in the wake of chimamandaâs comments on trans womensâ âmale privilegeâ and âmale socializationâ i have seen a lot of transfemme and nonbinary femme friends, in their personal posts, speak of having felt like girls their whole lives, and not having experienced male socialization ever because they were never male. and like, hell yeah. i want to scream âyes!!!â at everything im hearing that unpacks and chips away at this ugly twerf logic, i canât relate personally. and i feel wrong for it. i feel like iâve missed some important marker of trans identity, and that maybe, somehow, i had been socialized as male.
this is the first time ive ever collected these thoughts into writing, so bear with me.
starting from the beginning of my life, my concept of self came very late. i was diagnosed with autism at age 3, which might have something to do with it. i was stumbling through life for a long time and nothing anyone told me i was really stuck. i had a sister a year and a half younger than me and when she was 1 and 2 and i was 2 and 3 we played a lot of dress up. thereâs tons of photos of me wearing my sisterâs midnight blue velvet dress with little sequins dotted over it like constellations. i look at those photos and try to see a little girl, who would eventually become me, but i dont think i could ever impose that level of consciousness on myself. i dont think i knew back then what boys and girls were. or that i was doing anything out of the ordinary by wearing a dress, or making a statement that i was not what my parents and their family and friends referred to me as. i think i just wanted to wear the dress.
fast forward to elementary school. as far as i can remember, i never thought of myself as a girl, i never claimed i was a girl, i dont really think i flirted with the idea of being anything other than what was on my birth certificate. but i didnt have a relationship with masculinity or maleness. it was just something i thought came with the package. i didnt know it was negotiable. if i had known, perhaps i wouldâve cared enough to express otherwise. but, as i said before, autism often just put me in this fantasy land of stories i created and things i liked. generally my childhood is very foggy and made up of small, abstract memories that donât connect any dots. itâs been hard on me cuz without it i feel like i canât get to the root of my relationship to gender, which only leaves me with what i learned when i started using tumblr and learned about queer identity, issues and politics from my high schoolâs feminist club.
so while all this was happening i was growing up, going to school, making friends, as a boy. presumably. and most of my friends were Boys with a capital B. 4th to 6th grade was peak suburban MySpace-era angsty prepubescent boyhood. i could write a movie on it. video games, junk food, offensive 4chan jokes, fall out boy, failing at sports, wanting to be a pro skateboarder, starting a bad band in my garage. we threw gay around as an insult, as preteens with internet access and no supervision do. it never felt like it was directed at me as a speculation of my sexuality, or by extension my gender. i was called âr*tardedâ a lot though, and that stung.
but i still did not fully subscribe to masculinity, and things i associated with masculinity, like guns and violence. the one time i ever hit a friend, in 5th grade, is one of the few memories that have stuck with me over time because it was so traumatic. and i suppose not liking violence or jokes about violence was seen as feminine by my peers. but did i think of myself as feminine? through any of my interests that deviated from the social norm for teenage boys? no. i didnât know it was an option.
learning about non-binary gender in high school did not quite explain what i had felt about masculinity in my youth, in the way where i had the thought âi must have been this way the whole time.â i truly did think i was a boy. i didnât think i fit in, but i didnât know i could break out either. so it was an entirely new perspective, but one that resonated with me intensely in such a way that it did not take long for me to say to myself: âthis is me.â i was a boy, but now i was something else completely. as time went on i embraced a new femmeness that has brought me to my current relationship with gender now, as a nonbinary trans woman.
so this raises a lot of questions, which i dont expect to really ever answer with surety. was i a boy? probably, yes. was i socialized male? well, if i didnât know or act otherwise, i suppose so. does that affect who i am now or delegitimize it? hell fucking no. and i suppose thatâs the conclusion i was looking to come to. that there is ample room for nuance in this discussion. some trans women were always female, and effused a femme aura that others had caught onto (and christened as Wrong due to the dominant transmisogynist mindset.) i just did not. and maybe others feel the same way. i mentally and spiritually transitioned, but perhaps both eras of me were the result of full self-consciousness and self-actualization.
im of course worried that i am misgendering and committing violence towards my former self. that somehow inherently there has always been a girl in this body and i just wont recognize it because ive chosen to believe that who i thought i was was True. maybe someone else will look at those photos of me in the midnight blue dress and see a girl just trying to be herself. and ill realized i denied her happiness.
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