First came the dreams, night after night, carrying the vision that refused to be ignored: myself from another life, if I had always been a woman. Undefined in her features, but unmistakable in her perfection. A formless ideal, overwhelming in sheer force of promise, shocking me awake at the sight of her. A tantalizing, desperate glimpse of what might have been, a fading afterimage slipping from my grasp.
The last time she appeared, I saw through her eyes, standing on a podium before a faceless crowd. She explained: If I had the choice, I would have made everything female. The epiphany that eluded my waking thoughts, blasted into consciousness by a mind that knew no limits. I couldn’t go back to sleep.
Decisions were made.
The first bra I ever wore was chosen by my partner, a voluptuous expert by necessity who knew exactly what I needed. Padded, sculpted, a shape for someone who has none: “barely there.” Apprehensively, I held it in my hands, simmering with the fear that it might just be wrong. Face to face with the spectre of feeling like no more than a cross-dresser, a man in a bra.
I slipped it over my head, pulling it into place, taut against a flat chest. Her face lit up as she adjusted it upwards – just right. I stood there a moment, paying close attention to how it clung to my body. Unfamiliar. Uncertain.
“Put your shirt on,” she encouraged me with a smile. The skin-tight, tie-dye green one from my hippie aunt and uncle in Seattle. With something new underneath. Small before, it was even smaller now. I walked to the bathroom mirror, tense and unsteady. Was this going to work?
The light came on. Her. Me. Life itself trembled, shifted, came to rest in a new pattern. Synapses rewired themselves at the sight. The painting, grown beyond its frame. The other half of the puzzle, the missing pieces flying exuberantly into place. The vision alive.
So I’m just confused… What is the difference between being a man and being a woman? Gender stereotypes are just myths aren’t they? So why do you care about being called a woman? I’m not saying I don’t want to call you what you want to be called, I’m just honestly confused. It’s fine with me for you to dress, groom, and be labeled however you chose, but if you don’t have preconceptions about gender roles, then why believe you’re really a woman? Pardon my ignorance, I really want to learn.
First off, I should point out that I’m currently not as insistent on this point as others may be. I’ve spent a great deal of time keeping my gender intentionally ambiguous and telling people I’m fine with either set of pronouns, and I don’t think I can be all that taken aback when they continue to act accordingly. I understand that most people who refer to me as male probably don’t intend it in a derogatory sense. And the few who obviously do mean to insult me via intentional misgendering have laughably overestimated how much I actually care. So you angrily called me a man? Whoa, watch out guys, we’ve got a badass over here…
But while this may not be so important to me right now, it can still be important to other trans people, and understandably so. Unlike cis people, we’ve had to fight for our gender – for who we are, and for how we’re viewed. The process of finding and becoming who we are, mentally as well as physically, is far from easy, and even after we’ve accomplished that, being accepted as who we are by the rest of the world is a whole other challenge. Cis people have their gender served to them on a silver platter from the moment they’re born: they know who they are, and so does everyone else. Their gender is above questioning, and they aren’t required to put any amount of effort into recognizing that they are their gender, accepting themselves as that gender, and being fully accepted as their gender by all of society. But trans people are, and it shouldn’t be surprising that many of us want our struggles to be recognized in the most basic and unimposing way: by simply acknowledging who we are. We didn’t spend six years in evil medical school to be called “mister”, thank you very much.
And even without taking the challenges faced by trans people into account, recognizing and respecting someone’s gender is a basic and well-established article of courtesy. When you ask us “why do you care about being called a woman?”, you could just as well ask a cis man “why do you care that people call you a man rather than a woman?” But it’s notable that nobody really does bother to ask such questions of cis people. When cis people expect that their gender will be acknowledged by others, no one balks at this. It’s so utterly normal that no one even notices it. They only make an issue of it when trans people expect the same.
I’m sure that some people might respond, “well, no one should care about being addressed by their gender, whether they’re cis or trans”. While the validity of this sentiment can certainly be discussed, it simply doesn’t reflect reality at this time. The fact is that people largely do care about having their gender respected and not being continually and intentionally misgendered. It should not be any more questionable when, like most others, trans people care about this as well.
