Petroion

I read this article (I Am a Trans Woman. I Am In the Closet. I Am Not Coming Out.) the other day. I was introduced to it in the context of this post:

this has nothing to do with anyone being bisexual but I don’t want ur cishet bf in a queer space 😭 like leave him at home don’t bring him to pride. don’t bring him to chappell roan. why would a MAN be there

@k1ndbutnotsoft

which is a hell of a username to be tweeting like that.

I’m pretty inured to this whole genre of complaint, and I’ve wandered through more and less understanding or sympathy with it, but this specific one made it through my usual layers of dismissiveness. Probably because I’d just gone to a Chappell Roan concert two months ago (Grand Rapids, 2024-04-06, first show to hear Good Luck Babe!, had a great time).

And I’d gone wearing a dress.

I’ve worn arguably-women’s clothing before. I have had the backup-dancer fit from Taylor Swift’s Look What You Made Me Do music video since 2017: crop top, short shorts, long boots, high heels. I’ve worn makeup. But I’d only ever put on a dress two times before in my life: 2012, for Truth or Dare; and 2017, briefly for a joke (and which I ripped in half when I breathed in. Oops). And I’d only ever been seen by one close friend each time. Now I was out in public.

When I was a kindergartener, about five years old, I was reading The Boxcar Children books. A bit of a misnomer, since they only lived in the boxcar for, like, half a book. Not the point. The point is that there were four of them, two boys and two girls: Henry, Jessie, Violet, and …I don’t remember the youngest (it’s Benny). My brother and I used to pretend to be them and act out stories, either from the books or invented.

I was Jessie. I just liked her best of the four. I don’t remember her being a girl as having anything to do with it, for or against. She liked blue. I liked blue. She was exploratory and found the boxcar. I wanted to think I was exploratory. And Henry went into town and worked and Violet was kind of snippy and Benny was a kid. I, of course, was a much more mature and capable 5yo than he was. Jessie just fit me best. Not a big deal.

I also read My Side of the Mountain, and I liked pretending to be Sam, a boy character. I never really thought too much about gender here. I learned about the anatomical differences in, oh, second? grade, and had what as far as I can tell were the pretty normal levels of childhood interest and disinterest in the topic.

I used to imagine what life would be like if I’d been a girl. Or if I were a taller boy (I was bottom-quintile height until after I turned 16), or stronger, or any number of counterfactuals. Kids do that. I never had any of the experiences that I’ve heard described to me by trans women as being An Indicator. I was never deeply invested in being a girl, specifically. I just had a general vague wistfulness of being different than the specific person I was.

That pretty much stopped at puberty. Being a post-pubescence boy was awesome. I was suddenly the tallest, or second-tallest, person I knew! I was still rail-thin, but weirdly strong for my build! The last traces of fat evaporated from my face. I had cheekbones and a jaw and my hair stayed good.

So I was completely done with physiological body dysphoria by 20.

Unfortunately, that’s when the social gender dysphoria really cranked up.

As a tiny, bottom-quntile, little boy, I was just a nerd who got picked last in gym class. It wasn’t awesome, but it was pretty meaningless. That isn’t true anymore when you tower over people, when you’re quiet and withdrawn and just a little bit off. Men start feeling competitive with you; they want to prove you’re not better than them just because you’re taller than them. And you’re not. You don’t go to the gym. You do manual labor for three summers, and you swim. You’re not actually strong.

And women start feeling threatened by you. It takes you a while to notice. You’re used to people not going out of their way to talk to you. But there’s a difference between people ignoring you when you move through a crowd, and people drifting out of your way as you pass. You start to catch on.

I think I first heard about trans people in 2014, on reddit. The context that introduced them to me was, uh, not great. But despite my generally-conservative upbringing and the less-than-subtly-reactionary flavor of the internet, I never really picked up the active transphobia that’s been getting louder in the last decade. I mean. Maybe it’s a little weird that some people are that way, but there are a lot of ways for people to be weird. And I mean, I kind of get it. I didn’t love being a guy either. I hated a lot of my fellow men. I was friends with an unusually-high number of women, and I knew some of them treated me as a sort of middle place between “one of the guys” and “one of the girls”.

