Before last fall, I had no idea that I might be trans; it’s only in retrospect that certain moments in my life come into focus as reflective of my transness. From my understanding - and this isn’t yet a well studied topic - about half of the transgender population has a similar experience to me, while the other half knows that they are another gender from a young age. The latter group has received the most cultural attention, and historically a number of gatekeeping practices revolved around “allowing” - to what degree it can be said to be allowing - that group to transition, while people like myself were considered to be mentally ill or stricken with a paraphilia. These views have not held up under scientific scrutiny, and so late bloomers like myself are starting to be better represented in trans circles.
All that said, I find it difficult sometimes to reconcile myself with the fact that I had never questioned my gender identity until last fall. In retrospect there are signs in my history in the form of feelings, strange interactions, bodily perceptions of myself, and obsessions that make me fairly confident that I was trans before I knew it. If I accept the fact that I’ve always been trans, the next question on my mind becomes: why figure things out now?
One of my bosses a few jobs back used to describe people that left his company as being either pushed out or pulled out. He wanted to ensure that people left under his supervision only when pulled out by better opportunities. He also didn’t offer me a salary increase to stay when I found a position elsewhere, so fuck him. But I think it’s a fair question to ask: is it something here irritating you that made you leave, or is there an allure elsewhere that has drawn you in? I’ve been trying to apply this question to my “egg crack” - did I discover my transness through trauma or through personal growth?
Trauma and disassociation
It’s fun talking with my siblings about our experiences of childhood because they always manage to dredge up memories I seem to have lost. Over time, I’ve come to realize that my personal record of childhood and adolescence, and even early adulthood, is somewhat hazier than that of most people I know. At first I thought it might be related to my weed habit that started around 2008, but more recently I’ve been suspecting that this loss has been a byproduct of disassociation, or as my family lovingly referred to it back in the day, “zoning out.” Other trans authors like Zinnia Jones have written about the connection between disassociation and transness. Imogen Binnie’s quintessential novel Nevada gives us the character James, an extremely disassociated “egg” who tries to extinguish the stress he experiences from his desire to live as a woman by spending his off-work hours chain smoking joints.
My experience leading up to gender questioning was one of significant stress. It was year two of the pandemic, my work was increasingly demanding, my wife was emotionally unavailable due to the stress of her PhD program, and Portland had just started in on what would turn out to be the rainiest winter on record. I was cooped up and isolated, and my vices seemed to only exacerbate things. I felt raw, like the armor I was used to wearing was worn full of holes and was weighing me down. My coping mechanism was to intellectualize and distract myself as much as possible. When the first glimmers of gender questioning snuck through in whatever way they managed, they appeared in start contrast as lightning bolts of emotion. I’m not sure if under better circumstances they would have been as obvious.
Therapy and personal growth
Shortly after I came out to my parents, we were on a phone call and my mother asked, “How did you figure out that you were trans?” I tried to explain the conjunction of multiple indicators that I was working with - moments of gender envy and euphoria, my positive feelings from past misgendering experiences, and above all the strange sensation of an obstacle blocking me from my understanding of self that I had been unable to see clearly despite years of therapy. My parents were shocked. “You’ve been in therapy?!” I got a good laugh out of that. I’m a middle class millennial, what do you expect?
I think that the therapy hours I’ve logged, despite not directly helping me access my gender identity, did guide me to a state of emotional awareness where I was able to notice my emotions around gender more easily and start to ask questions about their sources. I’ve been in both couples’ and individual therapy, and the issue that came up for me again and again was my lack of awareness of the emotions I was experiencing. This presented itself as what I sensed as a very limited palette: goofiness (especially while stoned), sternness that became long-smoldering anger, and unpredictably intrusive anxiety. I was clearly feeling more than these emotions because I could dig out the underlying emotions with considerable effort. Though progress was slow, I started to learn techniques in therapy that helped me identify what mechanisms were causing me to feel things from the limited palette, and more quickly jump to addressing my real emotions. I suspect that this progress was necessary for me to acknowledge any feelings of gender envy or dysphoria at all.
Closing thoughts
I’ve been editing this blog post on and off for about a month, and I think where I’ve landed with it is all of the factors I describe had roles to play in my egg crack. Being a human is messy and complicated, and it’s more important to me now that I act on my feelings, however I arrived at them. Just like the totally creepy Richard and Linda Thompson song that I named this post after, sometimes the answer is the circumstances of the ambiguity itself.