What it is like to be Trans

Five years in, my reflection on being trans every day

Before I transitioned, gender was like a mote in my eyes. There was nothing I could look at, no ability to focus on anything entirely separate from my awareness of it. It colored my perception of other people, of how the world worked, of my own comfort or discomfort in any given situation.

Since beginning to medically transition five years ago, that has changed dramatically. I view gender and sexuality differently. I feel wildly different in my body and identity. Early on, I was asked the question “what is is like to be trans?” pretty often. That has become much more infrequent now, but as I approach my five year anniversary, this felt like a good time to revisit the question.

First off, some perimeters. To be trans, for me, is a different question when applied to different arenas: to be trans as an identity in the world right now, to be trans in social relationships/in relationship to those I interact with, and my own relationship to being trans.

Let’s start with the innermost circle: how it feels to me to be trans.

How being trans feels to me

The most wonderful and almost laughably ironic thing about transitioning for me is that as soon as I did it, all of the fears and doubts and insecurities that had seemed insurmountable beforehand faded away. I have described it as spending my whole life thinking there is a monster under the bed, only to look under the bed and find dust balls.

Being trans feels right. In fact, it feels so right that it doesn’t even warrant thought. (That’s when you really know something is right). I love the unique perspective that I operate out of. I love being able to dance a line, to be read and accepted as male, and to also not fit into a cis male category. I love looking in the mirror from a certain distance and seeing the muscular bulk of my shoulders, then taking a step back and bringing my scars into view, seeing the curve of my hips. I love (in my own estimation), being both male, and also not. It feels magic, exceptional.

There are still the occasional moments when I feel the grief of ‘never knowing.’ That is, the moments in which I am envious of cis men, saddened that there are certain experiences they are born into having that I will never have in the same way. I don’t find the defensive narrative of trans men having the exact same experience or being able to do ‘everything’ that cis men can do helpful. The aggression of this narrative, to me, exposes its vulnerability. The reality is that our experience is different, but that that difference isn’t a bad thing, that we cannot and should not apply an inherent value judgement in the comparison. That in the same way in which I will not experience certain things cis men experience, they will not experience certain things I experience. Still, while this can feel like a powerful counter argument, a detente, I see it as natural to occasionally feel a bout of grief or resentment around this.

But mostly being trans feels like the most true and interesting way to live my life. I know that looking back on my life I will feel nothing but pride and gratitude for having made the leap, and for all of the joy and peace it has brought. I am a believer in the idea that being trans is not a difference in kind but in degree, an experience built on universal experiences. We all long to be seen and known, to feel true to ourselves, to feel that we are understood and desired and loved for who we are. Being trans forces me to face these core human needs in a very explicit way–that can sometimes be a burden, but it is also a gift.

Socially Trans: Being Trans in Relationship to Others

Being trans in relationship to myself and in relationship to others has been a self-reinforcing process. That is, I started out very tentative, fearful of rejection or pity, and not very comfortable in my body. As I received acceptance and love and desire and respect from others, this then emboldened and empowered me. It was not as though my confidence was dependent on others, but that they provided the first shelf of land for me to then inhabit, grow strong in, and own. Bit by bit (if the analogy is having been out at sea), a passing comment “you’re looking ripped,” or “have a good day sir,” garnered me another foot of land. I stood tall, I explored, I came to feel comfortable in my dimensions. And the more I was confident, the more the world reflected that back at me. Confidence is a beautifully self-reinforcing thing.

At this point in my life, I am almost never misgendered. In fact just the other week, our next door neighbor, who is a wonderful older woman and a dear friend of ours, used ‘her’ in reference to me when she was yelling at her dog to stop jumping on me, and it was a complete non-event for me. It didn’t trigger any dysphoria or discomfort. I wasn’t even sure whether it had to do with gender at all, or just the kind of language slippage we all sometimes make, especially as we age.

I also operate out of an interesting position in the sense that I am read, as far as I can tell, as male by pretty much everyone, but if I get into even the briefest of conversations with people, it’s almost impossible for my transness to not only come out, but to become a topic of conversation. This is simply due to the fact that strangers, when they meet, almost always inevitably ask the other person “so what do you do?” and there is no way for me to talk about being the founder of Both& without my transness being a part of it. Sometimes this can be exhausting, but for the most part I have had a really positive experience being able to connect with and talk about transness with folks on terms (business) they understand and therefore feel much more comfortable with. I doubt that I have changed the minds of any true transphobes, but I have certainly brought plenty of people who were somewhat neutral or didn’t know what to think into a place of greater understanding and compassion.

I am extraordinarily grateful for the community I have–for my biological family and my wife’s family, all of whom are loving and supportive, for my wide set of friends all around the world. Articulating your greatest fear and desire, holding it out in the palm of your hands for the world to react to, is a profoundly scary thing. To have had the experience of my community blessing my passage, supporting me and loving me without a hitch, has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. My hope is that we can build a world where that is more and more often the case.

Trans as a Political Identity

Because I am not only trans, but am seen as a kind of representative of trans people, given Both&, I am often the person who gets inundated with articles or podcasts etc. when well intentioned people in my community come across something about trans issues they find interesting and want my take on. Sometimes this can be fun, and lead to thoughtful conversations. But as a whole, I am not someone who is good at being exposed to politics all day every day. We all have our different ways of making an impact–I have known from a young age that I am best suited for impact on those directly around me. Both& is an extension of that, a humble but important way of making as many trans and gender queer folks’ lives a little bit more joyful every day.

My personal, philosophical read transness in politics today is that we are not simply a hot topic that polls well strategically for the right, but that we do so because we represent or press the button on very real, foundational insecurities in modern culture. There is a crisis around masculinity, on what it means to be male and what the value of men today is. As a trans man, I am in a fascinating position in relationship to that. I am all for deconstruction and reconstruction of masculinity, I am walking curation of the parts of it I am drawn to and resonate with and the parts I want nothing to do with. In a way, this is what cis men in America today are being asked to do (though not explicitly, and often in contradictory terms). I would also argue that trans women, in a way, are the other side of the same coin–they are read as a threat to maleness, its usage, its flexibility, its discard-ability. Tear down the boundaries people thought were natural and every lasting and then what? How to face that freedom? How to navigate without the signposts you thought would always be there? Transness is etymologically a ‘crossing over.’ It’s the frontier, at a time when we are culturally at sea. Everything that felt like a given is now an unknown. It does not surprise me, given the time we are living in, that we have become a kind of trojan horse for all of this cultural anxiety.

What I have found to be the best, healthiest formula in my own life is to balance three things: to make the biggest impact I am able to make in constructively moving society forward towards acceptance and understanding of trans people, to spend time thinking deeply about the first principles and roots of the insecurities and tensions that come up in this conversation rather than having a knee jerk reaction to any idea that isn’t immediately comfortable to me, and finally, to surround myself with love and acceptance from my community.

Final thoughts

If I weren’t building Both&, I don’t know what role gender or transness would play in my life, how present it would be relative to how it is right now. But the irony for me is that its presence has done a 180–it used to be entirely private, entirely something between me and myself. Now it’s not really a topic of thought in relation to me personally, but it’s a constant present in my external life, in my work and in the social interactions that come about through that.

I am grateful to be trans. It has colored my life with such richness, such nuance. It has forced me to be intentional about who I am in essentially every way, and I see no downside to that. My hope is that we as a society will hear more and more stories of transness not as a polarizing or disempowering or negative experience, but as one filled with joy and stimulation and magic.