I can’t seem to shake imposter syndrome or doubts about whether I’m “trans” or whether I’m a woman, etc.
Just wondering what you all do when you feel that way, if you have any recommendations?
It makes me feel awful, there is so much commitment to a transition it feels like you have to be certain, but I just don’t have constant certainty.
Sometimes I’ll sit down and try to analyze it objectively, basically considering the “null hypothecis” - if I am not trans, then I would be cis, if I were cis then a certain set of things would be true (like, estrogen would probably not feel so great, testosterone would not make me depressed, etc.).
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I’ve been on HRT for 2 months and I still have doubts occasionally. But then I think of stopping HRT and going back to how it was before and it fills me with absolute terror. That really helps with the doubts.
Deciding whether to start HRT in the first place was a bit more difficult, but it helped to realistically compare the two options. I could either start HRT and have a small probability of finding out it wasn’t right for me and regretting it. Or I could do nothing, but I already knew that I would regret that decision for the rest of my life. So I went with the better odds!
Yes, once I started HRT taking seriously the thought of stopping definitely shocks me back into affirming continuing HRT. I think sometimes I forget how bad it was before I was on HRT and it allows me to entertain delusional thinking, like that it’s all just placebo, etc.
Deciding HRT was definitely diagnostic for me as well, and it seems I clearly prefer it.
I just remember that I’m biohacking my body with hormones, and remember that’s rad as fuck, and that I’m rad as fuck, and anybody who thinks otherwise is most defiantly not rad as fuck.
lol, I don’t have that kind of confidence or self-esteem. Where you see rad biohacking, I see fragility and disease - a problem with my body that makes me reliant on industrial inputs I cannot produce myself, which keep me desperate and dependent (esp. on my employer, my only feasible path to health insurance).
we like to look back on our many “egg moments”. makes us feel much better. those moments where we said the most trans thing to ever be said, etc
(totally valid to not have these but a lot of creatures do)
My friend told me he didn’t notice any signs when I came out to him. I noted that I “joked” with him frequently about being a lesbian. His mind just about melted from the realization.
In any case I was wrong, I’m Pan but there are moments like that sprinkled throughout our eggy pre-lives that everyone else pays no mind to and sometimes so do we.
Yes, in the first few months after egg-cracking I would sit down and journal for an hour, writing out every “sign” or indication I could remember from growing up where suddenly I could make sense of it because I was trans. Things like: why in 3rd grade did I wear a heavy winter coat in the hot summers, why did I never feel comfortable showing my legs or arms in public (there wasn’t a single day I went to school in shorts and short sleeves, I covered up no matter how hot and humid the weather was).
very cis thing to do /s
I literally thought I might have been a victim of sexual assault, and just had repressed memories and couldn’t remember.
At the time I was thinking this, I was seeing a therapist and had as my primary goals to be less like a man, undo male socialization, be more like a woman, like be more emotionally sensitive, etc. The therapist thought maybe I had experienced some things my mom did as inappropriate and maybe it explained the symptoms. My mom did some inappropriate things, but I don’t think they were traumatizing, nor do they explain the discomfort with my body. Anyway, a bit ironic looking back. Is it normal for cis men to want to not be like a man and also cover up their bodies like trans people feel compelled to do? 🙃
That’s a great question, I probably should have an answer to that
lol, it’s totally legitimate if you don’t have a “good” answer to the question, but if you experience those doubt moments, you are probably doing something when they happen 😝
Usually I completely disassociate from the concept of gender, it works somewhat but doesn’t help with dysphoria
I think I dissociated from gender before transitioning, and it was my primary coping strategy. I didn’t think I had any dysphoria before transitioning, but felt lots of dysphoria once I started paying attention to gender.
I would describe myself as anti-gender before, because gender felt actively painful to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if I would have identified as “agender” before, though of course now I look back and just see how strong that dissociation and denial were as coping strategies, so of course I was antagonistic against “gender”.
I have a couple answers to this that might be uncommon, personal, and wouldn’t have helped me in the early stages, but were the final nails in the coffin of this doubt for me and I haven’t ever worried about it since.
