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Trans & Traumatised

A Personal Perspective on Survival, Boundaries, and Identity - A.K.A Navigating Transition With Debilitating Self-Doubt


By Dorian Rose / @generefuccere on Instagram & Bluesky


This article is featured in issue 11 of Transmuted's journal, set to be up for pre-order by this weekend!


 

Everyone has a different experience of life. More specifically, everyone has a different experience of transition.


The following is a patchwork of two separate personal essays, discussing the same topic of personal needs. While it has been my off-time, on-energy passion to linger on this topic and write for myself, I would like to bring this discussion to Transmuted’s audience, and hopefully pursue wider conversations that help us understand both ourselves and each other in our infinitely complicated multitudes.


While we might compare notes or share end-of-life reviews on the overall product, we can never quite explain – in its entirety – what precisely we have been through during our existence on this earth. Our recollections are often somewhat off-mark, missing vital details in sharing ‘exactly how it happened’ and ‘this is why I reacted in this way’.


We face similar challenges when sharing details on our perspectives of ‘what it means to be trans’. Whether we are explaining precisely what it is that we feel to a cisgender person (who is completely and utterly clueless to the whole concept in the first place) or explaining our experience of gender to a fellow trans person: we often stumble, either in speaking or receiving, during the translation of our self-expression.

 

When I was making my bi-annual 2024 public appearance (very rare, what with agoraphobia) to talk at a trans event in Leeds, I was suddenly hit in the face with the reality of the complexities and differences in trans experience. I immediately began shrivelling up inside of my non-existent shell, lost my train of thought forever, and attempted to wrap the whole thing up as quickly as possible before I burst – which is absolutely not what you want to happen during a public talk.


What had happened was thus. I had prepared a talk, without any form of entertaining PowerPoint slides (I am accidentally old-fashioned in my speaking practices), on the act of reflecting cisnormativity back onto itself. It was my belief that, through analysing how cisnormativity Others transgender people, we can use our findings to deflect the labour of self-discovery onto cisgender people themselves – rather than us being the only party to be forcibly engaged upon it.


Of course, this fear of self-analysis is one of the largest driving factors in modern transphobia: transphobes completely refuse to learn precisely what makes them any particular gender other than the fact that they simply ‘are’ it. The mere thought that they are not actually a woman or man makes them explode into a confused rage, accusing trans folks of inventing ‘ideologies’ when the rigid binary gender is as far from scientifically true as it is a system of ideas and ideals (which is the definition of ‘ideology’ according to Oxford Languages).[1]


At some point during this talk a brilliant attendee piped up, as I had welcomed, to signify disagreement as I was discussing some personally-based points of internalised transphobia. To summarise (and with a lack of clear memory), they reflected that internalised transphobia is indeed wrong and signified that they saw it quite simply – compared to how I had personally experienced it. It was at that point that I felt a punch in my gut, recalling the years of feeling alienated from the popularised ‘trans experience’, and began to struggle to stay on track mentally. (Hence the ‘run away before brain explodes’ escapade.)


It was clear to me that, throughout the course of this talk, the crowd came from such vastly different experiences of ‘transness’ that it felt almost impossible to know where to take the discussion at each point.


Do we deconstruct the questions that us self-scrutinising trans folk ask ourselves at home, alone, and in the dark? Or do we deconstruct the questions that society, as a whole, throws at trans people – though some of us somehow manage to dodge the bullet, even then?

 

Some of the questions I used to mull over, for years, include:


“Am I really trans or am I just traumatised?” “Why do I only have periods of dysphoria? Is it related to when my mental health is worse?”“How can I be sure that I am trans, and not experiencing internalised misogyny?”


I know now, as fact, that I am not the only one who has been pained by these ruminations over the years. 


There are trans people out there – right now – beating themselves repeatedly over the same questions. And while there is no easy answer, and I cannot reach everyone, this topic is incredibly important to discuss openly and freely. It is far too easy for people to be shamed for being trans, but it is easier still to shame those who are struggling to come to terms with it. A lack of ability to be personally open on these topics – to talk about our own struggles, not about or over other peoples’ – is precisely why so many still struggle with the same questions today. Possibly, even, a reason why there is a ‘proper way to transition’ in the first place.


Questions like these are weaponised by TERFs and transphobes at large to justify all kinds of heinous speech and should-be-illegal activity. Trans folks who are already traumatised, or who already experience inordinate forms of self-doubt or insecurity, are the bare target of many transphobic actions inflicted by people like JK Rowling, Jordan Peterson, and far too many others.


The answer to these questions does not need to be easy. But I would posit that the question should not be asked in the first place – at least not in this form, and not in the repetitive motion that often brings us to unbearable emotions.


It is both an unfortunate and fortunate fact that cisgender people do not ruminate upon these topics. If more cisgender people were to ask themselves if they were really just cis or just misogynistic, we would be in a much better place socially. To make a leap – because it isn’t the topic of this article – the founding ideas of cisnormative gender are: ‘man is what woman is not’, ‘woman does what man does not want to do’, and ‘we invented a pyramid hierarchy based on centuries of colonialism and patriarchal designs’. Let’s move on.