If it were normal for no one to be bothered when they’re addressed as a gender other than the one they identify as, and such careless and carefree misgendering was commonplace and accepted, and we were the anomalous ones for making an issue out of it, then yes, it would be quite legitimate for you to ask us why we care. But this is not the case. And as long as the expectation of being treated as one’s identified gender remains a norm, suggesting to trans people that we shouldn’t care about this essentially means asking us to expect less than cis people, who probably aren’t going to stop caring about having their gender respected any time soon.
Why do we care about this? Go ahead and ask yourself: Why does anyone? The answers aren’t all that different.
So I’m just confused… What is the difference between being a man and being a woman? Gender stereotypes are just myths aren’t they? So why do you care about being called a woman? I’m not saying I don’t want to call you what you want to be called, I’m just honestly confused. It’s fine with me for you to dress, groom, and be labeled however you chose, but if you don’t have preconceptions about gender roles, then why believe you’re really a woman? Pardon my ignorance, I really want to learn.
First off, I should point out that I’m currently not as insistent on this point as others may be. I’ve spent a great deal of time keeping my gender intentionally ambiguous and telling people I’m fine with either set of pronouns, and I don’t think I can be all that taken aback when they continue to act accordingly. I understand that most people who refer to me as male probably don’t intend it in a derogatory sense. And the few who obviously do mean to insult me via intentional misgendering have laughably overestimated how much I actually care. So you angrily called me a man? Whoa, watch out guys, we’ve got a badass over here…
But while this may not be so important to me right now, it can still be important to other trans people, and understandably so. Unlike cis people, we’ve had to fight for our gender – for who we are, and for how we’re viewed. The process of finding and becoming who we are, mentally as well as physically, is far from easy, and even after we’ve accomplished that, being accepted as who we are by the rest of the world is a whole other challenge. Cis people have their gender served to them on a silver platter from the moment they’re born: they know who they are, and so does everyone else. Their gender is above questioning, and they aren’t required to put any amount of effort into recognizing that they are their gender, accepting themselves as that gender, and being fully accepted as their gender by all of society. But trans people are, and it shouldn’t be surprising that many of us want our struggles to be recognized in the most basic and unimposing way: by simply acknowledging who we are. We didn’t spend six years in evil medical school to be called “mister”, thank you very much.
And even without taking the challenges faced by trans people into account, recognizing and respecting someone’s gender is a basic and well-established article of courtesy. When you ask us “why do you care about being called a woman?”, you could just as well ask a cis man “why do you care that people call you a man rather than a woman?” But it’s notable that nobody really does bother to ask such questions of cis people. When cis people expect that their gender will be acknowledged by others, no one balks at this. It’s so utterly normal that no one even notices it. They only make an issue of it when trans people expect the same.
I’m sure that some people might respond, “well, no one should care about being addressed by their gender, whether they’re cis or trans”. While the validity of this sentiment can certainly be discussed, it simply doesn’t reflect reality at this time. The fact is that people largely do care about having their gender respected and not being continually and intentionally misgendered. It should not be any more questionable when, like most others, trans people care about this as well.
If it were normal for no one to be bothered when they’re addressed as a gender other than the one they identify as, and such careless and carefree misgendering was commonplace and accepted, and we were the anomalous ones for making an issue out of it, then yes, it would be quite legitimate for you to ask us why we care. But this is not the case. And as long as the expectation of being treated as one’s identified gender remains a norm, suggesting to trans people that we shouldn’t care about this essentially means asking us to expect less than cis people, who probably aren’t going to stop caring about having their gender respected any time soon.
Why do we care about this? Go ahead and ask yourself: Why does anyone? The answers aren’t all that different.
The most common understanding of transgender people which actually bears some resemblance to reality is that we felt we had the incorrect body from a very young age, we experience significant and debilitating distress because of our physical sex, and we need to transition in order to avoid serious long-term consequences to our well-being. For some trans people, this is certainly true: the pain of gender dysphoria can be so severe that without the necessary treatment, it can lead to depression, self-harm, drug abuse, and even suicide. And during their childhood, many trans people did have a sense that they were really the opposite sex to the one they were assigned at birth.
