Why not to say trans and non-binary and what to say instead

CW: mentions suicidal thoughts, misgendering, transphobia, mental health, exclusion, dysphoria, trans healthcare

Not the blog post I’ve been promising, but one that’s been requested by a couple of people.

This blog isn’t about correcting individual people’s language or labels. What it’s about is how we organise ourselves, and the words we use when we come together in visible groups, the messages we collectively give to cis people about who belongs where, and why it matters.

Nothing is ever as simple as a longer-than-i-wanted-it-to-be blog post can describe. I’m going to argue, though, that trans or trans+ are good enough umbrella terms, and, more, to the point, even if they’re not, “trans and non-binary” is not useful, and there’s a reason why many of us have been fighting against this terminology tooth and nail for many years and feel frustrated by its resurgence. It’s also why I used “trans and gender diverse” in my book title, even though I’m not entirely wedded to that term either, and “divergent” would probably have been more accurate.

Words rewrite history

Recently, I was delivering some LGBT+ competency training and I was asked two familiar questions: the first – why were trans people “added on” to LGBT+ when being gay is about sex? And the second, “wait, are you saying non-binary people are trans? I didn’t know!”

Cue me patiently explaining the history – that the word “gay” was once more inclusive, and being queer is a many-faceted thing that for many people, not just trans people, is about gender as well as sex. A butch lesbian once told me “butch is my gender, lesbian my sexuality” – you cannot separate the two when so many of us have a queer relationship with both.

We were always a part of this community, so the addition of the letters B&T as an act of “inclusion” created a false story – that bi and trans people were a late addition to an existing gay movement, erasing the fact that bi and trans people were integral (and often foundational) to the movement right from the start, and “gay” at one time meant us too.

And the same thing is happening with trans.

The history of trans labels

When Leslie Feinberg popularised the word “transgender” in the 90s its meaning was close to what non-binary means now, only perhaps even wider and more inclusive than non-binary has become. Feinberg was in no way a “binary” trans person, and zie used the term to include a very wide group of people. But over time, transgender became narrowed to mean trans men and women, or rather non-binary people got forgotten and excluded, and we needed a new word to include ourselves again.

For the record, many of us wanted that word to be genderqueer, not non-binary. I don’t like the word non-binary at all and for many reasons don’t want it as my label. But I accept this is what the majority settled on. Just like, back in the 90s a lot of WLW didn’t like the word lesbian and did not identify as lesbian, but we didn’t replace the L in LGBT for them.

When I came out as non-binary a decade ago, we were fighting for the right to access trans healthcare and be included in trans spaces. We were fighting to drop the godawful trans asterisk popularised by Sam Killerman, the cis guy who plagiarised the Genderbread person from trans people and talked over our community time and time again, becoming cis people’s go-to resources on learning about gender diversity. We needed not to be seen as a footnote, something separate. We needed people to understand that misgendering us mattered just as much as misgendering any trans person. That those of us who needed healthcare needed it as much as any trans person. That we weren’t something different and separate – that we were the trans community as much as anybody.

Meanwhile TERFs back then were telling the world that “true transsexuals” were okay (as long as they saw themselves as mentally ill and biologically the sex they were assigned as) but the rest of us – the transgenders – were the real problem, and sure enough we were getting backlash from some quarters within the community that we didn’t belong and were spoiling things for the real trans people with real needs and real gender dysphoria. We were the special snowflakes identifying as attack helicopters, and so on.

This us and them splitting of a movement into the “good ones” and the “unacceptable riff-raff” is of course a classic divide-and-conquer tactic.

No specific detriment

Then in 2015 the UK government stated:

The Equality Act 2010 protects people from discrimination if it arises from their being perceived as either male or female. We recognise that a very small number of people consider themselves to be of neither gender. We are not aware that that results in any specific detriment…

Trans men and women needed to be trans, but we were just doing it for kicks, was the underlying message. We didn’t need protection or inclusion like the real trans people. Although since then we’ve had one legal case that set a precedent to the contrary, let’s be clear that “non-binary is separate/different from trans” has legal implications for inclusion, healthcare and civil rights.

One real-world consequence of this was me going without a passport for a decade, with all the difficulties that entailed, and finally succumbing to one that misidentifies me.

Back in 2015, I was in a long-term relationship with a trans man. The reactions to us both coming out were starkly different. He was correctly gendered by our queer friends quickly, I was not. His trans man friends almost never got my pronouns right, and saw me either as a trans man in denial or a cis woman – many trans men still do. In other words, refusing to see me at all. Queer friends thought I was just jumping on my partner’s bandwagon, even though I was the one who’d been involved in trans activism and talking about my complicated gender for years and we came out within weeks of one another. He got support, I got pushback, it was that blatant a divide.

In seeing non-binary genders as different, more trivial, less in need of support or as suffering less difficulty than trans men and women, non-binary people get excluded from safety and care. The exact same thing happened to bi+ people, incidentally, which is why it transpires that bi+ people suffer worse health outcomes than lesbian and gay people. Exclusion harms. Stories about groups being less oppressed and therefore less in need of inclusion harm. When we internalise those stories, we can harm ourselves and each other too.

The psychological impact of your needs being dismissed

I really hear the non-transitioning non-binary people who exclude themselves from the word trans because they feel like they’re not as oppressed, or don’t suffer enough.

But here’s the thing. People did such a comprehensive job of making me feel like an inconvenience to the “real” trans community that I started to think the world would be better off without me even existing. I began to believe I was inconvenient to the cause of trans rights in exactly the same way bi and trans people had been made to feel inconvenient to the cause of gay rights, and edged out. In having my needs trivialised, I trivialised myself and that meant it became harder and harder to ask for what I needed, or even accept my needs were real and valid.

But none of that changed what I needed or the pain I felt in trying to make my needs smaller, e.g by not coming out to my partner’s wider family, by accepting “he” pronouns for a while at work when I decided to medically transition.

It took a long time for me to understand it’s important to all trans people to realise we have the right to exist as ourselves without assimilation, neat little boxes, and medicalisation. Non-binary people being fully part of this community gives everyone breathing space because nothing about trans experiences is binary. It dismantles the tyranny of “trans enough” that can leave everyone with a sense of imposter syndrome.

The last thing this community needs is more gates and gatekeepers.

But also, understanding non-binary people’s stated needs, whether for correct pronouns, somewhere safe to pee, or healthcare, are every bit as important and necessary as for trans men and women’s is a matter of life and death for many of us. I could so easily not still be here thanks to that belief that I was taking space I had no right to chipping away at my sense that I had could ask for things that I nevertheless profoundly needed.

