I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who’s also nonbinary transgender. We’re both strong, resilient people who teach in our communities. Since beginning our “transition” processes, we’ve shared the experience of it becoming harder to know where to turn in moments we feel deep internal struggle. It seems people we’ve always been close with are further away, less involved, or not understanding of our current lives. It’s not clear anymore who will be safe and accepting when the need to let go and find emotional support comes around.
My friend mentioned the 2-3 year marker for feeling friend loss, which apparently happens after one starts “transition”*. I hadn’t heard that measure before, but I can say in my experience it feels true.
*I’ll get to the reason for putting quotes around the word transition later.
In this article I’ll share a number of things we spoke about and expound. If you’re trans identified yourself you may or may not resonate with what I write. If you’re an ally you may or may not have considered some of the subjects I discuss. Whether cis, trans, and/or nonbinary we all have a hard time knowing where to turn when we’re feeling down—maybe especially those of us who are good at supporting others in their times of need. I hope my thoughts will generate conversation in useful ways.
“Make new friends
But keep the old
One is silver
And the other gold…”
Old friends: I learned this song when I was a kid in Girl Scouts. It’s sung in rounds and is quite lovely. There’s nothing quite like the friends you share a long stretch of life with. You’ve logged an accumulation of years together, faced similar struggles, bonded from work passions, maybe even have childhood memories together. These people are not often wholly surprised that you’re coming out as trans, but they may be surprised that you’ve decided to engage in hormone replacement therapy or “actively transition” in some way. These people will often stick by you saying you’ve always been their friend, and identifying in a different way won’t change that. You may also watch these people become more distant in time. The ease you once had in reaching out to them dwindles as they seem to make less time for you, or offer you less opportunities to make time for them.
New friends: it’s important to befriend new people as we grow and change. We all experience this in one way or another. Whether you’ve been diagnosed with a life altering ailment, you’re processing a heavy loss, you come out, sober up, have a child, learn a new vocation… Our lives are full of reasons to make new friends who share our recent interests and experiences. These people help us through change and to learn new things. These new friends may not be people we feel safe enough to bare our souls to in moments of critical need though. The lack of history and few-points-of-connection aspect to the friendship can limit one’s intuition about whether they’d be capable of helping with our burdens when times are tough.
I wish I had more “platinum” friends in my life currently. These would be people I’ve known for a shorter yet solid amount of time and feel comfortable with. They’d be people who’ve seen me through (or been aware of) some of my hardships in that time, and shown me they care. They’d be people who have more intimate knowledge of the current struggles I’m facing as well.
I wish more of my old friends would come along with me on the journey I’m currently on. I wish my old friends still felt as reachable when times are hard. This is one of the hardest parts of going through changes—changes which ultimately make me much happier.
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Why I put quotations on the word “Transition”: The word transition is a wonderful one. I also have some ongoing issues with what it seems to imply. These things tug at the back of my brain when I hear the word used. A common example is the question, “How long have you been “in transition””. I often feel like retorting, “My whole life?!”.
Honestly that’s not just a snappy comeback. For the entire first part of my life (childhood and onward) I was actively being transitioned away from what felt right to me. Each time I was told I had to wear a shirt outside, all the times I was not invited to wrestle or do anything else with “the boys”, when I was supposed to shave my legs and armpits and genitals to be acceptable, every time someone told me that what I was feeling was because “I was a girl”, every time someone automatically addressed me as miss or lady or anything else girl-gendered, and on and on…
It took me a long time to find myself under the depression instigated by these assorted rules and regulations. Embracing who I was internally kicked off more transition processes. Unlearning those things which make me unhappy is transitory. Figuring out alternatives to remedy my dissatisfaction for how I’m treated, or what ways I’m expected to behave is transitory. What others call “my transition” is simply me taking some medicine which aids in showing them my social dissonance. Testosterone doesn’t feel like transition, it feels like home. Bodily changes are happening all the time, like aging, but no one asks me what it’s like transitioning into older age. Telling people my name and pronouns isn’t transition, it’s just me sharing truths about myself with words which are less compromised than ones I’ve used before. I’ve already done a lot of the work of transition. By detangling and walking away from decades of instilled and practiced untruths that I was afraid I might die/never be loved again/lose everything over if I ceased to participate in was transition. I’m simply asking the world around me to accept what’s real.