It’s completely understandable that many people would explain being trans in this way: as an inborn characteristic, not a matter of choice, and a cause of perpetual suffering that can only be alleviated by transitioning. For plenty of us, this really is the case, and the claim that we had no choice in this is a strong rebuttal to the people who believe we’re only trans so that we can rape people in restrooms, confuse everyone’s children and destroy the fabric of society. It’s a way of making it clear that this is a real condition, in a world that largely refuses to recognize it. But this general model of what it’s like to be trans isn’t entirely reflective of what every trans person experiences. These various elements aren’t always present in trans people’s lives in the same combination and to the same degree. It’s not always a burning red arrow of constant agony pointing you directly to another gender. I spent a long time doubting that I could really be trans, because for me, it wasn’t like this at all. And I’ve had a lot of choices about it, too.
For most of my childhood, I didn’t feel like I had a meaningful identity of any kind, gender or otherwise. Sure, I could look back and dig up any early signs of who I am today, like how I was the only boy in the local tap-dancing group when I was 4, or how I happily volunteered when our school needed someone in the 6th grade to dress as a girl and run through the gym during an assembly, or how I dreaded growing hair on my legs. But these experiences could be shared by plenty of cis people as well, and they don’t necessarily mean anything. At the time, they didn’t mean much to me at all in terms of how I viewed my gender, and I definitely didn’t “always know” I was trans. As a kid, my identity was defined by one word: “smart”.
That’s what the adults decided I was from an early age, and this was the lens through which they and the other kids always viewed me. It was solidified and made especially visible as the centerpiece of my identity when I was placed in classes two grades ahead. This effectively made being “smart” the most important thing about me, the first thing anyone would notice, and an unavoidable topic of conversation. My life was defined almost exclusively by academic obligations that I was expected to meet simply because I was able. The questions of who I was, what I wanted to do, or who I wanted to be never seemed relevant. The idea that this was up to me rarely even entered my mind. That was for other people to decide, as always.
Looking back, it’s easy to see why the situation deteriorated so badly when it turned out I wasn’t that smart after all. Everyone’s expectations had been crushed, and I felt utterly lost. I had never developed a sense of myself beyond someone whose job it was to do schoolwork, and after I dropped out of school at 14, I ended up spending years doing nothing simply because I had no idea what to do with myself. It took me that long just to get to a point where I could envision myself as someone who could have a genuine identity, let alone define it for myself. When I was finally ready, I started doing videos, and this is who eventually emerged.
Those who have been following my channel probably know that I wasn’t always like this. It took me some time, and a schedule of 3 or 4 videos a day, before I got a feeling for what I was actually doing. It wasn’t long after this that I began developing a certain presentation for myself. I started dressing up to make a distinctive image for my channel, but I kept doing it because it looked good, it felt right, and it worked well for me. Over time, as my sense of style evolved, it stopped being something that stood out for its contrast with who I was – because I wasn’t the same person I was when I started. At some point, this wasn’t “dressing up” anymore. It was just wearing clothes.
But despite finding this a more comfortable presentation, growing my hair out, taking a woman’s name and being okay with either set of pronouns, it took me a long time to realize that I might actually be trans. I’m sure some people are surprised I could be so oblivious, given that my videos over the past four years are literally a timeline of unwitting transitioning. My mistake was that I thought being trans entailed a specific cluster of features: being constantly uncomfortable with one’s body, seeking medical treatment, and receiving some sort of diagnosis. Obviously, none of this is actually a requirement to be trans, but I felt that my personal experience wasn’t sufficiently similar to other trans people I knew, and I didn’t want to be seen as speaking for trans people. I just didn’t think I was qualified. While I had no problem with people thinking I was trans, I leaned toward other descriptions, such as genderqueer.
Luckily, a very good friend of mine helped to clarify things. She told me how she thought she was bisexual for quite a long time, because she found sex with men to be tolerable rather than something that made her want to vomit, which she believed would be the natural consequence of gay people trying to have straight sex. But when she realized that sex with women was vastly more enjoyable for her, and that she pursued women and avoided having sex with men no matter how “tolerable” the experience was, she came to understand that being a lesbian was the most appropriate sexual identity for her.
