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For the Gatekeepers, Part 1

My first story actually begins before I could understand words, let along remember anything. My mum told me the other day that as a baby people mistook be for a girl – because I was 'so cute', apprently. I think most babies are cute and often confused for the other gender if not wearing blue or pink, but I'm still slightly chuffed, so I'll take it.

I don’t remember ever explicitly saying ‘I am a girl’, or even ‘I want to be a girl’. But there was an age where I began to behave in a feminine manner. I had a girlfriend (which at around 6 years old is an interesting affair) and I spent all my free time with her and her best friend. I asked for dolls and skipping rope, and my parents obliged me.

For maybe a couple of months I did girly things with my girlfriend and her friend. Eventually, though, they got fed up of me, and I was left isolated. I was being bullied. One day I gave up on it all, and starting playing football with the boys. I came to love football, and I still get a kick out of it today (sue me).

At perhaps 8 or 9 I started reading the Dolphin Diaries. I remember feeling that this was something I had to keep secret - but I loved those books dearly. They were stories about a young girl helping dolphins, complete with girly cover art. I went back to read a page of one of those books recently, and 10 pages later I came out of my dazed state. The author has an addictively simple narrative style. But anyway.

I don’t really remember anything girly from my childhood until I started cross dressing. At maybe 11 or 12, I started to wear my mums underwear. When I knew everyone in the house was out, I would go to my parents bedroom and put on a pair of my mums knickers, and admire myself in the mirror.

At this time it was a sexual thing - but maybe that’s too simple a way of putting it. I liked how I looked in the mirror. It wasn’t about the underwear, although that was kind of exciting too I suppose. It just was, and is very difficult to explain in any way. I just had the impulse to do it, and I believed at the time that it was purely sexual. 

Looking back at it I'm really ashamed that I wore my mother's underwear – especially in such a sexual manner. In practice she wasn't really part of the picture, and I was just going by my impulses and using what was available to me at the time.

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For the Gatekeepers, Part 2

The year I turned 18 I was due to start university. University was amazing as a place to meet people who were liberally minded, the types to state that gender and sexuality were fluid social constructs. I like these people, needless to say – but I didn't find any of them in my first year, or if I did I didn't yet know them very well. My first year was spent living in the halls of residence with a group of people who didn't really stay my friends.

I had been living maybe 4 or 5 months without any women's clothes. One of my flatmates would air her laundary in the corridor. GG-size bras and matching knickers. I figured that it was better for a guy to buy women's underwear than to steal it off a flatmate (and less horrible), so I went to Ann Summers on my first trans shopping experience – but more on that another time. I brought a tiny pink thong.

I got the first inkling that this wasn't just a sexul thing when I found myself lying in that post-orgasmic glow a little too long, still wearing the knickers. Before I could only get privacy for limited periods of time, but with a lock on my door I found myself wearing the thong a little bit longer each time. I decided to just go with it and do what I wanted to – but at the same time buying any more clothes seemed like a waste of money. At the end of the year I threw them out, not wanting to risk discovery by my parents.

In my second and third years of university I lived with four other guys who I had met at the housing social. After picking the only room with a lock on it, I brought more underwear a few months in to my second year. In those two years I gathered two bras and three pairs of knickers in total. I experimented with wearing them for longer periods of time, and started to wear a shirt over them that looked feminine, if I stuffed the bra. The clothes were ill-fitting and uncomfortable

I also met and got to know a few of the afore mentioned liberal types. The friendship group frequented a gay bar and the most macho guy in the group was the one who crossdressed for Halloween. I appreciated the attitudes of (most of) the people around me. Around some of these friends I started making jokes, these almost-allusions to being trans. In one instance I joked that I wasn't a man at all when a friend called me manly, for example.

I also referred to things I didn't like about my body. My face is too sqaure, my shoulders too broad. My friends invariably disagreed and I felt a little confused. Of course my face is too square, I thought.

It's strange to look back at this, because although I was well aware of what trans people were (and had read a couple of books about trans people) I never conciuosly thought that I was trans. One memorable conversation went down like this:

A couple of my female friends are talkng about clothes. I chip in, 'Oh, I saw a really cheap bra the other day.' At this point I'm realising that guys don't normally have much reason to notice the price tag on a bra. 'It would be a good deal, uh, if I was a woman.'

'You should just stuff the bra.' says my friend, who obviously had cottoned on to my trans status before I did.

So why did I never make the connection? I think part of the reason was that even if I dressed up in what clothes I had and posed in the mirror, I would look like a man in women's clothes. I didn't own any dresses that would cover my masculine body – just underwear. Dressing up made me feel dysphoric. It didn't have this irresistable pull that I felt it must have for trans people and I didn't crossdress that frequently as a result.

It wasn't until I was reading the stories of trans people on reddit and seeing just how plausible transition actually was that I seriously considered it. Which brings us to today.

[stephlouiseblack]

For the Gatekeepers, Introduction

The documentaries and TV interviews that have talked about trans people often talk about the gender expression of the person as a child, and their early feelings and experiences cross dressing. These stories are echoed by the memoirs of trans people, and their gender identity is evident when they are very young. These stories are very popular, it seems.

They have also proved popular with so-called gatekeepers. In the trans community, a ‘gatekeeper’ refers to a medical professional (usually a therapist) who requires trans people to meet arbitrary requirements. This might be presenting as their desired gender in public before any hormone therapy makes the individual look like that gender - and sometimes, for a significant period of time too. Or, it might be telling the stories of their childhood that ‘prove’ their transness.

