Finding Yourself: One of the Hardest Things a Trans or Non-Binary Person Will Ever Do.
I have a young transgender friend struggling to figure out who she is, while also trying to climb out of the economic difficulties of getting a decent start in life at age 22. I had an easier time of it when I was young; I earned a career certificate in high school and landed a good job even before I graduated, but that was in 1974. Things are a lot harder for young people in 2021. Earlier today, my friend posted a long message to our support group, which concluded with:
“Sorry for the rant…I’m in a place where as much as I love being beautiful, coming out, [and] dreaming of a stable environment for me and my son, I’m afraid it’ll never happen. I feel like just packing away all my femme stuff in storage with the rest of my hopes and dreams.”
I replied with what I hope was some encouragement:
Don’t be “sorry.” If you have stress in your life, it’s better to voice it to someone than to keep it bottled up. If your friends truly care about you, they’ll listen. They might not be able to actually do something to make your problems go away, but at least they’ll listen and be there for you.
Where you said “I feel like just packing away all my femme stuff in storage with the rest of my hopes and dreams,” may I say, that path usually isn’t a good one for trans people to take. Your inner sense of gender identity “is what it is,” and all you’ll accomplish by denying yourself the right to express it is to increase your gender dysphoria, depression, and unhappiness. I know. I lived something like 20 years of my life in a state of near-continuous low-level pain and depression, not really knowing why I hated myself so much, and when I committed myself to transition, the sense of release and peace was physical: I actually felt the weight of that burden of pain and guilt that I had borne for 54 years lift off of me.
You are who you are. No one, not even a therapist, can tell you that you are something, or someone else. Only you can suss out that innermost sense of your gender identity. Only you can make the decision to be who you should be. A therapist can help you explore your sense of self, and help you with the logistics of transition if you decide to go that way, but the decisions are yours alone.
Unfortunately, gender identity often presents as non-binary for transgender people, and the older one is when contemplating transition, the greater the likelihood that your inner sense of gender will be “fuzzy.” What I mean by this is that not all trans people know with absolute certainty what their gender is. By definition, cisgender people know with certainty, without even having to think about it at all, what their gender identity is: male or female, and their biological sex agrees fully with their sense of gender identity.
But for us, gender identity can be far less certain. I lived as “a guy” for a long, long time — 59 years before I stepped off the nice, wide, comfortable, paved sidewalk I was strolling through life on, and took the rough and rocky — and unknown — trail to gender transition.
I’ve known on some level since I was 5 years old that I wanted to be a girl, and that my name should have been Laura, but I was socialized as a boy. Then for 28 years, I was in a very happy marriage, and was proud to be Lynn’s husband. I go around now wearing a skirt, and I’ve legally changed my name and my gender tag to female, but that piece of paper (my court order), hasn’t erased those 54 years of memories that Larry accumulated. And it hasn’t erased or downgraded the fact that I did a pretty good job of being Lynn’s husband. At least Lynn told me that herself a couple of times before she passed. So I did transition, and I think of myself as a woman, but there’s still a lot of “Larry” remaining in the mix.
There are no detents in the potentiometer, no intermediate “clicks,” just the two end points and an infinite number of gradations in between.
So how to define what your gender identity “feels like?” I’ve developed what I call the “Thermostat Model” of gender identity for trans and enby people:
Imagine if you will, a dial attached to a potentiometer in your brain somewhere. This dial has 359° of sweep. If you turn it all the way to the left, as far as it will go, that dial position is 100% “male gender identity.” Turn it 359° to the right, against the other stop, and that’s 100% “female gender identity.” There are no detents in the potentiometer, no intermediate “clicks,” just the two end points and an infinite number of gradations in between. You can also think of sexual orientation and attraction the same way, with 100% hetero on one end of the dial sweep, and 100% non-hetero (gay/lesbian/pan/bisexual) on the other end.
I think that for a lot of transgender people, their dials are not only set somewhere other than at the two extreme end points, but also, that those dials can change and drift around at different times of their lives. Maybe my “truth” is that my dial is set at about the 80% female point, leaving the other 20% of “me” as “Larry” — the influence that my memories of my former life as a “he/him” exert on me now, at any rate. Maybe gender identity is a construct that can’t be defined by any physical model at all — maybe it’s a purely existential thing? I think that a person perceives their gender identity and sexual orientation in the part of the brain that deals with emotions, but unlike “regular” emotions, these two are permanent, and if they change over time, the changes are gradual, and small. And they never “go away”. You can be angry, or fearful, or happy and exuberant, all in the space of a few minutes; your gender identity lasts a lifetime.