If I don’t get to call myself trans, does the trans man who doesn’t want lower surgery? What about the one who doesn’t mind what pronouns he gets? The one who transitioned quietly and easily thanks to private health insurance and never experienced transphobia? The one who didn’t experience anything he could have called dysphoria, only euphoria?

If trans is a term only permissible for those who have it the toughest we are going backwards to the days when you only got to transition if you would not survive otherwise. We become defined by our suffering.

Newsflash: we should have the right to transition in any way we need if it will make our lives happier or more meaningful. We don’t owe anyone a narrative of suffering in order to get what we need to thrive.

The move from transsexual to transgender to trans* to trans to trans+

There was a reason the community had gone towards “transgender” and away from “transsexual” – the community as a whole were realising we weren’t all about surgery, that not all of us, even the most “binary” among us had identical needs and profiles that could neatly be spelled out by a medical pathway and underlined with a GRC. That it wasn’t for cis clinicians to make us into who we knew ourselves to be, but for us to self-determine who we were.  Transness is a mixed and complicated experience and each of our transitions is different, tailor made for us alone. But all of us probably do share the need to change something – clothes, pronouns, names, identity labels, documents, hair, bodies etc – in order to thrive.

And this is why people distancing themselves from the word trans can be so problematic if it goes beyond personal preference and into dictating umbrella terms. Not because everyone doesn’t have the right to determine their own personal labels, of course they do, but because “I’m not trans because…” so often misdefines and misunderstands the breadth and complexity of what “trans” is. It narrows the definition of trans in order to leave people outside of it, which can have the effect of excluding non-binary people from spaces they need to be included, or to problematise, medicalise or otherwise distance from the trans community.

For instance, every time someone says “I’m not trans because I’m not medically transitioning” I die a little inside, because that person just reduced trans people to a medical process, and it’s only a small step to reinforcing the validity of trans identities only if they have the correct surgeries. Which screws over a lot of disenfranchised people who don’t have access to, or don’t want, trans healthcare.

Trans+ works fine. Or trans and gender diverse/divergent. There are genuine and legitimate reasons for someone not to call themself trans (e.g. intersex, 2 spirit) but that doesn’t mean splitting off non-binary from trans is the answer.

I understand equally that we need to signal that non-binary people are fully included in our spaces because that’s not always a given – we haven’t always been sure of our welcome. At the ICTA Project I worked on through to last year we (most of the trans researchers were non-binary) favoured using “trans (including non-binary)” to be very clear about our inclusivity. But “trans and non-binary” doesn’t signal inclusion, but separation, in the way “men and trans men” wouldn’t be an inclusive phrasing, but “men, including trans men” would, or “cis and trans men” would.

Whose needs are greater here?

I’m prepared to be proved wrong, but I feel like the damage done to non-binary people excluded from the support of trans spaces, not counted in trans healthcare discussions, excluded from trans healthcare itself, and left out of trans legal/civil rights discourse outweighs the impact on non-binary people who don’t consider themselves trans of us vetoing the umbrella term “trans and non-binary”, which we’ve been trying to do relentlessly for a decade.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’ve yet to hear evidence that the same safety/civil rights imperatives are attached to the need for the specific terminology “trans and non-binary” to be used as the default umbrella term.

Someone’s right to choose what labels they want for themselves is essential, but it does not need to dictate what umbrella term should be used more generally, because no umbrella term will be perfect. For example, I choose genderqueer and trans as my personal labels, but I accept non-binary as a term that includes me, even though I dislike the word, and don’t think it’s helpful or fair to conceptualise trans men and women as “binary”.

Likewise, I see no great harm done to people when we accept trans as Leslie Feinberg intended “transgender” – an umbrella term that includes what we now call non-binary.

The growing use of “trans and non-binary” isn’t just about language: it teaches cis people that folks like me aren’t trans when we just spent a decade fighting hard to be recognised as part of this community. The real-world consequences are people taking non-binary identities less seriously and seeing our need for healthcare, accommodations and civil rights as less important. And that impacts our safety, mental health, and wellbeing.

Not cis, not trans, but a secret third thing?

I’m not a fan of binaries or dichotomies. But it’s hard to describe someone non-binary as definitively “not trans” without narrowing the definition of what trans means. People say cis/trans is an unwanted binary, but as cis only means not trans, let’s try saying “I’m neither queer nor not-queer” or “I’m neither bisexual nor not-bisexual” “I’m neither non-binary nor not non-binary” – sounds ridiculous huh?

It’s not a binary to say there are people who are trans and people who aren’t. Even though we can’t accurately measure where one ends and the other begins. We don’t need to – trans can be a land without borders, because if people need to belong here, then they do. It’s not a resource that will run out if too many people claim it, it’s not something that needs to be patrolled and guarded with high fences and “no entry without a permit” signs. It’s not exactly prime property to be located in at this juncture in history.

It is more than okay to not know if you’re cis or trans, or feel you live in the undefined borderlands between the two, but that’s a whole other thing that doesn’t require the drawing of new borders around your identity. The drawing of those borders only reinforces the “trans enough” narrative where people might feel they have to move faster than they want to or towards things they’re not sure of in order to prove their belonging and need of the safety of community. We don’t need anything to feed people’s queer imposter syndrome, which is also in infinitely available supply.

When trans people are one of the most scapegoated groups on the planet right now, I understand the need to disown the trans label, or to deny having the same difficult experiences that some trans people share. But rewriting our history and definitions, and talking over those of us in need of inclusion for our safety and wellbeing is not helpful.

By doing this, “trans” gets turned into the narrow little box it never was.

“I’m not trans”

Everyone of course has the right to define themself how they like. All labels are invented, equivocal, imperfect, subjective.

But I’d like to encourage those out there who identify as non-binary and “not trans” to reflect on what this might mean.

Jack Monroe vs Julia Long, C4 News

It’s a tricky territory to negotiate. There is currently a backlash against non-binary, both inside and outside the trans community. In a month that saw the two most prominent  UK non-binary and trans people, CN Lester and Jack Monroe, being pitted against the worst of trans-antagonistic feminism on the national news, I have been experiencing an equivalent attack from within the community, from a minority of trans men and women.

While “radical” feminists on Twitter told Jack and CN that they looked like girls and that their scarves precluded them from being taken seriously . . .

