Binding Affinity

missdorotheabrooke:

From the inbox of Ms. Visions:

Can one ever be certain that they’re a transgender woman? Even if they may not have very “feminine” pursuits, but still get really sad when they think they won’t look like other regular women, or at least wish to be recognized as a woman?

I don’t want to answer the question itself here, because it has already been answered very well. I want to talk about what would cause someone to worry about a question like this.

I came to my identification as anything close to MTF tentatively over a period of couple months. Things reached a tipping point, and I could no longer maintain the assumption that I was just attracted to female gender roles of submission and stuff. It was clear that aspects of femaleness appealed to me. So I went about things very slowly and carefully.

My initial self-description was that ‘I was experiencing many phenomena which put me in a cohort of people for which it was reasonable to assume that the majority of those people would eventually identify as MTF’. I hope what that means is understandable, but basically, I depersonalized my experience from my ‘self’, and made it an exercise in clinically describing my experiences. I strove to adopt the scientific method, of testing and retesting that the pronouns felt right, that the name felt right, constantly. I was pathologically obsessive about it.

As a person with obsessive tendencies, I spent months scared shitless by this concern: what if I am wrong? I used to get set off into obsessive fears about my identity when I could use the bathroom without being made miserable by my genitalia. I was freaked out over any little thing that might indicate that I was just lying to myself the whole time and that Deep Down I had failed. In my constant, debilitatingly intense efforts to know myself and my darkest sides and truly understand myself, I had failed, and I was a horrible member of a cargo cult.

I consider it a testament to just how real and powerful the experience of being transgendered is that even with my constant worrying and fear, I never came particularly close to going back on identifying as transgender at any point.

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I feel like my story is relevant here because the most important part of it is, I had irrational and exaggerated fears of what the consequences would be if I eventually backed down on transness. I feared I’d be validating the idea that it was a mental disorder. I feared I’d make a fool out of myself to the people I had come out to, and the thought of needing to ‘un-do’ my coming out made me want to vomit with embarrassment and shame. My doubts were motivated by awful, awful fears, and not by the actual probability that I was/am mistaken.

If you make an effort to be honest with yourself, and you’re drawn to identify as transgender, then you’re almost certainly ‘really’ transgender. There’s always a chance there’s some fucked up part of your psyche and you haven’t gotten it figured out yet. But if you _still_ haven’t figured out what the weird part of your brain is that is all screwed up about what it means to identify as transgender, probably the only way you’re _really_ going to figure it out is by actually attempting to live with that identity publicly. It’s a ‘mistake’ you’re going to have to make if you want to get to the bottom of things. 

I feel like wanting certainty about something like this is speaking to wanting to negate some fear that one has; some fear of what it would mean if one was ‘wrong’ about being transgendered. But like I said in my reply to the question itself, it is nonsensical to pretend that we can be genuinely certain about _anything_. That’s just the nature of things. So, to whoever is out there being overconcerned about being _certain_ about their transgenderedness, the question I have to ask is: what’s so bad if you end up being wrong in some way?

Transgenderedness has been scientifically shown to not just be psychological. Available scientific evidence indicates that there are neurobiological similarities between an MTF brain and a cis female brain, and between an FTM brain and a cis male brain. By all available evidence, transgenderedness itself is real. And if one is wrong in one’s particular case, what real harm will come of it?

Sometimes you have to be wrong to figure out how to be right. There’s a hidden faith in ‘well if I’m wrong about it I must have to THINK REALLY HARD to find the answer’ behind the fear of being wrong about one’s transgendered identity, or at least there was for me. Sometimes the only way out is through, and whatever other method you might try to use to disarm or ‘figure out’ the trans identity you gravitate to is probably going to be much less effective than actually publicly transitioning.

And if you’re a self-doubting transperson, you’re probably not wrong anyway, and just lack self-confidence. Note that the self-confidence of past transpeople is why we have the science we do today, the science that validates that we are not just psychologically deluded. What progress we have today is built on the backs of those past transpeople who strode forth defiantly asserting what later came to be known as the truth, spitting in the face of established society.