 

It should be pointed out that experiencing this form of identity crisis does not mean you will want to transition at any point in your life. It simply means that, in any and all regards, you are not what is typically known as ‘cisgender’.


Let me expand, for anyone who is reading this and coming from a place where it might be helpful to do so.


When a person is cisgender, they identify with the same gender they were assigned at birth. This gets a little bit complicated, because that doesn’t really mean much. A gender shouldn’t be associated with anything in particular other than a set of pronouns – and often, especially in trans circles, gender isn’t.


However, we do live in a cisnormative world: and thus, we experience cisnormative genders. We associate types of clothing, colours, activities, likes and dislikes, to types of genders. If you were born a man, you are expected to like masculine things, and vice versa for women. But just because you don’t fit into those models of gender doesn’t mean you’re trans. So how do we know otherwise?


It is somewhat simpler to look at what can self-identify a person as trans, rather than what doesn’t make a person trans. For example,


  • Experiencing dysphoria about the body, a part or the whole (‘I would prefer to not have any genitalia’, ‘I do not like having fat on my breasts’, ‘I like to imagine myself with a vulva in daily life’),

  • Experiencing ‘gender envy’ for people who do not identify as the same gender as you (‘I, assigned woman at birth, feel jealous of this person who isn’t a woman, and want to be like them’),

  • Experiencing social dysphoria when people refer to you in a gendered way (‘I dislike being called Robert, and by he/him pronouns’),

  • Feeling ‘different’ from people who identify as the gender you were assigned at birth (‘I don’t relate to other women, but I do relate to non-binary people’).


While this list is not all-encompassing, and certainly not a diagnostic criterion, it includes some of the ways in which we can identify ourselves in true or false statements.

 

The process of self-identification becomes incredibly problematic for folks who experience any form of difficulty with boundaries, dissociation, ego-loss, and so on. While we might look at lists and the experiences of our fellow humans to advise us on self-identification – we might still struggle to align with any idea of the self in particular, and oscillate wildly between ‘this is definitely a true statement’ and ‘but what if it’s because I am wrong somehow?’


(Or, alternatively, ‘this is definitely a true statement’ and ‘but I don’t feel like I am trans’. There are a great many alternatives, but let’s ignore that for now.)


One thing is for certain – folks like us need to work on our internal and external boundaries. Understanding what makes us happy, what we should pursue to be comfortable, is a process in undoing self-abandonment processes that have kept us safe in the past. Self-criticism, exacerbated by external criticism, also presents in this form: to consistently doubt our gender identity is simply another face of self-criticism.


When we are confronted with the question of making any certain statements about our gender, we immediately reflect upon external criticisms that we have internalised throughout all aspects of our lives – whether they be personal experiences or opinions seen in media. In a sort of defensive manner, we attempt to pre-react to external criticism by inflicting it upon ourselves before anyone else may do so. Moreover, the anticipation of criticism – and the entire process of self-doubt – dissociates us from knowing what our true feelings are about the matter in the first place. In this way, ‘but what if it’s because I am wrong somehow?’ becomes a multi-layered cover up process for what may actually be a simple movement.

After all, nobody ever had a gender in the first place (as if it is something that does not develop throughout childhood), and a person does not actually have to do anything in particular to be transgender.

 

In an informal addition to this somewhat disorganised writing, I would like to remember an existentially beautiful conversation I had with Exodus Crooks – artist, philosopher, activist, I cannot sing their praises enough – where we discussed the topics of ‘what it means to survive’, ‘tenderness’, and so on.


“’what is a life?’ it must be understood that the ‘being’ of life is itself constituted through selective means and the operation of power.”[2] […] “Norms, social and political organisations and other institutions have developed in contexts of power to maximise precariousness for some and minimise it for others, meaning that while all life is equally defined by precariousness, it does not follow that all lives are equally precarious.”[3]

If we understand that ‘life’ can be determined by precisely the parameters in which we live, then to ‘survive’ is to live amidst unequal precarity without losing ourselves to its terrific jaws. But to determine what ‘losing ourselves to precarity’ would be, as a definitive moment that could happen in anyone’s life, is to pre-determine what ‘the self’ is – and to do so would be stripping others of their right to self-determination.


It is precisely this kind of struggle, of definition and determination, that can cause so many rifts among communities where certain precarities are in common. Therefore, we can only say that ‘survival’ is the self-determined boundary between ‘surviving’ and ‘not surviving’. Only the individual can speak on what that means for them.


It is, without a shadow of a doubt, very hard to say with any certainty what trans people – or anyone in any marginalised group of people – need to survive. As we’ve to some extent discussed, every trans person has different circumstances: some may have HRT but not love, others may have love but not HRT, and so goes the endless list of experiential diversity. It is easier to say what trans folks don’t need than what they do. We don’t need transphobia, for example. Nobody needs that, no matter how much they may act like it.


