Recently I’ve begun working through the book How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are, by Alex Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker. But initially, I wasn’t ready to take my time with the questions I was asking myself.
Looking back, I treated the beginning of questioning my gender like I was self-diagnosing myself in an emergency room. Without trying to be too harsh on myself, I’d go as far as to say that my behavior at first was manic.
A friend of a friend I know from college moved to California before I did, and around the time of her moving, she had begun transitioning. In college, I don’t think I ever had a conversation with her. We were part of the same scene, with me more on the fringes of it (I’ve taken an observer role in a lot of different communities in my life — happy to observe, but also lonely). The first time I actually met her and talked with her was when a college friend/former roommate of mine visited with another friend of a friend I didn’t know, and we planned it so the four of us hung out together while they were here.
I hadn’t begun questioning yet, but, as I would learn when I started to read other trans women’s “egg-cracking” stories (more on this later), I was engaging (both intensely and with a sense of confused detachment) in certain pornography and roleplaying that is normally a harbinger for many Americans questioning their gender (more on this later too). This was a secret I kept that I was compulsively anxious about being discovered; yet the awkward fluidity I was living out in private would occasionally seep out during the day.
There’s something else I want you to know about me. I tend to live under the impression that my internal world is completely visible to everyone outside of me, even though I know logically it’s not. For a lot of different reasons, including: evangelism, as in, ‘God is always watching and judging your thoughts;’ my mother’s strategy in reinforcing my older sister and I’s obedience by suggesting that she would watch us at school during breaks at work without us knowing; my lifelong identity crisis, in that I felt an obligation to be hyper-aware of how people interacted with me so I could figure out who I was through their reactions; being an empath and feeling strong emotions that made no sense to me, so I would claim them as my own and my fault and my deformity to fix. In other words, an exponential sense of imposter syndrome; because I was always terrified that someone would see some lurking truth in me that I could never see (and only I could be culpable for my blindness).
I was in awe of TJ even before I saw her again in person. She was so knowledgeable, so self-sufficient, and so brave. She had this constant determination that I always envy in other people. I don’t know if she would call it this, but she also had that hustle-spirit. She was always so sure of who she was, even when she was voicing her doubts. We spent most of the trip in her world. She worked for a magazine and quickly became editor before she even moved out here. And because the magazine had been made in the same building for decades, she lived in a room above the archives where she didn’t have to pay rent.
At one point, our visiting friends went off on their own for, I think it was a 23-course dinner at a sushi restaurant. (I think it was one of those things that sounds insane, but when it’s possible to do, why not?) So TJ and I spent the afternoon and evening together. We ate lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant, and I hung out at her place and talked with the other folks who helped run the magazine while she worked. I felt pretty awkward. I felt like I wasn’t enough, not self-aware enough to ever seem interesting to her. She was gentle with me in her own way. She convinced me to knock over the rent-a-scooters with her that littered almost all of the blocks in San Francisco while we walked around. On our way to lunch, she asked me how I identify and/or what my orientation was. I tried to be clever. “I’m comfortable,” I said. Even if I had wanted to tell the truth instead of obscure it, I don’t know what I could’ve said.
While being around her for those few days, I felt a variation of that confusing feeling of attraction/admiration/awe that I’ve felt so many times and would push away my urge to analyze it (it was always easier to imagine a bullshit reason and bury it). Unfortunately I felt it as a disjointed physical attraction towards TJ; “unfortunately” because it wasn’t true to how I felt. I think a part of me wanted to know so much more about what her gender journey had been, but I didn’t know that was what I wanted and I couldn’t allow myself to ask. So in the midst of my awe, I cared for her very deeply.
I mention TJ because she was the first out trans person I ever talked to at length. But because I wasn’t at the point of questioning my gender (at best, because of what I did in private, I questioned my sexuality; which on one hand I was certain of, and on the other hand, my private actions distorted what I felt I knew), it felt like I had gone into another world for four days and then returned to my old, normal world. To put it another way, it was another strong experience that was speaking to me in a language I didn’t understand yet.
The catalyst for my questioning happened during shelter-in-place. Lots of internet time both active and passive. Then, like so many others who start questioning: r/egg_irl. That subreddit is a good example of the phrase, “the medium is the message.” Every post is about relating to the subreddit’s memes about being a closeted trans person, but because one is only reading the memes (eventually everyday) instead of actively transitioning, one can continue being in denial of their transness and/or their questioning. Hence the popular phrase on that page: “still cis tho.”
Being on that page led me to the subreddit’s two discord servers, which led me to leaving the pornographic servers on the account I already had, and led me to talking with other trans people. It felt good to finally have an outlet for the questions that I’d been wrestling with for what I first thought were months, but really had been years. The main question I was posed from the first conversation I had in the server was, “What was it that felt good about having your secret online female persona?” I was really appreciative of that question. I had already gone through the stage of assumption and self-putdown of “this is just an unhealthy fetish.” But to answer that question, I had to stop and sit with it for a couple days. It wasn’t necessarily the sexual aspect. And I hadn’t begun being attracted to men in my day-to-day life (I was always very picky about who I roleplayed with anyway — they had to be close enough to the kind of man I felt comfortable being). It was about accessing this female power in me, despite it painfully being defiled through the lenses of sexism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy. This was the beginning of my acknowledgement.
When I began to sincerely consider that there may be parts of who I am that are female, a weight was lifted. The relief I felt was peaceful, matter-of-fact. Because of my lifelong depression and anxiety, I had begun to experience minor memory loss during grad school, but all of a sudden memories from childhood started coming back. So many of those moments that were strong to me but I had no way of holding onto them. And the anxieties I had around sex because of the outlet I’d been using lifted too. My proclivities made sense. I was able to let go of the stigma of what I’d been doing in private, along with the urges that came with it that would swamp me nearly every night. For what seemed like the first time, at least to this level of magnitude, I started to make sense to myself.
What followed afterward were days of secret euphoria and mortified panic.
