Why This Trans Woman Is No Longer Fully Comfortable With the “Trans Women are Women, Period” Trope
Gender identity is in your brain at birth, and it’s not hard-binary for everyone
A young Facebook friend of mine, who lives in Pennsylvania, posted a meme this morning, poking fun at transphobes and being supportive of transgender people like me. I slightly modified her meme, filed the serial numbers off of it, and added a line; this is my version of it (BTW, she is cis, not trans, but she is 100% totally committed to LGBTQ acceptance):
This was my response to her:
Gender identity is in your brain at birth. It’s just there. I take estrogen hormone therapy, and I got an orchiectomy (surgical removal of my testicles), to find some kind of peace with my gender issues, and to feel better about myself. I didn’t do it as a “lifestyle change,” or to try to “convert myself into a woman” — I already was one. Four years on estrogen now, and every day, I become more sure that Transition was exactly what I needed to do. When they wake up in the morning, go through their daily routines, and finally prepare to go to bed at night, cisgender people know exactly who they are. They never need to question their own identity.
The only times in my life when I knew who I was, and felt at peace and happy, were the 29 years I spent with my wife Lynn, and these last 4 years post-Transition. This photo — that’s me on the left — is one of only a few photos of myself in my former gender that I don’t cringe at, and it’s because I was with Lynn that day. In fact, it was Lynn that shot the photo.
For nearly half my life — this being about nine years longer than the sum total of the years that my young friend has been alive — I hated myself. I hated my name. I hated looking in mirrors. Cross-dressing was something I was compelled to do by some internal force that I didn’t understand, and while it comforted me somehow, it also terrified me, not just because I was worried about “getting caught,” but because 𝙄 𝙙𝙞𝙙𝙣’𝙩 𝙠𝙣𝙤𝙬 𝙬𝙝𝙤 𝙄 𝙬𝙖𝙨.
I used to echo that stock phrase that’s popular with the trans community, “Trans women are women, period,” but I don’t “shout it out” myself so much, not anymore. Each of us is a unique individual, and I have come to know many trans-feminine people, and not all of them are hard-binary trans women. Some of them are bi-gender and seem to live happy, dual-gendered lives: male sometimes, female other times.
These are real friends, not just casual acquaintances, and I have had some deep conversations with them about who they are inside. Some, but not all of them, are married. Most, but not all, are attracted to women. They are thus “straight” when living in their male mode, and “trans-lesbian” when in female mode.
It must seem utterly bizarre to most cis/het people, especially men, but I will submit to you that these friends are “just people.” They are IT professionals, Civil Engineers, Doctors and Nurses, Architects, Accountants — almost every job classification you could possibly think of. Some of them are parents, mostly with kids that are grown up and have lives of their own now.
And in many ways, I am a lot like them. I lived very happily as Lynn’s boyfriend and husband for almost 29 years, and 𝙄 𝙙𝙞𝙙𝙣’𝙩 𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙢𝙮𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙛 𝙣𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙡𝙮 𝙖𝙨 𝙢𝙪𝙘𝙝 𝙙𝙪𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙝𝙤𝙨𝙚 𝙮𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙨 𝙖𝙨 𝙄 𝙙𝙞𝙙 𝙗𝙚𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙄 𝙢𝙚𝙩 𝙇𝙮𝙣𝙣, or during the two years immediately following her death. This seems to me to mean something profound, but it’s something that I don’t have the language to describe, even to myself. But in order to integrate my past life as Lynn’s husband, into my life today as Laura-Ann, I have decided that I have to loosen my grip on the “Trans women are women, period” trope.
Today, it comforts me that I seem to be usually perceived as a woman, and I get treated as one by customer service employees at businesses and restaurants. I asked for, and was granted, the right to change my legal gender from male to female, and my name from “Laurence George” to “Laura-Ann Marie”. And I hate to be misgendered. But I have come to realize that I have always been simply “this person” — the consciousness in this brain, and the soul under the skin and living in this heart, from which my inner light pours forth to illuminate the darkness. Just because my parents gave me the name I had, and that Lynn knew me by that name, shouldn’t mean that it was only that name that made me feel bad about myself.
Where the rubber meets the road, I felt bad about myself because the soul of a woman is what lives in me, and that fact could not be openly admitted until the time was right. And at the same time, I have to acknowledge that, when I was trying to be a guy, for the sake of my family, I did a reasonably good job. I earned an honest living, and I kept a roof over our heads. Lynn thought I was a pretty good husband, and, although I can’t ever be anyone’s husband again, Pauline seems to like me, too. Lynn and Pauline both were able, apparently, to see that inner light, even when I often can’t see it myself in the mirror.
I’ve been very lucky, and had a very good life, despite having to put up with decades of gender dysphoria. Way fewer than half of the people I know had full and happy marriages that didn’t end in bitter divorces. My own father only stayed with my Mom out of a sense of duty, and the hope that, despite how awful my Mom was — alcoholism would eventually kill her at age 52 with terminal liver and kidney failure — that I would turn out okay, which I think I did.
