I Didn't Know I Was Trans Until I Transitioned

"The things I feared the most are now my favorite parts of medical transition."

I don’t think I was ever a boy. I don’t know; maybe I was. When I was five years old, I sat on my back porch and pleaded with my mom to cut all my hair off. “I want it boy short.” I repeated this directive multiple times, and I’m sure my word choice irked my mother. I was the youngest of three daughters, and both my parents took great pains to demonstrate that this was a fact of which they were proud. It was an understandable and well-intended overcorrection. When my mom told people she had three girls, she was regularly met with unabashed sexist comments. “Still trying for a boy?” “I bet Nick wants a son.” She grew up with a mother who generally despised women. She endured childhood and adolescence in the 60s and 70s alongside brothers who got to do everything she didn’t. And so she and my father both made it abundantly clear: they did not want a son. In my household, girls weren’t equal to boys; they were superior. Girls were smarter, more mature, more intellectual, more evolved. And while my mom vocally despised the “Boys will be boys” mantra common to the early 2000s, her distaste was less for its content and more for the tone in which she heard it uttered – fondly, albeit with resignation. Honestly, I think she agreed that boys would be boys, and for that very reason wanted nothing to do with them. And so I was raised to believe that I could do and be anything, except perhaps detach from my venerated gender.

 After cutting my hair to a bob length, then praising its cuteness – one last ditch effort to convince me of girlhood’s virtue – she caved and chopped the rest off: boy short. Following this haircut, she would virulently correct strangers who “misgendered” me. She would marvel at people’s instinct to read me as a boy. “She’s wearing a skirt!” she said with what-the-fuck exasperation to the Playland employee who called me “he”. I don’t remember feeling any particular way about it. I believed everything my mom did and said, and she demonstrated that anger and indignation was the correct response to misgendering, so I agreed, however impassively. I can sift through my childhood and pull out myriad examples of inchoate transness, but who am I trying to convince and of what? Sure, the conditions of my childhood were inconducive to realizing this identity, but I also enjoyed my girlhood deeply. I was obsessed with men: Heath Ledger, Will Smith, Corbin Bleu, Taylor Lautner, Robin Hood (cartoon fox), Captain Jack Sparrow, Anthony Keidis’s body on the cover of Scar Tissue on my sister’s bookshelf. But this all got chalked up to boy-craziness. In adolescence and teenhood, my obsession continued: 90s rappers, all the Reservoir Dogs, the men of Bottle Rocket, Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenenbaums, Nic Cage’s chest hair in Raising Arizona, Alec Baldwin’s chest hair in anything. This I chalked up on my own to some blend of internalized misogyny and sexist media. I thought if there were better representation, movies and TV that made being a woman seem cool, that I would want to be one. But then I thought: Well, if that’s so, why doesn’t everyone want to be a man?

For a time, I reproduced TERF talking points and ideologies in my own thinking. I resented AFAB people who came out as trans or nonbinary, feeling that they were jumping ship. Really it boiled down to, “If I have to be a woman, so do you.” I was so jealous of their self-determination, clarity, and agency. I was so tortured and immobilized by ideological arguments with myself: arguments that played in the background at a constant frequency that drowned out any voice telling me kindly and simply to follow my desires. I talked myself in and out of transition hundreds of times. I smoked weed every night in spite of the panic and dread I knew it would bring me. Every time I got high, I felt deeply some iteration of, “Everything will not be alright.” In my head, testosterone was as terrifying as TERFs want you to believe it is. I dreaded the body hair, facial hair, bottom growth. Then I told myself, “If you were really trans, you would want all of those things.” But why would I, a person socialized female and instructed for decades to aspire to and attain hairlessness, suddenly be jazzed to have a hairy ass just because it might accompany alleviation from my voice dysphoria? As for bottom growth, I feared it because having your genitals drastically change as an adult is kind of fucking scary. It’s worth noting: the things I feared the most are now my favorite parts of medical transition. I love my stomach and chest hair, I’m desperate for my patchy facial hair to fill in, and quite frankly, growing a dick is maybe the single best thing that has ever happened to me. (If you’re on the fence about starting T, I suggest you do so simply so you can experience a blow job. The hype is, in fact, quite real.) There is so much I wanted but there is also so much I didn’t even know to want. I never could have dreamed it was possible to feel this way. I look at my body in the mirror while I brush my teeth and I laugh out loud because I still can’t believe I got to choose this and I get to live in it every day. To eat in it, to fuck in it, to walk down the street in it, to put clothes on it, to tattoo it. I didn’t experience much dysphoria before I started T, just lots of longing and a sort of muted neutrality toward the reality of my body at the time. It’s funny, since I’m so obsessed with my dick, I’ve often wished that I had taken photos of my external genitalia before T, but of course I didn’t; I don’t think I ever actually looked at it. I was so disinterested in my body, which is now the object of fascination and wonder to me.

