You Won’t See a Trans Story Like Mine on TV
By: Rachel Anne Williams
Tags: Transgender, Identity, LGBTQ, Self, Equality

After starting my transition, I began attending a local support group for trans women called FemSpec. I remember being in awe of these trans women, some of whom had been in transition for decades, paving the way for a baby trans like me. We exchanged notes on everything from local hormone doctors to how to deal with unsupportive work environments.

Because I was a grad student at Washington University at the time, which is a progressive, private university, I was lucky enough to be in a supportive and collegial environment. A group called “Women In Philosophy” invited me to an event and I felt so grateful to be included, despite still dealing with my own internalized transphobia and doubtful feelings that I belonged in such spaces. Despite their friendliness I still felt like an outsider, having read so much TERF propaganda that I had started to believe it. Eventually, though, I won this internal battle and gained the confidence to feel more comfortable in women-only spaces.

Despite this increased confidence, I’m still not totally comfortable using the women’s restroom. Even after four years I still get nervous. If there’s a line I usually just hold it, because I’m scared that some woman will try to talk to me and out me because of my voice, which I spent many of my first months in transition trying to feminize by watching YouTube videos and endlessly practicing vocal exercises using a voice-analyzer software on my phone.

A lot of cis people don’t realize that male-to-female hormone therapy doesn’t affect the voice, which once deepened by testosterone remains so permanently. The only way to sound more feminine is to either be lucky enough to have a high-pitched voice, or to practice vocal exercises to raise the voice’s pitch and change its resonance. Beyond pitch and resonance, there is also intonation, vocabulary, and many other factors that go into how your voice is gendered. Many trans women struggle with this, which in my opinion is my most clockable feature. To this day, I hate talking on the phone — especially when the line glitches and I hear myself in a feedback loop. Instant cringe.

Eventually, I cared less about making my voice “passable” and gave up on vocal exercises, partly due to being misgendered less often and having fewer problems blending in. But the bigger part of this was simply not caring as much about passing, solidifying my nonbinary identity, and not trying to fit some stereotype about what women are “supposed” to look like. When first transitioning, I would never leave the house without makeup, as I wanted to maximize my chances for people to see me as female. It does still hurt when people “sir” me, but I’ve come to care less about putting in all the effort required for passing as female, shifting towards a fairly casual sense of feminine fashion that doesn’t always require expensive makeup.

In the media, we usually see trans femmes who are high-glam all the time: Gatekeepers expect this and enforce it. At the same time, we’re often punished for our femininity, with TERFs claiming we’re obsessed with a contrivance of the feminine which doesn’t allow us to simply exist along a spectrum of femininity like cis women do. Plenty of cis women never wear dresses or makeup, but when trans femmes do the same we’re considered not “serious” about transition, or not really trans at all, just perverted fakers who want to appropriate the label of “woman” for nefarious purposes. And if we have facial or body hair just like some cis women do? Lord forbid because that is the worst sin of all: How dare we exist without perfectly smooth, hairless skin!

Speaking of stereotypes, when I came out to my mom she said she had never noticed any “signs” of me being trans as a child, clearly forgetting about the time she’d punished me for cross-dressing in her clothes. This “lack of signs” led her to be skeptical at first: She was worried my sudden public coming out as trans was a sign of an oncoming psychosis, and worried about me eventually regretting my decision to go on hormones.

Their Christian faith taught them to “love the sinner/hate the sin,” so even though I know they love me, I don’t know if they hate what they probably think is my sin.

“How do you know you’re really trans?” she asked, thinking my newly expressed desire to transition was a social contagion resulting from having done too much research on the internet.

My parents were initially very skeptical of everything I did, and I could tell it was hard on them. Hard for them to give up calling me the name they’d given me at birth, the name they’d been using for 28 years; hard for them to see me as anything but a boy. To this day I don’t know if they see me as a woman, or as their daughter, but they’ve both come to accept me, and they never disowned me. They now use my chosen name and pronouns (with occasional misgendering), and in that, I am lucky, as not all trans people have that luxury. It took them awhile to come around, but they eventually did. I still remember the first time I received something in the mail addressed to “Rachel” from my mom. That meant so much! Although I love my parents and they never stopped loving me, coming out to them was complex. Their Christian faith taught them to “love the sinner and hate the sin,” so even though I know they love me, I don’t know if they hate what they probably think is my sin. To be honest, we don’t talk about it that much. It just goes kind of unspoken.

In these matters, I think it’s important to give our family members time to adjust. They may never come around — and if they don’t, it’s okay to give up hope and move on since doing otherwise can be downright unhealthy for both sides. Often, if we just let time do its thing. The people in our lives come around when they see us living our lives, see it isn’t a “just a phase,” see us happier than we’ve ever been, and see us thriving. They begin to use our chosen names and pronouns, finally accepting us as the complex people we all are, remembering that our shared history is what brings us together.

And that, in a nutshell, is my trans story. Trans narratives are rarely simple enough to be fully captured in short personal essays, and mine is no exception. There is much I left out: so many relationships, so much pain, and joy. But you get the gist. If I have conveyed anything, I hope it’s that there is no single trans narrative, and that every journey is unique.

When we can finally excise from our minds any notion of conformity to the story that all trans people are “supposed to have,” the less we will hear people say things like “I never saw any signs.” Instead, they will say, “I see you, and I believe you.”