I've noticed that I can be far too quick to assume that the experience of others matches my own. This is one of the reasons I've held off on writing about being transgender fo so long: I figured I would just be telling my transgender audience things they already know. But over the past four years, I've realized that the way I experience gender has substantial differences to the way every other trans woman I've talked to experiences it, just as every trans woman I know has a unique and deeply personal experience compared to any other. I am to highlight this broad range of experiences when I portray my own.
The other reason I have held off on discussing my experience is that I often mistake the hesitance of my cisgender friends to ask questions as apathy. While I know many other transgender people are less open about their experience (which is understandable!), I have always been overjoyed to have conversations about gender and my existence as a trans woman with the cis people in my life. I hope this post can lay out the groundwork and serve as an invitation for people I know to start these conversations with me.
My wonderful girlfriend Mia has also written a blog series about being transgender, which you can find here. You should read that one after this -- I always look up to her wisdom when it comes to big topics like this :)
Update: my girlfriend Ava has also written a very insightful post about this! Her blog can be found here.
Link to this section Early Transition
A commonality between most transgender people I know is that our decision to transition is defined by strong emotions. Deciding to transition is deciding between something very known -- your everyday life, as it is now -- and something entirely unknown. It is impossible to know beforehand what emotions you will experience after coming out. Nobody can tell you with perfect accuracy if transitioning is something that would make you happier.
The only way to know for certain is to try it in a truly immersive sense: name, pronouns, and the way you present yourself in every aspect of life. Unfortunately, we live in a society where this is often somewhere on the scale of impractical to impossible. And thus, most trans people are going in blind.
In my case, the strong emotion that determined my decision to transition was fear. Not fear of stepping into this unknown experience, but fear of not doing so. I was depressed in the years leading up to the start of my transition (for me, the last two years of high school). Had I not transitioned, I may not have made it to here today. Despite being a complete unknown, transition felt like my best chance of survival.
While I know my story is far from unique, it brings me happiness that there are those for which this decision is led primarily by positive emotions, too.
I chose to delay my social transition until starting college since moving cities let me avoid or postpone coming out to people I already knew. While diving headfirst into being "Brooke, she/her" was overwhelming at times, it was better than having to hold a "coming out" discussion with everyone in my life at the time.
It is a cruel irony that one of the most difficult parts of transition -- having to explain to everyone in your life what being transgender is and answer countless questions about something so deeply personal to you -- happens so early on in the process, before you have had a chance to build confidence in yourself or even grow to understand yourself. It makes me happy to see communities in which gender fluidity and questioning are more widely accepted and supported.
For the first year of my transition, I honestly didn't have the energy to think critically about my own experience of gender. I knew that presenting femininity felt nice, but the details didn't matter -- I was too focused on learning how to buy clothes that I like (and throwing out everything I knew about how clothes were "supposed to" fit), learning how to take care of long hair, and overcoming my fears, one step at a time.
I take my confidence for granted nowadays, but I still vividly remember my first time leaving my dorm room wearing a skirt. I remember noticing how much my hands were shaking when reaching for the elevator button, and trying to make myself small in any way possible. I am six feet tall, and while I enjoy being loud and confident nowadays, there was a long stretch of time when I just wanted to blend into the background.
Link to this section Gaining confidence
The next year of my transition is when I finally started to feel like I could "take up space" in social gatherings. I dyed my hair bright pink for the first time and started to assert myself more. I finally started to feel okay with using the women's restroom instead of walking halfway across campus for a gender-neutral one.
While I made a few false starts at voice training, over time I realized that I had become comfortable with my voice as it is without deliberate training. While I'm less likely to be gendered correctly by strangers in public, I can still feel safe in that my friends, peers, and coworkers will not see it as evidence that I am any less of a woman. While I'm not ruling out voice training in the future, it would be on my terms.
My goal in transition is not to assimilate into cisnormative society. It is to wake up each morning and present myself to the world in a way that sparks joy.
Being transgender does not define my life nowadays to the extent it used to a few years ago. On one hand, the day-to-day stresses of my early transition years have subsided, and I am much happier as a result. On the other hand, I do think my trans-ness -- my experience of transitioning, my presence in transgender social circles, and the unique perspective I have as a result -- is one of the most notable pieces of my life.
I would say that in my day to day life, I am a very happy person. I would also say that my trans-ness is an aspect of my life that brings me happiness. This would have been unfathomable to my past self.
Link to this section Finding stability
The word "transition" implies that the process of changing one's gender happens over a well-defined time interval. This is, in my eyes, inaccurate.
In one sense, my transition "ended" when I made the commitment to myself that I was a woman. The social steps -- changing the way I dressed, coming out to friends and family, updating my legal name -- were all just logistics.
In another sense, transition is never "done." As my body cannot naturally produce estrogen, I will keep taking hormone replacement therapy for as long as I live. The style of clothing I wear will continue to shift throughout my life. There are still people who knew me before transition and who I will need to come out to if we ever cross paths again.
It is only recently that I have felt stable enough to reconsider some of the fundamental questions of my transition. I enjoy the way I dress, the way people refer to me, and the effects that feminizing HRT brings to my body. But the label of "transgender woman" was less something I decided on and more something that was handed to me as a result of this.
I've begun to question whether "non-binary" describes the way I experience gender. I've always felt a bit of dissonance with being referred to as a woman, and for the longest time, I wrote that off as imposter syndrome. But four years in, I'm as confident as can be, and that feeling is still there.
Perhaps this questioning could only happen this many years in. It's taken time for "they/them" pronouns to stop feeling like a way for people to avoid acknowledging my transition and gender, and start feeling like them acknowledging the complexities of my gender beyond the binary.
Alternatively, perhaps this was down to a lack of representation of non-binary people in my social groups. While early in transition, I sought out friends with similar experiences to me, and ended up in groups primarily consisting of binary trans women. At present, several close friends of mine are non-binary, and I've been able to have many more interesting conversations about gender with people outside the gender binary. These conversations have undoubtedly been a catalyst for questioning my own gender identity.
Link to this section Conclusion
There has been an ongoing bit on this website since three years ago in which, at some random probability, the pronouns displayed on the homepage will be either "she/her" or "she/they". I wish I could remember what was in my head when I wrote that.
One explanation is that labels have always felt unimportant in relation to my own experience. While I recognize how powerful labels can be in helping people explain their identity and connect to others, I find their imperfect fit frustrating. I care less about whether I am called "she" or "they," and far more about the motivations of those calling me this. Am I being called "they" in an attempt by the speaker to avoid recognizing or legitimizing my identity as a woman? Or am I being called "they" in recognition of the fact that my identity does not perfectly map onto the gender binary?
I hope that in five years I can re-read this post and find myself disagreeing with parts of it. I hope that my perception of myself, of transness, and of the way I fit into society will shift over time. I want to continue thinking about, exploring, and experimenting with my own sense of gender identity.