In 2014 I was about a year into my career as a web developer. I was doing all the good little programmer things: going to tech talks in town, reading Hacker News, following tech celebrities on Twitter who linked to interesting projects and code tutorials. I felt like I was starting to find a community that I could fit into, and I was trying really hard to consume the right nerd culture in order to get all the references and seem like hot shit. The trouble is, I’m me, and so the media that I found myself drawn to was not the nerd mainstream. No, in retrospect what caught me in its hooks was the gender.
I remember distinctly thinking, wow, there’s a lot of trans women in tech! and combing through every piece of media produced by every trans woman I encountered. There was something intoxicating to me about playing body horror games by Porpentine Charity Heartscape, or reading essays on art and culture by Liz Ryerson, and I wasn’t quite sure why. Another thought I remember having was: I wish I was trans! Did I bother to investigate what it meant to be trans, or what my feelings might be hinting at? Absolutely not! I think the intoxication and “admiration” I felt for the trans women I encountered in tech media were another dog button-style conflation of emotions. What I really felt was longing to be like them. When eight years later I would stand looking in a mirror and say “hi Erin” for the first time, I would finally satisfy that longing with the satisfaction of knowing that I get to be trans.
I don’t think that feeling of “I get to be trans” is something that many other trans people start transition with or necessarily end up feeling later on. For past generations of trans people what being trans meant was that you had a lot of work to do. You needed to “complete” transition, focusing on passing as your desired gender, and usually culminating in bottom surgery. As I’ve addressed in other blogposts, the transnormative narrative is a fiction - no one ever is done with being trans, and most people ’s experiences don’t follow the imaginary path from point A to point B that cis people came up with in order to make us palatable to a society that wants to forget we exist. These days there’s much less of an emphasis on this path, but things are bad out there, with trans healthcare bans driving refugees to flee to safer states, and bigots feeling emboldened by these attacks on our rights to take things into their own hands with transphobic violence. It’s hard to feel like transness is a gift when so much of the world seems to hate us. It’s hard to not feel shame about being trans when so much of the world makes it out to be a shameful thing.
It puzzled me for some time that I have such a positive outlook on my transness despite it all. Just this week though I realized that I’ve faced a similar challenge before. I grew up in the southern US where evangelical Christianity is king. Every so-called secular institution there is guided by Christian leadership and attitudes, and it’s hard to participate in anything community related without visiting a church, or having a group prayer, or using religious language in conversation. It was scary when I realized at 15 that I was an atheist and that I had to put on a good face for everyone and close my eyes during prayers until I could find a way to get out. At times I felt like it wasn’t so much that I was confident in my beliefs as much as I was faithless in a world built on faith. I was ashamed that I couldn’t seem to muster that faith that seemed to come so easily to everyone around me. What changed everything for me was finding and befriending other atheists and agnostics when I went to college. Suddenly I had peers in real life who understood my circumstances and who were willing to share about their own struggles. It made being an atheist feel wonderfully unremarkable.
I suspect that isolation in transition - especially in early transition - can be detrimental, because then all you have to guide your understanding of transness is what you can find in media, which for the most part tends to be either transnormative or caricatured for virality. Seeing other trans people on social media set me on the path of understanding transness as something normal, but it was participating in trans community in person that helped me find love and acceptance for myself. “I get to be trans” means I get to be surrounded by friends who can share my joys and help dispel that feeling of otherness. Being “done” with being trans is no longer a concern, because I can live in the present. When it comes to interacting with cis people, things are still hard in a lot of ways, but I have a confidence now that I didn’t used to because I know I’m not alone. Maybe one day being trans will be a boring thing, a mundane aspect of human biodiversity that everyone recognizes as such. We have a long way to go, but until we get there I will continue to take heart in the fact that life has given me a second chance and so many wonderful people who love and accept me. I get to be trans.