Iâm tired of pretending this isnât a problem.
Iâm a 21 year old trans man. Iâve known who I am since I was 7. I learned the language to describe it when I was 12. Iâve been openly trans since I was 13. I have diagnosed gender dysphoria the kind that wrecks your brain and your body, the kind that makes living in the wrong skin unbearable, and the kind thatâs been at the core of what being transgender actually means for decades.
And letâs be clear about something: gender dysphoria is not new. It didnât just appear out of nowhere in 2013. Gender dysphoria was first formally recognized on July 6th, 1919, in Berlin, Germany, at the Institute of Sexual Science (also known as Sexology). That institute became a refuge for early trans people and a pioneering center for gender-affirming medical research. But on May 6th, 1933, the Nazis raided and burned it down in one of their infamous book burnings. With that destruction, much of the early research and recognition of gender dysphoria was deliberately erased from history. The condition itself never went away it resurfaced 80 years later in medical documentation, but it had already existed and been treated long before.
This is important: older trans people didnât just wake up one day and decide who they were. They received medical care, diagnoses, and transition-related treatment because gender dysphoria has always been acknowledged, even when history tried to bury it. So when I emphasize this, itâs not gatekeeping itâs grounding ourselves in reality. These have always been the rules.
So let me be blunt: You need gender dysphoria to be transgender. Otherwise, youâre not trans. Youâre gender nonconforming and thatâs fine, but donât water down what this word means. Trans isnât a vibe. Itâs not a trend. Itâs not an aesthetic or a game of pronoun dress-up. Itâs a painful, often dangerous path of confronting your body, your past, your identity, and society just to be seen as who you are.
Iâve been discriminated against, mocked, misgendered, physically assaulted, and called âitâ to my face like I was some kind of creature. That word was never cute or quirky, it was used to dehumanize me. So when I see people online choosing it/its as pronouns and saying itâs empowering or ânonbinary,â I genuinely canât wrap my head around it. Youâre free to use whatever language feels right to you, but letâs not pretend it doesnât come with history. For those of us who were called âitâ not by choice but out of hate, itâs not gender-neutral. Itâs erasure.
When it comes to neopronouns, I personally struggle with them Iâve tried to use noun-based neopronouns in sentences, and they just donât function naturally in the way pronouns are meant to. That said, I do accept and respect pronouns like ze/zem when someone is fluent in a heavily gendered language that lacks gender-neutral pronouns. In that context, creating and using an alternative makes sense because it fills a real linguistic gap. But in English, where they/them already works as a neutral option, many of the newer noun-based neopronouns often end up feeling more like self-dehumanization than empowerment, which honestly just makes me feel sad. I wish the people using them saw enough value in themselves not to adopt identifiers rooted in being treated as âother.â
We fight for hormones. We fight for surgery. We fight to be taken seriously and when you tell the world that âyou donât need dysphoria to be trans,â you erase everything we went through to survive. You donât get to rewrite the definition and then shame people like me for calling it out. This isnât gatekeeping, itâs protecting the meaning of a word that saved my life.
And while weâre at it, I donât care if people want to use neopronouns like kit/kitself or bun/bunself as nicknames, for OCs, or as personal flair. Go for it. But letâs stop pretending these are real, gendered pronouns tied to an actual identity in the same way he/him, she/her, and they/them are. They arenât. The more you push made-up pronouns as valid genders, the more fuel you give to transphobes who already donât take any of us seriously. Youâre not helping the community youâre making it harder for people who actually need to transition to survive, to be seen, heard, and respected.
You can identify however you want. But stop hijacking âtransgenderâ and stop acting like criticism is oppression. Weâve earned the right to speak up.