It’s confusing, I get that. You weren’t there in my mind and my emotional experiences, even if you were in the room all those years.
The word “transition” also indicates that a change process is taking place, but I react to that idea by asking, “what change”? All trans people are not the same. The image the word “transition” evokes is a space existing between two points—a finite beginning and a finite end. I think most cis people (and perhaps some binary identifying trans people) have the idea that if one is “in transition” it means they haven’t reached their ultimate goal yet. The person hasn’t “fully transformed” into the butterfly or swan they will someday be… I find this concept depressing and ultimately useless.
I also find it weighted toward cis-normative values. “Passing” as a marker of “trans success” is probably the most obvious example that comes to mind. Passing is a binary concept which can’t really be detached from cis-straight (and sometimes gay and lesbian) normativity. Passing is not a queer concept, and it has no place on my queer body. Here I’ll challenge my cis-queer readers to consider the concept that queerness itself begs one to fight for (or at least recognize) queerness in all of its forms. If you cannot embrace the queer truth of my existence outside binary notions, are you honestly queer yourself?
Not all trans people care to pass as the “other” sex. “Other” is in quotations because we know that in nature (as studied in science), sex and gender are represented by way of a diverse spectrum of forms and functions. Not even remotely is it true that all examples of an organism found in nature will exist neatly within any binary. Nature loves a spectrum. Nature loves diversity.
Perhaps if people asked me how long I’ve been enjoying my spectrum I could answer more honestly. I would at least be amused instead of wanting to run away.
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The world is transitioning more than I am: I’ve known who I am for a long time.
Due to socialization and well developed survival techniques, I have a lifelong habit of adapting myself (to some extent) to the seeming expectations of the company I keep. Until I came out as transgender to others, I struggled with the need to vocalize what was important to me. I struggled because I felt it wouldn’t be safe to share who I was with the world. In truth, many of the times I tried to I was shut down, dismissed, laughed at, ignored, broken up with, or point blank told I was wrong. It took a lot of baby steps. By the time I was ready to enunciate gender truths aloud to others while digging my heels in more firmly, I’d already broken with many specific social expectations: make-up, body shaving, playing female parts on stage, and various styles of playacting I’d cultivated in my youth—to name a few. Before coming out fully (even to myself) I’d been immersed in the work of figuring out what slices of life I was attracted to. I started moving toward them, leaving more and more not-queer communities and spaces behind. These breaks with straight and female traditions and expectations were crumbs for my friends and family to follow. Their minds needed to catch up in order to find me where I was at. It was time, and their transitions needed to begin.
More than anything, I think all those steps made up the lion’s share of my transition. Moving from an idea of who I was supposed to be, to outwardly claiming the person that I am, I’ve executed decades of self-examination, experimentation, and behavior modification. Absolutely, will I say that experimentation is a gateway drug. Through lifting the heavy weight of repression by trying new things, one finds actual knowledge—better data. One can only ignore what they know firsthand, they cannot un-know it.
I think what other people link the idea of “my transition” to is: the experience of being on HRT and watching my body change; asking for my pronouns and/or names to be respected; jumping through legal loopholes and red tape; working on my self image and outward presentation. I will state that these are more like the housekeeping of “transition”, than anything remotely structural. At this point my structure has already been planned, framed out, built, and painted. My internal mechanisms have been in place and in play for a while. What the rest of the world sees as “transition” is more equivalent to the redecorating of my dream house—now that it’s built and mine to do with as I please.
I think people who knew me prior to these decorative touches imagine, as they watch me hanging new curtains, that what they’ve witnessed is the loud rumble of a jackhammer opening earth in order to dig a foundation. They don’t realize what my house looks like. They may have been hanging out with me nearby as it was being built, but they were absent from the construction site. To me, hanging curtains can feel a lot like yelling “I’m here! I’m here! Can’t you see me?!”, “Nothing’s really changed!” and, “Is it just that you don’t like the color!?”.