This was more applicable to me than I knew at the time. But once it sank in, I recognized that I don’t need to have intense, unbearable gender dysphoria in order to be trans. I just need to prefer living as a woman over living as a man. Being uncomfortable in my body isn’t a requirement. Being more comfortable as a woman is all it takes. The old shoes don’t have to be such a poor fit – the new ones just have to fit me much better. And regardless of whatever grey areas there might be at the margins of how we define “transgender”, when you’re living as a woman, going by a woman’s name, dating a lesbian, and don’t want to live as a man despite being assigned male, the fact of being trans is pretty much inescapable.
In retrospect, I can see that there were plenty of choices available to me throughout all of this. Could I have chosen not to present as a woman, not to take a female name, and not to go by female pronouns? Yes. I could have chosen not to do any of this, at any step of the way. Would I have survived if I had chosen differently? In all likelihood, yes, but I doubt I would have truly thrived. Because of the choices I made, the world that’s opened up to me is better than anything that came before. And knowing what I know now, I would never choose to go back.
But ultimately, this wasn’t something that thrust itself upon me. When did I “know”? Not until I bothered asking that question, and got a real answer. Not until I actually tried this on, and found out it fit really well. This didn’t seek me out. I went looking for something, and this is what I came back with.
There’s a certain idea of some prevalence that dismisses our choices and fails to grasp the personal importance and value of our hard-won identities. This is the belief that people transition because society’s gender norms are excessively restrictive, and if the rigidity and narrowness of these gender roles were relaxed, there would be no need for anyone to be trans. This has been a recurring theme in some strains of radical feminist thought. In The Transsexual Empire, Janice Raymond writes:
Defining and treating transsexualism as a medical problem prevents the person experiencing so-called gender dissatisfaction from seeing it in a gender-challenging or feminist framework. Persons who think they are of the opposite sex are therefore not encouraged to see this desire as emanating from the social constraints of masculine and feminine role-defined behavior.
Drawing a parallel between being transgender and a hypothetical black person wishing to become white, she says, “it is their society, not their skin, that needs changing.” She later adds:
A society that encourages identity and role conformity based on biological sex will naturally turn to sex-conversion surgery rather than accept what it sees as a threatened obliteration of these roles.
Feminists like myself envisage a time beyond gender when there is no correct way to behave according to body shape. In such a world, it would not be possible to conceive of a gender identity clinic. The idea of GID is a living fossil – that is, an idea from the time when there was considered to be a correct behaviour for particular body types.
Julie Bindel endorses this sentiment in a number of articles, saying:
In a world where equality between men and women was reality, transsexualism would not exist. […] We live in a society that, on the whole, respects the human rights of others. Accepting a situation where the surgeon’s knife and lifelong hormonal treatment are replacing the acceptance of difference is a scandal.
And in Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin recognized the importance of transitioning and supported access to medical care for trans people, but concluded that:
…community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.
The same idea has often appeared, perhaps independently, among people who would otherwise have little interest in feminism, let alone the works of Raymond, Jeffreys and Dworkin. Many of its adherents seem to think that this is a way of helping us – and to some degree, it certainly could – but this isn’t exactly the kind of help we’re looking for. While the abolition of gender policing is a worthwhile goal in its own right, and there are indeed various ways that this could make life easier for trans people, it does not follow that this would make being transgender wholly obsolete.
Yes, I’d like it if the TSA agents didn’t give me odd looks every time I go through their strip search X-ray machine. Yes, it would be nice if my voice wasn’t taken as indicative of me being “really a man” every time I’m out in public. And yes, I’d love the option to keep my hair short and my legs unshaven if I choose, without it marking me as a man rather than a woman with short hair or unshaven legs.
But relaxing gender norms only helps us from this one direction, and those who propose this solution don’t seem to have much interest in ensuring that my womanhood is not negated by a certain presentation. These are not the options they want to give me. Instead, their attitude seems to be more along the lines of, “now you can be a man instead of transitioning, because society will accept a man like you!” And while that’s fantastic for any men who happen to be like me, I’m not a man, and I don’t want to be. If I just wanted to be that kind of man, I would have stopped there – but I didn’t. And that’s not up to them.