I would make a distinction between most therapists and gatekeepers. The difference is that getting someone to present as their gender out in public for a year before they can go on HRT is absolutely unreasonable – but getting them to do so once in their own home is not. After all, there are reasons for someone to desire a transition besides being trans, including disassociative identity disorder, schizophrenia, and others.

It gets trickier with childhood stories though, partly because not everybody has much of a story to tell. This doesn’t mean they’re not trans - they might not have a good memory for one reason or another, and they could reasonably be unwilling to ask the parents about it. They might have repressed their trans feelings from an earlier age and tried their best to fit in, so they have

Even though I know that a childhood story isn't a good basis for diagnosis – I still find myself searching for them in my own past. Partly I'm looking for the answers that I'll give a therapist one day – but I'm looking for answers for me, too. Why do I find this topic fascinating, and why do documantary makers and gatekeepers for that matter?

Perhaps it's just natural to try and find the first instance of something happening, to look for the cause. It doesn't work quite the same way as searching for our first experience of being afraid of dogs, since trans is something you are born as. But I think that is the logic behind digging up the past to make sense of my trans status.

Either way, I've been thinking back to my early childhood and writing everything that I can remember down. Read on, gatekeepers, and be amazed.

[stephlouiseblack]

Transgender 101

I thought I'd put this here as my second post just in case you read my first one and were massively confused. It would be nice if this wasn't necessary, if we could tell a coming out story about being trans as easily as we could one about being gay.

Sadly, people don't really get what trans people are. It's not necessarily their fault - it's just that they don't hear about trans people, or if they do, it's misinformation. They see them in porn, or hear about them on the news as a shocking headline. They don't understand why trans people are the way they are.

A transsexual person is someone who identifies as a different gender to the one they were assigned at birth. When they were born, the doctor exclaimed "it's a boy!" and they were raised a boy and given trucks as toys, until many years later they said one day "actually, I think I'm a girl." They don't know why this is the case, but it feels right. This example is of a trans girl, or trans woman. Her body is male, but her mind is telling her that she is a woman.

Because of this many transsexual people transition. They take steps to change their physical body to match their brain sex. This is achieved mainly through hormone therapy. A trans man, for example, would go on blockers for female hormones and take testosterone. This replicates the hormone levels found in most men.

Alongside a physical transition many trans people talk about a 'social transition'. Social behaviors, mannerisms, and manner of speech are all highly gendered, as trans people are aware more than anyone. 

The early stages of transition can bring a lot of stigma for trans people. So why transition? The brain sex of a trans person will make itself known through gender dysphoria. For a trans girl, having the body of a boy is uncomfortable. Dysphoria can be so painful that many suffer anxiety and depression, or worse. Transitioning is not so much something that trans people fancy doing, as something they do for their survival.

If you've read this far, odds are you're a cis person. Cisgendered people were assigned a gender at birth that matches their brain sex. This is a useful term to have, because it stops the need for terms such as 'natural born woman'. Trans women are also natural born women - many theorise that birth sex is decided in the womb. Trans women are only as natural as cis women.

Finally, 'transgender' is a broader term. Often transgender people don't identify as another gender. Instead, they present as that gender from time to time, through crossdressing in private or public, or through drag. Some transgender people don't have any desire to transition, and others later discover this desire. All transsexuals are transgendered. 

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The Realisation

I had taken the week off from work, and the grand plans that I had for my time off weren't really working out. I hadn't submitted my work to poetry magazines, or applied to any jobs where they would actually pay me, or started writing articles for a friend's magazine. In fact I had done very little at all, except play copius amounts of XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Loadout. I was feeling unhappy. When I wasn't at work, I didn't seem to be able to motivate myself to do anything. Hell, I still can't, really, even though doing nothing at all leaves me feeling really unhappy.

My other methods of procrastination are YouTube and Reddit. I'm a 21st Century digital boy alright, and this week had been particularly lazy. I had signed up to Reddit about a month previously, and I subscribed to a number of subreddits: gaming, dnd, books, writing prompts. I also signed up for askfeminism and asktransgender. I knew a little about these topics already and they were simply interesting to me.

I never ended up reading much of askfeminism, but by the end of that month I was well versed in the posts on asktransgender. People who were questioning or in the early stages of transition would ask questions to try to ease the doubts they had - and the responses were heartening, I suppose. "Actually, I don't have a huge history of childhood crossdressing, and I'm trans." "Actually, everyone can pass as their desired gender with 6-12 months on hormones and maybe some minor surgery." I was unsure of whether to believe these posts or not, but the week I was off work I subscribed to a few more subreddits, including transtimelines.

Some of the guys and girls that post there are incredible – a man frowns at you in the first picture, and a woman is smiling sweetly in the second, and you're left wondering how the hell that happened, let alone in 3 months HRT. Others are more gradual, and there is a middle phase of androgeny before the person really looks like a man or woman, before they really look happy. Some of it must be the angle of the camera, or the lighting, or something, I reason – but whatever it is, they are who they were supposed to be. And they are happy about it.

After a week of procrastinating, playing games and looking on Reddit, I realised that I had spent more time on the trans subreddits than all the others put together. I had seen every single new post on transtimelines, and I got a buzz from people's progress. I was beginning to wonder if I was trans.

Yeah, I thought. That makes a lot of sense. I'm trans!

It's never as simple as that and the more I think about things the more unsure I feel about it. I hadn't really 'realised' anything – but I have started 'questioning' now, and I'm on my first steps towards transition – or something else, perhaps.