I remember being a young confused trans girl on the internet in the late 90s reading endless personal blogs of trans women and wow this is so different from tumblr but there were endless warnings on these sites about you shouldn't transition if you haven't given it like years of personal reflection and it would be the only thing stopping you from putting a gun in your mouth ... maybe. I remember reading absolutely ludicrous hypotheticals like would you physically transition if everyone still considered you 100% a man or would you rather have everyone consider you a woman but never physically transition? Even mtfconfessions, for all I love it for getting into the really deep and sticky abjection and neurosis of trans women, don't get as deep as lot of those blogs got. These women made blogs to talk about being trans and make community and a lot of them gave bitter and stark warnings about anyone following their path (and also policed the living hell out of other trans women).
I never did what they said. I never did some soul searching. As soon as I realized it was possible and I could I did. The most I ever really justified it was when I was going through the three month with a therapist gatekeeping bullshit. I mostly wanted cover and role models for being a dyke too and also for being my own woman (and honestly the barbies and queens in my life have given me the most encouragement on that). It's probably easier for me because given all the options of physical and social transition I'm check check check all the way down the list. I was always more interested in the material conditions and the actual experiences of trans women, how to play that game and maybe how to change it - rather than spending any energy thinking about should I transition, is it right or appropriate to transition. I'm still constantly thinking about this! I wonder to this very day what happened to all the trans women and queens and vestidos I knew - are they still alive, what do their lives consist of, are they happy, what do they think when they look back?
To the extent I ever thought if I was a TS or TV or TG (back then) or if I'm binary or not or what the fuck ever (now) I thought of it in terms of solidarities. The only reason I would go there and say I'm binary as fuck is because I am very willing, if it came down to it being a war, to be on the side of all people who call themselves women. If some misogynist came shooting for all the woman he could find I would not use that I was trans to get out of that even if he wanted to let me. I would tell that motherfucker to go ahead and kill me. Now obviously I have more common experiences and solidarity with trans women and latina women and jewish women but it still extends to all women and doesn't extend to men. And obviously I have my own very individual experience of gender and map of ideas and and associations and personal goals but really so does every woman on the planet I don't think my experience, even if pretty unique, is special or deserving of a specific noun.
I've heard people on this site that the more people identify as some sort of trans, even if that basically means only they just say you can use whatever pronouns during a PGP go-around, then that's positive for the cause of trans people. I obviously disagree because what does focusing on the differences in everyone's individual gender experience and worse, their greater theories of how gender operates, what does that do to build solidarity with trans people? What use is it that people declare themselves somehow outside of gender or just not enough like any gender category that exists in society outside of the internet? How does this build useful solidarity to analyze and work against exploitation and oppression that mediates through gender? How is this useful to build community and organize based on shared experiences? How is saying you're trans when you have approximately zero of what trans people would call trans experiences helpful? Why do you think you need to question your gender to be down with trans people?? You can also be in solidarity with people you don't have a lot in common with and I strive to do this all the time (immigration rights, pro-Palestine advocacy). At this point I appreciate when a person just can call themselves cis and I just about get excited when they don't feel a huge need to throw down the identity instead of just being real about who they are if asked and consistently and calmly reacting against transmisogynist shit. And I'm starting to seriously think about how all this mogai-ass proliferance of gender identities does to impede all these crucial and needed tasks.
I realize a lot of y'all on this site are young and finding yourself and I'm relatively unique in finding uniqueness a real burden instead of a treasure to yell about. I just want to make you think about what comes after doing you. You can say doing my transition was all about me and that's probably about right. But I also think coming into my womanhood (and my selfhood) has made me a person who can be there for people, who can build community to help out women like me. Are you really so interesting all by yourself? Or so good?