The first came a couple months after coming out. I noticed that I had already changed a lot, almost entirely mental. I couldn’t describe exactly how, but it felt like I really had done myself a favor and burned the bridges I needed to in order to take control of my life. At that point, I started to figure - well, if this whole being-a-girl thing doesn’t work out, who’s to say I can’t transition again? I couldn’t imagine going back to who I was before - I knew that if I was going to ever identify as masculine again, it’d be a retransition, not a detransition. And tbh if that ever happens I very much look forward to what new roads lie in front of me. It’s nothing to be afraid of - everyone I fell out with in the process of coming out was no real friend of mine anyway. And I know the people in my life now would have my back.
The second was that I developed pretty severe fibromyalgia after some time on HRT. I think I had it to a low grade before? But it definitely worsened to a disabling degree after about a year on hormones. It’s not a very well understood condition (and as a diagnosis of exclusion it’s probably not just one condition) but it’s a lot more common in women, which maybe implies it’s just part of how my body works on estrogen. So I had a choice to make - would I rather go off estrogen if it’d help with the pain? And the answer was a surprisingly immediate and definitive “hell fucking no”. Even with a new disability life was so much better. That’s the point I knew it was the right choice and I’ve never doubted it since.
I guess the way I’d tie this up is - it took a long while after I started giving it a go to be 100% assured I’d made the right decision. It is a leap of faith you will have to make without a guarantee - that said, if you’re thinking about it to this level your odds are probably extremely high. And you’ll know pretty quick if things like HRT are for you or not.
You might also benefit from nonbinary identity in the meantime to give yourself the space to explore any and all options. I landed on identifying as nonbinary but broadly transfemme - you can figure out the more specific parts of your identity later, just figure out what you want to explore in the present and you’ll get there with some time!
I think about what my character would be on the character creation screen if I was given a free respawn.
If that doesn’t work, I think about cutting my hair, bagging everything feminine in the house, throwing it away, etc. That idea usually has me in tears. (Is that a clue I’m not cis?)
Also trying to remember how depressing it is to go back to presenting as male.
I keep this in my phone for whenever those thoughts hit.
I love this tweet, but it doesn’t seem to do much for dispelling doubts. Admittedly I tend to over-think everything, and I am interested in philosophy (especially epistemology), so maybe some of this is just my temperament intersecting in an unfortunate way with a difficult life choice.
If you like epistemology, then I have some thoughts that might help.
At a neurological level, our brain seems to store information in terms of essence. To simplify and generalize the raw information our sensory organs capture, multiple stages of compression break it into something we can efficiently work with. For vision, your brain breaks info into elements like lines movement, color. From there, it tries to place the subject and the context, identifying what it sees and where it is separately.
The fun part of this system is that it does a lot of generation. The raw image you receive from your eyes looks like shit. It’s mostly light and dark, with a small section of 8k full color and a blind spot right under it. We perceive reality like a movie by constantly moving that 8k part to get as much info as possible. Our brain fills in any missing details with what it thinks should be there.
We understand the world by simulating it in our minds. Like an AI generation model, it builds a version of reality using the interconnected schemas we piece together over our lifetime. Our memories and past experiences are saved as generative prompts of what happened, not what actually happened. Every single time you remember something, you’re not accessing a detailed file, but generating it from scratch using key details and connections.
The end result of using fallible essences to build our reality is that we often struggle when they reveal their inaccuracy. When ideas are central to our being, understandings indispensable to our entire view of the world, we try everything possible to preserve it.
Realizing you are trans feels like a Matrix level reversal of reality because it truly is. There is no reality we exist in other than the one our mind builds. Having such a core paradigm overturned feels like the world was turned on its head and pulled inside out. It’s hard to let go of that old reality emotionally, as without it you free fall through uncertainty.
It’s hard, but rejecting solipsism will get you to the most likely epistemological truth: We will never escape this cave. We can never perceive anything but shadows of what’s out there. Even our most well tested and fundamental theories of science rely on shadows that tell an incomplete story. If we found an understanding of everything, it would still be a shadow. The most generalizable shadow, but still only a representation of the true form.