This is the key point they appear to have glossed over. To suggest that I would revert to a male presentation and identity given the chance is to misunderstand the meaning of gender identity on the most fundamental level. Even in such a society, I would still choose to be a woman, and offering a solution where I’m expected to live as a man is no more acceptable than telling a cisgender man, “hey, you should go ahead and be a woman now, since people won’t mind how manly you are!” But that man is not a woman. And this woman is not a man.
Furthermore, the assumption that someone must have chosen to transition because society is more accepting of transgender women than feminine men would be laughable, if the ignorance it exhibited wasn’t so insulting. Being a gender other than the one you were assigned is something that the world barely understands, let alone accepts. If feminine men are largely rejected, and trans women are seen not as women but just extremely feminine men, what makes them think transitioning is about finding acceptance from society? This aspect of their solution is largely irrelevant to trans people anyway. We’re already unwilling to give up who we are in the face of significant social opposition. Reducing that opposition would do nothing to change our minds, because there would be even less of a reason not to be who we truly are.
But do they actually want to reduce society’s opposition to trans people? For all of their talk of taking apart restrictive gender roles, it’s suspicious that they feel the need to offer a solution other than simply accepting us as who we are. If they wish to enlarge the sphere of manhood until I’m comfortably situated within its walls, then why can’t the sphere of womanhood be expanded to encompass me as well? Why would they want to stop right before recognizing trans people and our identities as genuine? If this is part of “radical” feminism, then clearly it’s not radical enough. As is, advocates of this approach insist on denying who we are and giving us anything but what we’re actually looking for. I’m not a woman because I couldn’t be a man. I could. But I’m a woman, because I choose to be a woman. And that’s all the reason anyone should need.
From the parts of Douglas Hofstadter’s books that I’ve read so far – and correct me if I’ve misunderstood – our minds can be conceived of as a network of “symbols” representing every distinct concept we have, with the meaning of each symbol being derived from its connections to various other symbols. On page 376 of Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter illustrates a small portion of his wider ensemble of concepts and their linkages. One section:
He later states that “I”, our self, can be represented as a symbol as well – “probably the most complex of all the symbols in the brain.” This is unsurprising, as any useful concept of our self needs to provide us with a model of the overall set of symbols in our brain and how they’re connected. If all of our symbols comprise “things we know”, then our self-symbol represents the Rumsfeldian “things we know that we know”. Or, as Greg Egan described a self-aware alien species in Diaspora:
He led Paolo into another scape, a representation of the data structures in the “brain” of one of the squid. It was – mercifully – three-dimensional, and highly stylized, with translucent colored blocks to represent mental symbols, linked by broad lines indicating the major connections between them. Paolo had seen similar diagrams of citizens’ minds; this was far less elaborate, but eerily familiar nonetheless.
Karpal said, “Here’s the sensory map of its surroundings. Full of other squids’ bodies, and vague data on the last known positions of a few smaller creatures. But you’ll see that the symbols activated by the physical presence of the other squid are linked to these” – he traced the connection with one finger – “representations. Which are crude miniatures of this whole structure here.”
“This whole structure” was an assembly labeled with gestalt tags for memory retrieval, simple tropisms, short-term goals. The general business of being and doing.
“The squid has maps, not just of other squid’s bodies, but their minds as well. Right or wrong, it certainly tries to know what the others are thinking about. And” – he pointed out another set of links, leading to another, less crude, miniature squid mind – “it thinks about its own thoughts as well. I’d call that consciousness, wouldn’t you?”
Considering how large the self-symbol must be, and the important role it plays, it’s easy to see why substantial alterations to that symbol are afforded such significance. Changing something we see as a part of ourselves, like our political, religious, moral or sexual views and identities, can be such a difficult process that it’s often described as a “crisis of faith”. This is why Paul Graham recommends to “keep your identity small” – if you regard a certain concept as being a piece of “you”, you’re liable to see it as something that needs to be preserved and defended regardless of accuracy or intellectual integrity. It’s become more important to you than some other belief that isn’t part of your personal identity and can be honestly evaluated and appropriately revised.
