How I Knew I Was Trans

A lot of people write about when they knew they were trans, but I think how is a much more interesting question.

This post inspired by a few people who have asked me for help in navigating being trans curious over the past few years.

Unless you’re a very boring person, you realize you are ‘different’ in some way at some point in your life. LGBTQ+ folks realize at some point they are different than the cis/hetero environment they are often raised in. There are different ways to interrogate this, many chose ‘when’ but I’d like to talk about the more interesting question of ‘how’.

The First How’s

I’ll also be cheating a little bit as far as covering a few when’s in talking about how. A lot of early childhood is either fuzzy or a jumble, possibly owing to abuse. What I do remember clearly, though, is family as being the first environment I didn’t ‘fit’ in. I was the child prodigy, but got the distinct impression that wasn’t enough. My father had a stroke when I was very young, and as a result I grew up in an environment dominated by females (and not very nice ones).

Back in the 90’s, society was not what it is now. Not fitting into what had been deemed acceptable gender roles meant you would have your heterosexuality called into question. I didn’t really have any interest in sports, would rather traipse around in nature than engage in things like hunting (a favourite past-time of many an Alberta youth) and in general didn’t fit. I got the impression that I was disappointing along this axis to most other in my family, which undoubtedly led to a lot of internal resentment and resistance to acceptance and coming out.

The ‘how’ here is that friction against what was expected. I think many trans people feel that early on, that they ‘should’ be something, try to be something but just aren’t that something. I think this is probably less of an issue today, and that it’s far more of an issue for transwomen. In places where people still fear coming out, though, it’s another force that keeps that closet door tightly shut.

Even though I am a very binary femme, my media consumption wasn’t totally slanted in that direction. Although being a Jem superfan was probably a very early sign, I also liked things more typically associated with males. Star Trek : The Next Generation was a nice utopia that I would often immerse myself in to escape from the horrors that often otherwise seemed inescapable. I most closely associated with Picard. So I wouldn’t say that media consumption was a direct how, but more of a supporting how (you could find my feminine interests if you looked).

Why Are Most Of Your Friends Girls?

The next how was probably socialization in school. I was bullied as many smart people were, but did have a circle of friends. I can’t remember exactly when, probably early junior high school, but this circle eventually changed to be dominated by girls. This can be an early how for trans people, but is also not a definite predictor. I liked talking about feelings and socializing in the ways that are most closely associated with female circles.

I began my journey to being Very Online in my teens, and like many trans people started to use female pseudonyms soon after. There was just an alignment for me, I felt far more comfortable identifying in that very early metaverse as a girl. It’s not at all unlike the relief from a certain kind of friction I felt after coming out and when people started referring to me by female pronouns. The how here is definitely more of the lack of a feeling than the abundance of one.

If I had suspicions before, it was probably around this time that I ‘knew’. If I had to pin it down to a definite moment or mechanism, it was being able to complete a completely new identity from scratch in digital spaces and explore what living an aligned life might be like. I’ll cover some other how’s, but they served more as confirmation than revelation.

On Sex: Nothing (But Everything) Changed

If there’s one detail about trans people that everyone seems interested in, it’s sex. This was probably the other big ‘how’. Finding another trans person in the same physical spaces in Alberta in the 90’s proved to be an impossibility. I was never, and still am not interested in men (although after starting progesterone I have been forced to recognize some bicurious tendencies), so I never really had to deal with the stigma around being gay that existed at the time.

Intimate relations with women never felt correct to me while presenting male. It has been fascinating to discover that it can be as much our own expression of gender, as that of others, that is required for even the most basic intimate or romantic connections to be viable. This element was also a double-edged sword, as if there was one thing that drove me over the edge in deciding to come out, it was the misalignment between this and the importance that is often placed on sexual prowess in male social circles.

The message was not delivered verbatim, but nonetheless received that I should be more interested in sex, and I was wrong for not being more interested in sex. This is probably the biggest reason why my social circles tended to be female, I very quickly grew tired of the same conversations and trying to come up with acceptable reasons. Some transwomen overcompensate, I opted for just not playing the game.

I’m still at the ‘can barely dress herself in an acceptable manner’ level of transition so I don’t consider myself too qualified to opine on that aspect of gender presentation, but dressing male or even somewhat androgynous also always felt wrong. It was again that lack of friction that I felt when dressing in a distinctly feminine manner that was the big how here.

Trying (and Failing) To Not Be Trans

At the peak of knowing, I made a decision that I was just not in a position to handle coming out. I didn’t want to be homeless, and I most certainly would have been. Part of the toxic home environment was having my room more or less searched daily, and one such search resulted in some found elements of clothing. The reaction was not a positive one, putting it mildly. No doubt this early negative reaction still colours a lot of my perception of how accepting society is of trans people.

The final how before actually coming out was probably that I was not successful in burying my gender identity. My lack of early academic success was probably also due to latent ADHD, but it was hard to throw myself into even subjects I liked while having a persistent feeling of being wrong. I was generally unhappy on the inside, and fell into a ‘sometimes funny, sometimes mean’ persona on the outside.

The last part of this how was when I landed a dream job due to being good at Twitter in 2018. I should have been absolutely over the moon, and maybe I was in some small way. On the inside though, I was totally and absolutely miserable. I was very close to being legitimately suicidal, if not actually being suicidal at many points before coming out in March of 2020. I came out to a few people and had a girls weekend in Montreal in late 2019 with some queer friends.

Having covered the ‘how’ question about being trans, I’ll conclude with the other ‘how’ question of deciding to come out. It was ironically due to the pandemic that I pushed myself all the way out of the closet. In the early months of the pandemic, I had this overwhelming sense that no one really knew what was going to happen. ‘Was this how the world ends?’ was one question I asked myself. Another was ‘Do I really want to let the world end without letting out this fundamental part of me?’

I decided to just go for it, as publicly as possible. Did the requisite blog post, tweet, and received an overwhelming amount of support. This proved to be a bit of an artificial bubble which led to my strong reaction to transphobia being so normalized on Clubhouse and elsewhere, but it was a really good few months. In asking the final question of whether I should have come out earlier, at that point in my teens when all the how’s were so clear, I don’t have an answer.

If I had done so, and perhaps taken an opportunity that presented itself to escape to California, what would have happened? I grapple with that just on a professional level, that maybe I would now be one of the silicon valley elite that I’m starting to rub elbows with now and again. Transition is a much bigger issue and what leads to most of my conflicted feelings. Starting HRT at 18 would have had a much bigger impact than it did starting in my late 30’s, and I would not have nearly as much dysphoria about what’s changeable now and what isn’t. It’s also possible I wouldn’t be around now, either due to direct violence or ending up homeless. Sometimes the how’s lead to these kinds of uncomfortable questions for which there are no answers.

For me, it only took a few how’s to know. The rest were more supporting evidence and motivation to admit to the rest of the world what I already knew. I hope this post helps those who think they might be trans, one way or the other. I want to also stress that things are very different now than they were during this journey for me. At times I felt like there was no one I could talk to, now there are a lot of supports for those that are questioning. Don’t be afraid to question, or ask for help during your questioning. The results are really, really worth it.