[...] my friend seemed a little let down by the photos. She muttered, "It's weird, because it looks just like you in the pictures, except that you're a guy." Similarly, whenever old friends meet up with me for the first time since my transition, they almost invariably comment on how strange it is that I seem like the exact same person to them, except that now I am female. It's as if our compulsion to place women and men into different categories of our brain, to see them as "opposite" sexes, is so intense that we have trouble imagining that it is possible for a person to change their sex without somehow becoming an entirely different person.

Trying to translate these subconsious experiences into concious thought is a messy business. All of the words available in the English language completely fail to accurately capture or convey my personal understanding of these events. For example, if I were to say that I "saw" myself as female, or "knew" myself to be a girl, I would be denying the fact that I was conciously aware of my physical maleness at all times. And saying that I "wished" or "wanted" to be a girl erases how much being female made sense to me, how it felt right on the deepest, most profound level of my being. I could say that I "felt" like a girl, but that would give the false impression that I knew how other girls (and other boys) felt. And if I were to say that I was "supposed to be" a girl, or that I "should have been born" female, it would imply that I had some sort of cosmic insight into the grand scheme of the universe, which I most certainly did not.

For me, the hardest part about being trans has not been the discrimination or ridicule that I have faced for defying societal gender norms, but rather the internal pain I experienced when my subconcious and concious sexes were at odds with one another. I think this is best captured by the psychological term "cognitive dissonance," which describes the mental tension and stress that occur in a person's mind when they find themselves holding two contradictory thoughts or views simultaneously——in this case, subconciously seeing myself as female while conciously dealing with the fact that I was male. This gender dissonance can manifest itself in a number of ways. Sometimes it felt like stress or anxiousness, which led to marathon battles with insomnia. Other times, it surfaced as jealousy or anger at other people who seemed to enjoy taking their gender for granted. But most of all, it felt like a sadness to me——a sort of gender sadness——a chronic and persistant grief over the fact that I felt so wrong in my body.

Unlike most forms of sadness that I've experienced, which inevitably ease with time, my gender dissonance only got worse with each passing day. And by the time I made the decision to transition, my gender dissonance had gotten so bad that it completely consumed me; it hurt more than any pain, physical or emotional, that I had ever experienced. I know that most people believe that transsexuals transition because we want to be the other sex, but that is an oversimplification. After all, I wanted to be female almost my whole life, but I was far too terrified of the label "transsexual," or of having potential regrets, to seriously consider transitioning. What changed during that twenty-some-year period was not my desire to be female, but rather my ability to cope with being male, to cope with my own gender dissonance. When I made the decision to transition, I honestly had no idea what it would be like for me to live as female. The only thing I knew for sure was that pretending to be male was slowly killing me.

Unlike those cissexual researchers who find it fascinating and thought-provoking to ponder and pontificate on my existence, for me the question of why I am transsexual has always been a source of shame and self-loathing. From my preteen years through young adulthood, I was consumed by the question because, quite frankly, I didn't want to be transsexual. Like most people, I assumed that it was better to be cissexual. Eventually, I realized that dwelling on "why" was a pointless endeavor——the fact is that I am transsexual and I exist, and there is no legitimate reason why I should feel inferior to a cissexual because of that.

This is precisely what frustrates me about those cissexuals who are most bothered when trans women say that we feel like women. They assume that we are somehow trying to claim to know how other women feel, when in reality all we are saying is that the identity of woman most resonates with our own experiential gender. And by insisting that we trans women cannot possibly know what it's like to "feel like a woman," they're the ones being presumptuous, both by arrogantly assuming that other women experience femaleness the way they do and by implying that they know enough about how trans women feel on the inside to claim that we do not legitimately experience ourselves as women. Their claims that they somehow understand "womanhood" better than trans women do by virtue of having been born and socialized female is just as naive and arrogant as my claiming to understand "womanhood" better because, unlike most women, I have had a male experience to compare it to. Any claim that one has superior knowledge about womanhood is fraught with gender entitlement and erases the infinite different ways for people to experience their own femaleness.

It is important to note that the lack of understanding that those at the center have of those at the margin is not solely due to their lack of exposure (such as the fact that they've never been to a lesbian bar or a transsexual support group). Rather, ignorance about marginalized people is often enforced from within the center. For example, if a straight woman decided to go to a lesbian bar (where she might have the opportunity to learn more about lesbian people and perspectives), she risks having her straight friends and family members assume that she is lesbian. In other words, she risks being marginalized herself. Similarly, if a straight man were to buy a book on transsexualiy (say, for example, this book), others might suspect that he is a closeted transsexual or a "tranny chaser." The constant threat of being ostracized, which is directed toward people who show even the slightest interest in marginalized cultures and perspectives, creates within the center an enforced ignorance regarding those at the margins.