I’m disinclined to get too in the weeds pointing to and deconstructing various TERF talking points. Calling out hypocrisy is a favorite pastime of liberals in particular, and so far as I can tell, it is without function. TERFs say that we are losing lesbians to transgenderism, but are disinterested in extending their thoughts to include trans dykes, transfemme lesbians, he/him lesbians, transfags, t4t transfags. Ultimately, it’s conservative thinking, and conservatism will never be interesting or productive because it  boils down to unexamined desire to halt change: a goal equal parts embarrassing and impossible. So, let’s move away from deconstructing hypocrisy and toward deconstructing blatant falsehoods. Considerably large factions of people believe that young women and girls are being seduced by trans ideology, then irreversibly “mutilating” their bodies in a misguided effort to eradicate what is in fact dysmorphia, internalized homophobia, or internalized misogyny. It’s beyond the scope of this essay to explicate the overtones of white supremacy and patriarchy innate to these arguments, but I will just point out that no AFAB person I am aware of is sitting in a dark room Clockwork Orange-style consuming medical transition propaganda, miraculously avoiding the cisnormativity and transphobia of every ideological state apparatus (educational institutions, media, nuclear family) that shapes our society.

When a socially isolated young man is radicalized into fringe white supremacy by the YouTube algorithm, the tipping point of his miseducation is not a conversion but rather an extension. The groundwork for such beliefs has been laid from jump by every force, ideological or repressive, of hegemony. The exact opposite must be said of coming to adopt trans identity. A great hindrance to my ability to recognize my transness was the fact that representations of trans people in my youth were predominantly relegated to modern-day freak show spaces (day time TV, tabloids, etc.), where trans individuals were Othered to the point, and least for me, where recognition was almost impossible. It is notoriously and intentionally difficult to see oneself in subjects who have been cast out of the fold of humanity. (The ways in which trans and other gender-nonconforming people have appropriated the very systems that attempt to exploit and destroy them is a fascinating and exciting history, too, though also beyond the scope of this work). This is all to say, it is far more likely for a person to be incapable of identifying their transness than to misidentify themselves as such, because for all the hypervisibility and rushed representation of the last decade, the needle has not changed so far, so fast.

I didn’t know I was trans until I transitioned. I had a hunch, and medical transition confirmed my suspicions. But if I had waited until I was “sure” as many cis (and trans!) authorities would have me do, I’d still be waiting. You don’t get to know how you are going to feel about something as of yet unseen, and transition is no exception. Like any work that demands imagining a future different from your current reality (i.e., anticapitalism and abolition), transition requires a tremendous amount of faith and a willingness to trade the intolerable for the unknown. This doesn’t mean barreling ahead despite any obstacles, internal or external. You can stop, start, and change course as many times as you want. But knowing one’s destination is not requisite to taking first steps.

Sometimes, when I’m depressed, I remind myself that my future contains favorite songs that I have not yet heard. That I will drive in a car, being moved to my core, by lyrics that possibly have not yet been written. And so too might I fall in love, as I have so many times already, with new chapters of this body: my body. Many people come to me seeking, in my estimation, validation of their transness. This I cannot provide, but I will offer the advice I wish I had: look out for your fears, then put them through the ringer. The world, categorically, is not trying to convince you you’re trans, so if you think you might be, at the very least make space to entertain the thought with kindness and maybe even a little excitement. I thank God I did.

Love,

Damien