Transitioning *Isn’t* a Choice
Okay, it is. The title lied to you, I’m sorry. But I promise the reasoning behind this title will become clear shortly. So let me begin.
It’s so popular today to say that “being trans isn’t a choice, but transitioning is” as a catch-all response for anyone who dare think being transgender is a decision one makes. Which, obviously it’s not, and I refuse to spend time explaining the myriad reasons we cannot choose to abhor our transness without denying who we are. However, the second part recently gave me pause, too. It makes sense in theory, of course. Transitioning is an action, and we choose to do actions. However by framing transitioning as something one chooses to do, we ignore the real question of what it means to take the action of not transitioning. Choosing not to transition is as much of a statement to yourself as transitioning is. So to frame transitioning as a choice places not doing anything as a less consequential action, when in fact it is anything but.
Imagine for a second you are in an empty room, and there is a door in front of you. Now, a choice you may (very understandably) make is to open that door and exit the room. What happens if you do nothing, though? If you don’t open that door? Well, you did not take a positive action. You chose the null action (doing nothing) over the alternative action (exiting the room). It was a choice. You chose to do something: nothing. Not doing anything is a choice too. And it comes with its own consequences: being stuck in an empty room, for example. So by depriving yourself of leaving, you effected plenty of change to yourself; just as leaving causes shifts as well.
When I was transitioning, I did it in little steps. First it was wearing a skirt to school. Then it was editing my pronouns. Then it was changing my pronouns again due to dysphoria. Then it was changing my name, then estrogen, then laser hair removal, then… the list goes on. Each of these changes seemed like such a big step at the time, and they were. I’m not going to deny that wearing a skirt or trying to change my voice wasn’t scary. They were intensely terrifying things for a young girl (who was seen as a boy) to do. But it wasn’t as much of a dichotomy of positive movement versus stagnancy as I thought back then. Doing these things brought challenges; meanwhile, not doing them would have brought their own struggles, albeit mostly internal ones. Every choice I made (there’s that word again!) was weighing these two options against each other: the pain they required, the excitement, the opportunities. Every single step along the way was a choice, a fork-in-the-road kind of choice. Every single time, the null action would have taken just as much effort and caused just as much agony. So, yes, it was a series of choices. But none were a simple choice of “do this or don’t” so much as “which type of future do you want?” It was as much a choice to reject not transitioning as it was to transition.
We as a people tend to simplify everything into proverbs. Instead of admitting that life is confusing as hell, we name rules that are generally applicable. The few cheat codes we have are wrapped up in these sayings. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. Love is love. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. It’s so easy, then, to take every phrase we have as universally true. And that, friends, is where we go wrong. Saying “treat people the way you want to be treated” is great for playground ethics, but it doesn’t work when the parties share an unequal amount of blame in a custody dispute. Similarly, “being trans isn’t a choice, transitioning is” is a great way to shut down TERFs — but it doesn’t accurately describe my trans experience. When we claim a transition is a choice, we need to know that a non-transition is also just as much of a choice. We cannot neglect the power that resides in choosing not to do something. And avoiding the null is as much a valid reason to act as wanting to do something is.
This framework shifts the question of transitioning from a yes-or-no to a this-or-that. We as trans people get those options, both important. And when you know you have to choose one, it’s much easier to say that you will transition. You know going in that the status quo will be affected regardless. Your life will shift if you choose not to transition, too. Staying in the room changes things, it moves the future. Inaction is an action. So whether you lean into who you want to be or who society wants you to be is up to you. That is always your decision. That is always your full, ever-consequential choice.
All the love,
Rose