So, revising your understanding of who you are can be a challenge. It’s more difficult than recognizing that you were wrong on a certain point of fact, correcting yourself, and moving on. It takes some getting used to.
What would be one of the most prominent elements of your self-symbol? Your name.
Zinnia hasn’t appeared in the top 1,000 American names for the past century. This makes it an excellent and recognizable “brand”, but for me, transitioning involved finding a name that blended in, didn’t draw the wrong kind of attention, and was appropriate for my age. This had the added benefit of my partner now having an easier time casually mentioning me in conversations with co-workers without the risk of drawing odd questions (not that this ever stopped her before).
But just deciding you have a new name isn’t that easy. It’s not a switch that flips and immediately updates everything tied to how you’re known, while erasing every trace of the old name. You’re trying to change the label for who you are, and that’s a big thing. It’s linked to every official document and record with your name on it, other people’s concepts of you (and how they might unconsciously relate you to others who share your name), how you’re addressed in your day-to-day life, how you’re mentioned in conversation, how people remember any events involving you, and all of your own memories of the occasions when you’ve used your name throughout your life. It would almost be easier to ask what it isn’t connected to.
This makes it a somewhat awkward and slow-going process for everyone. Other people have to get used to using your new name. You have to get used to hearing your own name, responding to it, and internalizing the fact that this name refers to you, and you are that name. All of this can feel like chipping away at a mountainside – or trying to re-color it with a single paintbrush, one stroke at a time. It’s not as easy as you, or others, learning your name the first time around and simply acquiring the appropriate label for a person. We’re working against an established history here. Even after moving from the Central timezone to Eastern almost a year ago, I still occasionally catch myself looking first at the “7” of “8 / 7 Central” when TV shows are announced, rather than the “8”. My name is much more deeply entrenched than this.
So how do you start to think of yourself as Rachel? (Not my actual name.)
Practice is a big part of it. Every time I wake up, the first thing I do is remind myself: “I am Rachel. I am Rachel. I am Rachel.” But I often feel like this is just an attempt to rush the process along, skipping a few steps ahead in what seems like a lengthier sequence of adjustment:
1. “My name is Zinnia, but it’s been changed to Rachel.”
2. “My name is Rachel.”
3. “I am Rachel.”
4. Rachel supplants Zinnia as the background wallpaper for my self, and I naturally think of myself as Rachel without it needing to be explicitly affirmed.
But even this addresses only part of the whole edifice of my old name that’s been built up over my life. “I am Rachel” is directed to the present and the future. What about the past? People might just think of me as Rachel-who-used-to-be-Zinnia, or Zinnia-but-now-Rachel, instead of simply Rachel. And I might, too, if I don’t make a concerted effort not to. How can I come to internalize “I have always been Rachel”?
I decided to start at the very beginning.
My first memories are about being at my grandparents’ house. When I was 3, they got a PC. They didn’t actually use it for anything – it was there for me to play with. This was my first computer: MS-DOS, no mouse, and educational games. My absolute favorite was Treasure MathStorm, a game about ascending a mountain by solving basic counting and arithmetic problems, and collecting treasures along the way, before going back to the beginning and doing it all over again. I spent hours on this almost every time I went to Grandma’s house, doing problem after problem and somehow never getting bored, carving those equations deeper and deeper into my mind, and gathering ever more treasures under my name.
I only had one opportunity to play it again some years after that, when my grandparents dug out that old computer while preparing to move. I couldn’t resist booting it up again, and it still worked just the same, with everything saved to my name. Of course, by now I wasn’t spending so much time at their house, so they soon decided to ship the computer to some of their friends in Maryland who had small children. Just like that, Treasure MathStorm was passed on. I assumed I would never get the chance to play it again. Sure, there were new releases of it with updated graphics, but it would never be the same as running it on a 25 MHz PC with nothing but a keyboard.
As it turns out, I was wrong. Some people had managed to get their hands on that first 1992 version, which could be run in a DOS emulator. I have never downloaded anything so quickly in my life.
