What Trans Liberation Means to Me
By: Amy J. Ko
Tags: LGBTQ, Transgender, Liberation

I first encountered the word “liberation” in college, in a class on women’s rights. As someone who was treated as a cis White heterosexual man, and lived with some of the privilege that comes with that, liberation felt like a foreign, even hyperbolic word. Civil rights, sure; freedom, okay. But liberation? Doesn’t that seem a bit extreme? Liberation evokes slavery, bondage, oppression, imprisonment. Is that what we’re really talking about when we talk about gender equality? To my naive, closeted mind, the word seemed exaggerated, radical, and disproportionate, especially when women’s liberation was placed alongside the liberation of enslaved people across human history.

But over the past few years, as I began to accept that I was a woman, I began to notice the strict constraints that society had placed on my body, my clothing, my name, my pronouns, and even my identity. I had lived in a socially constructed male prison for most of my life. What word other than “liberation” would describe what it meant to be free to be myself?

As I learned about myself, and others’ trans experiences, I learned to name the oppressive forces from which I needed liberation:

Dysphoria. I had always hated my body since I knew I had one, but never more so than after puberty. My body, my feelings about it, and especially the feeling that my body would never be right, were a prison. At first, I imagined the maker of my dysphoria to be nature, and to some extent, that is true. But as I’ve transitioned over the past year, I’ve learned that most of my dysphoria had been socially constructed. As I began to wear what I want without stigma, shame, or ridicule, I’ve hated my body less. As I began to fix the balance of sex hormones in my body, I’ve hated my body less. As I began to wear my hair as I wanted, I began to hate my body less. It wasn’t inevitable that I hate my body; had society asked me the gender question earlier in life, I could have fixed these things when I was young. Therefore, dysphoria was far from inevitable: it was a prison built by Western ideas about the gender binary, exported from Europe, adopted by my Chinese and Scandinavian grandparents, and reinforced by my parents, schools, and community.

Self-loathing. While the world’s rigid ideas about gender prevented me from resolving dysphoria for three decades, its silence about these ideas—and too often, its overt transphobia—sent a clear message to my young mind as a child: you are not normal, nor are you acceptable. In fact, you are disgusting, vomitous, inhuman creature, and deserve to be laughed at, imprisoned, or killed. Society taught me to hate myself, through its silence and through its relentless stories of pathetic, evil, untrustworthy men in dresses who deceived others to get something they wanted. And it told these stories to ensure that I would hide my difference, and conform, and that others would ensure that I did. Self-loathing was my path of least resistance in a world that’s tried to erase me. But that self-loathing became a prison. And I could only survive that prison by accepting chronic depression, abusing alcohol and drugs to escape my thoughts, and constantly surprising thoughts of suicide.

Self-advocacy. While most people think of self-advocacy as a form of empowerment, it can also an unnecessary, unwanted, exhausting burden. Coming out last year, while it helped with dysphoria and self-loathing, also required me to regularly demand space for myself, since the world hasn’t granted that space by default. Correcting people who misname me. Correcting people who misgender me. Demanding rights to change my name in public and private databases. Trying to get algorithms to stop recommending me transphobic news and media. Navigating gatekeeping to get basic gender-affirming health care. Last weekend, for example, I spent three hours on the phone with a lovely senior customer support representative at Apple who desperately wanted to help me remove the deadname from an iCloud email address, but it still took her four emails to their engineering team and three return phone calls to get it done. I never know when the world is going to force a choice upon me: either go back into hiding, or stand up for yourself, because few others are by your side to speak up on your behalf. And even when there are allies, the history of trans exclusion built into our myriad systems will ensure that I’ll be burdened with self-advocacy for the rest of my life. Like dysphoria and self-loathing, the burden of self-advocacy is an oppressive one.

What then, is trans liberation to me? It’s having rights to health care that frees me from dysphoria. It’s undoing the decades of traumatic self-loathing that the world forced upon me by denying and ridiculing my existence. It’s cis people changing their beliefs about trans people and redesigning the world include us, rather than asking us to fix it ourselves through a lifetime of exhausting activism. The absence of these challenges is a freedom that most cis people enjoy and take for granted and a freedom that all trans people deserve. Hence, liberation.

None of this is to say that I am suffering. Embracing my gender, and living it authentically, has dramatically improved my physical health, my wellbeing, my confidence, and my hopefulness. Most importantly, I no longer want to be dead. But too many people characterize transition as courageous. Transition, at least for me, was not courageous; it was survival, and that is not a triumph, it is a tragedy. The world shouldn’t be a place where a successful, healthy, privileged person like myself should have to reject themselves, suppress suicidal ideation, and then spend a lifetime fighting for basic health care, respect, and recognition of my identity. And it definitely shouldn’t be a place where trans people with far less privilege than me also having to fight for basic housing access, livable wages, loving parents, safety from hate crimes, and protection from transphobic law enforcement officers. Trans liberation is not having to courageously survive oppression; it is the freedom to simply live.

If you are cis, you can’t repair the trauma that trans adults have experienced living in a trans oppressive world. But you can prevent future trauma by passing laws, changing cultures, and proactively demanding liberation on our behalf. And you can prevent a lifetime of trauma for our children by simply asking them the gender question: create space for the possibility that how you see their gender isn’t how they see their gender. Creating this space, more than anything else, is the way to liberate future generations, and create a world where the beauty of gender diversity is something we celebrate, design for, and assume, rather than tolerate, resist, punish, or erase.