I finally got to read this post and signed up to Substack so I can write this comment. I came across this post in Mastodon on Friday and as I've generally been very interested in this topic lately (I'm 45, btw), I started reading. After the first two paragraphs I decided to follow the link to Part One: Webcomic. Surely didn't know what was about to happen.
Webcomic post was interesting and therefore I started reading from the beginning of your blog. Went to the Amanda Roman article. Started feeling something strange in my stomach, where I always have physical symptoms when I'm nervous. About this time I got home (was reading these on the bus) and as my wife was home, I pushed the thoughts away. Or at least that's what I tried. The anxiety was still somewhere under the surface.
Yesterday morning I tried not to think about this but felt it in my stomach. When my wife went to work, I bursted into tears. "What the f*** is going on?" I asked myself. I had no choice but to go online and google "How do you know if you're trans?" Some things seemed to fit, others not at all. After I googled "How do you know if you're non-binary?" things started to click.
I think I'm non-binary. The term genderqueer resonates with me. I remember so many times when I've felt like I wasn't the right kind of boy. How I've wished I wouldn't be this emotional. I've had a wonderful therapist with whom we've discussed the gender roles, among other things. Now it all clicked. I've always felt that I don't fit in the box a male should fit. Well, that's because there's a part in me that is male but that's not all there is. I'm more than male.
I kept reading, both your blog posts and other websites, understood more. I knew I had to tell my wife. I was terrified. When she came home in the evening, I asked her to sit down with me. It wasn't easy but I went almost straight to it. I told her that I think I'm non-binary. I explained that I don't feel that there's anything wrong with my body (as that's how I really feel) but that this realization still means a lot to me. I also added that I was afraid of her reaction. She replied with "This doesn't affect how I see you at all." (I'm crying as I'm writing this.) As I told about my feeling that there's a male in me but I'm more than male, she replied with "I knew that." I can't believe this! I love her so much!
During the last half a year, maybe a bit longer, I've felt better than ever. My therapist can surely take some credit for that. We just bought a house with my wife. I'm at a transitional place and feel maybe safer than ever. You mentioned in your post the transitional phases being when people realize they're trans. Yup.
This weekend's been a wild ride and there's still lots to process. I've read about the topic a lot yesterday and today. I'm a big bundle of all kinds of feelings, I've cried a lot. At the same time, I feel like nothing has changed. Now I just understand something more about myself. Many things from my past now make sense! Next, I'll go polish my fingernails. It's something I had a courage to start last year, thanks to my therapist. Now it feels so obvious tell-tale.
I want to thank you for your posts! Without them I wouldn't have realized what I realized yesterday. Sure, it would've most likely happened later but better now. Thank you so much!
Is there any chance you can provide the details on the works you cited in the paper, so folks can track them down? I'm particularly interested in some of the works on understanding comic narratives and rhetoric.
I read this earlier today and have not been able to stop thinking about the disharmony this struck in me. The jarring chords between "yes this is totally relatable" and "oh no this is dysphoric and cringey as hell." I think this is a good article and good comic choices to echo the basic Trans Story that everyone likes to simplify it to - the "I've always been dysphoric and didn't listen, and all the things in my assigned gender were dysphoric and the things "opposite" were euphoric." And that's great, that's a lot of people's experiences. But this article wastes a thousand words explaining how comics work and are useful, instead of delving into the hard stuff beyond the stage 1 realization - or the fact that it all exists. Example, the panel where smooth shaven legs = euphoria bc it is feminine. As someone nonbinary and AFAB, that made me want to gag. Shaving and body hair and the shame and embarrassment and fear and literal danger it put me in to not abide by the idea that my feminity had to equal hairless, and its summed up as a major milestone towards womanhood. In the "aha" moment where to someone who does it for the first time, of course it's a significant shift of course it's affirming bc it's what society told them women were. But the nasty picture behind that is the internalized misogyny, the "why does this equal feminine so deeply in my mind? Does it always need to? What actually makes me feel feminine and GOOD in my skin" all that hard, CRUCIAL work past the first babystep. Maybe the comic goes into it, but this article definitely doesn't. Instead it dives further into the gender binary, with both authors realizing that breast size was inherently tied to gender in their minds - without any emphasis on the internal questioning of that or the "larger breasts to feel more feminine" and vice versa - and without emphasis of that in this article literally examining the trans journey. It's not that it's not good and helpful in a lot of ways, and these are a lot of people's baby step experiences or things summed up into easy binary packages. But if an article was going to take thousands of words to talk about them and cherry pick examples and frames, doing so without critical analysis of those choices and what is left out of the picture by doing so, or mention of nonbinary realities beyond some definitions at the beginning, would've been a lot more helpful to a lot more people than the way this was presented.
