An argument against transmasc and transfem labels

As promised, here are a few thoughts about transmasculine and transfeminine as labels. Disclaimer: if you are a person who uses these words to describe yourself and you find it empowering, I’m glad for you. This piece does not apply to you. As with most content I have up so far, this is explicitly for cisgender people and their relationship with these terms.

Here we go, time to make this personal again.

It took me a very long time to come out. I began to think of myself as nonbinary almost as soon as I learned the word, probably late 2014 or early 2015. I had a good friend who was nonbinary and we had so many talks about what it meant and I found myself really identifying with it.

But, I let popular logic about the topic get to me and told myself, “You just want to fit in. You have this new friend that you adore and you just want to relate to them more. You’re projecting. You don’t get dysphoria, shut up and be a good ally instead.”

So I was. I started talking to my cisgender friends and advocating to the extent that a younger, shyer me could.

In 2016, I took a course at my university about Buddhism and sexuality. It seemed like I was the only person in the room who definitely wasn’t straight and who knew anything about trans* issues, so I found myself speaking up a lot in class (and getting a lot of weird looks from my classmates). During that class, the professor informed us of a performer called Yozmit. The professor really struggled with describing her and using her pronouns because her philosophy of gender was incredibly abstract. In class, we listened to her song Sound of New P*ssy (censored because I’m not sure what the rules are on Medium for that kind of language).

It would take a lot of space to describe why that song had such a profound effect on me, but as we watched it together, I cried in class. Almost ugly cried. In front of over 20 people. We had spent so long talking about her philosophy, how it related to my religion, the symbolism in the video, her personal struggles, and I remembered that time I dared question my own gender for the first time and… phew. I just broke down. The professor noticed, and I am eternally grateful that he didn’t make it a big deal in front of the others.

I walked out of class that day knowing I was nonbinary. For sure. I told one person. I was scared to come out, I didn’t know what that would look like for me, so I kept up my cisgender façade. But I was comfortable with that, because I knew who I was finally.

I stayed in the closet until 2018. I didn’t choose to come out. By this time, I was beginning to feel dysphoric about my cover persona. I had also discovered that certain things I took for granted as normal, run of the mill self hatred were actually dysphoria that I had been experiencing for years.

When I couldn’t hold it in anymore, I told my partner at the time… who then proceeded to tell our entire friend group in the most confusing way possible, forcing me to come out to them and clarify things. It ended up working out in the end because it meant I had the confidence to come out during grad school and create a professional social circle for myself that was accepting, but those were very dark days for me.

Suffice to say that most people in the social circle I was outed to were not the most accepting. I was called names. Jokes with slurs were thrown around. I was interrogated about issues like “trans women in women’s sports.” It was heavily implied that I was mentally ill or confused. They didn’t know how to see me as nonbinary so I was misgendered constantly (I still am sometimes, to be honest).

And it was so frustrating because the only terms I could get them to understand were in the binary. They weren’t great about binary transgender people, but they at least had a frame of reference for what “man” and “woman” were, socially, and how a binary transgender person could exist.

So I started defining myself in those terms. I started trying to alter my voice to be more consistent with the “opposite” gender. I bought gear that would flatten things that needed flattened and bring out aspects that needed to be brought out on my body to present more typically for the “opposite” gender.

Like a light switch had gone off, I was suddenly being gendered correctly. The cisgender people in that social circle were complimenting me, telling me how much they were starting to read me as the “opposite” gender. They started using compliments that were stereotypically used for people of that binary gender.

Suddenly, I was a transmasculine/feminine nonbinary person. Sorry if that’s confusing, but I’ve said that I will not be disclosing my assigned gender at birth (agab) and I plan on sticking to it- fill in the previous with either transmasculine or transfeminine and you get the idea.

And at first, that went really well with me. I’m not an agender person, I do definitely have a feeling of gender (even if it isn’t much of one), and it definitely leans a little bit towards either masculine or feminine. I actually felt empowered by it for a while. I was being recognized! I wasn’t being misgendered really anymore! I had found phrases that they understood!

Then the invasive questions started. Was I getting surgeries? Was I starting hormones? In social situations I was still considered “one of the girls” or “one of the guys” (the one that correlated with my agab). It felt like I was being treated either as a spicy version of my agab or a lite version of the “opposite” gender.

I started feeling tired. I remembered what it was like to pretend to be cisgender for those years that I knew I was nonbinary initially and this feeling was exactly the same. I was pretending so much to be so like the “opposite” gender for their comfort that I wasn’t being myself.

So, cis people. Please be aware of this implicit bias you have. There is no “opposite” gender. There is no correct way to look nonbinary. There is no correct way to sound nonbinary.

It is actively nonbinary-phobic to try and force nonbinary people into binary boxes for your comfort.

There are nonbinary men and women, and I don’t mean to discount them, but that experience is not all of our experience. If a friend comes out to you as nonbinary and you automatically start using “opposite” gendered words for them you are not being a good ally. You are preserving your own comfort at the expense of ours.

Ask us how we would like to be described. Have a conversation with us about what words are comfortable and which ones aren’t. And then respect that. Not every nonbinary person who was assigned female at birth is transmasculine. Not every nonbinary person who was assigned male at birth is transfeminine.

Anyway, that’s it for today. I hope me talking about my experiences has helped someone understand what it can be like to be nonbinary in this world. I’m thinking about talking about tokenization in the next one or about queer characters in popular media. We’ll see.

Anyway, that’s it for today. I hope me talking about my experiences has helped someone understand what it can be like to be nonbinary in this world. I’m thinking about talking about tokenization in the next one or about queer characters in popular media. We’ll see.