I have been a man in the eyes of the world for almost eight years now.
I transitioned slowly, thinking maybe people would be more accepting if they saw I wasn’t “rushing into things,” if I gave them a chance to adjust. Or maybe I thought I could do it so slowly that nobody even noticed. It didn’t work, of course. It might have been gradual for me, but for people I came out to, it was always sudden – one moment they didn’t know I was trans, and the next they did. There’s no way to ease people in like “I’m about 10% trans now, just put a pin in that… okay now it’s 20%… are you ready for more?”
(At this point I had long since been cutting my hair short and wearing men’s clothes and no makeup, but these are all things women can do. There’s no way to unambiguously signal maleness with personal styling alone, which is lovely for human diversity and all, but a big pain in the ass when you’re a coward trying to soft-launch a gender transition.)
I dragged my feet on every step, still trying to prove to the world that I had Extremely Slow Onset Gender Dysphoria; it took me two years from starting testosterone to come out at work, and four years to legally change my name and gender. Every night I’d have this conversation with myself:
“I don’t want to be trans! It’s expensive and a lot of work and people hate you for it! This isn’t fun anymore! I want to quit!”
“Okay, you can do that. It’s an option. You can go back to living as a woman.”
“What??? Why would I do that??!?!!?“
And at the same time, I’m not sure I would have accepted a magic potion to become a cis man, if one had been offered. I’ve made so many friends in the trans community. I’ve gotten to decide what kind of person I want to be, far more consciously than most people have the opportunity to. I got to choose my own name! Not a lot of people get that! (Which is weird, honestly, considering that everyone has the opportunity. But I can count on one hand the number of cis people I know who’ve changed their name to one that simply fit better.) And I’ve learned a hell of a lot about gender, both what it feels like from the inside and how people treat you when they see you as a man or a woman.
The main thing I’ve learned is something I suspected all along – it doesn’t make that much of a difference.
This is weird to say when I’ve spent years on the project of changing my gender, but on a day-to-day basis, I’m still me. I’m not angrier, or hornier, or better at math, or worse at… I don’t know, sewing? You run into very silly stereotypes very fast when you start trying to drill down what the difference between the genders is supposed to even be. Eight years of testosterone and I still don’t understand football.
When I came out to my mom, she said “it’s like I’m losing a daughter,” which was an awful thing to say, and also a strange one. There was no point at my transition where female-me disappeared and male-me took over. I’m the same person and I don’t think that’s entirely because “I was always a man” or whatever – I think it’s because being a human is kind of the same experience no matter what kind of sex hormones you’re doing it with.
Even the changes in my body feel weirdly normal. If you’d asked me “what’s it like to be a guy with a half-inch penis?” before that was me, I would have thought it was really like something. Like oh you must feel terribly self-conscious about it, or must have a lot of confidence to compensate, or… anything other than the reality, which is that on most days, I don’t even think about it. My face was my face when it didn’t grow hair, and now that it does, it’s my face with hair on it. I’ve never had a lot of physical dysphoria, but I also don’t have any now. I’m just whatever shape I happen to be at the moment.
The way people treat me is a little more noticeably different. Mostly in what doesn’t happen. Men used to have opinions about me, sexually. Some of them were “you should fuck me” and some of them were “I wouldn’t fuck you,” but either way, they formed those opinions and often shared them. It doesn’t work the other way at all. I have no idea what random women in passing cars think of my sexual prospects.
(This is mostly a positive, but God, I miss picking up straight men. All you have to do is exist in front of them. Finding queer men who want what I’ve got is an entire goddamn outreach program.)
The standards are lower for me, too. If I exercise what I’d consider the bare minimum of politeness as a woman – smile at people, say please and thank you, listen when someone else is talking – I get told wow, I’m such a nice guy. Although if I try too hard to be nice to a woman sometimes that gets misinterpreted. It honestly hurt the first time I tried to make small talk with a cashier and she suddenly turned cold and distant in a way I’d never experienced when I was a woman. I don’t blame her for it, I blame cis men, I know exactly what they did to make her feel unsafe with me, but it did hurt.
People are a lot less likely to ask me if I have kids.
I have never had to get in a physical fight over matters of manly honor. I didn’t really expect I would, but some guys seem to put a lot of stock in “women want to be equal to men, but can they fight like a man?” And the answer turns out to be that when you’re thirty-eight years old and you don’t start fights, this is literally never an issue.
Sometimes patients mistakenly call me “doctor,” and that never happened when I was a woman.
So if everything’s the same, why bother? It’s been a lot of time and money and needles and exposure to Republican opinions just to end up at “life is the same, except I’m on the other side of sexism now.”
I don’t know. It’s ineffable. It’s something that I want simply because I want it. And in eight years I’ve never stopped wanting it. I can picture myself pretending to be a woman again, but not being one.
That’s the sticky thing about being trans, when you get really honest about it. When you’re trying to explain it, you either have to point to goofy boys-blue-girls-pink shit like “I liked trucks as a kid,” or to… nothing, seemingly. To “just because, but it’s a very important just because.” Gender is extremely silly and arbitrary and I also don’t know why I have one, but apparently I do.
Being a man feels exactly like being a woman, except without the part where I’m being slowly worn down by the feeling that I’m constantly pretending to be someone else.