Some feminists (particularly unilateral feminists) will no doubt have a negative knee-jerk reaction to my suggestion that we extend our understanding of misogyny to encompass effemimania——our societal obsession with critiquing and belittling feminine traits in males. However, as I have argued in past chapters, effemimania affects everybody, including women. Effemimania encourages those who are socialized male to mystify femininity and to dehumanize those who are considered feminine, and thus forms the foundation of vitually all male expressions of misogyny. Effemimania also ensures that any male's manhood or masculinity can be brought into question at any moment for even the slightest percieved expression of, or association with, femininity. I would argue that today, the biggest bottleneck in the movement toward gender equity is not so much women's lack of access to what has been traditionally considered the "masculine realm," but rather men's insistence on defining themselves in opposition to women (i.e., their unwillingness to venture into the "feminine realm").

In the early days of my transition (when "transition" consisted mostly of refusing to wash my clothes, letting them pile up on the floor so I could weep in bed [...]), I often described my sudden shift in self-awareness as feeling as if a demon had entered my room in the middle of the night, startled me awake by whispering, "What if you were a man, sort of?" into my ear, then slithered out the window before I could ask any follow-up questions.

It was such a ridiculous and yet a persistent thought, which came on all at once and in a way that suggested it had always been with me: What if you were a man, sort of? To which the only response imaginable was What if I were anything? What if I were Donkey Kong, or the city of Chicago? Nothing in my life previous could have prepared me for this question, and I was unqualified to answer it. It was a ridiculous thought to think, and a ridiculous feeling to feel, and yet there it was, so often lurking just beneath something else: What if you were a man, sort of?

[...] after a number of years being vaguely troubled by an inconsistent, inexplicable sense of homesickness, I woke up one morning and remembered my home address, having forgotten that I forgot it in the first place, then grown fearful and weary at even the prospect of trying to get back.

I tried apologizing to my mother when I told her I was not just "figuring some things out" but transitioning. It was one thing to be a man, or wish to be a man, or live as a man, in a coffee shop or with a friend or alone in my apartment or out in public, but to be a man in relation with my mother meant being not-her-daughter. A person is not-a-daughter in their own right; they are a daughter to and of someone else, and as much as I knew my gender was my own, that my vocation was assured, that self-determination mattered more to me than external validation——still if I could have transitioned while remaining her daughter, I would have wanted to do so. I wanted to promise I would not change in relation to her, that I remained grateful for the girlhood she had given me, that her affection for my former embodiment, my former name, would not hurt me, that if I could have stayed a woman a minute longer I would have done it.
  I wanted to promise that this would be the last change, that I would never make excessive demands on the people who I believed were bound to love me, believing as I did that their loving and my changing was somehow a rupture or a violation of the agreement I had entered into by being born. I thought often of Jacob and Esau. Of all the brothers in Genesis who deny and disinherit one another, they are the first to reconcile. Cain flees from the body of Abel, Isaac and Ishmael are parted as children and never meet again, but Jacob and Esau make peace. Before they make peace, Jacob changes his name.

I was as desperate to remain legible to my family of origin according to their terms as I was desperate to change, as desperate for permission as I was for autonomy. I could not rid myself of the idea that my body was in some fixed and ultimate way the property of my parents, a collective asset of the family unit. More unthinkable than the idea of transitioning was the idea of transitioning outside of my family——of failing to become a son, if I asked sweetly and often enough and worked very hard to earn it. As a child I sometimes attempted to bargain for bigger and better birthday presents by promising "It will be my birthday and Christmas present combined——I'll never ask for anything else again——this is the only thing I'll ever want, I swear." There is a limit to gift-giving, and there is a limit to gift-getting, and I sensed myself getting dangerously close to that boundary.

Rapid-onset gender dysphoria might be more aptly called, then, "unwanted coming-out disorder," where parents belong to a peer group in which one, multiple, or even all their friends might self-describe as "a pretty open-minded person, most of the time, but don't you think this is taking things a little far?"

"Something irreversible" is to polite people what "self-mutilation" is to impolite people: a quick way to reorient the conversation around their own discomfort with bodies. In both cases it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to have a productive discussion with someone struggling with a reflexive, implicit horror of flesh.

One thing that came as a relief to me was the realization that absent any sort of narrative about biological destiny or the magic of chromosomes, everyone's description of their internal sense of gender, their own sense of themselves as male or female or anything else, always sounded a little ridiculous, always depended on shorthand and substitution. Any attempts to justify or ground said feelings in externalities inevitably resulted in a sort of half-hearted list of hobbies, interests, toy preferences, instinctive reactions to certain forms of dress or speech or address. So this was not a uniquely trans failure of speech, at least, so much as an example of how difficult it is to put any sense of desire or being into words.

