Trans Ponderings
Plight of the Transbian
Why gay trans women tend to have an exceptionally insidious form of gender dysphoria.
When I first questioned my gender, I was a guy in his mid-thirties.
During this period, I went to see a live storytelling show to distract me from my ongoing gender crisis. And yet, despite my efforts, this was the night my trans-egg was smashed to smithereens.
The host was a girl my age, with my same eye color and hair color and haircut. She even kind of talked like me, with a repressed Appalachian accent that leaked through on certain words, like ‘naked’. (“ — nekkit.”)
She and I were also wearing the same outfit, despite being different genders. Cuffed jeans, nice boots, a Henley, leather bracelets, a green beanie. Your basic ‘small-town graphic designer’ ensemble.
It wasn’t just my signature style this girl had copied.
She told stories in the same way I did, her commentary between acts was the same take I had, and from what she shared, I could tell she had the same eccentric taste as me in movies, politics, and women.
The more I learned about this lesbian doppelganger of mine, the more things fell into place. At some point in the show, I stopped paying attention to the stories altogether because my brain had split open like a piñata. My life was flashing before my eyes in vivid detail — a version of it that I never got to live.
To understand what I mean, let’s do a thought experiment together:
Imagine that we go back in time to when this girl was born, and we change one teeny, tiny thing about her — her sex. Maybe flip an X to a Y at just the right moment in the womb. She will otherwise live the exact same life, with the exact same brain, personality, tastes, family, environment. She will simply have a different reproductive system. That’s it.
Right from the first moment of being alive, we see significant differences from this microscopic adjustment. The birth certificate says ‘Boy’ instead of ‘Girl’, and her parents gift her the name: ‘Samuel’ instead of ‘Samantha’. Different pronouns, of course, different assumptions. The balloons and bibs and booties are switched from pink to blue, for some reason.
Not that it matters much, because even in her previous life, she wasn’t a big fan of pink.
In fact, much of these changes aren’t THAT off-base for her.
Some of them she chose herself, back when she was female. Like when she once requested the Hot Wheels toy at McDonald’s instead of the Barbie one. The same goes for pants instead of dresses, watching Ninja Turtles instead of the Little Mermaid, keeping her hair short instead of long. All preferences that Samantha had to petition for, but are simply assumed with Samuel.
So far, being reassigned to boyhood is a pretty sweet deal for her. But the older Samuel/Samantha gets, the further these two paths split, with puberty acting as the wedge.
The first big change for Samuel is in 2nd Grade.
Back in Kindergarten, Samuel had made friends with a few girls. At that young of an age, the fact that Samuel was a boy and her friends were girls is unimportant, even to the adults.
Samuel keeps these friends for another year, but around age 7 or 8, the adults get uneasy. She is now encouraged to play with other boys. While Caitlyn is herded away to girl scouts, Samuel is instead signed up for boy scouts. When Suzie goes to softball camp, Samuel goes to baseball camp. She now has no other choice but to make friends with other boys, which she does reluctantly.
She meets Robert and Andrew, and they are…okay replacements — they like the Batman cartoon and collecting Star Wars action figures, same as her. But Samuel still misses the natural ease and comradery she had with Caitlyn and Suzie, and it makes her sad that there’s now an invisible gulf between them, as if they were shipped off to a different school, even though they all still ride the same bus, sit in the same classrooms.
Years pass under this new social paradigm, and Sam forgets all about Caitlyn and Suzie.
Just like with Samantha, Samuel shortens their name to the unisex version. Sam’s body starts to change, and it is uncomfortable — even disturbing — for her to experience this. But the tagline for puberty is: “STRANGE and AWKWARD things happening to your BODY,” so everyone must feel the same way, and she learns to accept it.
She is socialized as a boy, and she doesn’t mind that. There’s still a lot of commonality between her and the other boys. Even when she was Samantha, she had no problem fitting in as ‘one of the guys’. It came easy, and it still did.
But just because it came easy doesn’t mean it came organically, like it had been with Caitlyn and Suzie. When Sam acted like one of the boys, it was just that — an act, a performance, something that took energy to maintain. As opposed to when Sam acted like one of the girls, where she actually receives energy from them, a sensation similar to relief. A relief Samuel rarely feels anymore.
However, Sam soon feels disconnected from the girls as well.
So often when she wants to be friendly to a girl, the interaction is steeped with skepticism, right from the start. In boy-form, any girl she approaches has to guess Sam’s intentions. Boys never just want to be friends with a girl, everyone knows that. The boys are happy to stay in their treehouses, and the girls are happy to stay in their pillow forts. There’s something fishy going on when one from the other side defects.
Sam still has crushes on girls, though. In fact, it’s the same girls she crushed on as Samantha. Except these straight girls actually reciprocate with Samuel in a way they never did with Samantha. (She’s handsome.) Yet, every straight girl that will ever date Sam has the same feedback afterwards:
“He was like my best friend, and he had no shortage of affection or romance. He was also attractive. It’s just…something was off. I don’t know how to explain it, but being with him was like being in a lesbian relationship.”