…
There’s always a chance you’re wrong about your identity, but with the abandonment of certainty comes the rejection of deduction. You can’t prove that you have the “transfem essence” because no essence can be proven for reality.
Medical disorders? Tools fundamentally relative to place and time. Taxonomic definitions? Created for convenience. Quantum particles? They ain’t truly particles, just quantized bits! We made it ALL the fuck up.
You probably can’t find that certainty. It’s most likely impossible. The best we can do is choose the most likely option and move on. You’ve started your transition. Being cis isn’t the null; being trans is.
Right, so two things:
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the lack of solidity or knowledge is a useful weapon for my fears, since I can’t be sure about transitioning (of course this requires special pleading, but it’s not hard to think transitioning is at least different than lots of other life choices)
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even if we ignore the fear and acknowledge there is no resolution to the epistemic issues (which, by the way, I think there is still room for discussion based on pragmatic arguments about evidence, even if the fundamental access to Truth is problematised), there is a practical question of how to best brainwash myself into accepting the illusion of being a woman.
It seems like the latter is a slow process, I feel much more intact womanhood now than a year ago - having breasts and soft skin helps, for example, because my brain is more likely to misinterpret my image as the image of a woman’s (I find this especially true in low resolution reflections, like seeing my reflection at a distance on a microwave, or on my unlit phone, etc.).
One approach is to use surgery, hormones, etc. to make myself look as much like a woman so when I see myself I can see a woman, but I wonder what other strategies are helpful for that self-ing as a woman, i.e. to build up the illusion of being a woman.
Your use of words like “misinterpret” instead of “interpret” and “illusion” instead of “perception” makes me think your issue is normative rather than descriptive. It isn’t about whether you are trans, but whether you should be trans. Getting from is to ought in this way exists in the realm of ethics, not epistemology.
It’s important to understand how we can get from is to ought within the neurological view I talked about earlier. The first thing to understand is how and why our brain forms the connections that it does.
One important mechanism for our brains making connections is Hebbian learning: neurons that fire together wire together. If concepts occur in tandem with one another more frequently, like feminine and submissive, then they become implicitly associated with one another, allowing you to more easily bring up one idea when thinking about the other. This is how decades of popular culture depicting certain ethnic or racial groups as criminals can cause implicit bias to form without the person ever believing in it explicitly.
However, the brain can also modulate connection forming with far fewer similtaneous exposures. Think of frightening experiences causing a sudden phobia of whatever the person was experiencing at the time. If you get scared around a fluffy animal enough times, you might become scared of the animal without the scary thing itself. This is caused by “reward” or “reinforcement” mechanisms encouraging stronger associations to form in certain circumstances. The brain evolved to make connections form more strongly when the stimulus is more salient.
It may not be obvious, but this gives insight into how and why we want. We want because it helps us survive, from wanting to get away from that which is bad for survival and seeking that which is good for it. A lot of these wants like hunger or the desire to breathe are buried deep in our brains, as if we don’t satisfy them, we die. You can’t force yourself to suffocate by holding your breath, as you will fall unconscious and your brain will automatically start breathing. We want certain things and sometimes cannot change that. Even if we manage to hold off on eating till we die, we’ll be hungry till the end.
You may be asking why I’m focusing on wants rather than trying to answer an ethical question, but I’m doing this because I realized ethics has always been about what we want. We bridge the is/ought canyon by wondering where else our sense of what “should be” can originate. We evolved to want survival, so we think we should survive. We want pleasure, so we think we ought to have it. We want companionship, money, life, liberty, and happiness. We need no better justification than wanting it finding a way to exist with other people and their wants.
…
Finally circling back to your inability to fully accept that you ought to be a woman, you need to accept that your wanting it is enough. You clearly want to be a woman more than anything else, and other people being bigoted is all the stands against it on the side of other people’s wants. You deserve the same thing you think we all do.
Insightful, thank you for your responses.