. . . some trans men and women on Facebook were fighting hard for language that continued to medicalise trans existence, or to base our validity firmly in the realm of appearance and presentation. Fighting for terms like “gender confirmation surgery” with its suggestion that we need to alter ourselves to fully affirm our identity. Fighting for the right to have their gender assumed by strangers after transition, ignoring how much that erases those who don’t or won’t or can’t have medical treatment or ever “pass”.

If I hear one more passing trans guy tell me he needs strangers to assume he’s a man because he’s “worked so hard to get there” I’m going to get really cranky. I understand the pain of being constantly misgendered and can imagine the relief when that ends, but it only ends for a lucky few, and that’s a privilege. To insist on that privilege being reinforced, to the detriment of those who can’t experience it, throws an awful lot of people under the bus – boyish looking lesbians, non-binary people, trans people who can’t access healthcare, trans people who simply don’t pass, and people whose presentation does not match their identity.

Because we are not just what we look like, or what’s in our pants, and the sooner we stop making assumptions about other people’s genders, the better the world will be.

And this is where “not trans” non-binary people feed into this narrative, because often “not trans” is put forward to mean “not having any medical interventions” and in creating those definitions, it medicalises trans identities. It’s fine for people to self-identify however they want, but care is needed not to redefine someone else’s identity inaccurately in the process. There is also, among a small minority of “not trans” non-binary people, an air of being superior in the way they are dealing with their gender incongruence – as if all our experiences are the same and should lead to the same “correct” conclusion.

 

Being transgender is not a medical condition. Being transgender can come with physical incongruence or dysphoria that even in a socially perfect world would be alleviated by medical treatment, but that’s not how it is for all trans people – many trans people love their bodies.

Being transgender can also come with social incongruence or dysphoria that can be helped with medical treatment in this imperfect world, where so much of our social assignment is related to the configuration of our bodies. Ideally, we will change the world to enable trans people to need less medical treatment, but we will never get rid of the need completely.

To be clear, changing the world means things like not assuming somebody’s gender based on the way they look, not invalidating somebody’s gender based on what they wear, how their voice sounds, what their physical attributes are or what’s in their pants. Yes, this means using gender neutral language until someone tells you their gender.

Because there is absolutely no way of knowing someone’s gender other than asking them or them telling you.

This also means not medicalising gender.  Doing away with terms like “gender confirmation surgery” that give extra validation to those who have had medical treatment. Not waiting until someone “passes” or until they’ve had surgery to start using the right pronouns for them. Not suddenly starting to misgender someone because you find out they haven’t had lower surgery. No more gross “hot dog or bun?” punchlines à la Zoolander 2.

For non-binary people, it means not conflating “trans” with medical treatment, or using the “not-trans” identifier to distance yourself from people who have transitioned in more obvious and visible ways, as if those people are somehow a different species. We are all negotiating the complicated path of gender incongruence, and there is no neat dividing line between us. Transition can take on many forms, and “trans” encompasses many stories. It is an umbrella term, and all people who experience gender incongruence belong under it. If you don’t want the shelter, that’s cool, but if you are shunning this umbrella because you want to distance yourself from the people under it, then we need to talk.

I cannot label someone as trans who does not want to be labelled as such. [eta- Many other cultures have other, better language for what I call trans, and this is not about wanting to impose my label on those cultures, or on anyone who doesn’t want it, such as intersex people who have their own language to describe their experiences]. However, I personally see identifying as trans if you are non-binary in *any* way an act of solidarity, not an act of appropriation.

[eta- In other words, nobody non-binary should feel “not permitted” to claim the label, and I’d prefer those who do not want the label not to redefine trans in order to make the label look like it doesn’t apply to them].

Can we move away from the idea that trans is a tiny, marginalised and fenced off community and see that aspects of trans stories affect many lives? Surely that is a good thing, making gender a less rigid, sure and certain proposition.

 

 

David Bowie – mirroring the times on gender

This morning I woke up to news of David Bowie’s death and felt a profound sense of personal loss. As a child of the seventies, Bowie had been a part of my life almost from day one.

One of my earliest memories is of seeing Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and falling completely in love. I was about three years old, and already having a complicated relationship with gender, which manifested in my continually removing the pretty grips my mother put in my hair and “losing” them in the garden. I can still recall seeing David Bowie’s made-up face on the TV, trying to work him out. I remember the thrill I got when I realised he was a man. David Bowie whispered something to me about gender difference that was compelling even at that tender age.

I look back across his life and see that Bowie was both a gender pioneer, and a mirror of the times. In one of the earliest media clips of Bowie, he is challenging the expectation that men should conform to gender stereotypes, as part of “The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men”. It really is worth a watch, if only to see the kinds of conventions he was up against at the time:

A window opened up in the late sixties and seventies around gender liberation and queerness and Bowie jumped straight through it, dazzling us with the way he flaunted conventions of gender and sexuality. We will always be left to wonder how much of his gender variant expression and open bisexuality was a calculated performance and how much was an expression of his authentic self; but whichever it was, he did an immense amount for the visibility of bisexual and gender variant people, and gave hope to young queers like myself.

But, as if to prove that progress doesn’t just roll smoothly onwards, the 1980’s happened, with a new conservatism, a backlash against the LGBT community, and of course the AIDS crisis. At this point even Elton John was married to a woman, and Bowie started showing up in suits, the image of respectability. He then claimed that coming out as bisexual had been “a mistake” that was bad for his career. But there was a knowingness in his cultivated image even then; he made us look at ourselves and where we had got to. If even David Bowie is wearing a suit, god help us!

I was a teen in the 80’s, and this social regression at such a formative time made who I was seem almost impossible. I hid myself under roles as conventional as Bowie’s suits, and bided my time.

The gay world recovered considerably from the crisis of the eighties, but I’m not sure gender variance did in the same way, because while Elton John is now happily married to a man, a figure like Bowie becoming as iconic and successful while turning gender performance on its head seems even less likely now than it did in the year of my birth.

But the 2010’s have given gender variance a resurgence, the hint of new possibilities. And there was Bowie right in the middle of it all again, cross-dressing with Tilda Swinton in a perfect image that encapsulates so much about the gender story of both these icons:

 

And then there was that amazing V&A retrospective on Bowie in 2013 reminding us of what had once been possible, whispering that perhaps it could be again.

