Journeys to identifying as trans and gender-diverse

I really like being non-binary. And I really think it’s an important kind of valuable kind of position isn’t quite the right word, but kind of space to inhabit within the world and to kind of be able to like recognise that there’s quite a big community of non-binary people throughout the world, and also obviously throughout history. But having that kind of, having that kind of, for me it’s a bit of a chink of light coming through the horrible toxic restrictive and quite violent systems of kind of binary sex and gender that have been built around, around us by kind of white supremacist patriarchal society, clinging onto power, and I feel like it’s a place where I can be myself and be comfortable and try to look at the world differently, and understand how things can be different or could be changed and to imagine a more interesting future where all of these kind of binaries between all sorts of different categories and disciplines and areas of life, are less important. And kind of, that’s kind of like the utopian side of it, and that’s kind of, yeah that’s why I kind of identify with it I suppose. It kind of feels like a way that feels like it’s what I’ve, it was, I was like, Oh this is a concept kind of feel at home in,’ after not having, not having a word for it for all that time to. Yeah and then I suppose in terms of making that be visible and how other people see me, is a slightly different prospect, which I think isn’t uncommon for a lot of people, I guess.

Well, I kind of always knew that there was something a little bit off. I’m not really sure how to phrase it or how I’m supposed to talk about it if you think that there is something a little bit different about yourself, it’s not something that you can really summarise in words. It can be small things like in primary school. It was just not necessarily clicking that brilliantly with everyone else. It was a case of you were friends with everyone, but, at the same time, sometimes you felt like you were looking in through a box and that happens sometimes.

But, of course, as a kid, you don’t really know if it’s just like I don’t fit in or I don’t have friends. As a child, you don’t think, mmmy gender’s weird, because you’re a kid and you don’t care about those things. You care about like comic books and stuff. You don’t actually care that much about whose a boy or whose a girl. But then as you grow up a little bit, it starts to hit you a bit more because everyone is starting to hit puberty and everyone is starting to change and people are just starting to just grow a bit different and that’s when you start to realise hey, I still don’t fit in or hey. My friends are all different to me and I don’t know why I always feel like I don’t fit in with them, which is a bit annoying. But they’re not really things you can bring up in conversation, especially if you’re like in year seven, because year seven’s are still kind of kids and at the sixth form we are looking back on year seven’s, I still think that they’re really small and so, if I talked about them, when I was in year seven like, even I think the future wouldn’t have believed myself. I would have just said, you are just a year seven, don’t worry and it gets easier.

it’s probably just because you’re going through a lot of change right now. So, for a while, I didn’t really address anything. It was just, hey, it’s all part of growing up and that’s okay to be told that, I think. it’s all right if you are confused because growing up from being a kid to like a teenager is wild in itself. I don’t think it would have been good, even if I’d tried to tackle it, because it would have probably ended up even worse than I am now [Laughs]. But as I settled into friendship groups and stuff like that. Stuff that doesn’t really matter, because I still don’t remember some of my friends from year 7. And, to be fair, I went to an all girls’ school which was entertaining to say the least in trying to figure out who I was. it’s only started to click from year seven to year eight and I think it really helped, cos I had a close friend that I ended up in a relationship with for a while and I think they were experimenting with gender and what they thought was gender for a while. And I think apart, a couple of days before me they ended up saying, okay, guys, I think I’m trans and then when they did that, it kind of felt like a slap to the face for me, because I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a word for it now’, I guess.

So I would say I came to identify as trans because I think at that point in my life I was going through like quite a deep depression, my mental health was probably in the worst place that it’s ever been, and I was really struggling to like, understand why. And I hadn’t really ever engaged in thinking about my own gender or thinking about my own presentation. I kind of felt like I existed in, in like a nowhere kind of space. And at that point in my life I started engaging with those kind of things, I met some trans people as well which definitely helped my progression towards identifying how I identify now. And yeah I kind of took about a year or so to just kind of think through myself, confront a lot of like, deep held feelings about myself internalised transphobia as well within myself, towards myself and on the other side of that I came out as, yeah, non-binary/transmasculine and I haven’t looked back.

What would you say non-binary means to you?

Non-binary means exist. To me means existing in a space that I don’t really care about gender I – well I care about in the sense of like if I’m mis-gendered it’s not a fun experience – but in the sense that I don’t necessarily think that gender as a construct is something that works for me. I don’t necessarily think of gender as a construct is something that is helpful for society, so for me my non-binary identity is both about myself and about how I feel on the gender spectrum, but also about what I envision for society. Like, I think that gender is a very unhelpful and often harmful idea that exists within our society and I believe in a society that doesn’t hold gender as a construct or gender norms as anything important or anything like, anything to base society on. And that’s, that’s my kind of, how do I even put it, how can I put it, that’s how I think a society should function and I know societies have functioned like that in the past but it’s kind of European westernised construct of gender has had massively harmful effects.

