There's an old narrative tension in the trans community between late-transitioning former "eggs" and trans kids and others who "always knew."
It's mostly harmless and most agree trans people should be supported and access care as early as possible (or desired).
But there has been a tug-of-war over whose narrative is the most representative.
"Always knew" has been treated as something of a cliche created for cis people's benefit, along with metaphors often used by people who "always knew."
That view seems common on social media popular with later transitioning people who perhaps feel forced to defend themselves because they didn't always know, although in many cases, they suspected but felt unable to act on it.
And unfortunately, there has been a tendency from the "always knew" or "early" transitioning group as well as people who transitioned under the old gatekeeping system toward transmedicalism and dismissiveness of people who come out and transition later.
In the past few years, as attacks on us have ramped up again, I think there has been a convergence toward recognizing there is no One True Trans Narrative about our lives, that many are aware from an early age but many also repress this knowledge until later in life for the sake of safety and social acceptance, and people should be supported in transitioning whenever they're comfortable doing so. Most of us wish we could have done so earlier.
But I still encounter that tension occasionally.
It's hard for some later transitioning people to believe I came out and transitioned in my late teens, in the 1990s.
And you know, I get it, I think?
I look at people who were out even younger and earlier than me with a bit of envy and wonder what I could have done differently.
And I wonder how teens transitioning today feel about people like me and those who transitioned later.
I most identify with kids and teens trying to transition today, under a more supportive environment, because that's what I would have done under those circumstances.
I loathe conservatives and others who want to deny them that, and it feels very personal to me in a way a "cracked egg" does not. Because I was one of those kids once. And I didn't have the opportunity.
But that doesn't make anyone else any less valid.
But you know, I still bristle a bit when people are dismissive of "always knew" and "born in the wrong body" when that's literally how I felt as a child.
It's not just a metaphor we created to explain ourselves simply to cis people. It's a bone deep feeling and something we created to explain ourselves to ourselves in this seemingly impossible situation.
And I worry that some people trying to defend their experiences are undermining the conversation around these kids who need help.
When I was a little girl who was AMAB, I didn't know the word "transgender." I still don't really embrace it as a description of my identity, and I don't participate in a lot of online trans culture because of it.
I was just a little girl. And I had to make sense of that as best I could, on top of trying to convince other people. I was convinced god made a mistake.
And that's a terrible situation for a child to be in, especially in a hostile environment.
So yeah, it's personal.
And while I understand the need to hide -- I was beaten by my brother and screamed at by my parents if I didn't -- I can't relate to not knowing and the "oops, all trans" sort of flippancy I occasionally see in the later transitioning crowd.
Being trans has rarely felt "fun" as opposed to something I've been forced into so as not to want to kill myself and which only poorly approximates what could have been.
But I'm not special. It takes all kinds. Everybody comes at this their own way.
I don't think anyone should feel ashamed of when or why they transition, but I also wish we didn't feel like we have to justify ourselves, not even to a hostile cis culture, but to each other.
@gwynnion as someone trying to learn more from the outside in order to better be empathetic and supportive in informed ways - and knowing it wasn't written for me - I really appreciate deeply articulated personal stories like these. It's too easy to collapse a diversity of human experiences into semantic categories, to flatten out distinctions, and very difficult as an outsider to understand internal disagreement & debate as well as I'd like to in order to be respectful of different paths
⧖ @gwynnion Same here. I knew early too (since my earliest memories, when I was 4 in 1961), but I don't expect to win a prize for it or anything. Not knowing early doesn't mean you're not valid, or deserve second-class treatment. I wish people didn't get hung up on this. I have no idea what the causes of trans gender identity are, but the human mind is so complex you should *expect* people to respond to those causes in different ways, and to have different internal experiences.
@gwynnion It's a place where solidarity is so important, conflict over distinctions like these makes my nerves curl. Just please don't be mean about it, anyone. There's already enough of that going around.
@gwynnion I'm an odd mix of both narratives tbh, so I defend both of them as valid. I transitioned later (19), but absolutely did feel like I was very specifically "born in the wrong body" since the moment puberty started to hit and I really diverged from other girls in physiology — got hairy, tall, muscular, elongated, and square. I explicitly and deeply identified with characters who had undergone horrific transformations or literally been born in the wrong body or were minds in incongruent bodies or whatever. I explicitly saw my body and a lot of my identity as something very separate and unreal that I was trapped inside and had to make the best of. I also knew since 12 that I would be happier as a girl. I just didn't understand what the source of those feelings was, or what they meant, or, most importantly, that you even could do anything about them until much later. And I didn't know since "birth" or anything, only when body dysphoria started to pick up thanks to puberty. So you could count me as either.
As someone who began their transition at the age of 43 (ten years ago), I'm trying to wrap my brain around the idea that 19 would be considered a "later" age to transition.
@funcrunch @anarchopunk_girl It felt pretty late to me! LOL.
@gwynnion I would speculate that the urge to divide these two groups into two categories is part of our society's tendency to insist that human minds are monolithic rational entities, when we're actually a jumble of distributed cognition. Some folks had conscious awareness of being trans much sooner. Some didn't have the necessary concepts or developed complex layers of repression.
@gwynnion I thought my "egg cracked" when I was 40, but it sometimes feels like a lot of me knew but a dominant part of my mind vetoed it. Anyway, the more I think about it I have a lot of empathy for everyone whenever they come out, knowing and not acting on it is intensely painful.
@gwynnion I relate very strongly to trans boys who are coming out around 12 - 14 who were never particularly masculine, and who also have mental health symptoms.
Bc that's who I was. I didn't have the slightest idea I was trans. I still don't relate personally to the idea of having a gender identity. For me, it's very much like a medical mystery of what was wrong with me, one that was attempted to be solved with all kinds of psych meds, and finally got sorted out when I was in my 30s.
@gwynnion I do relate strongly to medical narratives. I don't want to impose them on anyone, but for me it's just a condition I found out I had, later than I'd have liked. I didn't feel like a boy and I don't "feel like" a man- I just felt wrong constantly (with very bad effects on my life), and somehow, weirdly, looking like/living as a man turned out to be the treatment.
A lot of folks have compared it to a splinter stuck in oneself -- always a bit of wrongness that acts up when we move (or are moved!) in the wrong way. And I think the metaphor still applies in some cases, where some of us get the resources and ability to diagnose that, while others are just told it's normal and to stop whining about it.
(A bitter irony is of course that the denialists and the medicalists are both insistent that there is only One True Path, they only differ on the specifics.)
But really there's no such thing as a perfect metaphor or a universal certainty when talking about the lived experiences of pretty much any group of human beings. Heavens, some folks just decide they might be happier outside of an assigned role, and just so happen to be right...,
@e_urq It feels like a very fucked up situation to be in! When you're a kid, you think there must be something wrong with you or with the world, and the less you can articulate it to yourself, the more confusing and painful it becomes.
I had doctors who wanted to treat me for depression, anxiety, borderline, etc. even as I was begging them for help transitioning because it all stemmed from dysphoria.
But I was lucky that I could understand and articulate that idea from an early age.
@gwynnion Yeah, I got diagnosis after diagnosis, treatment after treatment. I'm jealous in a sense of anyone who knew earlier and transitioned younger, but I feel more similar than different to basically any gender-dysphoric trans person.
I am, perhaps, a little jealous of people who are more madcap adventurers and experience being trans through the lens of joy and choice rather than pain and necessity. But that also seems rad, and I'm glad there are such people!