It’s no surprise then that this has also been the decade when I came out fully about my own gender. Visibility begets visibility, makes it possible to be seen and at least partially understood. Bowie did not show me the way this time – rather, we were both riding the same wave. Many social movements follow this pattern – revolution, backlash and regression, and ultimately, integration. Whatever his motivations, Bowie was part of that revolution, inspiring generations and showing us a different way. At the very least he was a public, visible symbol of an important change that was happening.

Bowie also had many very problematic moments that we 100% need to acknowledge, such as sex with an underage groupie and a drug-fuelled brief fascination with fascism. And if you want to know if it’s still okay to admire aspects of Bowie after reading this, try this article on “How to be a fan of problematic things“.

Intriguing and compelling to the last, I feel huge loss for this man who showed me an image of masculinity that was a million miles from the buttoned-up rigidity of my military family. Thank you, David Bowie, for showing me other ways of being a man.

Catch 22

Life is full of catch-22s when you’re trans.

Here’s one – act like the gender you most identify with and you’re “aping stereotypes”, act in the slightest way non-stereotypically and you fall under instant suspicion, as if you’re revealing all your “true colours” in one gesture.

But for me, the most insidious of all the catch-22s is the madness trap.

The original novel Catch-22 tells of a war pilot who couldn’t get himself grounded for being mad because not wanting to fly in war is the very definition of sanity. Trans people are faced with the very opposite conundrum – trying to prove we’re in sound mind when gender dysphoria is still considered a psychiatric diagnosis.

But the catch-22s keep on coming – because if we look happy about being trans, why then we’re frivolous and selfish, putting our own needs and desires before the common good. If we look unhappy, well that’s proof it’s all a big mistake.

If the stress of stigma and oppression make us mentally ill, this feeds into the notion that being trans is in itself a mental illness – society can bully us and then point at the results of its bullying and go “look how damaged you are, why should we listen to someone like you?”

Generally, I try to brazen it out – I don’t want to let the world in on my internal struggle, the difficult road that brought me to the decision that transitioning would be the best thing for me. If I show any pain and conflict, I know well enough it can be used to undermine me and make me doubt myself. So I only share my doubts, my fears and my turmoil in very safe places.

As a consequence, I’m sometimes shocked by the people around me who think that I am easy and confident about my transition – I’m clearly putting on a good front.

The question that plagues me most is, “Am I being selfish?” I ask myself that all the time – some days the feeling is so strong I wonder if the world would prefer not to have people like me in it, so it can go about its business as usual. The internalised, hateful narrative I go into is completely erasing of who I am.

It took me a long time to realise that I had been subject to a form of “conversion therapy”. Conversion therapy is a form of therapy that seeks to brainwash the recipient into having negative associations whenever they think of being gay or trans, until they reach a point where being gay or trans is so painful to think about it no longer is viable. Not long ago, I had a moment of clarity – conversion therapy was exactly what was happening to me, because I was being foolish enough to listen to the toxic words of people who don’t want folks like me to exist.

I have now stopped listening. I considered their point of view very carefully, and for many years. I utterly reject it. I don’t need to keep hearing it.

Yes, I am a threat to the status quo, and if that’s terrifying for me, no doubt it’s also threatening for all those people who want to be able to divide the human race into 2 neat, unchangeable, segregated and non-overlapping groups, for whatever their reasons.

So coming out as transgender, then, could be seen as a little crazy – so much to lose, so much respect, potential employment, social support, lost through the process of admitting you cannot endure the process of sex assignment inflicted on you at birth.

This is perhaps why, since coming out, I have encountered people like me who conceal their trans nature. Some take hormones or have surgery in secret, some live only part-time as who they really are. Others simply manage their gender incongruence as best they can, fearful that “coming out” would put extra psychological pressure on them, that the gains would not be worth the losses.

I was one of these people – feeling like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the male person in female spaces. The psychological pressure of that alone was pretty unendurable, but I cannot judge which is the hardest route to take.

In the end, I think we owe it to the world to find a place in our lives where we can resolve our psychological conflicts as best we can. I don’t think coming out, being open to the world is the only way of doing this. I don’t believe deciding to transition is inherently better or worse than deciding not to. But I do think the knowledge that diverse narratives and paths are legitimate is essential to everybody’s psychological wellbeing, so the more we strike out for our own truth, the more others are liberated by our example. Living as a masculine women is just as valid for some as living as a trans man is valid for others, as non-binary identities are valid for others still. I celebrate a world in which all are possible, and accepted.

I do know coming out is risky. Exposing a trans nature leaves us open to so much undermining and social judgement. So it does take a certain amount of psychological strength to come out. For some people, coming out is a matter of choice, but for others there is no choice at all, they could not survive in the position they were allocated, or they could not survive in their body as it is.

I am not sure whether I did have a choice. Could I have endured as I was, or were my efforts to hide my transness ultimately doomed? I am aware that society, with its either/ors, to some extent limits my choices. If I could be understood in ways as both a man and a woman, a trans man and a lesbian, then I would be entirely happy.

And that’s the ultimate catch-22, the trap of a society that disallows the possibility of multiple, overlapping and sometimes paradoxical stories about our lives and identities.

Together in our differences

When I came out at work about my plans to undergo a medical transition, at first I didn’t even bother to go into “non-binary” and what that means, because it felt too hard for people to understand. I told colleagues a simplified version of my truth, which implied I was transitioning to live “as a man”. It felt right at the time, but I quickly realised this identity was just as suffocating for me as the assigned female identity I’d been lumbered with at birth. I rectified the situation, took time to explain non-binary to people. They were nice about it, but clearly they did not understand. I felt more authentic, but way out on a very bendy limb. I was a unicorn*, tempted to saw off my horn to appear like a less authentic but more believable pony.

Of course, if all us unicorns wore our horns out and proud, we wouldn’t seem so imaginary. But the reality is, most of us, cis or trans, spend time negotiating the varying sized gap between “fitting in” and “being ourselves”.

Was I lying to my colleagues when I implied I was a man? No – in a world where currently there are only two legal and social options, I’m enough of a man – maleness being a significant part of my gender story – to deserve to be included in male spaces, male toilets, male services, if that’s what I need to exist in this imperfect, either/or world.

If we start to erase my right to belong to the group “men” by citing my femaleness, my femininity, then we’re falling into dodgy territory where people need to perform a perfect version of masculinity in order to be acceptable. Hell no, that’s not the way to go – though of course trans people are under constant pressure to perform this perfect stereotype because our identities are continually scrutinised and questioned – any hint of femininity, female socialisation, female-typical or stereotypical behaviour, and I am invalidated, as people encourage me to widen my leg position, shorten my hair, lower my voice etc. to “pass” as myself.