Growing up and I had no idea I was trans, which was, which was a benefit I think in a lot of ways, cos I went back to my school recently, my secondary school and walking around, you know, I was having all the flashbacks and I thought, oh my god, I could not have been trans here. Like it was, I couldn’t even come out as bi until I was in the sixth form and then it was like, ooh, wow, the bi kid, you know, that was my party piece at parties little did they know. Yeah, so I’m from [county]. I just went to school there blah, blah, blah. Then when I was 18, I went to university in [city] and I was very miserable. didn’t really have any friends. Quite weird and withdrawn. But I did meet a couple of trans people there which kind of got me thinking. Okay, this, this, you know, I vaguely am aware this exists and these people are cool. It was still very, very like repressed.

I kind of, I had no idea that this was like this was me. And I, cos I didn’t really yeah, I never really sort of explored or experimented like with myself. And then like so I did, I did my four years. I did my time there. Then I came to [city] and for postgrads, maths. I had like the last year before I realised I was trans. I was like 21 and I was having a lovely time in [city]. I had friends all of a sudden I was studying and it was fun. And that was like the yeah, that was like the last year [laughs] of kind of just believing myself to be like a sort of oh you know queer, bi guy, whatever. And then, that summer like it was so corny and I like I read the Danish Girl which is this novel about very loosely based on a true story of a transwoman from Copenhagen in like the 1930s. It was kind of like, as I was reading it all these doors were kind of crashing open in my mind [laughs] and I was like, shit, shit.

This is, yeah, this is like and then there was this sudden urge, this need to like I don’t know, live as a woman, become a woman try and, you know, do everything I can to get away from maleness, cos all of this kind of sort of, I suppose, yeah, over the years I’ve never really thought about, there’d been moments when I’ve been like, I’m done with gender. I don’t, I don’t care about gender and there was me, you know, being like a feminist in university and getting really into that. And these were kind of, I think, subconsciously ways for me to syphon off my kind of feminine identity being like, oh yeah, well I have this, I have that and that, you know. And then, yeah, so I have been transitioning some 20, 25 tomorrow. I have been transitioning for two years now. And yeah, I kind of went all hell for leather, at first like I kind of cos I, cos the things I had no idea I was trans beforehand. I hadn’t had any years of like secretly cross-dressing or trying make-up or blah, blah, blah, whatever. I was at this position of being completely socialised male and now trying to bring myself over to the other side and just shed myself of all of the toxic masculinity I didn’t even realise I had and I don’t know just learn this whole new way of being and it was really messy like trying to find out how to present myself and months of getting very consistently misgendered at the start. Yeah, it was pretty miserable. But then I kind of—I don’t know why I started going to a lot of support groups and yeah, just meeting other trans people. The important thing for me was having role models, having kind of people that it can be like okay, well, I don’t pass, but neither does she and she’s really cool and so it’s okay. Just kind of things, almost like that and meeting other trans people and realising that, you know, rich diversity that exists and because when I first realised I was trans, I was just like the first thing I looked up and I think a lot of people have this is like, well, there’s no point in even trying and it’s like not gonna be able to pass. The first thing I looked up on YouTube, which is, which is stupid because later on in your transition you realise that you don’t have to and will a lot of people, a lot of people it remains important, it’s important for me, to some extent, but I don’t know. At the start it just feels like so important. So, the first thing I looked up on YouTube was like voice feminisation and then there was all these videos of these like obvious trans girls from like even like ten years ago when the landscape was so different when it was all about blending in and passing and like it’s assumed that if you wanna transition then you want to work on your voice and like, whatever [laughs].

I think I first properly came to terms with it when I was 20 because my friends were quite confused about Ruby Rose’s character in Orange is the New Black or not her character actually but the actual actress. They, I think identify as gender fluid. My friend didn’t really understand it. The conversation felt like to me that she was kind of discredited like the friend was discrediting Ruby Rose’s gender identity and that is when we really got started talking about gender and she kind of confronted me on the fact it sounded like I was very uncomfortable being a woman. I was like, this is accurate. Obviously, I’d had thoughts about being unhappy being a female before, but not really ever considered myself anything other than because the research you do as a young person is very horrifying, especially if you are like 13, 14 which is when I think I first started having these thoughts and actually realising that you could be transgender and there were like surgeries and treatments and you could socially be accepted as a different gender than the one you were born as. it’s a very scary place because the only like kind of resources in terms of like fiction and facts is these kind of like horrible images of like surgeries and being social outcasts and you know, this kind of thing. I’d already, like I’d always kind of pushed the idea away again. Yeah, when I was 20 I kind of realised that that was the case for me and I was more unhappy pretending to be female than whatever consequences I would have living as a male.

