Myths About Trans People
Women transition to male because they want to escape sexism
Trans men, people who were born female but identify as male, aren’t trying to escape sexism at all. We would still transition even if men experienced sexism as badly as women do.
Transitioning, being trans, can create a whole host of issues in terms of how society treats us and reacts to us in general. Being trans can make life much harder than it normally is, so nobody who wants to transition does so lightly.
2. Men transition to female because they want access to female spaces
While it is true that some cis men may take advantage of the existence of trans people by claiming to be trans in order to be predatory – trans women aren’t doing that.
Being trans isn’t predatory in itself, even if there can be bad people in every group in society. It’s the person that can be predatory, not the identity.
People who are doing this to access spaces of the opposite sex are normally not trans people at all, just cis people using the label to do things they shouldn’t be doing. And it’s highly unlikely that a cis person would go to all that trouble to assault someone anyway - they’re far more likely to just do it.
3. Trans men are just confused tomboys
Being a tomboy and being a trans man are two completely different things. Tomboys are masculine women, compared to trans men who are men who were assigned female at birth.
Exploring your sexuality and gender can get confusing, but trans men are real men, and deserve to be treated with the same respect as any other man would.
4. People who transition from one gender to another are confused about their sexuality or are really just gay
You can be trans and also identify with a sexuality that isn’t straight. Trans people can be gay, bisexual, or anything else, because the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Gender and sexuality are two different things. Trans people can be confused about their sexuality, but it’s not a reason why trans people transition.
5. Trans people are out to trick cis people
No. People are what they identify as, and there’s no trick in a trans woman saying she’s a woman, or a trans man saying he’s a man. The whole ‘point’ of being trans is that our genitals don’t match our identity on the inside, and so we do what we can to match our body to our internal sense of self.
You don’t need to know what genitals someone has unless you’re going to be intimate with them, at which point they’ll probably tell you themselves.
6. It’s dangerous to let trans people into toilets that match their gender identity
A lot of trans people just want to be left alone or go about their day unnoticed. If a trans person wants to use the toilet – they just want to use the toilet.
We’re not dangerous, and we might even feel more in danger around cis people than cis people do around us, as we don’t know if someone’s going to harass us once they find out we’re trans, or worse, hurt or kill us if they decide we’re in the ‘wrong’ toilet.
Everyone needs to go somewhere.
7. Medically transitioning takes one big surgery and then you’re all done
Medically transitioning in the UK is a lengthy, difficult process. The wait to see a gender specialist is about 5 to 6 years on average right now. Then, once you’re in to see a specialist, it can take a few months as an adult to start hormones, and that’s if your GP even knows how to or wants to treat trans patients. They aren’t always so happy to cooperate.
Then, it might take another few appointments over months for your gender specialist to agree to just refer you to surgery. After that, the waiting times for a first surgical consult can take up to a year or more, then another year to get just one surgery.
And we do this multiple times for several different surgeries, depending on if you want surgery at all. Not every trans person transitions medically.
8. Children shouldn’t be allowed to transition because they don’t know themselves well enough yet and it’ll just be a phase
Children know themselves better than adults give them credit for, and often present with a strong sense of identity from a very young age.
Children also aren’t just given things like hormones the minute they say they’re trans – so there’s no danger in letting them explore their gender identity.
They might socially transition by using a new name and pronouns, getting a haircut or wearing different clothes, but nothing permanent normally happens until a young person has been on hormone blockers for a year, and only then are they allowed hormone replacement therapy.
This normally happens around the age of 16, once they’ve gone through the lengthy process of seeing a gender specialist in the first place.
Blockers are completely reversible, and allow the young person time to explore their gender identity more in-depth without the anxiety that puberty might cause, as certain aspects of natural puberty are not reversible, or aren’t something hormone replacement therapy can easily cover up, such as voice drops in trans women, or people assigned male at birth.
9. The label of ‘transgender’ is a third gender
The term transgender is actually an umbrella-term, not a third gender.
It encompasses anyone who’s gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth. This can mean someone assigned male at birth who identifies as female, for example.
Many trans people just identify as male or female.
10. Being trans is a new thing
Trans people have been around for longer than we’ve had a label for ourselves – it’s just that now we finally have the language to express how we really feel on the inside.
The Internet has helped more people find the terminology to talk about their feelings, but it has also made it seem like there’s suddenly a ‘surge’ of trans people coming out of nowhere. That isn’t true at all.
11. Being trans is a choice
Being trans is innate, in the same way that you can’t choose your sexuality, we are born as who we are. We just needed the language to figure it out.
There’s also a lot of science that backs up the fact that being trans isn’t something you choose, but that there are complex things that happen during the development of a baby in the womb that nobody has any choice over.
And nobody would choose to be treated so poorly by society for fun, or just because they can. Being trans is difficult in so many ways, and the only reward you get out of it is that you keep trying to be who you really are, even when you’re surrounded by people who think they know your body better than you do, or who don’t want you to exist at all.
