Thinking about growing up unknowingly trans

One of the things about transitioning has been feeling things I didn’t expect, didn’t previously understand. Learning about myself.

It was so amazing when I first started expressing any sort of femininity how it felt like I was, somehow, finally, doing the same things as the other people around me always had been, as if somehow I was allowed to be ’normal,’ too. I started to realize how much I really somehow felt the (other) women around me were somehow ‘my group’ that I was supposed to be part of. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be, really, earlier in life. More recently on HRT and having gotten near the end of electrolysis on my face, again it’s amazing how much I feel like I just sort of look ’normal’ like the other people (women) do. I did look ’normal’ as a guy, I understood that thinking about it, but only now do I really understand how I didn’t feel that at all. Only now that I do feel it do I even know what it is to feel it. I never knew you could feel it like this.

I remember lots of things from high school, I have some memories of the middle school years, 6th through 8th grade, when I was, well, the only way I even know is I was 17 when I graduated high school, so (I had three years in high school for reasons) 14 at the end of 8th grade, so 11 when I entered the new school in 6th grade. And here and there just scattered fragments of memories from earlier.

I wonder now what some of those early experiences were. The ones outside of memory.

Thinking about it now it seems like I must have tried joining in on whatever the other kids, meaning the other girls of course, were doing and that didn’t make people happy. If I was many decades younger, a kid now, probably people around me would recognize what was going on, for better or for worse, but in nineteen-seventy-something probably no one had a clue, and certainly no one told me anything I was able to understand in any useful way. So I guess what I learned was not really so much that I was looking to the wrong people as much as that I shouldn’t look to other people at all, that I was supposed to do what I was told to do and ignore the other people doing their other-people things for whatever mysterious other-people reasons they had. It’s not like anyone was going to explain what they were doing or why, it was all just an unknowable mystery. And I imagine the adults were not unhappy with me coming to the conclusion that the one key to getting along in life was to do whatever they told me to do.

I switched schools going from 5th to 6th grade. I didn’t have great expectations for how things might go in the longer term, but I really wondered what the short term would hold, what it would be like to be a new kid who no one knew. Would people talk to me? At first at least? Maybe in time they’d decide they didn’t want to anymore, but surely the first few weeks or maybe months would be different from before, with people not knowing me yet, not having an opinion about me yet.

Didn’t work that way, was exactly as always right from the first instant. Looking back, I’m sure I wasn’t any good at talking to people, I’d never had any practice, after all. And I wonder what sort of a weird mix of personality I might have had. I probably knew a few dozen things I was supposed to do, knew of a dozen things that I shouldn’t do because they were ‘girl things,’ and then had a million other things I was entirely unaware of, that I would have picked up unconsciously from the girls, but of course not as part of friendships with other girls but only what I noticed from a distance. I’m sure it was special.

I went to a residential nerd high school (the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy) and I actually talked to people, had friends, and even dated. We didn’t describe ourselves as autistic back in the late eighties, but I think it’s fair to suggest it was not uncommon. It was a very different environment from when I was younger, and I probably changed a lot, and similarly in college, and things seemed to be going fine for me as an adult.

When I began experimenting with a social transition, wearing ever more overtly feminine clothing while not changing anything about my body other than letting my hair grow long, eventually typically wearing dresses while still having a beard, I was of course surprised to not really get any harassment. But I was more surprised that what I really experienced, on the whole, was people being friendlier, nicer, and politer to me as as an obviously genderqueer person than they were when I was ostensibly a straight dude. I’d have all these nice little social interactions with women, I’d get those little compliments women give each other, about my hair or clothes. Aside from the constant worry that at some point I’d run into someone overtly hostile (which happened an amazingly small number of times, but more than zero) I worried that even if someone wasn’t overtly hostile they’d maybe ignore me, not help me, not take me seriously, but, again, honestly it felt like people treated me better than I’d been used to. People noticed me, everywhere I went people remembered me, but it never felt like it was in a bad way.

I’ve become a great deal less visible, a great deal less memorable, since the start of the pandemic, when, with my face covered, people just switched from “sir” to “ma’am.” It’s taken a long time for me to really get used to it, to really believe it. It’s weirdly comfortable. I get to just be like the other people, as if I’m allowed to be normal, too, and to go almost unnoticed as some ordinary person, no longer noticed everywhere as someone boldly doing ‘other-person things.’ It’s been hard to get over the lifetime of anxiety about talking with people even as I discover it’s weirdly easy now. It’s amazing to realize I can relax and act natural and people around me are not just willing to tolerate that but it goes much better than anything before.

The real mystery to me is that everyone knows men get taken more seriously than women. And yet, things are going great for me at work, first as by far the most visible gender weirdo around, and even more now, as a woman who is widely known to be trans since so many people know me from the old days. I’m being kept informed about stuff, I’m being asked for my input. I do science, and in the core lab mostly we do fairly routine work. Now and then I’ve been named in the little acknowledgments bit at the end of a paper. From time to time I’m more involved in a project and am one of the coauthors. That is a far more significant credit. When I look at how many papers I’m a coauthor on under my new name, which I only started using professionally early last year, and under my old name, which I used the previous 27 years I’ve been working in the labs, it sure doesn’t look like I’m not getting taken seriously or given credit. If anything, I’m getting taken more seriously, getting more credit.

So, what did people see me as in the old days? I suspect it was pretty variable, and people who actually knew me might have had different impressions from first impressions. People who knew me at work maybe different from people who knew me outside of work. Some of the weirder or more frightening experiences in life might have been from people who saw me as some sort of queer, with me having had no idea that might be a thing. I understood myself as shy and awkward, but maybe I was a lot more awkward than I realized. Probably you don’t get great results if your big lesson from childhood was that you shouldn’t look at how other people act, shouldn’t imagine you can do as they do. And if you’ve learned not to look to the examples of others then whatever you experience is what it is, nothing to meaningfully compare it to.