There are some things, however, that we do all need in some shape or form. Community is always important, and a ‘healthy’ community is often paramount to being ‘healthy’ with oneself. Universal needs, such as community, are not often apparent to those who have it, and often most apparent to those who don’t. There are certainly some complications with this; ‘often’ is an integral part of the sentence. If you have been scarred by your own community before, you may have found community as the opposite of a need – perhaps hindering your ability to survive, in one way or another. It is similar to the universal need of trans-affirming care, only perhaps a little more complicated in convoluted ways: having a transphobic doctor may have required you to pretend to be binary trans in order to access treatments, or you may have felt pressured to access healthcare in order to be accepted.


What will always matter, regardless of the situation, is twofold. The first is that you are in pursuit of your own happiness, or of your own survival: no one may cast judgement, doubt, or wanton criticism upon your attempts to navigate your own transition, self-awakening, or survival. The second is that society, your fellow humans, should give you the means to get what you need. This could be for yourself, your community, or even nobody in particular. Of course, this is not the current situation – we are so far from having the means to get what we need that we can barely identify what they would even be, and the discovery of which is a part of every step in our survival.

 

Ironically, during the course of Exodus’ research on ‘tenderness’, conversations happened online around the concept of the ‘tenderqueer’ – which, as far as I understood, is a queer person who might be quick to find enemies, faults, and react disproportionately to things in general. I should like to note that there are certainly people who are queer and inflicting harm upon others in their own community, or even outside of it, and that I personally do not condone such behaviour – but as we were discussing the topic of ‘tenderness’, it became a moment to analyse the topic in a particular light.


Let us first imagine ‘tenderness’ as ‘sensitivity’. ‘Tender’, as many of you may already know, is said to derive ‘tenere’, a Latin word meaning ‘delicate, sore, soft, dainty, pampered, impressionable’ […] and so on. The word certainly does translate quite well into modern English – ‘tender’ can mean so many of these things all at once. I believe that ‘sensitivity’ is a somewhat appreciable manifestation of all of these significations, while at the same time being one step removed from the actual word (for better or worse). That ‘one step removed’ is important, for myself at least, as ‘to be sensitive’ holds two notable modes: either to know that something about yourself is tender (delicate, sore, soft, and so on), or to say that something about someone else is tender (most often used to say that someone is impressionable, pampered, etcetera). That is all to say: though it is the first instinct of many of us humans to say that ‘to be sensitive is always bad’ (snowflaking is an adjective now!), for us to call something ‘tender’ we must also acknowledge an area that is ‘sensitive’ in whatever way we regard it as such.


Let us look for a moment at ‘traumatised citizenship’, a term used by C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn in their writings on Trans Necropolitics, which is on my essential reading list.[4] Our unfortunate reality is that in many cultures, to be transgender is to be a traumatised citizen – regardless of whether we ‘pass’ or not, whether we are ‘out’ or not – and the same applies to all oppressed, minoritised folks citizen to any (or even no) governing state. While the terms and conditions of our ‘traumatised citizenship’ are not unilateral, as ‘traumatised citizens’ we must navigate, appropriate, and choose the terms upon which we ‘survive’ – that is, upon which we exist, (in)authentically, (un)restricted, (un)documented – state-inflicted precarities.


As Snorton and Haritaworn put it:


“Self-actualisation largely remains uninterrogated in its complicities and convergences with biomedical, neoliberal, racist and imperial projects.”[5]

Unfortunately, as is the necropolitical agenda, many of us are intrinsically unable to perform complicity within the ‘selective means’ of the state, the institution, ‘the operation of power’, and/or the general constitution of life-as-it-is. So what does that mean for us?

 

We can recognise that we live in precarious situations that are unlike others, that our situations often traumatise us, scar us, heighten our sensitivity. Tenderise us, as you might imagine a private chef to a piece of meat, feeding a power-hungry head of [insert your preferred institution here]. We can recognise that these precarities, these wounds, are created not only by the obvious villains but by anyone or thing that might prevent us from self-actualisation, from removing ourselves from precarity, from achieving our needs and thus our long prosperous survival.


It might be important, in this recognition, to see also the importance of not promoting the idea of being ‘tender’, ‘sensitive’, a ‘snowflake’, a ‘victim’, a ‘traumatised citizen’, as a bad thing. Not only is this an historic ideological tactic of the oppressor, we might find there is a stark difference in ‘tenderness’ and ‘being quick to find enemies, faults, and so on’. While both may be caused by trauma, by precarity, we need not converge the two and reify the conditions of the oppressive power: in codifying hurtful behaviour as ‘tenderness’, we promote the idea that traumatised ‘tenderness’ is problematic in the same way that our oppressors do. We chip away at the already dismal ability of those experiencing precarities and traumas to speak – not just for themselves but in general. Language is an ally of those with the power to change it, rather than the minoritised it is used to silence.

 


References


[2] Judith Butler, Precarious Life (Routledge, 2004), p. 1.

[3] Ibidem, pp. 2-3.

[4] C. Riley Snorton & Jin Haritaworn, 'Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife', in The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (Routledge, 2022).

[5] Ibid., p. 67.

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