
*Editor’s Note - this is a 4AM rant that I’ve been trying out on friends for the past couple of weeks. I wrote it initially as the underlying concept behind the Gender Transition Strategy Guide, but before taking it that far I want to first see if it can stand on its own.*

In his [*Side Affects*](https://upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/side-affects) essay “Future Fatigue,” Hil Malatino extrapolates on gender as a landscape of self-perception and presentation that everyone inhabits. Cisgender people tend to stay close to the places we refer to as “male” or “female”, occasionally wandering around but generally remaining nearby. These well-known locales are not entirely fixed, and have their own sprawl. Transgender people in this conceptualization are the pioneers who strike out into the broader space, sometimes moving from one named locale to another, or inhabiting spots of their own choice, and oftentimes living nomadic lives without any fixed destination.

Gender transition is often described as a linear process trans people undertake to move from living as one gender to another. While many trans people do seek to move between the well-known locales of female and male, there’s no fixed path or direct bus line, everyone’s journey takes them in unexpected directions over indeterminate amounts of time. Many adventurers make it out into the wilderness and find areas of natural beauty that suit them better than they thought. Some find that they love the journey and spend their lives seeking new territory. Some strike out, run into inclement weather, and hike back the way they came, oftentimes to try again another day. Almost everyone finds themselves pausing and reflecting at some point, saying “am I sure I want to head this way? Because *that way* seems so much better,” and changing direction. Transition, then, might really be the wrong word to use to describe this journey.

A term that encompasses the linear transition fairytale that many of us were raised with is *transnormativity*. Transnormativity refers to the hallmarks of transitioning the “right” way, ie. the way that institutional gatekeepers have laid out. The transnormative narrative of transition is a nice, tidy, and very wrong story that has been compiled and iterated upon by figures of the establishment who have sought to protect the greater cis public from the implications of the malleability of gender and the destruction of the binary. If there is no gender binary, then there can be no justification for forms of oppression like institutional sexism. In order to rationalize some form of treatment for the obviously real existence of trans people, gatekeepers concocted a story of a route between the well-known genders and forced trans people to stick to this story for fear of losing access to gender-affirming care.

We’ve come a long way from the transnormativity practiced in the mid-20th century, but there are still many holdovers that we’re still shedding culturally. One example of this might be the idea of gender as a sliding scale between two points, and being non-binary as being a third point somewhere in between. When someone says that they are non-binary, it doesn’t mean that they are at some percentage between male and female, rather it means that their transition has led them to areas of the greater space.

An idea that might not obviously derive from transnormativity is the perceived lack of “trans elders.” I should be clear that I mean this in the sense of trail guides, people who could help one successfully “complete” transition. Because everyone’s path is different and the territory shifts in uncanny ways, no one particular person can function as a guide through the gender landscape. Transnormativity suggests the possibility of guru-like figures who could help shuttle new transitioners between the poles with their applied wisdom, but there are no clearly defined poles and there is no bus line. Experience in transition is a complex thing, and because of this we have terms like “trans time” to differentiate time spent exploring the gender landscape from chronological age. But even then, since everyone’s paths are so different, someone with more trans time under their belt hasn't necessarily earned more credence.

The author Torrey Peters lays out in her book *Detransition, Baby* a framing she calls the “juvenile elephants” problem, in which she describes newly-out trans women as often volatile and poorly socialized, and are therefore in need of a parent figure, an “elder” to guide them through self-discovery in transition. The older transitioners who Peters frames as “elders” rarely stick around in trans communities due to a number of pressures, leading to the juveniles continuing to act out in an unrestrained manner with no accrual of collective wisdom. This framing fails to take into account two considerations.

First, the juvenile elephants problem takes for granted a transnormative view of transition, in that there are people “further along” who can serve as guides. This structure is reinforced by gatekeeping - if transness is a traversal of a landscape, the only reason we might think someone brings more “trans experience” outside of their own life experience and personal growth is because they’ve cleared hurdles that are often kept in a particular order by transnormative policy. For instance, most insurance guidelines for gender affirming care in the US are based off of the WPATH standard, which requires being on hormone replacement therapy for a particular amount of time before gender affirming surgeries can happen. This isn’t a medical requirement, it’s a form of gatekeeping to ostensibly make sure someone who wants one of those surgeries is “really sure” they know what they’re doing. This minimizes the lived experience of trans people who have not opted for HRT and who may or may not want to undergo these surgeries, for instance. Institutional transnormativity bars us from free movement across the gender landscape and tells us that it was never possible in the first place.

Second is the issue of “socialization”. A common transphobic critique is that trans people are “socialized female” or “socialized male” and are therefore unable to truly mesh with their cisgendered peers. The author Devon Price has [three excellent rebuttals](https://devonprice.medium.com/gender-socialization-is-real-complex-348f56146925) to this myth. First, scrutiny of what it might mean to be socialized in a particular gender shows that there are no core elements that make someone socialized one way or another. Second, children and adults are constantly exposed to all gender norms and therefore internalize them all to some degree. Third, many trans people speak about painful life experiences stemming from the dissonance they experienced trying to navigate their own gender expression in spite of the norms forced upon them *without even their own awareness of being trans*. If newly out trans people need socialization, and the concept of gender socialization is a transphobic red herring, then at best what Peters is describing is something merely tangential to transness, and at worst her critique carries a transmisogynistic veneer.

So if there are no trans elders, then who should people new to the journey look to for guidance? Maybe the real trans elders are the friends we make along the way - fellow travelers with whom we share our stories and campfires as we cross our winding paths. I recognize that this is the hottest of takes - our peers help us grow as we congregate and share our experiences with each other - but if we acknowledge the harm of transnormativity and discard the myth of transition, we can more clearly view living-while-trans as a great exploration of gendered experience, a ramble, free from notions of correctness. We can relax and find pleasure in the journey wherever it takes us.

Roaming the Gender Landscape

<p>This blog was originally named in an FPO-sorta-way "Transition Blog." Now that I no longer agree with the concept of a transition in favor of a journey through the gender landscape, I think it's time to make an update.</p>

I Need to Rename My Blog


It's been a real past few weeks, so I want to throw some updates about my personal situation on here that are important for understanding [exactly where I’m at](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FEFClgA37E).

I had a second, non-trans-related surgery at the start of May. Healing from my orchi continues, but recovery from this other surgery has gone a lot faster. My mood was extremely low from mid-April to mid-May as I was stuck in my house for most of the time and couldn’t get out or see people as easily as I’d liked. My body is finally at the point where I can do things like jog again, which I’m especially thankful for because of how much exercise improves my mood and general well-being. I’ve been catching up with a number of friends IRL this past week which has been reinvigorating.

That said, I managed to flush a big part of my social life down the toilet last weekend. Long story short, I ended up leaving the Discord server I had been an admin on for the past seven months. I had initially posted this with more detail on the situation, but reflecting further I don't want to go into it because it's too complicated personally. The Pollyanna in me wants to treat this as a blessing in disguise - I’ve been wanting to explore more queer spaces and change things up, so now life has lit a fire under my ass - but I'm also sad about making my decision.

At least I’m getting some good blog time in. After changing the blog name I got on a give-a-mouse-a-cookie kick and made a number of UI improvements that have been on my mental to-do list. Who knows if I have any readers at this point, but the writing still feels meaningful to me.

Oh hey, and I sold my soul to Instagram finally! I joined because I needed the memes, but now I'm posting selfies on the regular like the basic white girl I am. Follow me: [instagram.com/erinholographic](https://www.instagram.com/erinholographic/)

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I Need to Rename My Blog

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