Mental Exercise

Can you do me a favor? Please? Let’s do a mental exercise.

For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re a woman. Imagine you encounter someone new. Maybe this is a brief, temporary interaction like a worker at a shop. Maybe you’re meeting someone you’ll be interacting with on a regular basis moving forward, like a new co-worker. Either way, this person calls you “sir” or “mister” and generally treats you like you are a man.

Really think about it for me, if you don’t mind. Play the interaction in your head. If it helps, think about the most recent time you did meet someone new. They probably addressed you as a woman, but relive that interaction in your mind and imagine they addressed you instead as a man. Focus on it, please. If you’re a man, feel free to swap the gender roles - so they addressed you as a woman instead of a man.

How does it feel: someone else earnestly (and to their belief truthfully and honestly) addressing you as the incorrect gender? How do you respond mentally and emotionally? Physically, even?

Let’s expand it some. You’re a woman, you have no doubt about it. But its not just the new person you’re interacting with, but everyone. Your friends. Your family. You know who you are. You are a woman. But everyone around you insists that you are a man. Please, play along with me and really consider how this might feel to you.

Think back further. Its not all of a sudden that people are treating you like a man. They always have. Your whole life, since the day you were born. The first thing that happened in your life is someone declared that you are a boy and everyone has gone along with it since then. You have a male name. You are dressed in boy clothes. You are given masculine toys. You are considered a son, a brother, a nephew. But you know that’s not right. You are a woman.

Focus on this. It is hard, but really try. Consider now that every physical piece of evidence indicates that everyone else is right. You have a penis. At first, that’s pretty much it. The rest is simply what other people provide to you because of that one fact. You have a penis, so you are a boy and society hoists the expectations of a boy (rather than the expectations of a girl) on to you. Later on, there’s more: your voice deepens and your muscles expand and you start growing hair on your face.

This is all true, but this next part is really important to this mental exercise: despite all of this, all of the evidence, you know you are a woman. Let’s snap back, briefly, to the now - to your reality. Focus on your internal self. Focus on the piece of you that only you truly know: your soul, your psyche, your id and your ego, however you want to think of it. Focus on the piece of you that knows you are a woman. Remove the expectations, the role hoisted upon you. Remove the feminine coded clothes and and the female body and everything physical. Focus only on your most internal gender identity. Hold on to it. This is important. Don’t let it go.

Let’s go back into our mental exercise. You are said to be a boy. You have a masculine body. You’re given a masculine name and masculine expectations. But consider that inner, hidden piece of you that knows you are a woman.

The world doesn’t see it. The world doesn’t believe. This is not malicious, not necessarily. They were told what gender they were at birth based on what genitals they had and they never had a problem with it. They can’t even comprehend what it would be like to not identify with the gender identity that aligns with their genitals. But still, you know. Maybe you try to speak your truth, explain who you really are, but they can’t understand. They don’t even really try.

Now think on it, and really think hard on it, and consider now that you believe them. You are still a woman. There’s that piece inside of you, that core piece of what is you regardless of anything else, that is still woman. But you’ve forgotten it. Maybe you never had a chance to know it, but it is still there. You’re told from birth that you are a boy and everybody agrees and it is stressed so much on you how important it is to be good and behave. So, you are good. You behave. You are a boy, but really you’re a girl and you don’t know.

You grow up as a boy. You’re a girl, but you have to be a boy and so that’s all you know. Something is wrong, but you don’t know what it is. You can’t even think about it because to express that something is wrong is inconvenient to the adults and so you bury it. If there is a problem then the problem is you and you can’t be a problem and so there is no problem.

Now, in the mind space of living as something you’re not, not even knowing who you really are, imagine that you find out. You discover that piece of you that’s been so well hidden. In this mind space, you know you’re a woman just as confidently as you do in your reality. There’s no question. It is who you are.

Picture your reflection, now. You feel as assuredly a woman as you do in your reality, but in our exercise your reflection looks like what everyone around you calls a man. Maybe you’ve got facial hair. Maybe you have a receding hairline. When you speak your voice is resonant and deep. That is you. It shouldn’t be, but it is. How do you feel? What do you do?

Do you continue to live pretending to be a man even though you now know you’re not? Or do you embrace your true self and live according to your gender identity?

Let’s zoom back out. Back into your reality. You’re a woman, still, but back in the world that’s always treated you that way. Could you now commit to living like a man for the sake of other people? Never being you who truly are? If you’re honest with yourself, if you’ve really pictured yourself as I’ve described, the feeling should be the same.

Being trans is inconvenient. Being trans is difficult. Being trans is expensive. Being trans is dangerous.

Being trans is not a choice.

People choose how they respond to discovering themselves. Sometimes their circumstances make that choice for them. But being trans is not a choice.

Final note: I’ve written this from the perspective of a trans woman because that is what I am, but despite what the media focuses on not all transgender people are trans women. There are, of course, trans men, but also people who do not fall into that binary. Specifics will differ, but the feeling of not being what society has told us we are is, I think, a common experience between us.