I’m tired of pretending this isn’t a problem.
I’m a 21 year old trans man. I’ve known who I am since I was 7. I learned the language to describe it when I was 12. I’ve been openly trans since I was 13. I have diagnosed gender dysphoria the kind that wrecks your brain and your body, the kind that makes living in the wrong skin unbearable, and the kind that’s been at the core of what being transgender actually means for decades.
And let’s be clear about something: gender dysphoria is not new. It didn’t just appear out of nowhere in 2013. Gender dysphoria was first formally recognized on July 6th, 1919, in Berlin, Germany, at the Institute of Sexual Science (also known as Sexology). That institute became a refuge for early trans people and a pioneering center for gender-affirming medical research. But on May 6th, 1933, the Nazis raided and burned it down in one of their infamous book burnings. With that destruction, much of the early research and recognition of gender dysphoria was deliberately erased from history. The condition itself never went away it resurfaced 80 years later in medical documentation, but it had already existed and been treated long before.
This is important: older trans people didn’t just wake up one day and decide who they were. They received medical care, diagnoses, and transition-related treatment because gender dysphoria has always been acknowledged, even when history tried to bury it. So when I emphasize this, it’s not gatekeeping it’s grounding ourselves in reality. These have always been the rules.
So let me be blunt: You need gender dysphoria to be transgender. Otherwise, you’re not trans. You’re gender nonconforming and that’s fine, but don’t water down what this word means. Trans isn’t a vibe. It’s not a trend. It’s not an aesthetic or a game of pronoun dress-up. It’s a painful, often dangerous path of confronting your body, your past, your identity, and society just to be seen as who you are.
I’ve been discriminated against, mocked, misgendered, physically assaulted, and called “it” to my face like I was some kind of creature. That word was never cute or quirky, it was used to dehumanize me. So when I see people online choosing it/its as pronouns and saying it’s empowering or “nonbinary,” I genuinely can’t wrap my head around it. You’re free to use whatever language feels right to you, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t come with history. For those of us who were called “it” not by choice but out of hate, it’s not gender-neutral. It’s erasure.
When it comes to neopronouns, I personally struggle with them I’ve tried to use noun-based neopronouns in sentences, and they just don’t function naturally in the way pronouns are meant to. That said, I do accept and respect pronouns like ze/zem when someone is fluent in a heavily gendered language that lacks gender-neutral pronouns. In that context, creating and using an alternative makes sense because it fills a real linguistic gap. But in English, where they/them already works as a neutral option, many of the newer noun-based neopronouns often end up feeling more like self-dehumanization than empowerment, which honestly just makes me feel sad. I wish the people using them saw enough value in themselves not to adopt identifiers rooted in being treated as “other.”
We fight for hormones. We fight for surgery. We fight to be taken seriously and when you tell the world that “you don’t need dysphoria to be trans,” you erase everything we went through to survive. You don’t get to rewrite the definition and then shame people like me for calling it out. This isn’t gatekeeping, it’s protecting the meaning of a word that saved my life.
And while we’re at it, I don’t care if people want to use neopronouns like kit/kitself or bun/bunself as nicknames, for OCs, or as personal flair. Go for it. But let’s stop pretending these are real, gendered pronouns tied to an actual identity in the same way he/him, she/her, and they/them are. They aren’t. The more you push made-up pronouns as valid genders, the more fuel you give to transphobes who already don’t take any of us seriously. You’re not helping the community you’re making it harder for people who actually need to transition to survive, to be seen, heard, and respected.
You can identify however you want. But stop hijacking “transgender” and stop acting like criticism is oppression. We’ve earned the right to speak up.