I am not always given the space I need to be “the same, but different”.

(I wish)

The tension between “sameness” and difference

I guess it’s normal to hide a difference if it comes with the threat of exclusion, but at the same time parts of ourselves can be suffocated, crying out to express “I am not the same as you!”

Trans people have our own unique experiences and culture, we have our own history of oppression and a profound difference in how we relate to our bodies, and how we culturally respond to assigned sex and gender. At the same time, when we are “othered” it marginalises us to the point where it becomes difficult for us to access things like services, toilets, social spaces and employment, so many of us spend a lot of time fighting for inclusion, and stressing our “sameness”.

Our dilemma is how to let the world know we are both different and the same; the dance many minority groups find themselves in, between isolating self-segregation and crushing assimilation.

Everyone has their own, entirely unique relationship with gender, sex and their own body. There are common themes, but none of them are absolutes. People need space to be different without risking rejection from the warmth, safety and security of the pack. Humans are suited to collective endeavour, but we are not a hive mind.

Organising across difference

Whether we focus on similarities or differences matters a lot when it comes to any kind of social organising. If we can only join together with other “people like us” to organise against oppression, or to create safety, there are problematic consequences. Organising around sameness and commonality risks erasing or excluding all difference. It also creates an inherently oppressive atmosphere in which assumptions are made about what “we” collectively think, feel and experience. It negates the need for us to work on our empathy and our ability to build bridges across divides.

Organising across difference lets the air in – people are free to not “fit in”, but to work together for something collectively beneficial. In a place where difference is celebrated and accepted, we are not always seeking to expel or exclude people, we are not focussed on doubting their legitimacy or vulnerability.

For non binary folk like me, there is an importance for both/and thinking that fights against the tyranny of the either/or: I have some experiences, feelings, history and biology that situate me as a woman. On the other hand, my predominant instincts from my earliest memories have drawn me towards male social rules, expression and behaviour, and in that I find I have a lot, if not more, in common with men. How I negotiate my relationship with the world given these complicated facts – how I identify, and where and how I wish to be included, should be up to me, as these experiences are inherently marginalising and render me highly vulnerable.

In an ideal world both parts of myself, and all the other parts of me that do not neatly fit this dichotomy, would be generally welcomed rather than excluded – there are some conversations that I do not feel a part of, but there are many, held under the banner of “women’s issues”, that certainly affect me.

The same but different

In reality, I am forced to conform to narrow ideas about who I am in order to negotiate my relationship with the rest of the human race; in my need to belong, I might sometimes grow tired of wearing my unicorn’s horn for all to see.

I am just the same as you, and I am nothing like you. Because mine is the minority experience, cis people have the power to choose whether to include me, accept me, believe me, or whether to use my differences to shut me out of spaces, conversations, civil rights, services, employment, toilets, and the safety of social inclusion; my being part of the human pack is entirely at the discretion of people who do not share, and may not understand, my experience and my difference.

*This blog was written just before I discovered the new, and infinitely improved, gender unicorn graphic: 

Me and my hormones

In my 20s, nobody minded messing around with my hormones. Like most uterus owners who sleep with testicle owners, I was shoved on the pill at an early age. For me personally, one dysphoria* trumped another – my absolute terror of pregnancy meant I would do anything to ensure sex was safe.

The pill seriously screwed me up, physically and emotionally. In my early 30s, a doctor figured out that I was naturally low on oestrogen, and the modern oestrogen-low pills were just making things worse. She prescribed me one of the old-fashioned pills, higher in oestrogen.

I read through the side effects and dire health warnings nonchalantly. For a very short while I felt a little better, but my body had other ideas.

Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) happened, and that was the end of me taking any kind of hormonal contraception, or any other oestrogen-based drug.

DVT meant not being able to walk, months of medical messing around and eventual surgery. More frightening than that, the clot could have travelled and caused a fatal embolism.

Needless to say, I don’t take any medication lightly now.

A decade or so later, and I am contemplating taking another hormone – testosterone. Of the physical dysphoria I experience as a transgender person, hormonal dysphoria is quite the most persistent. Ever since puberty, I have felt as if my hormones were slowly poisoning me.

The desired effect of testosterone is that I will feel better, and I admit this is an experiment – it may not be true, but I believe the anecdotal and scientific evidence stacks up enough to give it a try.

I may take it and not like it, and that’s okay. I can always stop taking it.

Like the previous hormone, I may be one of the few that suffers undesired side effects, even though the therapy has been proven to be very safe. That’s a risk I am willing to take. It frightens me – I suppose it should frighten me, but I am well informed and this is my body, my risk to take.

The side effects I am ambivalent about are the visibly masculinising effects of testosterone. I want them up to a point – as a non-binary person, I would love to be able to press “pause” at the point where it is impossible to tell whether I am “male or female”, and nobody will gender me ever again. In reality, I know from my transitioning friends that there is no such point – people will always seek to gender you, and I have friends who have been ma’am’d and sir’d on the same day.

I don’t believe that testosterone will “turn me into a man”. I don’t “want to be a man” – I am who I am, and always have been; no amount of testosterone will change who I am. There’s a chance that it will make my outside appear more congruent with who I am, because if gender was on something as simple as a line (it isn’t), then I fall on the more male end of that line.

So, a possibly beneficial side-effect of testosterone is it may ease my social dysphoria, as well as my physical dysphoria. Quite honestly I would prefer to ease my social dysphoria by challenging and changing this cissexist, sexist, heteronormative and binarist society. Sadly, changing myself turns out to be a tiny bit easier than changing the entire world – who knew?

If I get read as a man it is also quite possible I’ll feel I’ve exchanged one lie about myself for another. Only time will tell, and many people in my situation have to moderate and stop/start their testosterone dose in order to get where they need to be.

Other folks may not be entirely comfortable with the fact I don’t know exactly how (and if) things will work out for me, but I am over being certain for other people’s benefit – all of life is one experiment after another, and this is no different – it’s a thought-through, talked-through and well researched experiment, but it’s still an experiment.

I want to take testosterone and I suspect the internal map of who I am will match up to that hormone with a click, as it has for the many other trans folk who have felt the need to take it.

If it doesn’t click, well I just stop – no harm, no foul. It’s my body, my choice.

