How to become trans

So you want to be trans? You've come to the right place!

In this post I'll unpack some of the thoughts that helped me identify as trans.

For the longest time I thought that being trans is an innate thing that people know from their early childhood and have an unshakable belief in — I now know this is true only for some.

This is a summary of some realizations that helped me in unlearning some of the bullshit I've been taught as a kid / young adult / not-so-young adult, that stood in my way of identifying as trans and beginning a transition. (And with transition I don't necessarily mean medical transition, but simply re-contextualizing myself as a trans person)

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to

Let's address the most obvious, most important and hardest to act on point first: It's my life and I can do what I want with it. There may be material conditions preventing you from doing certain things (lack of access to gender affirming care, unsafe living situation, mental health struggles etc), but morally there is nothing from stopping you doing basically anything. To drive the point home, you can even do things that you know will make you miserable — it's your choice.

This is both a blessing and a curse — you are the sole creator of your identity, no matter what any psychologist might ever tell you. However, no matter what any psychologist might ever diagnose you with (hello F64.0 / HA60), you're still the sole creator of your identity and “being trans” is not something that can at all be diagnosed. In fact, over the last decades, the pathologization of trans people through psychiatry has moved to diagnosing the distress that may arise with a trans / gender diverse identity, not the identity itself (although most practitioners didn't get the memo yet). In any case, this means that you cannot delegate a definitive conclusion on your identity to an external person, you'll have to figure it out yourself (although having a therapist help you do that might still be a precious resource).

You can (and should) do whatever you want:

And none of those have to correlate in any way!

You're allowed to make mistakes

Crucially, you can also allow yourself to make mistakes. As a possibly trans person, you're operating in a system that is hostile towards any kind of gender exploration, it's all about being certain and “having always known” (ideally just be cis, please). It's just natural that you may do certain steps to fit a “trans narrative” in your transition and later come to realize it isn't for you. The point is not to buy into the fear mongering of TERFs around detransition. Detransitioning is probably not something to aim for from the start, but people regret their knee surgeries more than trans people do their transition, yet nobody's asking them to do years of therapy before. Life will not end if you take a new direction on your gender journey! Neither now, nor if you're de- and re-transitioning.

Being trans vs living trans

One thing I have only recently come to realize, is that I have a much easier time answering the question “do I want to live as xyz gender / trans”, rather than “am I xyz gender”. Many cis people I've talked to don't have an innate feeling about their gender – they were assigned one at birth and haven't felt the need to change it. For trans people, there is the expectation of the aforementioned unshakable, long-held belief in one's gender identity.

I've held a misconception for a long time, that just because something is a social construct, it is not real. Take e.g. money: A fiction invented by humankind, defended by all-powerful nation states, but purely a social construct. Nonetheless, if you have none, that has very real and material consequences. You're forced to work throughout your entire life, just because of it.

The analogy here is, that even though gender may be a social construct and just from nature there's no such thing as a “man” and a “woman”, only a multitude of bodies with differing biological characteristics (some of which happen to be related to reproduction), we are raised on the core belief that humans are neatly segregated into two fundamentally disparate groups of men and women with distinct personality features and bodily abilities. This fiction creates very real-world consequences (patriarchy), that probably billions of people suffer from. You may not like it, it may not be nearly as relevant as we are taught to believe, but the fact remains that any space you navigate will try to categorize you into one of these buckets.

Thus, even if you don't feel like a certain gender, if you decide to step out of your assigned role for whatever reason, that changes how you interact with the rest of the world, that still holds that belief. I'm not saying that every gender nonconforming person is trans, rather I want to move the focus from “who am I” to “how do I want to interact with the world”. If the latter gives you an answer that is a gender or presentation other than the one assigned at birth, then you can do something about it, without necessarily having to go through the mental hoops of realizing “I am actually irrevocably a xyz”.

This also ties with other commonly found (and great) advice in trans spaces to stop focusing on identity and to start focusing on “what do you want” — irrespective of identity, would you feel better using different pronouns, a different name, changing your presentation, etc.

Or to put it bluntly: If you'd rather engage with the world as a certain gender, than the one you currently do, that may be enough reason to just do it.

Change your gender as often as you want

Finally, you can change your mind at any point in time.

This is less helpful advice for social transition (in a transphobic world, outing yourself as trans once will probably stick in some way), but for yourself, it's worth keeping in mind that there's absolutely nothing wrong with changing your gender as often as you want. This also includes a framing where you perceive your current transition (or related thoughts) as not rooted in childhood — I personally have wondered often enough if I've always been nonbinary or if I've had a change in gender in my twenties. In any case, I'll never let anybody, including myself, set this in stone for the rest of my life!

Further reading