My “doubt” then might be better understood as a form of cognitive dissonance, as I struggle to unify my desires - a part of me desires to remain closeted and not transition while another part desires to move forward with the transition.
Clearly at this point the part that wishes to transition has won out, and has been driving the ship. But this does not silence the part of me, which is deeply ingrained, that transition threatens my survival and well-being. The problem is that both are true, I have to reconcile and navigate being between a rock and a hard place.
Also, it’s not merely the bigotry of others, but my own internalized disgust and bigotry I have to work through, but I think this is maybe less of an engine of my dissonance than my fears about safety and survival.
I only transitioned because I was in a uniquely dissociated place in my life, having survived a life-threatening situation that left my injured and partially disabled, and I was working a lot on my mental health. Being able to see the conditions that put me in a dangerous situation where I was injured helped me see the ways I was becoming a burden on others by not being well, so my wellness became a priority for the first time. I was finally able to prioritize eating healthy, exercising for my health, etc. in ways I just couldn’t before, and a downstream consequence was that I was finally able to acknowledge I might need to transition for my wellness.
I also only transitioned because my back was against the wall. I was lucky to have the intensive mental healthcare needed to recover from such a place, but I couldn’t have done it if I never came out. It did automatically fix some problems I could never deal with before, but more than anything, it made my problems solvable. The biggest thing transition gave me was the ability to love myself.
In my personal experience, the number one challenge with treatment resistant depression is self hatred. The shame of being worthless and despicable. If you view yourself as inherently bad rather than as a person who did a bad thing, it’s much harder or even impossible to make progress. It becomes self fulfilling, with wins not sticking and losses piling up. That is often what holds people back from recovery; the enemy of living a good life.
The treatment is a arduous process of being greatful for everything good and not defining yourself as inherently bad. You can amend the wrongs rather than letting them define you. You are a good person deserving of love, so it’d be a shame to not love yourself. This is less about stroking your ego and more about cherishing yourself for all that you’re worth.
Most people go through life without getting all the joy they can out of all the good. All things in life, from the good to the bad, are only here for a brief moment. Whether you’re sad or happy, always remember: This too shall pass. The sun will fade and the final eclipse will shadow the earth, so make sure to not let self hatred of any kind destroy those moments.
You will need to fight off self hatred for the rest of your life. You can’t put down your weapons or “fix” it once and for all. It will be tiring, but worth it.
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I gotta try doing this in a pub but making sure they know nobody else will find out
edit: also is that rozi rabbit the tiktok girl???
right!?
I regularly wish to reproduce this - I’m sure there is a cis guy out there somewhere who would take a single estrogen pill, lol.
I suppose, but someone like that would either be the kind of guy who would take any random drug you offered him, or, probably a guy who knows that a single estrogen pill wouldn’t do anything by itself anyway. But then what would be the point in him taking it except for a laugh to shock his friends etc? Either way they wouldn’t be doing it for the intended effect.
Yeah, I do tend to think if someone is keen to take estrogen and likes the effects that’s a strong sign they might be a woman. The tweet is implying men also wouldn’t even consider taking the estrogen, as though to point out that cis men like being men, and that if you don’t like being a man and would even consider taking the pill, it’s a sign you are trans. That might also be generally true, but I think there is murkiness there.
And an awful lot of eggs, I bet. “Well, if you insist”
Cis guy here. I don’t question my sex/gender etc. If you’re not entirely sure, I would reckon that, at the very least you’re somewhere in between. All that being said, glory to you, and your identity :)
I used to think I was a cis guy :-) I guess many trans women have thought that. I didn’t really question my sex or gender that much either, if anything I actively avoided doing that. I knew I was a bit non-conforming in my gender, I wasn’t the manliest man, so I felt insecure in my masculinity and tried to compensate in various ways.
And when I first transitioned, the intense doubts at first made me think I was non-binary (in-between), but what helped me realize that was unlikely is that there was nothing about masculinity that felt affirming or good to me, and nothing about femininity that feels off or wrong to me. I truly wish I had been born a cis woman, and I have long felt that being a woman is the best thing you can be (even when I thought I was a cis man).