Make things a lot easier for trans kids because I know a lot of people who came out during like high school period, they had to stop doing P.E. and sport and stuff which I think’s really bad because I’m a really big advocate for like trans people doing sport and I feel that a lot of the time trans people are just put out of their education a lot when they’re not able to do these things because schools don’t under-, don’t know what to do, don’t know what changing rooms to put them in or they don’t have the guidelines already in place and I feel like, if they have the guidelines in place, even if they don’t have the trans student it makes it a lot easier for when they do have a trans student because they probably will now. People are coming out younger and I feel that it’ll be useful for schools to have these guides just in case like because legally you can, like a school can change your name without a deed poll but a lot of them don’t want to and won’t and it’s not until you actually show them the actual laws and stuff that they actually do something because a lot of the time they’re like, Oh but we don’t have to I was like, legally you have to

I think it was, it was realising then and sort of, and the internet. You know even at 28 the internet was a huge, huge, it was massive for me, and I, you know I was involved with transmasculine YouTube for a long time, because it was realising that the, they didn’t have, there wasn’t just that one narrative. For me the idea of being born in the wrong body isn’t something that fits. Like I wasn’t born in the wrong body, I was born in my body. I just am not comfortable with certain aspects of it. And so for me it was hearing other people’s stories, and, and I remember it was, I think it was Skyla Kergil who’s a transmasculine YouTuber, and I remember him talking about his experiences and there was something in it that just, and it clicked, and it clicked in that same way that, that the way that I know that an idea is a good idea when I’ve had it, the way that you know that something’s going to be delicious when you eat it. There was something kind of inherent that just went, ‘Oh, okay it’s that’. And so yeah that, that was, I guess it took me a long, I kind of had to go past it and then double back and be like, ‘Oh hang on a minute. This actually does apply to me.’

Ok so, it must have been around 2014. It was one of them things where it was just starting to be spoken about in the media, a little bit. At that point in time, I feel like I always knew because the word was being thrown around and there was a part of me that always avoided it. Obviously growing up there wasn’t really much resources on it, but I think yeah 2014 was when it was starting to be spoken about in the media quite a lot. And yeah I remember just watching this, this clip of this guy just saying exactly how he felt and I was just literally like “Oh my god, this is actually me” and the fact that I started crying just told me at that point this is me and I need to do something about it.

In the period of time at university where I was sort of exploring my identity a little bit more, I came across a group of people that were sort of, you know identified under the LGBTQ spectrum, and were very kind of open about discussing how they were feeling.

And it wasn’t until I had a couple of conversations with those people, and started to kind of explore things a little bit more, you know I remember hearing somebody describe themselves as gender queer, and that was a term quite early on that I thought oh actually that, that might fit. Because I was, I’ve always been aware of this kind of, this dissonance, this disconnect between how I feel and how I want people to see me, and kind of the body that I’ve got, and I kind of grew up either having just the sense of apathy towards my body, which I know isn’t you know, with teenagers especially, isn’t, isn’t uncommon. Or I would have periods of time where I would actually feel quite a lot of distress around certain areas of my body and doing different things and being in certain social situations.

So when the words yeah gender queer was the first one, and then kind of when I explored term trans, and transgender more specifically, I started to realise that there were other ways of identifying, and I think, when I started to experiment with things, very much in a safe way, so I started off by wearing a binder, a couple of times a week, just in my room.

And I just kind of did it really, really slowly, and then I, then I would wear it out, and obviously nobody really kind of noticed specifically apart from a few close friends, and my partner at the time, who I kind of have conversations with, but they were very subtle changes, so I was aware I was taking it at my own pace, and then I kind of asked people to change the pronoun use, and then it wasn’t, I think it was a, I think that, that kind of happened over a period of probably about two years. Cos I was quite conscious, and I guess the media also is prone to telling people that when somebody realises that they’re trans it’s [clicks fingers] suddenly everything happens very quickly, and people make quick decisions and then regret them. And that was a rhetoric I think that I was very conscious of, and still to an extent am quite conscious of for different reasons.

There’s like all sorts of things to consider. Like going to uni for example, you know – how, how do you want to present going to university? That, that I think that’s probably the question that sort of plays on my mind now especially filling out UCAS forms and things like that which are terrible anyway the UCAS forms I, I don’t know if, you know, but there’s this whole thing about gender options that’s limited to male and female and that’s all. They, they’ve got, they’ve got an Mx title but male or female which, which is so unbelievably dumb to me in that just have, male or female doesn’t even describe sex like there, there is a very legitimate probability that there is some percentage of the population out there that that isn’t male or female that they’re intersex as in biologically they have XXY chromosomes or something like that in which case, it doesn’t even apply to them biologically never mind in their social identity. So that, that’s been a grey question I’ve been stressing about in regards to uni in what gender do I even put on my UCAS because that will affect gendered dorms and stuff like this and it’s been a really big pain [laughter].

So it, it is kind of whenever you are sort of moving onto the like the next thing is kind of ‘Hey there’s decisions to be made in that regard’. But I suppose that’s, that, that’s why I’m working through it now and that’s the sort of big decision on the horizon about like how, how am I gonna be at uni and I think a big part of uni as well is setting up support networks and stuff like this yeah. So, it’s in a way stressful but also I’m really excited to go to uni so it, it’s stressful in a hopeful way and that I’m excited for it but also worried, yeah.