesn’t make me an entirely different person. It’s really not that stark of a division. This isn’t like being injected with Borg nanoprobes that start whispering inside your head. It’s not like turning into someone else. You’ll still be yourself. This isn’t a cure-all, it won’t make you superhuman, and it won’t destroy who you are, either. It might just help you feel better, and if it does, then this could be what works for you. The grass is the same color as it is over there – I’m just seeing it a little differently now. And I’ll let you know if anything changes.
On my last post about trans people and “disclosure” in relationships, where many people seem to have missed the point entirely and launched into the usual debate over if and when trans people should disclose and whether cis people consider trans people to be acceptable partners, commenter Sivi cuts right through the bullshit:
As a brief note, to other cis straight dudes, can we refrain from patting ourselves on the back by going “You know, by gum, I would sleep with a trans woman.” It’s uncomfortably self-congratulatory for what is, after all, an admission that as a straight dude you would sleep with a woman.
As Greta has pointed out, when someone calls a woman “ugly”, the proper response is not your immediate reassurance that they aren’t ugly. Focusing on someone’s perceived attractiveness only serves to center the discussion on this, mistakenly reinforcing the idea that it’s relevant. The same applies here. No matter if they answer yes or no, straight men’s opinions on whether they would sleep with trans women are simply not the point. Just as the validity and worth of a woman and her work do not hinge on her appearance, the identities of trans people do not become any more or less real based on whether cis people want to fuck us.
When someone tries to invalidate our genders by saying that, sexually, they consider us less than “real” women and thus unacceptable by their standards, the error in this argument is deeper than the surface-level result that they don’t want to sleep with us. It’s easy to think this is where they’re mistaken, but that’s still not the core of it. The underlying error is the assumption that whether people accept or reject us as sexually desirable has any bearing on the reality of our womanhood. Failing to recognize and reject this can lead to counterarguments of the “Well, I’d fuck you” variety, which are equally irrelevant and only solidify that flawed assumption.