Yup, those are thoughts that don’t occur to me, not that there is anything wrong with them, either way of course. I too wish you were born in your body of choice. I however support your transition into the person you wish to be, kind stranger. I desperately hope you live in an area where bigotry isn’t prevalent, and you can be safe with who you are. I genuinely wish you the best, and may you live an long and happy life.
Sorry, I don’t mean to talk about my self-conception as a cis guy as a way to cast doubt of your own identity, I only bring it up because I would have previously said the same and I haven’t been able to rely on something like not questioning or not experiencing common trans things as a guide as to whether I’m cis or trans. It took me many years and the conditions in my life had to support that process of realization, and honestly even if I had the right information if it had come at the wrong time I would have found ways to rationalize not transitioning or considering myself trans in the first place. Looking back it feels like I’ve been trying to “come-out” as trans my whole life, and every time it has been shut down (sometimes with violence).
Unfortunately I don’t live in a safe place, and I honestly should probably move, but it is difficult to do. I have been denied access to gender affirming care where I live, and I live in a place with some of the most restrictive anti-trans laws in the country. That said, I am used to it, and while other trans people are afraid to even catch connecting flights where I live, this place feels normal to me and I try to live a normal life as best I can.
That said, I appreciate your well-wishes, I wish a long and happy life for you as well! ❤️
Don’t know how to quote, but I didn’t take anything you said as a way to cast doubt on my identity fwiw! I’m hope the elections go well so that you can continue to be relatively safe. So far it seems pretty good up here in the great white north. If SHTF I welcome all my 2SLGBTQIA+ homies up here!
Ah, glad you didn’t take it that way, just wanted to be clear.
Thanks for the well wishes! If you’re in Canada, I think the current treaties prevent me from seeking asylum there without first seeking asylum in other states like California. However, if the federal elections go poorly, maybe there will be a case for granting that asylum. Still, things will have to be pretty bad before I act, so it is likely to be too late by the time I need to flee. If I had money, I would have said the writing is on the wall and left already.
Stay safe friend.
I cracked my egg about 1 month ago. I’m about to start HRT in less than 2 months (MTF). I’m 26.
I sometimes do have moments of doubts but they quickly vanish when I look at myself in the mirror wearing my fem clothes, or when I do makeup. Something incredible is how I feel like jolts of pure happiness when people call me by my new name.
I remember the day I told myself I am trans and going to do HRT. There was a storm and I was outside yelling, crying and dancing. I didn’t care about the rain, nothing mattered around me for a moment, just me being incredibly happy, maybe for the first time in my life. Just the realisation itself is a strong sign for me.
First of all, congrats - I wish I had transitioned when I was 26!
I do feel happiness when called my name (esp. by strangers or people who didn’t know me pre-transition), and I feel happy wearing women’s clothes (I felt this way before my egg cracked too, which is weird because I have internalized wearing women’s clothes as a part of my “cis male” identity and experience).
I think “doubt” becomes a bit of an amorphous term, at some point I think it’s clear that what I’m experiencing is essentially an emotion, a sense of insecurity, fear, and uncertainty about transitioning rather than a reasonable intuition that I’m not trans or that I am wrong. Ironically I seem to “doubt” the most when I am dysphoric and feeling the symptoms that prove I am trans most strongly, when I can look at those symptoms and reason through that this is what makes me trans.
When that happens, I think of aging. I notice that I would dread aging as a man but I am fine with aging to be an old lady.
I do feel like ageing will somehow rob me of my gender, since being a woman feels so tied up in being pretty and having a man’s body puts so much pressure on doing everything you can to lean into being pretty so you won’t be confused for a man. Being old will texture my skin and make it harder to appear as a woman, but maybe it won’t be such a big deal.