Second, the long explanation of the trans experience at the beginning is there because this was presented at a conference which was not a dedicated gender studies conference--indeed, I was one of only, so far as I know, two trans women who presented there. Because of this, a lot of Trans 101 was unfortunately necessary for the meat of the subject matter to be comprehensible to my audience--and even then, there were several questions about it after the talk!
Secondly, I can certainly understand your revulsion at shaving, given your gender. This is why the two primary examples we dove deeply into featured one transfeminine voice--Mae Dean, and one transmasculine voice--Nate Stevenson. Moreover, it was one binary trans voice and one nonbinary one, as Nate is bigender; we tried quite hard to be balanced in that respect. The Brooks comic you refer to about shaving is present only to demonstrate parallel structures with Galaxy, a traditional comic, which we needed to do in order to demonstrate that webcomics are part of the larger scholarship on conics. Unfortunately, there is very little work that's been done on webcomics in the scholarly literature, so we felt this was necessary to demonstrate the foundational validity of the work itself.
We constrained ourselves to the hatching and coming-out moments of these comics because that's how scholarship is performed--you do one very specific thing at a time, and only after a lot of work and enough critical mass can you make big, sweeping arguments. Even still, this talk ran more than double the length of a normal conference presentation; doing more than the "baby steps" would've been impossible, given time constraints.
I am deeply puzzled by your claim that the presentation doesn't feature transmasculine nonbinary perspectives, as not only is Nate Stevenson's The Weight Of Them explicitly about the transmasculine nonbinary experience, it highlights what many transmasculine people have told me is the most important intervention in their transitions. Unfortunately, I am not nonbinary, so it's not appropriate for me to speak to the nonbinary experience with authority, and the same is true to the transmasculine experience; it'd be like a white critic trying to speak with authority on the Black lived experience. It's just not my place! Nevertheless, we featured The Weight Of Them as the climax of the critical presentation, giving it top billing, and because I cannot speak with authority on the transmasculine or nonbinary experiences, the only way left for me to contextualize that comic is to relate it to experiences I *can* speak with authority on. The first draft of this presentation included material from Hyperfocus as well, for what it's worth, but that had the presentation running well over 40 minutes, so it had to be cut.
Again, thank you for your feedback! I'm sorry that there was so much material that you didn't care for.
This is exactly what I think a lot of educators need to read. We’re out there. We’re teachers too. And in some states, it isn’t safe for us to come out. My students call me Mrs. Lastname.
(Minor error: you have pages 2 and 3 of the Real Life Comics story backwards.)
Once again, you strike so many chords in me. Wonderfully broken down to help me further understand myself. I can see and understand where and why I am stuck. Thanks for another excellent post.
The funny thing is I found all these comics soon AFTER my egg cracked. Which helped a lot with accepting that what I was going through was not unusual.
My first attempt to transition in my 20's was marred by a therapist who made it clear that he wasn't in this business to "create any damn lesbians" and that my goal was to turn me into a fully functioning heterosexual woman (some assembly required). I managed to convince him I was asexual, but the unrelenting demand to conform to his idea of what a woman should be (complete with points given or taken away by how feminine IN HIS VIEW I was presenting at each session.
I hadn't really thought of this as a contributing factor to my cPTSD, but in retrospect, yeah, this behavior did a lot towards causing my rapid detransition, followed by a trauma response as I tried to keep who I was protected and safe behind a mask I was never good at wearing.
30 something years later, and finding I could no longer lie to myself about who I really was, I started looking for a therapist fully expecting to have to jump through all those hoops again. And was absolutely astounded and amazed by how much had changed and how much more agency we had now as supposed to then. It did a lot towards crystalizing my decision.
In a sense, I don't see myself as making a second attempt to transition, I see it as picking uo where I left off, only now I'm also making up for lost time. Only now, instead of trying to be someone else's idea of who I should be, I'm being my idea of who I should be.
This is so true. I guess I never realized how much easier it is to relate to the visual + emotional combination that these transgender materials provide. I did find myself crying reading the self acceptance portions of these examples. It is an absolute comfort to see such common experiences.