I first met trans people when I started being active in the Rust community. I’m quite sure I met some in 2016 and 2017, at Rust conferences, but my first trans friendship started in 2018, and that’s when the imagined “trans-trender pressure”, and I cannot stress enough that this is imagined, pressure started. I use the phrase only out of mockery. I was friends with trans people. We talked about gender. We talked about their experience of being trans. We talked about my experience of being alive. They asked if I had considered if I might be trans, and I considered it.

Let me say again very flatly that there is no such thing as a social contagion to be transgender. I linked that not-coming-out piece at the start because the social contagion is to be cisgender. Many people are. Some people are not, but are shoved into that mold because they’re not strongly trans enough to commit to the jump. Some people are, and make it.

I don’t consider myself a trans woman. Out or closeted. I go back and forth on whether and how I consider myself a man, but I always consider myself male and masculine.

So why do I crossdress?

I honestly don’t really know. It doesn’t make me feel happy. It actually makes me feel unbelievably sad. The most intense feeling of what I’ve been told is gender dysphoria has been looking at myself in the mirror and seeing something wholly unrecognizable staring back at me from the dress. It was actually, not exaggerating, nauseating.

I like having long (for men) hair. I liked having blue hair. I like wearing fun clothing and, honestly, slutty clothing. I liked painting my nails even though they always immediately went to shit and I like doing a little bit of makeup.

I like being an unusual boy. I like being a femme boy (which is not a femboy). I like that the people I want to reässure are reässured, and the people I want to repulse are repulsed, by using these signals.

I called this article Stone Egg because, of all the stories and experiences I’ve heard about gender, Jen Coates’ is the closest to how I feel. I don’t share her experience about a crushed girlhood and enforced boyhood. Opinions vary on whether I was (or am) anorexic, but I’ve never had any other disordered eating.

But I share her alienation in spaces that, nominally, strive towards modern inclusion. I sympathize oh so deeply with the experience of being around people who revile cis/het men, and maybe toss in a “not you, of course” as an afterthought, or expect me to be self-effacing and go along with it.

I’m not a woman. I don’t think I’ll ever be one. I don’t feel it in my body, mind, or soul. I’m a man, though I choose how I want to be one, and I continue in my resolution to not be an entirely conformant one.

I called this article Stone Egg because maybe, under some other circumstances, I might have been one. Or maybe not. Maybe the thing in me is just coïncidentally-shaped. Maybe it never was an egg at all. Or maybe it could have been, but fossilized too early.

To paraphrase Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, maybe, in another life, I would have really liked just doing beauty and estrogen with you.

I don’t know if there’s an alternate-timeline lost future with my other name on it. I know there are a lot of alternate-timeline futures with my current name on it that stopped, and I’m certainly glad I’m on this one instead of those. That’s enough of a blessing for me.

I just hope I can help ensure that there aren’t any other Jens. That we don’t smother anyone else before they have the opportunity to hatch, that we don’t poison our social atmosphere against the vulnerable who are disguised as the powerful.

And I hope I can figure out how to describe who I am. I’m not required to be absolutely a man just because I’m not a woman. And maybe if I can exist in that in-between space, as a man who’s just outside the norm enough to be noticed even if it’s not enough to warrant other labels, maybe I can help us be less likely to accidentally, or negligently, crush other people.

My friends who previewed this piece reminded me that gender isn’t a binary. I don’t have to be a trans woman to be a trans person. I don’t really know if I feel comfortable calling myself that, primarily because I don’t know if I deserve it. Shouldn’t I have to do more than change outfits every now and then and write the occasional essay on how I’m “not like other boys” or whatever? I don’t know.

Maybe I don’t.

Maybe I am.