Either way, another one that struck me was that I thought I had body dysmorphia and just hated being fat, but what I realized one day is that actually I hated the male pattern fat distribution on my body, and I wouldn’t mind feminine fat distribution even if it made me not skinny, etc. Recognizing there was a gendered lens to my body hatred was a shock to me.
hey the fat distrubution thing is relateable to me too. I think getting old while on hrt would be good enough to not “get robbed off my gender”
yes, especially at your age - most of the androgenization of my body happened when I was in my 20s, so preventing that would be massive!! It can be harder for us trans-laters, but I still think most of us recognize it’s worth it. Honestly, I couldn’t even give myself the hope of being a woman in the world, my transition goals were / are oriented around things like mental health. If I ever manage to integrate into cis-normative society and live passing as a woman it’s beyond what I am willing to let myself dream or hope for.
As long as it eases dysphoria it would be worth it I think. Also I saw a lot of timelines online of people who transitioned when they were older. A lot of them passed and the others were atill really pretty even though didn’t 100% pass. So I would say neither of our cganches are bad.
I had a lot of doubts before coming out and getting on HRT. Now I know I am a woman, sure I still have days I don’t feel pretty and dysphoria gets me down, some days I don’t feel like a woman and I just feel like me… But before HRT I never felt like me, I had nice distractions time to time, but I never felt comfortable in my own skin and now I have that most of the time. <3
Some days you don’t “feel like a woman”, but on days when you “feel like a woman” what is that like for you?
I find there is almost a psycho-social aspect to “feeling like a woman” - that getting dressed up, wearing makeup, and then being in society as a woman results in something remarkable where I begin to see myself as a woman more.
I have habituated seeing myself as a man in this same psycho-social way, and in my dreams I sometimes revert to a “man” this way, and sometimes in my dreams I am a “man living as a woman” in that particular trans way (where my body is neither fully male nor female, and I try to live as a woman but feel insecure in that position).
All that said, I felt like being a man was more truly a deception somehow. For whatever insecurities I have as a woman, being a woman doesn’t make me feel like I’m putting on a fake character or show for people the way that I felt when I tried to live and pass as a man (the fact that I felt like I had to “pass” as a man when I was assigned male at birth is maybe a sign here).
I agree that I feel much more comfortable in my skin, but sometimes it feels like maybe some dissociation thaws and I suddenly become much more sensitive to my male body - like all the positive effects from transitioning overshoot and I suddenly expect myself to be a cis woman in a cis woman’s body, and reminders that this isn’t true then are even more disturbing than it felt when I felt fully like a monster but felt so far away from being “me” in my body.
I discussed this with my partner, this was a huge comment to unpack. And we agree that maybe you aren’t quite feeling doubts, but instead insecurity/imposter syndrome. And that is something I mean when I say I feel not like a woman some days, and in others that I don’t feel as pretty as I’d like. We have some extra baggage having come from a testosterone heavy past and we experience the same insecurities a cis person would experience with that added.
That said in the social aspect I receive a lot of affirmation, and I honestly don’t even try to pass. I struggle but honestly I have to recognize that most of my battles are between me and my mirror, colored by thoughts of my pre-transition self.
I decided to not worry about labels and instead figure out what I want. Who cares whether I’m Really Trans™ if I get to have a feminine body – and that’s something (if I’m honest) I’ve wanted so much since… well, as long as I can remember. Do I feel like a woman? Eh, who knows. I certainly never felt much like a man. Or a human, come to that.
And sure, some days I don’t want to look at my dysphoria-inducing face practicing makeup, or listen to my dysphoria-inducing voice doing training, and that’s fine. Put on some androgynous clothes, cuddle up with Blåhaj and Trust the Process while I watch a film or something. More often than not I end up wanting to do something girly anyway after a while.
And some days, when I get the tuck just right, and my hair isn’t too bad, and I’ve got on some nice tight jeans and a cute sweater, I think: “do I want to be a trans woman?”. And the answer is hell, yeah.
The doubts seem to be able to shift from “am I trans” to “is this affirming” really easily. Even when I can feel it is affirming, the non-affirming aspects of being trans, the literal dysphoria that confirms I am trans, can make me feel confused about whether I am delusional about what I am feeling, about what I find affirming, etc.