I’ve witnessed fear in many cis people, fear that they’ll: do allyship wrong; offend those they care about; stumble over issues they don’t want to get wrong… Sometimes friends are aware of these fears and can speak to them, which makes getting along much easier. Sometimes fear comes out as a sudden roughness around the edges when I thought our friendship had been mostly fluid before. Sometimes there’s a partial (or complete) withdrawal from seeing one another altogether. Some people, I’m sure, just don’t want to be close with trans people—they love you while you’re passing cis, and don’t know how to shift the narrative to include you when you challenge the sisterhood/brotherhood/cishood standards they’ve always felt safe expecting when you’re around.
I expect those I care for to care for me too. This means that my being out as trans, taking steps to address my dysphoria, and bring my body more in line with my vision of self is an honest attempt at happiness for me. I want my friends to be excited about those things too. The world around me has a bunch to catch-up on, as do many people who are or have been close to me. It hurts feeling as though I’ve created distance between myself and loved ones by offering a more authentic, happier, version of me.
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Feminist friction: As a trans person who is female (AFAB), I’ve noticed that I feel much safer and happier exploring and enjoying my femininity the more people physically recognize and respond to my masculinity. It feels balancing to me, and I love that. It feels safer to me, and I truly appreciate it. I can somewhat understand the feeling of betrayal some cis women, namely TERFS (Trans Exclusionary Feminist Separatists), get caught up in when they decry trans masculine people (though their treatment of trans women is nothing short of rude, selfish, incredibly short-sighted, and an abomination). I’ve heard people say, “How dare you not identify as a beautiful strong butch—we need them?!”, “Why would you want to join the other team?”, “Why do you want to be “a man”—you’re a feminist and a strong beautiful woman?”… the list goes on.
The fact is I do not want to be “a man”, that is not one of my identities—and if it was, it would be an even more inappropriate and shitty thing to hear someone say. Trans people who are more binary than I am deserve to be recognized as the types of men and women they are also. Period. Just as I deserve to hold down my truth that I am not a butch woman. I am a genderfluid transperson. I am not “switching teams” (as if there were even teams to begin with). I am happily existing in my corner of the vibrant multi-dimensional continuum that gender and sex exist in. I exist. I have a right to not play ball with those who would run over my identity in order to strengthen definitions of their own. (Also I never liked sports.)
Should I grow in time to feel differently than I do now, that will also be a part of my story and developing identity. I am many things, like we all are. Never one.
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There’s an awkwardness to changing your hormones, your body, and your image that’s not just about rebranding, but forging new and exciting territory. It’s hard to learn how to shop in a different section of the store or find a haircut that feels right and is flattering. It’s all awkward—remember your teenage years? It’s not just the hormones making me feel like an awkward teenager again, it’s also learning the ropes of my body and figuring out how to keep adjusting towards being happy. As a kid I tried new things out all the time. Some of it worked and some of it didn’t. The biggest difference between now and then is that I was trying and failing with everyone else around me, including the somewhat guided support of my family elders. We were all in my development together, and I was far less conspicuous in that crowd (regardless of how I felt at the time).
Being an adult with a wardrobe cultivated from a lifetime of settling for what I could get away with—and I have it easy compared to most trans feminine people!—I find it painful and awkward that the things I own no longer make sense to me. I don’t really know what will work better yet though. I’m breaking down old branding and trying to find what brings me joy and confidence today. It’s as blinding a process as it was to me in puberty.
I’m not cute anymore in the same way I was (ouch). I’m not as handsome or as pretty as everyone’s used to me being (sorry?). I’m not tied up all pretty, having well-executed the acceptable ways to be (oops). I’m mostly on my own these days. I’m figuring out complicated math equations. Often I find it very lonely.
Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
This writing takes time, research, and consideration. It is my art.
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