Gender FAQ, By Jaz
I’m not an expert. I’ve not got my doctorate in gender studies nor am I a renowned expert on transgender issues. I’m just a girl that has known she was trans for a long time. Long enough that some people reading might not have been born when I first chose my preferred pronouns and representation. I’ve been out to close friends since I was a preteen, been on hormones so long that I’m more hips than girl nowadays. These opinions are mine and mine alone, but they’re based on decades of observation and experience.
Gender and Identity
What is gender. Gender is a presentation of identity, a sliding scale of societal norms and beliefs culminating in a hazy understanding of who a person might be and what they prefer. It’s a wildly unchartable and vastly misunderstood social construct used to categorize a person by inherent traits. Gender isn’t a two dimensional line with Male on one end and Female on the other. It is not a measure of a person nor is it something that even tells you anything about that person. Some days it is a steady pulse that you can confidently explain to your peers. Others, it’s somewhere entirely different or not even holding still long enough to catch sight of. Gender just is.
“Why” is a far more interesting question in terms of gender. Why is my gender something else? Why change it? Why does it matter? It matters because humans are very, very good at categorization. Very, very, very good. As a whole, we’re able to look at something and very quickly compare it to other things in order to make a reasonable guess. If you come across a large, fluffy, four-legged creature standing near people, you would assume it to be a dog. Smaller, you might guess a cat. You can do that because you have categories in your head that lets you react quickly to new things.
Western civilization has gender categories of male and female ingrained so far into its culture that your genitals determine whether you are told to play with action figures or dolls. But it does so such that a person need only look at you to understand you. In the fantasy ideal of some; looking like a boy means you like sports, chasing girls, and other manly type things. Liking anything considered feminine is frowned upon and can lead to social isolation. People get upset when what they see confuses their concept of Male and Female and it all falls back to humans being relatively good at categorizing and then trying to categorize gender, personality, ideology, and more into two labels: penis or no penis.
Cisgender, transgender, femme/masc/non-binary. They’re all identities and sometimes you wonder if a trait or two of yours might be signalling a different identity than you thought. It’s all a natural part of self-reflection and in my personal opinion, discovering who you are as a person is the most important thing you can do for yourself. Question what you think of yourself and others and come to conclusions based on your observations and the observations of those you trust. If you come out the other side exactly the same, at least now you know for certain. Find the happiest version of yourself and live life well. That’s the best thing you can do for your own wellbeing.
The Girl in the Mirror
One question I get often: “if you’ve known you were trans for so long, why didn’t you get on HRT earlier? What changed?” The short answer is my health and well-being. I don’t think anyone chooses to drastically medically alter their body for any other reason. As a kid, there was a very clear moment where “being a boy” felt dissonant to me. Prior to then I was just me. My gender wasn’t something I was conscious of so it wasn’t something that I had an opinion on. Once it did register that everyone expects me to exist in this binary of self-expression, I sort of just made the decision to ignore my gender. It made no sense to me, it did me no good, and leaning into it just made me feel like a very squeamish actress in front of a perpetual audience. When the time came, I chose to stand on the line between girl and boy. A balancing act that seemed a spectacle to others but for me was as easy as breathing.
Nevertheless, despite all efforts, who I saw in the mirror looked horrendous and misshapen. I suffered from dysphoria, the feeling of discomfort and distress caused by a clashing physical and mental representation of my gender. I binged, I starved, flirted with anorexia, learned to use the bathroom in pitch dark just to never need to see that dreaded reflection. Even with my options explained to me by a medical professional, I knew that transitioning at that time would cost money I didn’t have and parental support that was criminally absent. But I so desperately wanted to.
I began transitioning in late 2017, when my therapist asked me why I hadn’t transitioned yet. I’d gotten complacent and used to just hating my body and feeling detached from it. That, paired with a support system, finances, and finally getting fed up at my own dysphoria led me to seeking hormones. Looking back, I was ready to start hormone replacement therapy in college, but I was too afraid. I don’t hold that against myself, but I know “waiting too long” is a fear for a lot of transpeople. The idea that you might be able to defeat puberty before it does more damage. As of the time this publishes, I am 28. There are people who start their transition far later and some who started at half my age. The time is right when you are finally comfortable with taking that step. No sooner, no later.
Tried and True Trans Terminology
I am femme and I am non-binary. Non-binary isn’t a single point in-between male and female. It’s a large swath of gender that means you’re not quite femme and you’re not quite masc. If you are unsure of your gender but you know you aren’t cis, check the other end of the spectrum. If the opposite doesn’t feel right either, not from a style or hobbies perspective but just as an identity, I’d consider that non-binary. Again, gender isn’t something so concrete as to be all of one thing or another. Even ciswomen might consider themselves a little masculine sometimes. It’s all in how you understand yourself. It’s perfectly okay to be a man with some gender-nonconforming behavior just as much as it’s okay to be non-binary but masc leaning.