I think a lot of the doubting comes from fear about being trans, about the commitment and long-term and permanent changes to my body, and so on. In a world without transphobia I might feel some doubts or uncertainty, and that could be difficult (I’m the kind of person that can’t get a tattoo because it’s “Permanent”), but I think I would have a lot less obsessive doubting, a lot of this is just coming from some kind of survival drive or something, lol.
And yeah, I feel the ups and downs. Androgynous clothes never help me, but some kinds of self-care like shaving can be a bit brutal, having to look at my face in the mirror, etc.
I’m the kind of person that can’t get a tattoo because it’s “Permanent”
I had this too! I think it came from an internalized idea of “I must accept the body I was born with.” Gave me a massive crisis when my girlfriend at the time got her ears pierced… I was so close to figuring it all out 20 years ago!
Now I’ve allowed myself to change my body, that’s all just vanished. Still don’t fancy a tattoo though :P
I had a lot of doubts to begin with. Part of what helped me was learning that it’s not useful to think of words like trans as prescriptive, but as descriptive. I started only thinking in terms of benefits and making myself comfortable.
I want to wear different clothes and otherwise present myself differently because I’ve always wanted to? Then I’ll do that.
I tried HRT and I liked the mental and physical effects? Then I’ll continue with HRT.
I have no connection to my name and prefer a female coded name? Then I’ll use a new female coded name.
Etc. etc.
Trans is just a word and the more important part is making yourself happy.
Edit: The word trans is useful because it describes a bunch of the stuff I’m doing, and it makes me happy when I see things that are trans supportive. I think it’s also worth remembering that gender is a spectrum and that being transgender is defined as not identifying with the gender you were assigned at birth/not being cis, and therefore includes a lot of identities and ways of expressing yourself.
No one else gets to go inside your head and tell you how you feel, so it’s only up to you to decide whether or not you are trans. Honestly you can do a bunch of gender non-conforming things and even do all sorts of transitiony things and stuff associated with being trans and then just decide to “not be trans” if you feel like it, even if others might describe you as such. What do they know anyways? Most people haven’t really put their gender identity under the looking glass or even so much as read about the subject.
Yes, I do tend to think of the trans label as a diagnostic category that if I’m in it, I should do certain things, so it is prescriptive and that grounds my choices around transitioning. Before transition I couldn’t motivate myself around things like my comfort or desires, that felt too selfish, especially for something that admittedly blows up my life and creates so many problems (I have lost several family members as a result of transitioning, for example).
It was only by realizing I was essentially living with a condition and not medicated that I was being irresponsible, and that was being a burden on others because I was living this way.
That said, whether I think of trans as prescriptive or descriptive, the doubt feelings have a foothold because it can equally target uncertainty about what I experience as what I want or find comforting - I can wonder if I am delusional about my own assessment of the mental and physical effects of HRT. This is especially the case when I started HRT and realized I had been really not mentally well for most of my life and not realized it. I had depression, suicidal ideation, intense anxiety, and a whole host of other issues that seemed to magically disappear when I started HRT, and the fact that I had never thought I had those things before really unseated my confidence in self-perception.
Anyway, yes - at the end of the day it’s undeniable and not ambiguous that I’m a trans woman, I feel very happy on estrogen and as a woman, etc. - the doubts are truly disconnected from reality, or maybe a better way of putting it is that the doubts are an attempt to rationalize detransitioning because it’s risky and scary being a trans woman where I live, and there is a part of me that is clearly concerned about survival as a trans person. (Of course, detransitioning at this point is even more likely to threaten my survival, just in a different way.)
Yes, I do tend to think of the trans label as a diagnostic category that if I’m in it, I should do certain things,
That’s because of generations of transphobic gatekeeping shoving that down our throats. They hide the people who don’t fit the acceptable narratives, and deny them care and invalidate them.
That is absolutely not what being trans is about.
Being trans is about taking the steps to live your life on your own terms. If you don’t know what your own terms are, then its giving yourself permission to explore and find out, because even that is living your life on your own terms.
It was only by realizing I was essentially living with a condition and not medicated that I was being irresponsible, and that was being a burden on others because I was living this way.