But the hormones that could have killed me, they were handed over to me with no fuss or preamble – no year of waiting, no searching questions, no psych diagnosis, no “are you really really sure?” – given to me like candy, there was a carte blanche to mess with my hormones as much as they liked as long as it was “women’s hormones” I was given.

Even that’s a lie – we all have the same hormones – men have oestrogen, women have testosterone. In no way are we as divisible, separate and binary as we love to think of ourselves.

So, next time someone speaks in hushed tones about whether a trans person understands the enormity of what they are doing, here’s the challenge – is the “enormity” really about health and psychological consequences, which have been proven time and time again to be highly favourable for trans people who seek medical treatment, or is it simply because we are screwing with a simplistic, binary picture of nature and sex?

Because I think what I am doing is no more screwing with nature than the contraceptive pill is screwing with nature. No more unnatural than anaesthetic, or abortion, or any other surgery or medical intervention that is known to prolong, preserve, or improve quality of life as medical treatment for trans people has been categorically proven to do.

I don’t want my identity to be medicalised – my identity is what it is no matter what treatment I seek, but I want the option to access healthcare that can help me.

There’s a good chance hormones will make me healthier and happier – all the evidence points that way. I hope one day my right to bodily autonomy will be fully recognised, and that folks will accept that healthier happier people do not make the world a lesser place.

 

*I’m on the fence about the word dysphoria – given its true meaning, the opposite of euphoria, it feels apt in my case, but I dislike the medicalisation of it and it’s relationship with diagnosis and mental health – my apologies to those who might prefer I used a different word.

What does dysphoria mean to me?

It took me a long time to come to the decision to transition, even though I have been out at home and work as transgender for over a year. I spent a lot of time asking would transition be right for me, whether I am “trans enough”, feeling like I was in a no person’s land.

Last week I was finally sure of my way forward; I changed my name to Sam, change my title to “Mr”, came out to the world yet again, referred myself to the gender clinic. I feel better than I’ve felt in a very long time. But I realise that, while suffering from what is currently known as “gender dysphoria”, I’ve never really tried to explain to people what that means to me.

At its most basic, I simply cannot live with the category that society placed me in when I was born. Cis people feel more comfortable having a legal and social label that is related to their genitals, whereas this categorisation causes trans people great distress.

Does that mean I think I was “born with a male brain”? Er, not really. Humans have been designed by evolution to be uniquely adaptable; our brains develop as much after birth as before, meaning we can “download” our social and physical environment and adapt easily to the changing world we’re born into. We are not, contrary to popular belief, stuck with whatever our distant ancestors adapted to in terms of social roles.

But do I think something made me think of myself as male from the get-go? Yes I do, and that’s a whole different thing, because once you understand that a young trans person instinctively sees themselves as different to the sex assigned to them, you can start to understand what it is that makes them accumulate the social conditioning of the opposite sex. I naturally followed male cues, male instructions, male rules. I ignored female ones. I was effectively socialised male, particularly when I was young. I cared about guns and bullets and hated dolls not because of something innate and natural in me but because of the way society socialised me to fit the male role. If that didn’t happen, if we didn’t have a sense of self, for whatever reason, that filters and mediates the societal messages we get, well then I guess we’d all be walking gender stereotypes.

So what’s natural, and possibly innate, about me is simply the sense of self that initiated all this male socialisation. Fundamentally, and for reasons I do not fully know, I think of myself as a male and always have done.

I think it’s also important to note that people around me responded to my “boyishness”, and that reinforced it – so they weren’t just treating me as a girl, they were also treating me as a boyish person, and a gender non-conforming person. My socialisation was completely different than that of a cisgender girl.

Trans people’s socialisation is not straightforward

So when people say trans folk were socialised as their assigned sex, that’s just not true. I may have experienced some sexist treatment for being perceived (in some ways) as a girl, and considerably more cissexist treatment for being non-conforming, but I also experienced a lot of approval for my “masculine” traits and behaviours; I definitely absorbed the message “I am masculine and masculine is better” – I also developed ideas about femininity being more artificial and inferior. Of course it felt artificial to me because I wasn’t orientated that way, but now I can see that my own way of being, my own attitudes and behaviours were just as artificial, just as constructed, albeit constructed with a built-in notion of male superiority.

So, I hate it when folks say all people with vaginas have some sort of shared experience of womanhood that trans women never had. Trans women have a shared experience of womanhood that is a mystery to me – they have thought of themselves as female and absorbed the according social instructions.

I, on the other hand felt like an imposter, an infiltrator in girls’ and women’s spaces, and a lot of gender conforming girls and women shunned me for my “male energy”. I was an outsider; I fought long and hard to fit the category “woman” and I absolutely don’t believe I should have been shunned from it. Nor should I have had to spend so much of my life changing myself to try and conform to society’s ideas about what a woman should be. I understand and empathise with gender non-conforming folks assigned female at birth fighting to be accepted, included and recognised as women.

But being part of the lesbian community healed that wound for me – I was accepted as a woman, and my difference was embraced. I am glad I had that experience so that I know I am not choosing my current path for cisnormative or heteronormative reasons. But in order to reinforce that sense of belonging to the arbitrary category “women”, the lesbian community erases a deeper dialogue about transgender experiences.

I am what I say I am

As someone who has a fundamentally different socialisation experience from both cis men and cis women, but is forced to live in a world where cis people dominate the discourse and dictate the terms of our lives, I feel very strongly that only I can choose where best I fit in this false and imperfect system, and how best to deal with my situation. If I say that “I am a man” this does not mean I think I don’t have a vagina, it means that “I am a man” is the statement that best describes who I am in a world that has categorised everyone for the comfort of cisgender people. Equally, if it felt comfortable for me to do so, it would be just as valid for me to identify as a woman. Only I get to decide this, because only I am inside my own head and body.

In reality, I remain genderqueer – a person with an identity too complex to insert into a neat binary, but the binary is here and I have to deal with it whether I want to or not. And believe me, the gender and sex binary mutilates me in ways no surgery ever could. If I choose to take hormones or have surgery to ease my distress, that should not be anybody’s business but my own. Nor should transition be seen as something so very huge – HRT and reconstructive surgery are routine things; what really feels huge to cis people is the challenging of sex assignment as the natural order of things.

And to be clear, I do not believe that giving children the burden of a legal and social status according to their genitalia is “the natural order of things” – it’s just a tradition we go along with without thinking.

