There’s currently a diary on the trending list about a gay man who suffered from gender dysphoria for many years. I am completely empathetic to his story because we share a lot in common as far as our understanding of ourselves goes, but I need to make a few crucial points.
First, I also have thought on occasion that my life would have been tragic had I been prescribed puberty blockers. But it’s important to note that the only time I’ve had that thought is when an anti-trans person brings it up, and paradoxically if I think about it further, my life would have been a lot better had my parents even considered such a thing. That would have meant that they recognized this thing that had caused me so much distress and unhappiness.
When I was a little girl, I assumed that when I went through puberty it would turn me into a boy. That was the only thing that made sense to me. All my friends were boys, I was a rough and tumble kid, I loved sports and guitars and girls. Oh, did I like girls. Not as friends, but as something different, though I didn’t quite understand the difference.
When I went through puberty I felt like this had to be a mistake, even though I was old enough to know better. My inner feelings did not make sense to me. I had crushes that I recognized as crushes on girls my age and older, but that couldn’t be permanent, could it? It had to be an odd side effect of puberty because puberty was supposed to clear things up for me.
At the time I did have gay and lesbian friends, but every lesbian I knew was a butch one. I love butch lesbians but I’m not one and I didn’t want to be, so I didn’t think I could be a lesbian. I just didn’t see myself in them. But I also didn’t see myself in my straight friends. I was completely lost and confused.
Finally (TMI, I know, but relevant), I share with the diarist the experience of it all making sense the first time I masturbated. I had a long term, very good looking boyfriend at the time and I was considering having sex with him, which would be my first time. I got curious about what it would be like, so I started experimenting. It took a while before it started to feel good (girls really need a positive sex education earlier in life) and as soon as it did I tried to think of my boyfriend but all I could see was the girl in my class who always flirted with me.
I couldn’t make it stop. Her smile, the way she looked at me when I took off my coat, the way she’d approach me but suddenly become shy and look down instead of at my face. She was the cutest punk girl I had ever met, and all I wanted to see was my hands in her purple hair that night alone in my room.
It took me a couple more years to completely accept this truth about myself, and a bit more time to tell the truth to everyone else. It was a very painful, scary, confusing journey. But the one thing that became clear to me is that I did actually love my body. I loved being a woman. I had never thought that was possible before.
I empathize with the other diarist on a very intimate level. But I must say, this is exactly why I think he’s wrong.
Our experiences happened long before LGB representation existed. If I had been born a decade later my life would have been completely different. Indeed, one of the reasons my coming out lasted so long is because of the timing. After Ellen, I came out to my sister and friends. I was working on coming out to the rest of my family when Matthew Shepard was murdered. I decided to procrastinate because I knew it would scare them. It’s cliche, but we are the product of our times in so many ways.
But children today have answers that we never had. Gays and lesbians are widely represented positively, so the little Me of today would have known there’s a word for what I was. Today children, and most adults, see gay and lesbian people as fully formed, three dimensional people. Not as invisible or, worse, walking stereotypes.
Even more important, children today have gays and lesbians in their own lives. Their aunts, their uncles, their parents, even their grandparents. When we were young, it was something to be tolerated but not discussed, and if it was spoken of it was with disgust.
The world has changed a lot, and for the gay and lesbian community it has changed quickly and positively.
I understand the instinct to protect our identity- believe me, I do, but that can be a vulnerability as well as a strength. As I noted above, I was also horrified to think of what my life would have been like if I had been placed on puberty blockers at a young age but that has never been presented to me as a hypothetical by anyone acting in good faith. It’s a pressure point designed to make me feel as though children are being harmed, because *I* would have been harmed. That is manipulation, and it’s wrong.
I also have to reiterate that had that been an option to me, it would have necessarily meant that I had supportive parents, which I absolutely did not. If they were open and supportive of me possibly being trans, they certainly would have talked to me before I reached that conclusion and I would have been able to express what I was feeling and why.
In addition to that, it’s not as though I would have told my parents “I think I should have been born a boy” and voila, they would make an appointment with the family doctor and gotten me a prescription for puberty blockers. That’s just not how it works, and at every point along the way I would have had plenty of opportunity for myself or someone else to recognize my dysphoria was due to my sexual identity, not my gender identity.
It is very difficult to decouple one’s identity and life experience from their opinions on other topics, especially those that feel personal. But we have to do that in order to evaluate things clearly.
Trans people have a long way to go to get the full representation that we need to help society see them as fully formed, three dimensional people. The LGB community must not now nor ever be a hindrance to that because the bottom line is that our experiences are not the same as theirs.
To equate the two is akin to the cishet woman telling me that she also had sex with a woman once, but that was a choice and so therefore my orientation is also a choice.
It’s wrong, it’s insulting, it obfuscates, it offends, and, worst of all, it does nothing to achieve a better life for all of us.