Whatever your inner sense of self is: male, female, or somewhere else along the spectrum between the two, I’d like to suggest that you don’t stuff your girl self into storage. We all only have a pitifully few short years to live, and then it’s over. I recommend you follow your heart now, and don’t waste precious time living with unresolved questions about your gender identity. If you need to transition to be happy, and less influenced by depression and gender dysphoria, then that’s what you should do. If you aren’t completely sure yet about what you need to do, then spend more time thinking about it, but don’t let it go for years or decades like I had to do.
California is a self-declare state*: you don’t need a doctor’s affidavit to apply for a court-ordered name and gender change. You personally, probably don’t even need the $435 that it cost me to get my court order — you’re low-income and can probably get a waiver of the court fee. You can do that right now, then the medical transition stuff later, whenever you want. Or see a therapist and start HRT in a few days. It’s all your choice. I highly recommend you start therapy if you haven’t already, and be active in our support group. We’re not therapists, but we are mostly full-timers who’ve been through transition, and can can counsel you regarding logistics.
Start therapy, and if what you need to do is spend a few months, or even a year or two thinking about who you really are, before committing to transition, or not transitioning at all, then do that. But remember, this is your life, your happiness. No one — not your parents, not your employer, not your life-partner, not your kids, not your friends, not your siblings, NO ONE — has the right to tell you who you are, or tell you what you need to do, or who you need to be.
You don’t necessarily need to fully transition to be happy and comfortable, either. Remember what I said about the thermostat dials? Maybe your true sense of self is “enby.” Neither fully male nor fully female, but a happy mixture of both. In that case, maybe all you need to do is change your legal gender tag to “X”, maybe change your legal name to something that makes you happier, and not do any of the medical transition stuff.
For me, I hated my name my whole life. Laurence George. It never felt right. Sometimes I hated it more than at other times, but I never liked it at all. When I picked my new name, Laura-Ann Marie, it felt right. Marie was Lynn’s middle name, and my paternal grandmother’s name, and I’ve known since I was 5 years old that I wanted to be “Laura,” so I know it’s right. Names have power. And a name that doesn’t feel right, that doesn’t make you feel joy when you whisper it to yourself, isn’t any fun at all.
Changing my gender tag to “F” also felt “right.” Maybe my thermostat dial isn’t pegged all the way over to the right end of the range, but I know I feel happier with my ID documents saying “F” than “M.” Maybe an “X” gender tag would be more accurate, but my happiness whispers to me every day that Laura-Ann has a female spirit living in her. It’s GOOD to be Laura-Ann!
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*FOOTNOTE — As of this writing, in November 2021, the following US States are “self-declare”, meaning that they do not require sex re-assignment surgery or a court order to issue an amended birth certificate with the requestor’s preferred gender marker:
Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Minnesota, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Florida, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia.
In these states, a Doctor’s Affidavit of “appropriate medical treatment for gender dysphoria” (usually meaning hormone replacement therapy), is required to amend a birth certificate, but not full gender re-assignment surgery:
Wyoming, Utah, Indiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, Vermont.
In these states, current policies regarding requirements to amend a birth certificate are unclear, or in process of being changed:
South Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Ohio, South Carolina.
In these states, full gender reassignment surgery is required to amend the gender marker on a birth certificate:
Montana, Arizona, North Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Kentucky.
In Tennessee, an existing birth certificate can not be changed under any circumstances.
This list only shows requirements for state-issued birth certificate changes. Other state issued ID documents, like driver’s licenses, may have different (and more liberal) policies. The requirements imposed by the US State Department, to revise the name and gender marker on a US passport, as far as I can determine, have not changed since 2012: A court order and a doctor’s affidavit of “appropriate medical treatment for gender dysphoria” are required, but not full gender re-assignment surgery.
This list was obtained from https://www.usbirthcertificates.com/articles/gender-neutral-birth-certificates-states.
