What does transgender mean?

When you’re born, someone typically declares “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” This is your assigned gender at birth. What they’re doing is actually using your sex and assigning you a gender. This can be a little messy for intersex folks, but I’m going to limit myself to my own experiences here. For most people, their assigned gender at birth — and what they align with — are the same, but this isn’t true for everyone. Since sex and gender aren’t the same things, this is bound to happen. Sex is describing a series of biological characteristics, and gender is a little more… abstract. Gender is how you feel about yourself.

Your sex describes your physical characteristics. This has many dimensions and includes things like primary and secondary sex characteristics, hormones, genetics, and many others. Most of these are actually changeable with the help of modern medicine, and can actually vary in how they manifest.

Gender is a social construct — we created a society that provides structure around what gender means and the impact it has on everyday life. Masculine and feminine have very well-defined roles guiding how you act, talk, dress, and much more. For many people, these roles assigned at birth don’t feel just right. Kinda like having shoes that are too small for you. You can see everyone else walking around just fine, but for some reason, it hurts for you to walk.

For me, being transgender is feeling like your shoes are too small. It’s to feel like the gender you were given at birth doesn’t fit who you are as a person, and how you’d like to present yourself. I can still walk around, but it’s uncomfortable and even painful at times not having the right fit.

Who am I?

I try not to focus on labels, since they put people in boxes, and boxes always exclude some people. They’re good at conveying information about certain attributes of yourself, but when you get dragged down into a debate about what exactly a label means, it becomes meaningless.

That’s not to say I don’t have labels for my identity, I certainly do, but I try not to concern myself with picking exact ones and lose the core experience of who I am. I know what it’s like to try and live a life with prescribed labels, and confine myself to them. Being trans to me is about the opposite: breaking away from these restrictions and just living myself as me, whatever that means. (I’m learning every day!)

I’m many other things, too. I actually consider myself non-binary. I don’t think I’m a woman or a man, but rather somewhere in the middle. This isn’t by far the only option out there. Gender is not just a spectrum between masculine and feminine, but it’s also normal to be outside of either, or different amounts on different days.

I’m also neuro-divergent, meaning my brain operates differently than most people. I find I need little distractions to actually keep me focused. I’ve also found I can’t work without music, and the occasional message to keep me on task. I thrive on the chaos of my job. There’s always something new to learn, a new problem to deal with, or another puzzle to be solved. While I'm going after a formal diagnosis for certain aspects, I’ve developed coping mechanisms to help me get through the day.

I’m also on the asexual spectrum. This means I don’t really experience physical attraction. I can at times, but by and large, I find people attractive not for physical qualities, but rather for their personalities. I can appreciate aesthetics, but when I look at the common traits between people I’ve found myself attracted to, common patterns are really just personality traits they exhibit.

How did I know I was trans?

The question everyone loves to ask is how did I know? It’s an understandable question — I just wish I had a better answer.

I was browsing memes and saw one like this.

That statement hit me like a ton of bricks. At any point in my life, I would have always preferred to be a girl. I just assumed everyone felt this way. It seems everyone does not.

This sent me down a rabbit hole of reading to learn what this could mean for me. This led up to a night when I was unable to fall asleep. It was past midnight and all I could think about was how I’m trans. I knew I needed to tell someone, and I agreed to let myself have that. I texted a couple of friends the next morning that I think I’m trans. This felt like such a load off of my mind.

I started to tell those close to me including my sisters. After about a month, the video by Philosophy Tube: Identity was released. This video cemented my notion that I’m trans. The segment about the man who isn’t there felt so deep to me. I knew at that moment I was transgender.

Since coming out to myself, I’ve been doing a lot of introspection. I’ve learned so much about myself. I’m working on healing old wounds and giving myself the space to simply exist. I’ve also learnt that not only am I on the asexual spectrum but also neuro-divergent. Learning these facts about me has opened up so many strategies and tools to not only understand myself but has also given me insight on how to create an environment for myself to live in peace and self-expression.

I don't fit in the boxes that I was given, and that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay. At the end of the day, I have to wake up as myself every day, and I want to be the best version of “me” that I can be.

Is it really that easy?

In the past, I’ve focused on the joy I’ve found since coming out, this is still true, but not the full story. The happiness I’ve found in being myself makes everything worthwhile. However, I spent the previous 28 years of my life constructing myself as a man, and to decide to tear that down meant tearing down everything I knew about myself.

It’s a difficult task. Deconstructing your identity, examining all the remaining bits, and deciding what to place where (if it gets to stay at all). I spent 28 years living a life that was uncomfortable and ill-fitting, but I was never able to explain why something wasn’t fitting.

Dysphoria is a really hard thing to explain to someone who’s never felt it. Like the shoe analogy, if it’s something you’ve always lived with, you tend not to question it. Dysphoria for me is the fact I was never able to look into the mirror. It’s the large, shapeless clothes that I wore because I hated how anything else made me look. It’s the thing that made me want to peel off my skin when someone would call me “handsome”.

Dysphoria is the thing that took hold of my life and brought me down to a deep depression that, on several occasions, nearly took my life. It took me 28 years to realize what the problem was, and while I’m already in a much better spot, there’s still a long road of recovery ahead.

None of this is to say you need to be traumatized to be trans — this is not even close to true. Dysphoria is not a requirement, just joy in being something else.

The Trans Agenda and the Trans Day of Remembrance

This is not an awareness week just focused on celebration, but one that also centres on the discrimination faced by trans people all over. The week ends with the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which reminds us to pause and remember those who have lost their lives over the past year.

This year so far 31 trans people have been killed. This is a stark number, but it’s not just direct violence that kills us. 81% of trans people have considered suicide, 63% are homeless, and twice as likely to be jobless. Not a week goes by where I don’t find a story about an unfortunate kid being kicked out of their home, families being torn apart, or jobs being lost.

These problems don’t exist in isolation either. There are certain other qualities that can be cause for further discrimination such as ethnicity. These can only amplify the discrimination you face when navigating the world.

I’d be lying if things didn’t look bleak for trans people right now. Many politicians are playing with trans people's lives, and I fail to understand why they simply elicit the kind of response they’ve given. Many US states have or are looking to ban affirming care for people under 18, and a few more are looking at ways to deny affirming care for adults as well, essentially making it illegal to be trans. Abigal Thorn of PhilosphyTube recently created a video describing her experience getting trans health care in England. Her words are very powerful and highlight the need for change in healthcare systems.

There is a silver lining though. When given access to affirming health care, and a good support system, the statistics of suicide fall dramatically. Turns out that when we treat people with dignity, their lives improve. The best thing we can do for my community is to treat them with understanding and acceptance. This is how we improve people's lives. Supporting folks in their transition is the most effective method of improving their lives.

If this is an issue you care about, pay attention to who you vote for. Make sure the person you’re voting for knows that this is a problem you care about and that you want to see action. There are also local charities that are worth looking into. The Skipping Stone in Calgary helped me a lot in the early days of self-discovery.

Trans people thrive in spite of the world around us. We have always existed, and always will. There’s no vaccine you can make to prevent people from being trans. It’s about time we accept this face and allow people to embrace their truths and live their lives and their whole selves.