For that matter, sex itself is complex for Sam.
When she hangs out with the other guys in the locker-room and they talk shop, she gets uncomfortable. Even though she finds girls hot, same as the other guys do, she sometimes feels like she’s speaking a different language. To her, an attractive girl is like a really steamy erotic novel, but to the rest of the guys, it’s like discussing your favorite porno. Once again, something’s slightly off with her perspective.
Other men start to pick up on her strange vibe. Even though she looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, something’s still…swan-like about her. And so the rumors emerge that she’s a gay man, and they never really go away. Which is problematic for Sam, especially when she’s trying to pick up girls.
Even Sam herself starts to wonder if she’s a gay man, because it would definitely explain the queerness she feels all the time. It would also explain why she feels a kinship to the gay community, even though she’s not gay herself. Alas, she was a boy who exclusively liked girls — it didn’t get much more hetero than that.
At some point she does start to wonder if it’s maybe a fetish.
After all, Samuel’s sexual fantasies are the same as Samantha’s. Sam has a preference for erotic content featuring lesbians, but, then again, who doesn’t? Even her straight male friends tended to salivate over that genre. However, it probably was a little unusual for a guy to imagine themselves as one of the women — a shameful little secret of Sam’s that would always pop up in the sweaty heat of the moment.
There were also times when she would eyeball fingernail polish in the pharmacy, or lingerie on her way to the men’s department of Target. Samuel suppressed these odd fixations, even though Samantha — as tomboyish as she was — had no opposition to wearing lipstick and black lace. In fact, she often took delight in those things.
Throughout Sam’s entire male life, there will be echoes of her natural female existence, reaching out through her subconscious.
Whenever she looks in a mirror and sees the five-o-clock shadow and receding hairline, her reflection will take on an “uncanny valley” quality. It becomes so common, she doesn’t even realize that she dissociates whenever she looks in a mirror or sees a photograph of herself.
Whenever she has to take off her shirt in public — like at a pool, or the beach, or in the boy’s locker room — there is a screaming impulse to pull it back on, as if she were exposing something vulnerable.
When she goes to a wedding and sees the father of the bride walk down the aisle with his daughter, Sam feels a bizarre and profound sadness. Sam and her own father never could figure out how to have a proper father-son relationship.
Occasionally, Samuel will question whether she’s actually a man.
But whenever she does, the answer comes quick: she couldn’t possibly be transgender, because — as everyone knows — trans people know from childhood. According to Hollywood, if she were trans, she would have been a six-year-old boy in a dress, requesting that their parents call them “Princess”, and having enough insight to know that their own penis shouldn’t be there. And that was not Sam’s story, not at all.
As an adult, she goes to therapy to try and figure out what this feeling is that she’s felt her entire life — something akin to a yearning without an object, homesickness without a home, nostalgia for a country that never existed. The therapists scratch their heads. Prescriptions are signed, and that is that.
But the phantom yearning in Sam only gets worse with each passing year. She feels like a lifeboat drifting out to sea. She can’t see the mainland anymore. The loneliness is absolute and exponential.
Desperation leads Samuel to re-examine her gender one final time.
She is out of options. So she tries on mascara and skirts and all the girly things that girls do in their girl time. But when she looks in the mirror, the uncanniness worsens. She feels like a man more than ever. Although, in those brief moments before she saw her reflection, when she was just enjoying herself, that yearning was momentarily quiet…
The girly stuff doesn’t convince her of anything. After all, Samantha never much cared for sundresses or knee-high socks or cat ears or any of the other tropes. Samantha was casual. Samantha was a blue-jeans-and-T-shirt kind of gal. But when Samuel dresses in blue jeans and T-shirts, all Samuel sees and feels…is Samuel.
Chaos ensues in Sam’s brain. She tries to balance out her masculinity with equal-parts femininity. At times, her reflection reminds her of the jabberwocky, thanks to all the measures she has to take to correct this incongruence. The specters of ‘fetish’ and ‘schizophrenia’ begin to haunt her once again.
What she doesn’t realize, is that her true self had never once needed to overcompensate.
Samantha just WAS; Samuel, on the other hand, can’t just BE. Her resting state is, fundamentally, the polar opposite of what it should be. That single, subatomic switch we flipped all those years ago can’t be unflipped, no more than you can unflip that first card you used when building a house out of them.
The confusion continues for Sam. She doesn’t know what’s going on with her. She doesn’t know her gender. She doesn’t know her story. Her identity is crumbling, in need of being rebuilt from the foundation up. But why? And into whom? Where are these feelings even coming from?
She has no answers. Until one day, she goes to a storytelling show, and sees a girl who looks just like her, wearing a Henley, nice boots, and a green beanie. And, once again, her brain splits open like a piñata. ❤
Similar Reading: Can the Buddah Help Enlighten Your Gender?, by K.C. Phipps
