Pinned
trans people will literally go “i have a complicated relationship with my history with gender and sometimes see it as a gender i ‘used to be’ and i don’t really look like a cis person of either gender and i don’t think i can fit it into simple categories” and everyone will spontaneously combust
i remember being at some lgbtqia+ group when i was at an all girl’s school and i was one of two trans people, i was the only butch or even vaguely masculine person in the room, and i said something along the lines of “i consider myself a guy who used to be a girl” and five minutes later one of my friends(if you would say that ig) went “yeah so he was always a boy, he just didn’t know it yet” about me. and i had to stand there like What Did I Just Say. Can Anyone Hear Me
now i make posts like “sometimes trans men used to be girls and sometimes trans women used to be boys and it’s ok if we think about it like that” and everyone immediately acts like they want me dead
If trans people don't get a choice about how we refer to our past and current selves, what's the fucking point? You don't cure the problem of people saying wrong and hurtful shit about us and who we used to be by policing us into saying different wrong and hurtful shit that's just wrong and hurtful from another direction.
Transness is different for everyone, and some of our lives aren't going to fit neatly into the stereotypical trans narrative that you've heard elsewhere or line up with your own lived experiences as another trans person, and you're just going to have to suck it up. v( ._.)v
The thing I always think when I look back on my childhood is, maybe I wasn't really a girl, but I had a girlhood. I understood myself through lightweight feminist frameworks about gender nonconformity that I absorbed from organizations like the Girl Scouts. I had an articulate and deeply held activist commitment to my girlhood. That my body and my life and my sexuality were frustrating to me were women's issues, and I saw this reflected in the girls and women around me.
Even now, having lived as a gay trans man for several years, I have a hard time articulating what made me Different from the girls and women I knew, even though it should be obvious. My closest friends growing up were boys. I hated "girly" clothes and the "womanly" parts of my body. I fought my mother for almost a decade to cut my hair short-short. I insisted on joining the boys' team in gym class. I got constantly teased about wanting to be boy. I had so many opportunities to think, "Huh, maybe these shitty children are on to something," and I refused them all. I didn't want to be a boy. What I wanted was to befriend who I wanted to befriend and look how I wanted to look; to protest the class arbitrarily dividing itself by gender when the teachers hadn't required it; to stop having people tell me, wrongly, who I had to be. I wanted autonomy. I wanted respect. These are very queer and trans things to want, but I could not - cannot - imagine anything more girl to want, either.
Would I have felt differently then, if I had known becoming a boy was something I could do? Maybe. But that's how I think about it now, and how I would have thought about it then: Becoming. Manhood is a thing I am slowly acquiring, and I am acquiring it badly, the way a person who moves to a foreign country acquires the local language badly. It does not come to me any more naturally than girlhood did. But I like it better, so I keep doing it badly anyway.
...I guess that's thing, isn't it. In so many ways I am even more aggressively who I have always been, and at the same time she feels like someone I knew a lifetime ago - like maybe she's out there somewhere still, girling badly in a country I no longer call home.