After 59 years of looking in the mirror, and at photos of myself, and more-or-less hating what I saw there, I now finally see someone worthy of being loved, even by myself. And that’s all the justification any trans person should ever have to give anyone for “why” they undergo gender transition.
***************************************************************
I have one other thought about gender identity and sexuality that I am going to add here. This came to me a couple of days ago, while I was talking to my friend Alicia about our experience of being transwomen. As I stated above, some of my friends in the MtF support group I belong to, the River City Gems, are not absolutely transwomen. They’re bi-gender, or gender-fluid, and I thought of a metaphor to illustrate how one might interpret this concept of non-binary gender identity or sexual orientation. Imagine if you will, that somewhere deep in the human brain, are a pair of dials, like the tuning dials of an old fashioned radio or TV set. One of these dials is labelled “Gender Identity”, and the other is labelled “Sexual Orientation”. The Gender Identity dial has two positions labelled on it : “100% Male”, all the way to the left, and “100% Female”, 359 degrees of rotation to the right. There are an infinite number of intermediate settings in between the two end stops on this dial, but none of them are labelled, and the dial itself, of course, is invisible. You can’t see it, because it’s way deep inside your brain, and it’s no different in density from any other brain tissue, so you can’t image it on an X-ray, CT scan, or MRI scan. You can only feel the effects on your self-perception of gender, that this dial controls.
The other dial, for Sexual Orientation, is pretty much the same in structure, except that the two end points are labelled “100% Hetero Sexual” on the left, and “100% Gay” on the right. Again, you can’t see this dial to verify just where the dial is pointing. My thought is that a lot of people are living with one or both of these dials set somewhere that is not on the extreme end points of their respective arcs of travel. And to muddy the water even more, I now think that either, or both, of these dials can and do move, slowly, throughout a person’s life, as that person gains life experience, and is subject to decades of crises and traumas, loves and losses, and the beginnings, growth, decline, and ending, of all the thousands of relationships and friendships that most people will experience in their lifetimes.
*****************************************************************
Addendum, April 13, 2021: I have received more feedback from readers on this post, than for any of the other 10 blogs I have written for GFtT, on my experiences as a transgender woman. Some of these notes have been critical, most are supportive and appreciative. But I’d like to add something here, as a reminder to all of my readers, about the context in which I would like you to interpret my thoughts on life: I’m old, almost 64 when I wrote this piece, and I was 59 when I transitioned. That’s much older than the average age for trans people who are beginning their transition process in 2021. Our American society has changed so much since I was 18 — the age at which trans youth can request full gender reassignment surgery in most States — that it’s almost unrecognizable today. I grew up at a time when racism and homophobia were so pervasive that they were invisible, taken for granted, like the 500 pound gorilla in the room that everyone knows is there, but ignores because hey, who is going to ask that gorilla to pack up and leave the building?
My perceptions of the world around me are those of someone who grew up before instant communications. No cell phones. No personal computers. No Internet. Even jet airliners were new when I was a child: the first American designs, the Boeing 707, the Douglas DC-8, and the Convair 880, were all developed in the mid-1950’s. I didn’t even replace the black and white TV sets I had in my teens and early twenties, with a color TV, until I was married and nearly 30 years old. I didn’t have a microwave oven in my kitchen until I married Lynn; she had one when I moved in with her. And it’s not just technology that has changed with the passing years and decades: people have changed, too. A lot. When I was 26, in 1982, I was suffering the worst gender dysphoria of my life up to that point, but there was no one I could open up to. The very word “transgender” had only been in existence for a few years (since the publication of version 1 of the WPATH Standards of Care in 1972). Men who cross-dressed, be they drag performers or MtF transgender woman, were viewed as mentally unbalanced at best, child-molesting perverts at worst, and it would not be for another 20 years that this perception would shift appreciably, and even then, only in larger cities. Even today, in small towns in rural areas, it’s not easy or even totally safe, to be transgender.
So I ask you to read my posts here on GFtT with this in mind, especially if you are less than 40 years old: I became a grandparent only 7 months after I started my transition. I’m going to go on Medicare — mandatory at age 65 — in just a few months. I grew up in a society, and at a time, when attitudes about gender roles, sex, and personal relations between men and women were quite different than what they are evolving into now. For 50 years, I knew I had gender issues, but didn’t know what they meant, and I would not have my first appointment with a trained gender therapist until I was 59 years old. So please cut me some slack if you disagree with my perceptions on the transgender life-experience. I grew up in San Francisco, and if you were raised in, say, Cleveland (Ohio), or Phoenix (Arizona), or Bangor (Maine), or Tampa (Florida), you’re going to have absorbed your own views on life from the culture of your immediate family members, your schoolmates, and your friends, common to those cities and states, and those are likely to be different than mine as a Californian. And if you are, say, 22 years old, your perceptions are certain to be enormously different than mine as a Baby Boomer born in 1956. Your perceptions and opinions will be different, but that’s not to say they aren’t equally valid, and equally valuable, as mine or anyone else’s.
