The Transness of Time Travel
Time travel is a strange game when it comes to gender identity. First there is how time travel itself affects identity by jumping through your own or other peopleโs lives out of order, often repeatedly. Experiencing puberty early or repeatedly, for instance. But then there is the aspect of time travel that has the most to do with identity--body switching. It can be called many things: switching, swapping, exchange, et cetera. With switching, you end up in a different body, for at least awhile, than the one you were born with. This can be a confusing experience for identity, especially for gender identity.
Time travel makes us confront a lot of assumptions we make about how we show up in life, and gender is a huge part of how people show up. For instance, the development of gender throughout a lifespan typically involves puberty happening at a certain time and in a certain order. A mental fourteen-year-old develops gendered features and develops an understanding of those features with a fourteen-year-old brain, based on experiences that came before. But a time traveler may hop back in time from later adult experiences into early life experiences, thus bringing the experience of an older person to early gender development. Another example is a preteen traveling to their own future adulthood, past the point of puberty, skipping those changes before living an adult life. When one skips rites of passage or goes through them out of order, it can entirely alter life experience. Rites of passage, after all, are usually based on the assumption that a person only experiences time linearly and in one direction.
Let us look at the bar mitzvah, a Judaic rite of passage that happens to boys around puberty to commemorate their entry into teenagerhood from childhood and their ongoing journey into adulthood. A bar mitzvah is a rite of passage that is assumed to be experienced once and in one direction only. But what if someone were to experience their own bar mitzvah, and then experience the alternate timeline where they had a bat mitzvah instead because in that alternate timeline they were born with different gender markers? A bat mitzvah is for girls, is assumed to be an experience of girlhood. Would one's own experience of masculinity be changed by having a bar mitvah and then a bat mitzvah? Of course. Would it be changed by having a bar mitzvah experience at a different time in life than the norm, or repeatedly? Of course.
Gender identity is often about certainty and confidence. One becomes certain they are a specific gender and confident in their gender expression through gendered experiences that are validating and stabilizing. Perhaps re-experiencing a bar mitzvah later in life might reinforce a man's confidence in his own gender, or maybe it might make him feel doubtful about his masculinity. Experiencing both could be validating or destabilizing depending on the individual and how they process life changes. Going out of sequence seems like it could violate the natural order of things, but what if a person's life experience is always that they go out of order or repeat experiences? Something that might weaken confidence in some people might strengthen it for other people. Time travel is often about confronting and accepting changes in life. Repeating experiences or having them in a different order than expected can help a person accept change.
A very common form of time travel is to focus on a memory and re-experience it, sometimes to completely re-enter the moment and redo it anew. This can be very validating and can help answer questions that come later in life when the memory of the experience has worn away and stretched thin. When having doubts about one's own gender in adulthood, earlier rites of passage are important to re-examine. Perhaps to make a decision earlier in life about one's own gender expression, a person might flash forward to gendered rites of passage to know ahead of time if they want to go through those rites at all.
Most of the mental difficulty when time traveling is in accepting experiences that are outside the perceived norms we learn from society. This is in fact one of the key experiences of being trans--confronting a gendered experience that is not the same as what society assumes you would (or should) have had. Often the taboos associated with time travel are about crossing barriers that society does not think should be crossed, or crossing them in different ways than society is prepared to accept.
Another boundary that time travel can cross, regardless of whether a society feels that time travel should or could do this, is the boundary between one's own body and the bodies of others. To jump through time, often the method is to jump into a different person's body who is in another time period. Sometimes the body of the person you are jumping into has a different gender or remarkably different gendered experience than you. This means you have the opportunity to experience gender differently, and thus, the opportunity to reflect on your own gender experience in turn. Experiencing a different body with different gendered features, especially for the first time, can have a profound effect on someone's consciousness, making them aware of norms they never knew they wanted or needed to have before. For some, it can shore up their own experience, confirming to them that they do not want to change anything about their gender identity. Living on "the other side" for a little while helps us understand more about the place we lived before, and might return to.
Some time travelers incorporate gender into their time travel. It is common for travelers to have preferences about the bodies they jump into, and one common preference is gender experience. If someone wants to have an ideal experience then they'll often choose a body similar to their own. Sometimes there is not a large selection of bodies to pick from and a person must go through a different gender experience than they are used to if they want to do time travel of a specific kind. Sometimes time travel is an escape or defense mechanism and there is no time or opportunity to choose gender or anything else about the body you land in.
Often the presumption about gender identity is that it needs to be "correct." Time travel is often an experience of alternate ways one could have done things or shown up for them, and in experiencing alternates, one has to confront which is the correct one, if any. It can be confusing to experience so many variants of yourself, but also affirming in that it helps you understand your own specific variation. One way we understand things is to compare them, and what better means of comparison is there than direct experience of different norms?
Time travel crosses a barrier that some consider impermeable--the barrier between trans and cis. The barrier between change and permanence. A cis person can be cis their whole lives and make no changes to their own gender identity, but via time travel, have a different body's gender experience for awhile. A trans man can experience a cis man's body and, after that experience, take back what he's learned into his own body. And a body can experience a differently-gendered consciousness for a little bit. All of these experiences cross, or at least nudge, the cis-trans barrier, and all of them allow for a person to come away with more and different information than they had before about their gender and the genders of others.
