Gender Expectations Made Me Think I Was Trans

Now I'm suing the providers who transitioned me

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This article was originally written for and published by the Dallas Morning News.

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I thought I was a trans kid.

From as early as age 11, I played with the idea of living as the opposite sex. Chronic social media usage, early exposure to pornography, insistent bullying, rapid-onset puberty, and a history of abuse and neglect (among other things) made girlhood painful and traumatic. 

In an attempt to escape, I sought out friends online. Many of these friends adopted fanciful identities, ranging from non-human to anime character to trans. Those identities felt like extensions of our love for art and roleplay. “Boy” was nothing more than a pin I wore.  

We expect so much from girls and from women. A friend shared this beautiful metaphor with me recently, that if a man and a woman went off into nature for a month, the man would come back more manly, and the woman would come back more manly, too. When I asked her why, she put it simply: “Man is considered the default state. Womanhood is about performance.”  Every “first” I experienced as a “trans boy” represented rebellion against this performance. 

Like many who think they’re trans, I was ecstatic to get my first chest binder. I nearly cried when I had my first pixie cut. I wore my first button-down everywhere, until it practically fell apart. Wearing a suit, instead of a dress, to my first orchestra concert was beyond-words liberating.  

It was like a weight was lifted from my shoulders, as I allowed myself to enjoy things I previously (and mistakenly) thought had been denied to me. With each move away from what I perceived to be womanhood, I felt less beholden to the crushing standards imposed upon the female person growing up. It wasn't weird for me not to shave anymore. Men didn't make inappropriate comments about my body in passing. I could wear clothing that was practical.

In other words, I could live in my most default state. And I interpreted this default state as boyhood, because the performance I abhorred, which I was taught to associate with girlhood, just didn’t feel right to me.

None of this made me a boy, though. 

As I grew older, it became harder to hide from reality. My depression worsened; peers continued to socialize and mature. By age 15, I experienced a manic episode and was placed in an inpatient psychiatric program where, I feel, a psychiatrist coerced me into telling him I was trans, then called home to tell my family that this was the source of my distress.  

Months later, I was diagnosed with autism and a slew of other mental health disorders. 

Within the next year, I began to obsessively research trans identity on social media and started attending a support group for transgender youth a town over. There, I met a nurse practitioner whose child was part of the group — and who prescribed hormones to several group members. By age 17, I was under his care. By age 18, I received a written referral for double mastectomy. By age 19, I went under the knife. 

Showered in positive attention from my allies, my experience with gender affirming care felt like night and day compared to the awkward othering I was made to endure when I was perceived as an autistic, gender-nonconforming weird girl. It’s like what we see happen in the movies. If the rebellious tomboy can be conquered and transformed into a beautiful woman, she’s the hero of the story. If she sticks by what she likes and does what she deems practical, then she’s just the butt of the joke. (Or a good friend, never a lover.) She will never fit the feel-good trope of princess. She is much closer to fitting the feel-good trope of prince instead.

Except it’s not “feel-good” when, as far as our culture is concerned, girls and princesses are one and the same. These “malaligned” people are ostracized and criticized.  We’re used as experiments, treated like fixer-uppers. We’re never allowed to exist as we are, to relish in our default nature. We have to “make sense.” And that is what transition did for me. It helped me “make sense” to myself and to others. (Even though I already made sense in my own, unique context.)

I needed community. I needed love. I needed affirmation and acceptance. Trans identity was the framework through which I achieved those things. It is a framework that fits our existing narrative and traditional sex-based expectations most comfortably. But it is not the only framework, despite what certain activists have to say. My existence is living proof of that. 

Still, for the longest time, medicalization felt like an extension of the happiness I got from expressing myself so freely. Doctors agreed that I was meant to be a boy all along, despite the red flags. If the scratchy dresses and insufferable objectification didn't sit right with me, medication was the best course of action. Just like how, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Eventually, this medicalized lifestyle caught up to me. After a series of complications, including a botched double mastectomy, I began to question the legitimacy of my experience with gender affirming care. I had essentially traded mental anguish for physical anguish — and the mental anguish had not even subsided. Soon, I stopped taking hormones. Then I stopped correcting people on how they perceived me.  

Now, I am one of four people in the nation that I know of, all young women who adopted trans identity and began invasive medical treatment as minors, to sue the practitioners involved in mishandling our distress.  

Through mindfulness and dialectical thinking, I was able to accept the truth of my distress, as well as the truth of my sex and body. My distress did not magically subside, but I did learn to see it as a product of decades of socialization, and the ongoing reinforcement of that socialization through media, medicine, and culture at large. It is a societal problem turned psychological turned pathological. 

My subsequent return to womanhood has been a process of reclamation. There are five understandings that have fueled me.

The “womanhood” I used as reference for my identity was based entirely on subjective cultural expectations. Womanhood looks different from culture-to-culture. Everything that I felt made me not-a-woman was based on what I thought the average woman looked and acted like. These expectations came more from media and pornography portrayals of women than women in real life.

My use of womanhood in this way placed limitations on other people. By saying that “x thing” made me not-a-woman, I was ignoring the fact that there are always women who prove me wrong. Short hair? Women have it. Sports? Women play them. Disdain for my boobs? Duh. 

Feelings of distress do not arise in a vacuum. We are not born with the belief that our bodies are wrong and in need of changing. The reason for certain behaviors may not be readily apparent to us. The roots of certain behaviors may even be informed by biology. But our interpretation of behaviors and feelings, like claiming that I dislike my hips because I should not have them, is subjective and learned through experience.  

We develop a sense-of-self through role models. We figure out who we are based on who we have to look up to. When you only see people with certain bodies doing certain things, your understanding of the world and who you are able to become is unfairly limited. 

I have the power to effect change through my language. The language we use both shapes and reflects how we interact with the world around us. If I want to see a world free from sex-based distress, I have to use language that does not reinforce womanhood (or manhood) as a list of expectations someone can meet or fail to meet. I am a woman because I am female. I strive to show the children in my life that women can and do look like me, even if I lacked that same role-modeling growing up. 

In other words, it wasn’t me that was wrong — but rather my relationship with the world around me. The distress I was feeling was based on an incongruence with learned expectations, not an incongruence with the very fabric of my being. In reclaiming womanhood, I have strived to break this cycle instead of reinforcing it. 

Cultural change will ultimately require collaboration. We need to come together to make space for people who do not conform to the expectations of their sex to exist free from the pressure to change their body, and free from the pressure to change what they like. We cannot pray for the medicalization to end while rejecting men who wear dresses. Likewise, we cannot pretend that we’re protecting children while reinforcing them in the misconception that because they like dresses, they must be a girl.

So, that is what my transgender experience has meant to me: finding a framework for self-acceptance that does not compromise my physical wellbeing, where I can accept myself for who I am in the radical sense, not on the condition of cosmetic change. 

I thought I was a trans kid. Now I know that I’m a woman. I’ve come to terms with my sex. And I’m looking forward to a world when others can do that too.

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