The reality of living with dysphoria is real, but it’s important that you don’t equate dysphoria and trans identity. One can be trans without dysphoria, and whilst there is a relationship between the two, they are distinct, and one doesn’t automatically flow from the other.
You don’t need to know all the answers. You don’t need a diagnosis. You don’t need a permanent and forever label that you are 100% certain of, because honestly, none of those things will give you what you want. If you’re chasing them, it’s because you are trying to validate who you are to yourself and to others. And that self doubt is a real thing, that so many of us struggle with. But we don’t solve it by finding labels and saying “See, I’ve got proof”, because the self doubt doesn’t care about that, and will still sneak through the cracks.
We disempower self doubt by living our lives on our own terms, and over time, the truth of our lived experience starts to undo the lifetime of self doubt we’ve been taught. Of course, it’s much harder than a single sentence makes it sound, but just be careful not to fall in to the trap of chasing labels and identity as the answer to the doubts you have, because they’re not. The labels help you understand more about yourself and the people around you, but they’re tools, not answers
Trans-Medicalism
Regarding trans-medicalism, I do tend to view my own transness through a clinical lens, and this lends itself to a lot of superficial overlap with trans-medicalists. However, I don’t see a need to equate dysphoria with trans identity nor to gatekeep others in their identity. Politically it is advantageous to have a big tent and to cooperate with one another, and that’s the spirit with which I see trans identity, i.e. there isn’t a single way of being trans and the thing that brings us all together is our mutual oppression under the hegemonic gender ideology. (For this reason, I think trans people should see intersex individuals as belonging to our political identity and as having a shared struggle, since they are similarly oppressed.)
I certainly would have been denied trans care under the old Benjamin rules, for example because I have attraction to women. I consider trans-medicalism as harmful and likely to lead to trans people being pushed back into the closet and refused services they probably need. I have seen this recently with the talk about the incel “transmaxxing” manifesto, which sounds basically like a way for incels who are trans to rationalize transitioning; truscum seem to view this transmaxxing manifesto as confirmation that men are stealing precious gender affirming care from more deserving and valid trans women, while I tend to think it’s more likely that anyone who thinks estrogen makes you happy should probably be permitted access to estrogen and is probably just having a hard time admitting they’re a woman.
Identity and Self
There is a lot of wisdom in your comment. I think a big problem I am running into is a weak sense of self and a lack of self-esteem. Because it feels like I just try to fit whatever identity is expected of me, it becomes a crisis when I try to declare an identity outside of that, because I don’t really have a strong sense of any identity outside of what is expected of me. This makes me heavily conformist in my thinking and behavior, and I think I’ll be happy if I’m just another woman.
Sometimes I get worried that I am going through my transition too quickly, that if I were non-binary, I wouldn’t catch those subtleties. Being attracted to women complicates this as well, as a lot of the way we think about femininity gets wrapped up in sexual dynamics - I notice among cis lesbians the incorporation of masculine elements (sometimes it even seems some sapphic women have more masculine features outside of their gender expression!). I don’t feel like a butch, but being a sapphic femme can be confusing when you’re born in a male body, I feel different from straight women in subtle ways that can lead to “am I non-binary” kind of thinking.
I’m also getting older, and there is a part of me that feels like a lot of my self-doubting has nothing to do with the actual question or exploration of my identity. Instead, it has to do with the fears I have about transitioning. I’m ten months into taking HRT and there has never been a moment where I thought being a man is preferable, nor where I thought a non-binary identity seemed affirming. I don’t like being gender-ambiguous or being able to be perceived as either gender, it’s clear that I think being a woman is the best, and so I use that as my North star.
Anyway, I need to work on self-construction and affirmation more, because I think you’re right that it would probably help with my doubt issue.
Thank you as always for your wisdom. ❤️
For what it’s worth, I’m a late transitioning trans woman that speed ran my transition and has a semi antagonistic relationship with femininity.
Nearly 8 years in, I still wonder if I’d identify on the binary if I’d have been born a generation or two later than I was. I still don’t really understand my sexuality and romantic attractions.
All I can tell you though is that even without all of the answers, I’m more me than I’ve ever been :)
