Trans Like Me: Conversations for All of Us

by C.N. Lester

It seems to have far less to do with gender than it does with broader issues of empathy and humility, and a willingness to understand that we are each the experts on our own lives.

When we are so surrounded by such diversity—in nature, in culture, in human spirit—how can we stand not to acknowledge it?

To be trans, you have to be surer than you’ve ever been, because being trans is what you are when you’ve exhausted every other option.

We torment ourselves: “How can I know for sure?” “What if I’m wrong?” “What would happen to me if I’m wrong?” We hold off our transitions until it is transition or die. We are encouraged to do so. And some of us die. Many of us who live have tried to.

I am not sure that I will be the same for the rest of my life. I am not sure that my needs will remain static or that I will not seek further expression for an expanded and maturing self. I know myself, but not all that I could become, the good and the bad.

But there is another kind of dysphoria, one I have found common to every trans person I have ever met. Social dysphoria: the collision between who we are, how we should be, how we need to express ourselves and live our lives, and the gendered straitjackets others would force us into. It is the misery, the wrongness, of being forced to live a lie. The pain of being called fakes for our authenticity.

Seventy years on, we are still fighting those who would go against a tidal wave of evidence because they have a personal problem with trans existence. As many trans people have noted, it’s baffling that some doctors, some laypeople, persist in thinking that trans people can be forced or shamed, convinced or persuaded out of being trans, when that is the same trick that society at large has been trying on us our entire lives, to no avail.

when considering what it is we know about sex, when exploring how the science of sex affects and is affected by gender, it is vital that intersex experiences are included. The existence of sexes beyond a simple male/female binary, and the experiences of people who have been punished for falling outside those bounds, show us both how our cultural understanding of what sex is warps the evidence of nature and, through resistance and solidarity, shows us a better way of respecting all human bodies.

HORMONAL, CHROMOSOMAL, INTERNAL, genital, secondary sexual, morphological: six ways of categorizing sexual development and difference. What if we were to listen to trans people, and add a seventh?

society still, frequently, insists on the division between the mind and the body. We dismiss conditions we do not like to admit—depression, chronic pain, undiagnosed disabilities—with the phrase “it’s just in your head,” as if the head were disconnected from the rest of us.

If we would dismiss the chance to learn more, then we admit to caring less about scientific inquiry than we do about the gendered stereotypes of sex.

we do not have to be philosophers to recognize how often we are misled by our own prejudices—and use those prejudices, in turn, to mislead others.

We must never believe that we are unaffected by our own current folklore of gender, in the false confidence that we are better than our forebears.

In popular culture—in the media, in schools, in the workplace, even in hospitals and doctors’ surgeries—we talk about “facts” which “everybody knows,” without examining what it is we’ve actually learned in an examined way compared to what we’ve picked up through ingrained assumptions and cultural conditioning.

When it comes to the impact of sex on trans lives, and what trans lives can tell us of what sex is, we have to stop pretending that we know all there is to know and focus instead on learning more.

By listening to, and believing, the young people who say that they are trans, we have the chance to end that pattern of isolation and self-loathing, to make the experience of being unconditionally loved the norm, rather than the exception. Removing stigma and sharing knowledge is not the same as forcing a label or category onto a young person.

Being trans is not a fate anyone needs saving from. But everyone, every child, needs to be loved for who they truly are, without conditions.

In 2016 there are some trans celebrities, a very small number of highly visible trans women, trans men, and genderqueer people, who are widely accepted as attractive. They are outliers. Attraction to a trans person is more usually seen as a joke and a failure. If we match normative standards of what it is to be beautiful then we’re deceptive; if we don’t we’re pathetic.

From so many of the people I have met and known, desired and been desired by, I have learned that a trans person’s needs, reality, and physicality are supposed to be secondary to those of a cis person.

If we are to be treated with respect in the wider world, we must trust in the respect of those closest to us. The micro and the macro are inseparable. Trans people are worthy of love.

Malta, Argentina, Denmark, Norway, and Ireland have decided that self-determination is enough, that all a trans person needs to do to be real is to declare it on an official form. So far, there have been no problems. The idea there would be problems is laughable. Trans people are living their real lives, with or without government protection.

the way bodies relax around each other, knowing that there is no judgment—express themselves with shyness or extravagance, but with that incredible sense of intimacy—that three o’clock in the morning feeling, when everyone is vulnerable in what they say, and everyone is reckless with that vulnerability.

Feminism is my method of resistance, my road map to change.

we have the idea that it is only socialization in childhood that matters: that it takes a certain length of time before a person can claim to be a woman or a man, and that if a critical window of opportunity is missed, a person cannot ever “change gender.” Leaving aside the fact that those putting forth this argument ignore both the existence of young transitioners, and the common occurrence of inner knowledge that predates social transition, this interpretation of how the self is constructed dismisses what we are coming to know of brain plasticity and the evolving field of theory of mind. I know I am not alone in having experienced significant shifts in personality following major life changes in adulthood.

Feminisms are ever changing, living philosophies and movements.

Working out how we can do our best by each other is not so simple as just using the most up-to-date terms and, without examining the deepest levels of our thoughts and actions, it can be easy to fall into thinking that intersectionality just means adding a surface layer of “diversity.” That all you have to do to make your feminism intersectional is to add one photo of a woman in a wheelchair, add one token piece by a trans woman, share an article from a black feminist, and call it a day.

“Feminism (n): Plural.” An explicit description of what that means: “We don’t all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry along with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us.” Any of us claiming that our feminism is neutral or total is either ignorant or a liar.

So my feminism must remain mine, and I must take responsibility for it, in all the ways in which my insights are valuable and all the ways in which they are limited. In doing so, I can hope to join my voice to others without drowning them out.

There is not one aspect of life where gendered oppression does not reach, and which cannot benefit from feminist inclusion.

Women of color, queer women, and transgender women need to be better included in the feminist project. Women from these groups have been shamefully abandoned by Capital-F Feminism, time and again. This is a hard, painful truth.… For years, I decided feminism was not for me as a black woman, as a woman who has been queer identified at varying points in her life, because feminism has, historically, been far more invested in improving the lives of heterosexual white women to the detriment of all others.

Life is seldom perfect, and everyone knows the sometime necessity of a compromise. But if we accept the necessity—the desirability—of offering up the lives of others to improve our own, then we have already lost.

The more we learn about the intricacies, overlaps, and contrasts of our experiences, the more we can dismantle the totality of gendered oppression.