There’s another side to this. My need to stand in my power as a masculine person and not duck the issue by pretending to be someone I’m not. It has been incredibly hard for me to admit my maleness, to accept that if there is a “male gaze” then like it or not, I have it. I have experienced huge amounts of shame and denial about this. I cannot say that I “want” to be a man, but I am finally ready to admit and take responsibility for how much of a man I am.

Many other cultures treat what we call transgender people as spiritual and important. Alternative perspectives in society can often be hugely positive if we don’t try and co-opt or erase each other. To me, we are all interrelated, all of us who transgress gender rules and norms. Not the same, but natural allies. We should be working together to dismantle all aspects of gendered oppression.

No-person’s land

TW: discussion of suicide

Please Note: The process of writing this blog post has shifted things for me dramatically. For the first time in months, I feel I know my way forward and am feeling quietly elated about this. It goes to show that sometimes, when we shine a light into the shadows it really pays off. Because of this, I decided to go ahead and publish the post, even if it does not reflect how I’m feeling right now. Thanks to all those who stuck by me while I went through this pain.

It’s probably not a secret that I have been struggling with suicidal thoughts. The news about Robin Williams, an icon from my childhood (long before the problematic Mrs Doubtfire, I hasten to add) hit me doubly hard because of this. I find myself asking questions that can’t be answered – Robin, what tipped you over from thinking about it to doing it? I feel sad that someone who meant so much to me growing up did not know his worth.

I see this meme flying around the internet and it resonates with me:

Let’s be clear, I’m not going to kill myself; this is not a threat, but sometimes it feels just as realistic (or unrealistic) as all my other options. I find myself stuck in a non-life, just keeping going and hoping things will make sense again one day soon.

When I was 18, and first thinking about my queerness, I saw the film Dead Poet’s Society in the cinema. To me, the film was about the impossibility of being different; in fact I would go further and say the film was implicitly about being queer. And it was about a world that would not make room for the queer kid. Where the queer kid kills himself.

The film speaks to a pain that is probably in most of us – just how different am I able to be before the world starts to push back against my difference and refuse to accommodate it?

For me, a lifelong struggle with being transgender is my difference. At that age I was secretly cross-dressing in my father’s old clothes, but I had no notion of the word transgender – I knew in my head I was more boy than girl, but not what that meant. Later, I would make some sort of sense of it with the word “lesbian” – by then a (relatively) socially acceptable term, but not the correct one – my sense of belonging to the lesbian community was about finding other “women like me” – it had little to do with my sexuality, and everything to do with my gender.

But there was such institutional stigma towards transgender folks in the lesbian community that my forward motion completely stalled. Four years ago I found myself meditating on an image of myself hanging onto a branch over a river, refusing to allow myself to be carried any further. I was stuck; I knew I was stuck, but I was terrified of the rapids ahead.

Oh, the irony that it was my partner, out of nowhere, who would come out as transgender ahead of me and make me look like I was jumping on some sort of bandwaggon! My initial fury at his audacity quickly transformed into a very belated admission: “But I’m transgender too!”

There, I’ve admitted it. And yet, I’m still hanging onto that branch, because every time I meditate, every time I get in touch with myself in therapy, my heart whispers the word “transition” to me. I’m not clear what “transition” means to me yet, or how it could be accomplished. Lana Wachowski called it going from invisible to visible; I call it becoming myself, letting myself truly be seen. And such a thing feels utterly impossible to me.

And so I continue my activism, hoping that one day I’ll make the world safe enough to allow me to really be me. Those that get ticked off with my “political” nature need to know this; I’m fighting for my survival, nothing less, because some days all ways forward seem impossible.

I’m still genderqueer; I identify, for want of more adequate words, as “masculine of centre” and male-socialised, but I am not entirely comfortable with calling myself “a man”. I find it impossible to face up to the artificial reality that society constructs; you are either one thing or another. If I am a “man”, then the affinity I feel with many trans women and lesbians becomes meaningless, because “woman” and “man” are presented to us as two mutually exclusive and oppositional groups.

I would rather not be assigned a sex or a gender at all; I would rather not be labelled according to how I look or what’s between my legs, but I have had to accept that society is not going to change if even the most radical of feminists cannot see the problem with categorising people according to their genitals. I don’t feel it’s me that needs to change, but society; and that, my friends, is a somewhat Quixotic position to be taking.

In therapy, I talk about being in no-person’s land; a muddy world of barbed wire and shell-holes from the battle of the sexes. I’m sure there’s fertile earth under all this mud but there aren’t enough people standing their ground here to make this place viable – our very language erases the possibility of gender neutrality. Even if it’s where I belong, it often feels impossible to live in such a place – a land unrecognised, blasted into oblivion.

Transitioning (whatever that entails) means obliterating all that’s left of my cisgender privilege; living my life as a second class citizen, constantly having my legitimacy and sanity called into question. The subtle violence of that is, inevitably, going to take its toll on my mental health; it already is – will I cope, or will I crumble? The catch-22 is obvious: our mental well-being is intimately connected to our levels of social support – as trans people’s social support lessens, our mental health worsens, and it becomes increasingly easy to dismiss our situation as delusional or a mistake that is making us worse, which inevitably means people will become even less supportive of what we are doing, and our mental health will worsen further still . . .

Where I am now seems safer – the comfortable lie, I’m just a genderqueer “woman” and you may as well call me she (because let’s face it, I’ll be old before “they” catches on). You can imagine me as part of this overall group “women”, I can carry on enjoying social inclusion in the only world I know. It’s tempting, even though it’s a lie.

And then I think of Robin Williams again, and that quote above. What if I keep on trying to fit in with this cis-tem that mutilates me more than surgery ever could? What if I compromise myself over and over until it becomes unendurable? If I take the “safer” path, will everything seem okay until one day I snap spectacularly? Will I feel included, but ultimately alone?

I know what I need to do. I need to find the path of my transition, however peculiar that path might be, however lonely. I just don’t know if I have the courage to do it, or where it will take me.

Please use my pronouns!

Not so much a blog post this week, as a request.

You see, as I have been trying to explain, I suffer from a thing called gender dysphoria. This means the legal and social identity assigned to me when I was born (female) does not feel relevant, authentic, comfortable or congruent with who I really am, and causes me actual distress. It has been a struggle for me to admit this, because the world is not very understanding towards transgender people.

