How Do You Know You’re Trans?
Tricky question. How does someone know they’re gay? There’s more than one answer, and identity can always change down the road, if you later find a label that you think suits you better, or you find that having no label at all is even better than that.
Mainly, though, it’s a combination of several things together.
Experimentation
This is what has worked for me personally, and it’s just one way of figuring things out.
Like we talked about in a previous post, finding that you prefer a different gender expression than the one expected of you, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re trans. Being born male and preferring to wear makeup or dresses, for example, can just mean that you’re a feminine man.
So how are you supposed to know you’re trans?
There’s no one size fits all.
I personally found pronouns were important to me.
Pronouns
I’ll tell you a little story about pronouns. I was a young teenager, and I had been a tomboy for a couple years at that point. I was leaving school and happened to hear somebody refer to me as ‘he.’
I had never known that that was an option, and I’ll be honest, my mind was blown. I was born female, so had always been called ‘she,’ and nobody had even gotten my gender ‘wrong’ until that point.
I say ‘wrong’ in quotation marks, because being referred to as ‘he’ is actually right for me now. From that point on, actually, as a friend corrected them and said ‘she,’ that was what felt wrong. That ‘correction’ of ‘she’ was what made me feel ill. And that isn’t me blaming my friend – I had never questioned my gender before, and they were just trying to back me up and defend me.
But all of a sudden there was another option that nobody had ever told me about, and I was elated. Something finally felt right. I think it even unlocked a wave of dysphoria I didn’t know I had, because I had never heard about trans people, I didn’t know that gender could be on a spectrum.
I started researching things like ‘preferring pronouns of the opposite gender,’ ‘not liking being called she,’ and stumbled on the term ‘transgender’ by accident.
But when I read what it meant, I felt right. It felt like me.
Somebody had accidentally called me ‘he,’ and it set off a year-long wave of research into why that felt so much better than what I had been called my entire life.
Not that being trans is something that can be ‘triggered,’ but rather, like sexuality, it’s something that can lay dormant until you finally figure it out, possibly even into late adulthood, because finding out new things about yourself doesn’t stop when you turn thirty.
What I’m saying is this – try out different pronouns. Maybe just to yourself at first, just to see how it feels. There’s more than just ‘he’ or ‘she,’ but I don’t know a lot about non-binary identities. I figured myself out to be a binary trans man.
I emphasize maybe keeping your feelings to yourself for a bit, just out of pure safety. Before you go around telling everyone this new, delicate thing about yourself, you should know yourself before you do it. Or know more about it, at least.
Some people will try to tell you that you’re wrong, and whilst I understand the concern about being trans in the current climate, it’s not really for them to decide.
Also understand that there are people who want what’s best for you, and then there are people who just don’t want you to be trans. If someone is gently questioning you to make sure that you’re sure, they probably just want to help.
If someone is being incredibly mean about it, really pushy, using outdated terms, they’re probably on the wrong side of things, or just need some more recent research.
If you spend a longer amount of time figuring yourself out, when you get to that point where you want to tell other people, you’ll be able to be confident about it, because you’ll be more likely to know if it’s right for you. If they have questions, you’ll be better equipped to answer them.
Things like ‘how do you know you’re not just a lesbian?’ and to that I would say, sexuality and gender are different. I personally found that after calling myself a lesbian for a while, I still felt like there was something missing from my identity. That something still wasn’t quite right.
To me, that’s the difference, and that’s another reason I researched further and further into being trans instead of just accepting that I wasn’t straight, because it still felt like I hadn’t found myself yet.
Of course, my experience is not the same as what other people might experience, but if I keep talking about that then I’ll just end up going on a tangent.
If you explore sexuality first, and you find that you still feel like you’re missing something, it really doesn’t hurt to explore further into different avenues.
Gender Expression
I know I said earlier that a unique gender expression doesn’t necessarily mean you’re trans, and that’s true, to an extent.
You can be assigned female at birth but dress masculine and be more of a tomboy. But if you find that just dressing masculine isn’t enough, or it feels like something more than just being a masculine woman, then there’s some exploring to do in there.