And we have terminology for these off-center genders. We might call this masculine non-binary person “demimasculine”. Demi- in this context means half or “just a little less”. Just as a demigod isn’t a full god but shares a lot of the same characteristics, a demimasculine person is “mostly masculine but just a bit off the mark”. It’s a very useful term when talking about non-binary folks or someone that feels like being masc or fem feels somewhat right, but not exactly right. How you choose to represent yourself, no matter how specific the term, is perfectly acceptable.
Disrespect the haters
Some people choose not to respect gender at all. They would rather defy all manner of evidence and medical studies just to protect their personal bias to the bitter end. So let me just say this very clearly: TERF is not a slur. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists are a cosmic joke of irony where the sanctity of womanhood depends on the vagina and the trauma of being a woman in a patriarchal society. They believe that a woman should not be forced into having a child if she does not want one but defer to the presence of a uterus to define femininity. Their insistence that transwomen are men has been such a cancer upon political and identity discourse that there is an organized focus on claiming TERF is a slur meant to silence “real women”. They are the old ladies peeking over bathroom stalls to make sure someone isn’t “one of those perverts”. They are the feminists willing to provide minimal support for transmen because according to them “transmen are just confused lesbians envious of the patriarchy”. They harass and gaslight so expertly that you can only imagine how emotionally abusive they are in their personal life. They are feminists with exceptions: they work for the equal rights of all women but not all women. An oxymoron in both name and function.
What’s worse, there are transpeople that buy into some of the rhetoric of transphobes. There are transmen and transwomen in this great wide world that throw themselves into looking as cisgender as they can, that jump through every hoop needed to convince a doctor to prescribe hormones or preform surgery, that have suffered and cried and hurt because of their gender dysphoria, and they have the gall to tell other transpersons that they are not trans enough. Transmedicalists are a group of cis and trans folk who believe you can’t be trans without medical intervention in some way. They move the criteria for transitioning far enough away that anyone without the means or privilege to go through with medical intervention are left behind. They have this bizarre fear that “transtrenders” only call themselves trans because it has become some sort of niche badge of coolness among young people. To combat this, they seek to limit the definition of trans only to those who have suffered greatly from gender dysphoria and have put in money/resources towards transition. It would be a wonderful joke if they weren’t so very serious about it. Worse, these “truscum” often receive the support of the very TERFs that hate them. Gatekeeping trans people who aren’t trans enough is a very easy first step to keeping anyone from being trans at all.
That being said, there are those that appreciate a transperson perhaps too much. They fetishize and covet these gender non-conforming people so much that they treat others like a thing to be chased after. A chaser is someone that, for a variety of reasons, is attracted to the idea of someone to the point of treating them like a fetish. There are chubby chasers, virgin chasers, and of course trans chasers. They might be someone that is super into girls with dicks and is absolutely willing to ignore anything and everything about you as long as you are a girl and also have a dick. A chaser might be someone who only dates transmen because “they’re cuter” or “less manly” than cismen. They exotify the very idea of a transperson; they’re more interested in the idea of something different and unique than the person to such a point that it seems both mildly obsessive and tremendously transphobic. Chasers typically operate off of a gross generalization and involve othering people into a stereotype that they did not sign up for and often just isn’t true. While it’s never a problem to have sexual preferences, the trouble with chasers is how uncomfortable they can make someone feel by only seeing a person as a kink to be indulged.
Self-love is a hell of a drug
Days and hours spent hating every aspect of yourself. Of being both disgusted with an unknown aspect of yourself and yet unable to admit to yourself or even recognize what those things are. Discomfort in every social situation as you hide some secret you aren’t even sure is true or even really a secret. Always the excuses that you don’t believe. Always behavior you can’t explain. Convincing yourself that there’s no point and using that as your shield against the uncertainty.
Before I was comfortable enough to come out, I simply could not bring myself to practice any sort of self care. It didn’t feel like my body was a part of me. It was this foreign object that I was simply piloting in an attempt to fool everyone around me. I would not wish that level of self-hatred on the worst humanity has to offer. I wouldn’t wish that uncertainty and listlessness on anyone.
Even with all these issues, opponents, and more that trans people face every day, it pales in comparison to how wonderful it feels to be truly and completely yourself. No one deserves to feel trapped or uncomfortable in their own skin. No one should need to repress who they are to fit into a societal expectation that does not belong to them. The sense of relief, of freedom you get from just being who you were meant to be is so very pure and thrilling that doing otherwise is never a viable option.