But transgender is genuinely what I am – the classification imposed on me is just plain wrong for me; it does not work. As such, whenever somebody labels me or addresses me as female, I feel just like the trans woman in this picture feels about being labelled male:

These are my preferred pronouns: They/them/their. Please let go of issues such as how they are difficult to use, or “not correct English” – language evolves to reflect human need, and besides there is plenty of evidence to support the use of singular they – you probably already use it way more than you realise. Frankly, you’ll get used to it with practice; your suffering of a little linguistic awkwardness does not really compare to the misery I feel in being continually invalidated by language that does not describe me.

Imagine if everyone called you “shorty”, and although you’re short, you didn’t want your identity based around your shortness. People would be pretty mean to go on calling you “shorty” after you said please don’t.

Well, when you call me “she” or “woman” you’re effectively saying my defining attribute is my vagina, and honestly I think what’s between my legs is about as relevant as how tall I am or what colour my eyes are. Just because everyone’s in the habit of labelling people this way, doesn’t make it useful.

If you really cannot get your head round using they/them/their, I’d like to offer you other options:

You could use my name, or my initial: Sam came over and I asked S to stay for tea

You could use ze/hir (pronounced zee/hear): Ze laughed/ I called hir/ Hir eyes gleam/ That is hirs/ Ze likes hirself – this seems to be the most popular pronoun choice next to they.

If you find another legitimate gender neutral pronoun (other than “it” – ugh!) – feel free to use that. I don’t mind being called per, ve, xie, co or any other neutral pronoun.

Or it you are unable to use any of those other options, I would infinitely prefer you to use male pronouns for me than female pronouns, because at least that would acknowledge and not invisibilise my transgender identity and my male aspect.

I have watched people around me accept my partner’s change of name and impending transition while being dismissive of my own, equally legitimate gender dysphoria. Try not to think of being transgender as some sort of linear scale, where non-binary people are just a watered-down version of “fully” or “properly” transgender people – that isn’t how it works. All transgender people, just like everyone else, are a unique scatterplot of different traits and experiences, biological and social influences that add up to their own individual conclusion. We need to be respected for who we say we are. We each have our own trials and challenges. I admit I have lots of privileges at the moment in not transitioning, but having my identity constantly ignored, whilst it has some advantages in terms of my safety, is profoundly psychologically distressing.

So please, if you want to help me not feel constantly distressed, eradicated and marginalised by the language you use, please don’t call me “she” or use female ways to describe me.

I am trying to be patient – I know it is difficult and I frequently misgender myself, so I will not be jumping down your throat for getting it wrong, but it would mean a lot to me if you would accept in your own mind the necessity of the effort to try. Because my welfare is at stake in this and gendering me female is psychologically undermining me every time it happens.

This is about authenticity, not privilege

In the past year both my partner and I came out as transgender. He is transitioning, I’m not, but we’re both not so very far from each other in the gender multiverse. Somewhere in the “in-between” leaning towards maleness, but not all the way over. Even if he’s a he and I’m a they, even if I keep bits he doesn’t want, even if he gets bits I don’t want, this relationship is still effectively homo. Despite this we can feel our community slipping away from us, as people assume we’ve become a straight couple because they only believe in binaries, or as folks simply back away in shear incomprehension or disbelief.

Don’t get me wrong, we have many amazing, supportive friends. But I’m talking now about the wider community and the mainstream attitudes and practices within that community. For ten years I silenced myself over gender because the dominant lesbian narrative carefully constructs gender variance as an aspect of sexual orientation, and characterises being openly transgender as some sort of deluded cop-out.

Sometimes I too have my moments of “hey, have we just lost our minds???” but if so, why, in the face of all opposition, do I feel so grounded and so clear, like the only person in the theatre who has seen through a magic trick?

For many folks, though, this is way out of their reckoning, and deeply suspect. They have their own answers to what’s going on, the main one being that after a combined 40ish years of being lesbians and feminists, we just couldn’t hack it and want to acquire hetero and male privilege.

I never had a problem being out as a lesbian, but when I felt I needed to out myself as trans* at work, I cried every night for a week, agonising over whether I really needed to tell them or whether I should stay in the closet. They already knew my partner was transgender because I couldn’t very well hide the change of pronouns, but me too? That doesn’t fit so neatly; sounds a bit far-fetched. I know nobody’s going to be getting my pronouns right, I know few people will understand, so why should I bother sharing this intimate detail with the world?

Well, because I’m a counsellor and a writer and who I am and what I do pretty much relies on me being congruent and authentic. I can’t hide a huge part of who I am without becoming incongruent and false; the very opposite of what I need to be to do my work well.

The tears, in the end, were the agony of silence. When it was all out in the open, I felt ok, even if I knew I wasn’t always being fully understood. And now I’m out I can state with absolute certainty that saying you’re a lesbian is easier in any scenario than saying you’re transgender. Lesbians are 1 in 20, transgender folk are more like 1 in 1000 – and people just don’t get it.

What doesn’t fit someone’s experience or knowledge still attracts confident conclusions – conclusions about your mental health, about your not coping with being a lesbian or never having been a proper one, about what your sexuality really is, about your wanting to appear more “normal” or normative; your trying to gain privilege. They decide you’re trying to escape something or making drama or simply hell-bent on misery. Anything other than the simple reality that you went deeper into yourself and came nearer to the truth.

And then there are the members of your community who are involved in such deeply transphobic campaigning that your hands start to shake at the mention of their name. Others politely try to see both sides and remain neutral. They don’t really get how much the campaigning hurts or the damage it does. Suddenly you’re afraid to go to parties and gatherings and you realise the transphobes are more welcome in what you considered your own community than you are.

I’ve discovered the hard way that what I thought was an inclusive community is often just a bunch of people who want to hang out with folks as similar to them as possible, and in that respect they are really no more enlightened than a bunch of cis-het white dudes. Their cool extra weapon for marginalisation is attaching spurious privilege to you in any way they can, so they can feel righteous rather than guilty about shunning you. Or they simply say you should go hang out with other people like you.

But there aren’t too many out people like me, although I’m touched by the number of lesbian friends who have affirmed how my story resonates with their experience. There are even fewer out transmen. It’s lonely here, because for all I have good friends I really do fear I’m losing my community. Permaculture tells us growth happens on the margins, but still the margins are a precarious place to be.

I’m not going to pretend to be what I’m not in order to fit the mainstream lesbian narrative. I’m strong enough to stand apart, and I am indeed privileged to have the inner resources and the circle of support to do this. But it does hurt to be in a “community” that goes to such great lengths to organise groups and events that only cater for the majority, and leaves trans* people (among others) uncertain of their welcome or certain of their exclusion.