It was only when I waas able to relinquish the fantasy of nothing irreversible, of uninterrupted cis-ness, that I could begin to imagine a livable future for myself, a future that did not depend solely on risk management and self-abasement. Ever since I first articulated to myself a certain degree of gender-conflictedness, ever since I openly wondered whether I might be having some sort of transgender-adjacent experience, the question had remained in my every waking thought. Not always at the forefront, not always obsessively, not even always distressingly, but once the thought had cleared the event horizon of my consciousness, it was never again unthought.

God-conciousness, too, is rapid-onset and strikes without warning: "But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Peter 3:8).
  The first letter to the Corinthians in the New Testament is attributed to Paul, a man whose life was changed in a single day upon encountering God on the road to Damascus. In the fifteenth chapter he addresses the question of what is to be done with bodies at the resurrection, whether flesh is a probem or an opportunity in the hands of the Lord: [...]
  The answer, then, for Paul, is the body-that-is exists always in anticipation of and conversation with the body-that-will-be, that all flesh is not the same flesh but that bodies please God, that death is always followed by growth, that there are many different types of glory, that dishonor may be followed by redemption, that all things spiritual originate in the goodness of the flesh, that our bodies might come to reflect both where we have been and where we are going. As Julian K. Jarboe puts it, "God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation."
  "Behold, I tell you a mystery," Paul writes later in that same chapter. "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed——in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed."
  I never did manage to sort out whether "this feeling," this trans-ness, this transition, is likely to pass away. I have been a mystery, and I have been changed, and I have been first natural and afterward spiritual and borne the images of more than one man. Sometimes in a moment, sometimes in the twinkling of an eye, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes where a thousand years were as a day, and sometimes where a day was as a thousand years.

But it's not enough to know that you are hungry; you also have to know that others have hungered before you and found the common solution named bread, and that bread is plentiful and readily available for you, that bread is digestible and wholesome and a ready answer to hunger; you have to know what hunger is, and what bread is and the difference between a loaf of bread and a rock that is shaped like a loaf of bread, though they may look and feel the same in the hand.
  You must be able to imagine your own father hungering. Let us further imagine that your father has only ever hungered and thirsted after righteousness, see Matthew 5:6, and has no concept of bread hunger, in which case you have to learn the language of bread and explain it to him, and hope that he will be able to compare it to his own hungers. You must trust that your father can tell the difference between a loaf of bread and a stone. You must trust that your father will not say, Depart in peace, be well and filled, but does not give you the things that are needed for the body. There are many conditions to be met before anyone might ask and hope to receive.

"Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light" (Matthew 11:28-30). But I had to desire rest for my soul more than I desired to cling to cis-ness, and I fought that exchange every step of the way. It was too late, I was both too young and too old, I should have said something sooner, it would not work for me the way it worked for other people, I would lose my family, I would be reneging on the promise my body had made to others, I would humiliate myself, I needed the heavy yoke, deserved it, owed it to the people in my life to go on carrying it; I did not believe an easy yoke existed for me.

All change entails at least some loss, if only the loss of a certain type of potential or expectation. Everyone has the right to mourn a loss. You're taking _________ away from us, at least let us hold a funeral. And yet other changes, other losses, even significant ones, are not counted as bereavements. The problem with the forced-bereavement that is sometimes thrust upon the transitioner is that there is no point at which the transitioner can rush up the aisle, call an end to the eulogy, and lead the congregation in song, praising God from whom all blessings flow, putting their whole hearts into it.
  On the one hand, here is death: stagnant, permanent, immobilized, silent, unvarying, inactive, formless, characterless, shrinking, constrictive, irreversible. On the other hand, here is transition: active, forceful, adaptable, energetic, animated, exspansive, full of possibility, capacious, comprehensive, vital, ambitious. Loss may be a part of the project of transition, but hardly the primary or initializing force. The question for the transitioner, then, is how to act in such a way that one is not mistaken by friends and family for Death itself; how to cope with being merely noticed rather than seen, how to prepare oneself to announce the end of a funeral only to be met with, "No, you're dead, or as good as. We'll stick with our corpse, thanks."

There is something willfully perverse about bereavement in the face of new life. My hope is not to squash or censor the complicated feelings of non-transitioning people, but to reconsider the direction of their sorrow. One might grieve and be prepared for something else, some new experience or sentiment to join one's grief, to mingle and ultimately sweeten it, add richness and support and texture. But to enter into mourning, to reenact the rituals of death, to borrow its vernacular, is to cut off understanding, curiosity, possibility, knowledge before they have a chance to flourish.