Your First Time

Being Trans Isn’t About Being Different

All your life, nobody has seen you as you are. They’ve always put you in group A, but you’ve always belonged in group B.

And now, you’re doing it. You are presenting as female for the first time.

It’s a big fucking deal.

For the first time, you hope, people will put you in the right group. For the first time, you hope, people will recognize you as you are.

You expect to feel different. You expect to feel weird. You expect the world to change.

It doesn’t.

When you were born, the doctor decided you were a boy. He or she didn’t ask your opinion, but then again, people rarely ask children their opinions on anything, and if they did, they wouldn’t trust them. They’re children, after all.

But you’re not a boy. You’ve never been a boy. People thought you were one. Heck, you even thought you were one. Everyone else was saying it, so it must be true, right?

But you never were.

It’s about identity. You see other girls—and, now that you are older, other women—and a strange judgmental voice in your head asks: “Why aren’t you like them? You’re one of them. You’re supposed to be like them. Why are you different? Why are you weird? Why are you a freak?”

You know exactly what you’re supposed to be like. There’s a beauty ideal: a lie which no woman can reach, yet which sinks in to many women and compels them to try. It sinks in to you too, and you, too, are compelled.

It’s worse, though. You’re not just not beautiful. You’re altogether different. You’re not even recognizable as a woman. You are fundamentally rejected from your group.

Every woman, it seems, is recognized as a woman no matter how beautiful society considers them. Every woman, that is, except for you.

Being trans is a story of rejection. Perhaps some women would be comfortable being so out-of-the-norm as to be considered men, but most never have to worry about it. They can completely take for granted that, whatever else they may do, they will still be part of the group called “women.”

You are not one of these women. You aren’t normal. You are a freak. You are rejected.

You go out, presenting as female for the first time.

Somebody calls you “ma’am,” or “miss.”

It’s not magical. It’s not amazing. It’s not somehow “right.” It’s not completely different or earth-shattering.

But, for the first time in your life…

It’s normal.