I hate being trans...

“I hate being trans” is a statement I find myself saying a lot recently. Not because I regret my transition or because I have become some far right anti-trans grifter, though I do love to role play as one in conversations with my partner, but because I care so much about my transition. Lets be honest, at the base level being trans is difficult. Getting hormones, constant doctors appointments and living in a world that is anything but friendly and welcoming to us is difficult. Not to mention surgery if you go down that path. I haven’t been able to leave my room much recently while I have been recovering from bottom surgery and it’s given me a lot of time to reflect on how I view myself in relation to the broader outside world.

One of my biggest issues with being a trans-woman or a tgirl are the labels themselves. The fact that the female part is always lead by this prefix of being trans like some sort of warning that the next part of the word you are about to read may not be as true as you otherwise would have thought. The more I have dove into trans and queer communities I have noticed that almost all the girls who are trans refer to themselves as some form of tgirl or trans-woman, maybe they find some sort of comfort in this, maybe its pride in their identity or maybe they feel compelled to. I also know that a lot of them have to fetishize themselves to keep food on their plates and survive, and maybe that’s why they so heavily refer to themselves as TRANS-women. But the more I continued into my transition the more discomfort I felt in calling myself a TRANS-woman and not just a woman.

Label

When I first started transitioning I took a lot of pride in my newfound trans identity and wanted to make it know that I was a proud and out transwoman, but as time progressed and I settled into my transition I started to take issue with this. That’s not to say that I am no longer proud of being trans or that I don’t identify as being trans, but that I don’t value publicizing my trans identity as much as I once did. I slowly realized that my trans identity was starting to form a hole I was struggling to dig myself out of.

I grew up watching a lot of Top Gear with my dad, the original British production not the comparably garbage American series that came after. One of the biggest things that always stuck with me was when they wanted to insult a car Jeremy Clarkson would do a piece to camera where he would say “...you can find it being driven by your local homosexual, or transgender.” or some variation of that. These casual insults in media stuck with me and as I got older seemed to become common schoolyard insults mainly being thrown at me. Now this isn’t to say I hate Jeremy Clarkson or Top Gear, and I would still love to visit his farm in the Cotswolds, but as I settled into my transition around the one year mark I realized my discomfort was because I just assumed that anyone who knew I was trans would think of me as the punchline as a joke. Obviously anti-trans rhetoric in the past few years also made coming out and living as a trans girl incredibly scary and uncomfortable, but I found myself latching into old childhood insults that kept me in the closet for so long. Using them against myself in moments of stress and anxiety leading to panic attacks. I realized my issue was not with my identity as a transwoman but the label and negative attachment to it I had given myself.

Every day I was constantly reminding myself of my trans identity, looking through old pictures of myself and talking about my transition to anyone I could get to listen. And while I want to say there is nothing wrong with this, for me it lead me to a pretty dark place. My new identity as a transwoman lead me to pinning myself as an underclass of woman and holding passing as an unreachable grail I would never be able to get close to. I became hyper critical of myself and fell deep into unrealistic beauty standards, and just when I thought I had fixed one “problem” I would invent a new one to obsess over for months. I grew anxious about my appearance and my voice, scared that if I went out in public as anything but my idea of perfection I would be clocked, judged or attacked for being trans. I found other transwomen online who were many years into their transition and some who had cosmetic procedures done and held them as idols, studying them and obsessing over every detail of what clothes they had, how they did their hair and makeup. During this anxiety fueled spiral I realized something, the thing I desired most about these girls was that even though I knew they were trans I didn’t think of them as trans but simply as girls who happen to also be trans. This was it, this was the acceptance I had been chasing and struggling to get the whole time, but I also knew that nonmatter how many times my partner told me that she thought of me as nothing but a girl I had to truly accept it within myself.

I knew that the acceptance I desired so deeply had to come from deep inside me, and when I took a step back I noticed two blockades to my success; the scarlet letter I wore below my waistline and the troubling associations I had made with being trans.
The first was easy enough to remedy, I had already started my journey into seeking out bottom surgery, and the closer I got to the operation the more I could feel the weight lift off my chest. The process wasn’t easy and the recovery has been anything but fun, but even now being over a month post-op I feel so much joy and relief not having to fear catching a glimpse of my body in the mirror and the resulting wave of dysphoria that follows.
It was the second blockade I was worried about most, the one that would take a lot of introspection, figuring out how I want to view myself in the world and confronting the false narratives on what a trans-woman was I had grown up hearing over and over. But, after a lot of writing and rambling conversations I realized that constantly labeling myself as a TRANS-woman was only doing me harm. In the past few months I have stopped referring to myself as a transwoman in favor of simply referring to myself as a woman or a girl. I placed so much emphasis on being accepted for being trans and searching in all the wrong places for that acceptance and validation. I fell deep into a pit of thinking all I will ever be was trans and never letting myself just be a girl, and treating being trans like disease I had to carry with me. I let my anxiety over my transition, identity and other peoples views on me dictate my life and decisions for so long. I slowly started thinking and referring to myself as just a girl like any other you may see if you go outside and giving myself the grace to have off days. I realized these impossible standards I was holding myself to were only hurting me and did nothing to build my confidence. And as I slowly began to realize, confidence was the piece I was missing the whole time. The shift in mindset from thinking of myself as a TRANS-girl to just a girl helped me immensely, I stopped feeling like a target to be clocked or attacked because of my gender identity. My confidence grew over time and I became happier. Now whenever I have been looking at myself in the mirror I just see a girl looking back who happens to be trans, just like all the girls I was so jealous of and idolized.

As my friends will tell you, I still identify as a transwoman and I’m more proud then ever to be trans. I just don’t prioritize the trans part of my label anymore, and I’m happier than ever for it. Its brought me unfathomable levels of confidence to be able to go outside and interact with people. I no longer walk around with the fear of being clocked, and at the end of the day I think its a label that just fits me better.