Why does it feel like there’s more there?
Do you wear masculine clothes to cover up your chest so that other people don’t know it’s there? Your hips? Or do you do it just because you like the style? Do you feel better when wearing masculine clothes, because people are more likely to think that you’re male? (Or the opposite of what you were born as?)
Why are you experimenting with your gender expression? I think that’s the important thing to ask yourself.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be so painful a reason, either. Does it make you feel better when you’re gendered as something other than what you were born as? Do you prefer how you look when you can’t see the outline of your body under your clothes?
This is just another form of experimentation, and is probably best taken into account with other factors as you try to get to know yourself better.
Your Body
This one is a lot to think about.
Gender dysphoria is a hallmark of being trans. People also talk about gender euphoria, and there’s a big debate on whether you need gender dysphoria to be trans.
Some people don’t experience the intense distress about their body not matching their identity, or what their brain expects to see, known as gender dysphoria. And yet they still experience euphoria, such as the feeling of elation when being gendered correctly, and they still identify as trans.
There is an argument as to whether their dysphoria is just lesser, or hidden, or they have dysphoria but just haven’t realized it.
And the question is often asked – people transition to alleviate gender dysphoria, so why else would you do it?
To experience euphoria? Can you experience euphoria without dysphoria?
I can’t answer that question for everyone. I don’t want to invalidate anyone else’s experiences either.
So, I’ll pose a different one.
Does transitioning make you feel more like you? Will it make you happier, even though you know that transitioning doesn’t take away other life problems?
If a cis person tried to transition, they would end up feeling dysphoria because their body doesn’t match their gender identity. There have been studies on children raised the opposite gender to the one they were born as, without their consent.
Which is highly unethical, but it does show that gender is innate, and you can’t force someone to be something they’re not.
Admittedly, I don’t have a lot of experience with a lack of dysphoria. I have pretty bad dysphoria, and being on hormones (hormone replacement therapy – testosterone injections) has done so much good in lowering my dysphoria.
I can look at myself a little easier now, even if it is still really difficult when I haven’t yet had top surgery, which I’ve never been more excited about knowing that that will happen in my future.
Gender dysphoria revolves around how you feel when you see yourself. When you look at your body, how does it make you feel?
It also has different social and emotional aspects to it. How do you feel about what other people think when they see your body? When they gender you a certain way because of it? How do you feel about the lack of/amount of hair you have on your body? Or about periods?
These are just a few of many questions you could start asking yourself, if you’re feeling confused about your gender identity.
People can have body issues not related to gender dysphoria. Things like body dysmorphia, anorexia, bulimia, they aren’t necessarily related to gender issues. They can be made worse by gender issues, but they also just happen on their own. Going through puberty can also make things feel a lot more confusing.
It can be difficult to tell where one issue ends, and another one begins. This is where therapy comes in, as well as talking to gender specialists or LGBT+ friendly therapists. It can be difficult to get in touch with these types of specialists, but you might find some on our charity page, if you feel the need to.
It might take a while to find a specialist you trust, or that you get on well with and that you feel understands where you’re coming from. But if you stick at it, you can eventually find the right person to help you.
Getting to the route of these issues is certainly not something I’m qualified to help you do here. All I can do is give some advice, maybe a little guidance.
It can be dangerous to try to do all of this alone. Confiding in some you can trust, or finding an LGBT+ group or helpline you can talk to, really can help you work through some of the more confusing aspects of gender identity or sexual orientation, or even mental health issues.
The Bottom Line
Nobody can tell you who you are, or how you identify. This is something you sometimes have to figure out by yourself, mainly through experimenting with different parts of your identity.
You can ask for help if you’re very confused or conflicted about something as complicated as gender dysphoria. There’s a lot to it, and it can get very overwhelming very quickly.
This isn’t a post where I try to ‘convince’ anyone into thinking they might be trans. Gender identity isn’t some weird cult that you can be pulled into, or some conspiracy theory. I’m not here to force anyone into second guessing who they are, or what they identify as.
I’m just trying to be useful to people who already are.
