Funny Little Stories and a Scary Big Question

To attempt to write this essay is to begin an insurmountable task, to answer the questions informing it even more so. To you, the presumably not-transgender reader, gender in all its forms (scientific, social, political, etc.) is not a point of contention, especially if you are a man. It does not permeate your every interaction, your every thought, your quietest and loudest moments. I am glad that it does not: if everyone was waxing poetic on gender and deeply understanding of its importance as it exists in our current psyche then we would collectively get nothing done. On the flip side of the coin, however, knowledge is power and to not think of gender is to be ignorant to (approximately) more than half of the world’s population. With this handful of pages, then, I hope that you can extend (if not empathy) sympathy and a greater understanding toward transgender people.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not asking for pity, nor is the vast majority of my community: there is a unique sense of pride and joy that accompanies the ability to know oneself so deeply. Far more important to note is that my experiences and opinions hardly encompass the depths and shades of life that my peers have lived. My relationship with gender was informed by my upbringing, class, education, race, and endless other factors that will never be perfectly replicated by another. Chinese tradition and being a lesbian have changed my relationship with gender as a concept, my status as a middle-class Bostonian with good health insurance entitles me to an easier medical transition than most others, and the fact that I am out to my parents and have not been excommunicated, kicked out, or otherwise removed from my family all contribute to the relative ease by which I go about my life. With all disclaimers established, then, let us then ask: what is it to be transgender?

For those of you who are scientifically minded, it may be easiest to begin with gender dysphoria, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-cataloged classification of “clinically significant distress or impairment” due to one’s assigned gender. This answers the “what” quite succinctly: a transgender person is someone who experiences a disconnect from their assigned gender, often treated by surgery or hormones until there is no longer a disconnect. And yet a purely medical approach just scratches the surface and hardly explains the core, the why of it all.

I was asked by my father why I would want to “mutilate” myself in such a way during a lengthy phone call in which I told him that I was saving up for top surgery, a procedure similar to a mastectomy that rebuilds one’s chest to be flatter, more similar to that of a man’s. I was asked by my mother why I couldn’t just get a therapist and work through my mental health issues, attempting to connect the dots between me starting masculinizing hormone injections to the bouts of self-harm and disordered eating I struggled with through the bulk of middle and high school.

I wish I could answer but I hardly have the language to do so now, let alone when I was six years old, an age when most kids start being more aware of the space they take up and the importance of having a body with which to eat and yell and play tag on the playground at recess. There was a hot pink velveteen zip-up jacket, something that only a six-year-old in 2008 would wear, that would scrunch around my chest in the most abhorrent way when I buckled myself into my booster seat. I knew nothing except the fact that, to my six-year-old self, those scrunched-up lumps looked like boobs and it made me want to scratch and scratch and scratch at myself until no one could see me. I did not know then but the visceral skin-crawling feeling of wanting to tear and rend myself away from my body was an early sign of dysphoria. That jacket met an easy fate at the hands of my overenthusiasm for hiking, becoming so muddied and ragged that it was discarded after a few months. My dysphoria was less simple, manifesting itself as, to my parents, just “weird kid behavior” in their otherwise normal child. When I thrashed and threw myself against the booster seat chest harness it was simply because I needed a nap or was throwing a tantrum for no reason, as six-year-olds do.

Dysphoria.

I finally had the word to explain my strange “quirks” in seventh grade when I got my first smartphone and subsequently downloaded Instagram. I had searched up something about the LGBTQ+ community because I had known for as long as I could remember that I was attracted to women. It was from one of those poorly-managed and oft-corny Instagram pages that I learned what being transgender was and all the accompanying language. It wasn’t so much a startling moment of clarity à la Socrates’s hypothetical man in the allegory of the cave, rather a quiet acknowledgment of something I already knew but had no words to attribute to.

It is impossible to put into words the sensations of my dysphoria in a way that those who have not experienced and never will experience it can understand. Much in the same way that I will probably never know what it is like to kick a soccer ball so perfectly in every conceivable way that I am euphoric at my own physical prowess, most cisgender people will never know what it is like to, at best, be a guest in their own body. There is little pleasure in looking down and not recognizing the form one has breathed and loved and lived in; looking down and lifting one’s hand without willing it to do so, rather, observing it being lifted. A discomfort, an uncanny valley, a raw sense of wrongness so strong, so compelling, that many of us are willing to sever ourselves from family, friends, and ourselves. It is, then, similarly impossible to put into words the sensations of gender euphoria and the comfort I find in binding or wearing much-too-large mens’ medium sweaters to obscure my form in layers and layers of fabric.

And then there is want, the very core of being transgender. Dysphoria is important, yes, but it is an insignificant planet to the Andromeda that is wanting. On a vague September day during a general chemistry lecture about two weeks into my first semester of college, I happened upon the literary magazine n+1 and a particular article titled “On Liking Women”. It was wholly unremarkable as titles go for queer literature but the subtitle, “The Society for Cutting Up Men is a rather fabulous name for a transsexual book club”, tickled me and I couldn’t help but read. Andrea Long Chu, the writer of such a titillating article, leads us through the winding intersections of being a transgender woman, a lesbian, and a feminist, until she simply concludes that “…transness [is] a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants. …How can you want to be something you already are? Desire implies deficiency; want implies want. …[and] The richness of our want is staggering” (Chu “On Liking Women”). My world was shattered. If I had been a movie protagonist a camera would have pulled back, an ensemble of strings swelling in the background, and the screen would’ve faded to black. At that moment it became obvious: being transgender can be painful but I am opulent with introspection. And while losing family can be painful, yes, finding family is blessed with wealth that neither money nor blood can buy.

“Know thyself.”

“I do.”

What turns most people away from attempting to understand transgender people is the misconception that being it is an identity. Identity, such a fraught word either spoken of reverently or derisively depending on who you ask. It is treated too delicately to be an accurate representation of what being transgender is. It leaves too much open to others’ interpretation. Identity accompanies cute buzzwords like “preferred” names and “preferred” pronouns. There is no “preference” to be had. It puts forward the implication that I merely identify as, not that I am.

When I, at the age of six, felt a compulsion to rip at the offending lump in my hot pink velveteen zip-up jacket, it was not because I felt the jacket was imposing upon my identity. It was because I did not want it. Like anything else deeply human, then, can you ever really know why you want something?