The trans woman I am
by Anne Macedo
This part of the story can be quite challenging to write about. There’s just a lot of things to cover this time, so bear with me for a little while.
This is my post egg-cracking story, one that continues to this day and will continue maybe, probably, forever.
Transness
The thing about transness is that being a trans woman is just a fact about my life. You see, typical, cisgender people, most of them never had to question whether they are a man or a woman. It’s just like why 2+2=4: it’s easy to tell, the most obvious thing in the world, yet so hard to explain why this phenomenon happens.
I think the same goes for being trans or non-binary - although we’re usually forced to explain why we’re trans (and we try to come up with reasons, only to understand that we’re just scraping the subject of gender stereotypes that aren’t hard truths) it’s still just a fact about ourselves. I understand people trying to take it to the medical, psychological, societal, even philosophical sides to try to explain transness, it’s still just a fact. We are what we are, and that’s it. That’s why we talk so much of acceptance, rather than explanation.
Family
On acceptance
My family is quite atypical, in the sense that I have a socialist, atheist father, a witch mother and a mystical aunt. I grew up to this kind of non-conservative, atypical family where many of the christian and politically conservative ideas were usually rejected.
However, the idea of gender identity was still new to my family when I transitioned. At first, when I said I was non-binary, my parents thought I was just gay. They kind of always suspected I was a gay man for some reason, because that was the only gender/sexuality diversity they kind of knew.
As I was more open with my mother and my aunt, I would explain to them these gender ideas through the Gender Unicorn [1], which proved helpful and a powerful tool for explaining all things gender and sexuality.
It was a little hard for me to tell my father I was trans, and at first he took it with some
Friends
Transgender subcultures
Myself
Dysphoria
Gender envy
Voice
Body changes
Sexuality
The world
Name change
Moral panic, religion and politics
[1] https://transstudent.org/gender/
tags: neurodivergence - transgender