Everything I had forgotten about it came rushing back: the elves, the time igloo, the cave of counting, the angry snowballs, rewards like a boot with a white mouse in it, it was all there. Sure, some of it seemed dated and repetitive (and I now recognized how unbalanced its economy is, as using one net to catch one elf gave you enough money to buy four nets to catch four elves…), but even all the grinding was still fun. And after completing each level, the game counted up all the treasures I’d collected:
Rachel. That’s me.
It sounds absolutely ridiculous, but it really does help. I ended up doing the same thing with old ROMs of Pokemon Gold and Silver, which I wasted an incredible amount of time on in my preteen years before the Pokemon trend waned in my neighborhood. And every time I see my name, it’s reinforced just a little bit more: “Rachel – me.”
Heather’s been helping me with my more recent history as well. One advantage of keeping digital versions of the notes we sent to each other is that they can be edited. We can almost literally rewrite history, so everything that was to and from Zinnia is now to and from Rachel. And when we look over them again, we see that Rachel is just as real as Zinnia was. Indeed, Rachel was there the whole time. We’ve spent hours reminiscing about everything we’ve done together, the highlights as well as the simple everyday moments, and reminding ourselves: “I was there. That was Rachel. That was me – us. Heather and Rachel.”
And it’s starting to sink in. Sure, I still have to make an effort to think and talk about myself as Rachel, and so do my family, Heather, her family and our kids. This doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen in a week, or a month. But it’s happening nonetheless.
In terms of continuity, I’m still the same person I was before. All of those other features that make me myself don’t change with my name. But my identity is becoming something different, and this has an effect, big or small, on everything connected to it. After all, if this wasn’t going to change anything, then what would be the point?
As promised, I’ve assembled an overview of my past work for any newcomers who want to familiarize themselves with my videos. This is only a small sampling of 350+ videos spanning four years, but I consider these to be the ones that best represent my body of work. Continue reading “A personal best-of”→
As part of Dan’s 24 hours of interviews for the Secular Student Alliance’s SSA Week, I spoke with him today about YouTube, religion, transgender issues and transhumanism. Go take a look, and support the SSA!
We have a political obligation to present some kind of unified identity. We need to be able to say “this is who we are. This is what defines us. These are our needs. This is what we ask”. We also have a political, cultural obligation to be comprehensible. They won’t see us if they can’t understand what they’re seeing, and they certainly wouldn’t know how to accept us. So we present our simplifications, our “X trapped in a Y’s body” metaphors, and obscure the endless complications and nuances and “well actually it’s not like that at all”s.
You should make sure to read the rest, but it was this part that especially rang true for me. It may not have been her intention, but I recognized that this obligation appears not only at the level of a movement, but also on a personal level. It’s the expectation, usually unstated because there’s no need for it to be made explicit, that we as individuals must exist, present, and explain ourselves in such a way that we can be easily sorted into an understood category. This demand becomes most obvious when we neglect or refuse it.
People attempt to identify a person’s gender out of sheer reflex, and it’s one of the first things they do when they look at someone. The process doesn’t even become a conscious one unless they can’t immediately reach a clear and binary conclusion of man or woman. On the occasions when this happens, it colors your every interaction with them from the very outset. In person, you might get an odd hesitation, a double-take and a once-over. (If you’re lucky, that’s the worst of it.) Online, people are often more direct, so we get “Are you a man or a woman? Are you a woman who used to be a man? Are you a man who used to be a woman? What’s wrong with your voice? What are you?” And so on.
What are you? Hostile and dehumanizing as it is, this really cuts to the heart of it. With a trait so fundamental as gender – something that’s almost universally treated, rightly or wrongly, as the bedrock of one’s personality and physical presence in the world – people are so accustomed to expecting an unambiguous answer that when this answer isn’t obvious, we now must provide it to them. We’re expected to explain, not who we are, but what we are and why we are this way.
“What were you born as? When did you transition? How do you know? Are you sure? Are you on hormones? How do you have sex? What’s it look like? Do you use it? Did you have the surgery yet?” Many people think these are acceptable, even necessary questions – that they must know these things in order to understand who I am before they’ll talk to me like they would any other person. (Which they won’t, of course.)
