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Hey trans friends? Real talk for a minute.
You do not owe it to people - even other trans people - to justify the way you look at your gender, sexuality, or the history thereof.
I describe myself as "having been a man" before I transitioned, because that was my life experience.
You do not owe it to people - even other trans people - to justify the way you look at your gender, sexuality, or the history thereof.
I describe myself as "having been a man" before I transitioned, because that was my life experience.
I went through 31 years of my life as a boy, and then as a man. That is how I look at my life.
Yes, those were identities assigned to me by society based on judgement of external characteristics, and then reinforced throughout my life without my consent. But they did happen.
Yes, those were identities assigned to me by society based on judgement of external characteristics, and then reinforced throughout my life without my consent. But they did happen.
And here's the thing: other trans women will describe themselves as never having been a boy or a man, and always having been a woman, AND THAT IS EQUALLY VALID AND CORRECT, and neither of us having differing viewpoints on our own lives invalidates one another.
Yes, perhaps people will see my declaration that I lived life as a man and then transitioned to womanhood as "proof" that I "believe that a man can turn into a woman," but here's the thing: they already believed that before I said anything, so evidence wasn't really an issue.
Because society makes the base assumption that if you're born with a penis, you're a boy, if you're born with a vagina you're a girl (and if you're somewhere in between, that's a deformity that must be "corrected") and a bunch of expectations about how to live get forced on you.
I was never asked how I felt about myself. I was never given the opportunity or the space to work out who I was for myself. I had to fight for that, and it took me 31 years to get to working it out. And in the meantime, I had to live as an identity I didn't... IDENTIFY with.
I lived life as a man - not a particularly normal one, mind - and I still believed I was a man right up until early July 1st, 2019. I have the experience of growing up as a boy, and then living as an adult man, and realising that these categories did not accurately describe me.
The philosophical objection at the heart of feminism is that doctors check what's between your legs when you're born. Thereafter, based on what they saw, decisions about your life are made that for 18 years you have no say in, and then for the rest of your life still too little.
If someone with a penis was presented to the world as a girl, treated as girls are treated, spoken of as girls are spoken of, dressed as girls are dressed, and nobody ever found out what was between their legs, they would suffer misogyny the same as any other girl.
And if, during puberty, they began to display traits that are considered traditionally masculine, it is fairly likely that they would suffer the exact same sort of prejudice that butch or otherwise gender-non-conforming women suffer.
Based on what they saw between my legs when I was born, doctors decided that I was a boy. My parents, never really having engaged with gender beyond the level that mainstream feminism in the late 1980s allowed, accepted this appraisal, and proceeded to raise me as a boy.
I didn't "always know" I was a girl. Perhaps I "always knew" I was different, but the idea of it being possible to be something other than the gender you were born as came fairly late in life to me - like, realistically speaking, maybe as late as 2010, when I was 22.
It took me at least another... 5 to 7 years, probably, to apply the mere possibility of the concept to myself, and until 2019 to accept that yes, this was what was going on.
In the meantime, what did I do? Yeah, I lived as a pretty miserable, self-hating man.
In the meantime, what did I do? Yeah, I lived as a pretty miserable, self-hating man.
The idea that "man" and "woman" are empirical, existential qualities that exist from the moment of conception is biological essentialism, and biological essentialism is the weapon of the TERF - we do not need it, and we do not use it.
Some people will have decades of experience living as a straight person, until they realised: no, I'm not straight. Some will be married with kids by the time they realise this.
No, they are not a straight person, but they lived as one for a long time.
No, they are not a straight person, but they lived as one for a long time.
This is because society DECIDED that they would live as a straight person. It didn't really present the option to be anything else, even if the one-size-fits-all... didn't fit them.
There's a lot of universal base expectations society has about people that aren't universal.
There's a lot of universal base expectations society has about people that aren't universal.
If we want to open people up to the concept that a lot of the things society holds to be concrete are actually variable, we need to be careful about policing the way people describe their own experiences of the world.
