On the Gender Reveal podcast, host Tuck Woodstock asks his guests - most of whom are trans - how exactly they would describe their gender. The answers range from pithy to complex; many guests explain that they give different answers to cis and trans people because trans people usually do a better job of understanding nuance in gender. This same dichotomy is something I’ve become familiar with as some of my friends have discovered over time that aspects of their gender seem to be outside of the binary, often using descriptors like like “creature” or “fae.” To cis people these people might refer to themselves as a woman or as a nonbinary person, but in trans spaces the nuance comes out.
When I first started transition, I described myself as a “nonbinary transfem” because I was afraid of calling myself a woman and it seemed like to claim a location on the binary was kinda… gauche? This proved to just be confusing to cis people and not actually protective. I also tried hard at first to blend in and be as boring of a ”nonbinary transfem” as possible as I could to the cis people in my life, despite my ebullience about transition. That didn’t last. Pretty soon I realized that I didn’t have any sort of nonbinary feelings about myself and that I should just own being a woman. So I’ve used the term “woman” since then to refer to my gender.
I hadn’t done much reflecting on potential nuance in any of this until this past week. In a discussion on Discord about how much of gender is a costume, one of my friends wrote about her target gender being “regular girl,” and something about it slapped me in the face. I realized that that’s kind of what I want, but there’s so much about me that will never be “regular.” My body will never be regular, my past will never be regular, and I have no intention of giving the impression that I’m anything other than trans, which is not particularly regular.
I just don’t see how I can unlink my gender from my transness. I embrace in myself how much of the gender landscape I have traversed on my meandering path to womanhood. There are aspects of womanhood and femininity that I embody that cis people will never get the chance to experience. Thinking of myself as lacking - not-cis - holds me back from exploring new frontiers of what it means to inhabit my gender. I keep half-remembering a meme I saw on Tumblr at one point about trans women being the “latest model of girl,” and in a weird way it feels like a better description and really builds me up.