Yes, I’ve recognized this obligation to make oneself comprehensible to everyone else. And I’ve often rejected it by omission. With the exception of partners and close friends, I don’t see the need to tell people my assigned birth sex, my childhood experiences, my sexual preferences, the extent of my dysphoria, my medical history, the details of my endocrine system, and anything else you wouldn’t ask a random cis stranger about. I’ll gladly share my pronoun preferences, because those who ask have often seemed to do so out of politeness and sensitivity. But I do not need to explain my personal life, my sex life, my body and my mind as a precondition to the most casual interactions in everyday life. I do see the ensuing confusion, and I see it every day. I see the barrier that’s come between my words and those who think they must know my anatomy before they can listen to me. But it is not a barrier that I erected.
Could it be that this is just an obstinate, contrary reaction on my part? Largely, yes. If this intimate, personal information wasn’t so often made the subject of these prying questions, I’d probably be much less resistant to discussing at least some of it openly. As is, I’ve almost always neglected to describe myself as trans unless asked directly – not because I’m at all ashamed of it, but because what I am is not the totality of who I am, and people will see it as such anyway when they’re handed that information. If I don’t prepend “trans” to each of my roles – trans atheist, trans writer, trans videoblogger, trans parent, trans everything – they’ll just do it in their heads. I’d rather wait and see if they’re capable of simply seeing me as a person like any other. I expect that of people, even if they often disappoint.
There’s nothing wrong with being what I am or saying what I am, but there is something wrong when the absence of this one piece of information poses an insurmountable roadblock to hearing me out, and its presence overshadows everything else about me. Even if confusion is the cost of my silence, I’d almost rather let people wallow in their own self-inflicted incomprehension.
In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been a little busy recently. That’s because I’ve now assumed the role of stay-at-home mom. The reason I came to Florida was to help take care of my girlfriend’s children, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past month. The younger one is not yet out of diapers, and the older one is in second grade. This has been an intense, hands-on learning experience, and probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. If you’re like me, and you’re the kind of person who says, “okay, so it’ll be difficult sometimes”, and you think it’s going to be just fine, you still don’t quite understand what you’re dealing with here. Surprisingly, raising children is not easy!
If this is something you’re planning on, you should be aware that you’re about to become an educator, entertainer, counselor, chef and maid, 24 hours a day, forever. You will constantly struggle to find an overlap in your respective conceptual spaces that allows you to explain things on a child’s level. You will lose every last bit of privacy, because there is no longer such a thing as being alone. Sleep will become a precious resource that you will fight to protect.
You will lose your mind from having nonsense conversations with someone who doesn’t quite know how to use words yet. You will regress to a primordial state of eating chicken nuggets and peanut butter sandwiches all day while watching Dora the Explorer and playing with Nerf guns. You will face the challenge of keeping them occupied at all times. You will not have five minutes to yourself to compose anything resembling a complex thought.
Everything you do will be subject to the whims of these living avatars of entropy. All of the autonomy you once had is now contained within them. You will run around all day long until you completely lose your ability to concentrate on anything. You will perpetually have to keep track of multiple autonomous beings who are seemingly designed to get themselves into trouble. If you’re the kind of person who’s obsessed with cleanliness, you’ll quickly learn to stop caring about what you just stepped in. Things will frequently get lost or broken, and that’s just how it is now.
The amount of garbage generated on a daily basis will shock you. You will find yourself cleaning up human waste every day. You will be faced with bizarre, incomprehensible and unspeakably awkward behavior from these developing people. And sometimes, regrettably, you’ll have to resort to heavy-handed incentives when they fail to understand why they need to behave. Essentially, a child is someone who is unable to constrain their volition to accommodate others, and you will have to deal with the ramifications of that.
And you’ll get over it. Yes, you’re probably not ready for this, but you’ll figure it out. You’ll learn to tolerate it, and even take satisfaction in it. The sense of fulfillment that comes from taking on a responsibility like this makes it all worth it. It’s striking to think of your memories of your childhood, and then realize that this is what they’re remembering right now – and you’re a part of it. There is so much joy to be found in making them laugh, watching them learn more and more words every day, and teaching them everything you know. It’s like watching your life grow beyond yourself.
This has been a radical change for me, and I’m sure there’s plenty more to come. But from what I’ve seen so far, I can get used to this.