I finally got to read this post and signed up to Substack so I can write this comment. I came across this post in Mastodon on Friday and as I've generally been very interested in this topic lately (I'm 45, btw), I started reading. After the first two paragraphs I decided to follow the link to Part One: Webcomic. Surely didn't know what was about to happen.
Webcomic post was interesting and therefore I started reading from the beginning of your blog. Went to the Amanda Roman article. Started feeling something strange in my stomach, where I always have physical symptoms when I'm nervous. About this time I got home (was reading these on the bus) and as my wife was home, I pushed the thoughts away. Or at least that's what I tried. The anxiety was still somewhere under the surface.
Yesterday morning I tried not to think about this but felt it in my stomach. When my wife went to work, I bursted into tears. "What the f*** is going on?" I asked myself. I had no choice but to go online and google "How do you know if you're trans?" Some things seemed to fit, others not at all. After I googled "How do you know if you're non-binary?" things started to click.
I think I'm non-binary. The term genderqueer resonates with me. I remember so many times when I've felt like I wasn't the right kind of boy. How I've wished I wouldn't be this emotional. I've had a wonderful therapist with whom we've discussed the gender roles, among other things. Now it all clicked. I've always felt that I don't fit in the box a male should fit. Well, that's because there's a part in me that is male but that's not all there is. I'm more than male.
I kept reading, both your blog posts and other websites, understood more. I knew I had to tell my wife. I was terrified. When she came home in the evening, I asked her to sit down with me. It wasn't easy but I went almost straight to it. I told her that I think I'm non-binary. I explained that I don't feel that there's anything wrong with my body (as that's how I really feel) but that this realization still means a lot to me. I also added that I was afraid of her reaction. She replied with "This doesn't affect how I see you at all." (I'm crying as I'm writing this.) As I told about my feeling that there's a male in me but I'm more than male, she replied with "I knew that." I can't believe this! I love her so much!
During the last half a year, maybe a bit longer, I've felt better than ever. My therapist can surely take some credit for that. We just bought a house with my wife. I'm at a transitional place and feel maybe safer than ever. You mentioned in your post the transitional phases being when people realize they're trans. Yup.
This weekend's been a wild ride and there's still lots to process. I've read about the topic a lot yesterday and today. I'm a big bundle of all kinds of feelings, I've cried a lot. At the same time, I feel like nothing has changed. Now I just understand something more about myself. Many things from my past now make sense! Next, I'll go polish my fingernails. It's something I had a courage to start last year, thanks to my therapist. Now it feels so obvious tell-tale.
I want to thank you for your posts! Without them I wouldn't have realized what I realized yesterday. Sure, it would've most likely happened later but better now. Thank you so much!
Oh my gosh, congratulations!!! This is WONDERFUL news! I'm so so happy for you and your wife!
Welcome home, sibling! 🖤💜🤍💛
Thanks a lot! 💜
I knew from the title I would love this! But also I knew I'd need a tissue lol ;) :)
That's the ol' one-two punch! Lure 'em in with the memes, then go for the heartstrings! 😉
Thanks for this!
Is there any chance you can provide the details on the works you cited in the paper, so folks can track them down? I'm particularly interested in some of the works on understanding comic narratives and rhetoric.
Yes, definitely, I'll get in touch with my partner and reassemble the bibliography as soon as I'm not swamped. Like... Couple of weeks?
I read this earlier today and have not been able to stop thinking about the disharmony this struck in me. The jarring chords between "yes this is totally relatable" and "oh no this is dysphoric and cringey as hell." I think this is a good article and good comic choices to echo the basic Trans Story that everyone likes to simplify it to - the "I've always been dysphoric and didn't listen, and all the things in my assigned gender were dysphoric and the things "opposite" were euphoric." And that's great, that's a lot of people's experiences. But this article wastes a thousand words explaining how comics work and are useful, instead of delving into the hard stuff beyond the stage 1 realization - or the fact that it all exists. Example, the panel where smooth shaven legs = euphoria bc it is feminine. As someone nonbinary and AFAB, that made me want to gag. Shaving and body hair and the shame and embarrassment and fear and literal danger it put me in to not abide by the idea that my feminity had to equal hairless, and its summed up as a major milestone towards womanhood. In the "aha" moment where to someone who does it for the first time, of course it's a significant shift of course it's affirming bc it's what society told them women were. But the nasty picture behind that is the internalized misogyny, the "why does this equal feminine so deeply in my mind? Does it always need to? What actually makes me feel feminine and GOOD in my skin" all that hard, CRUCIAL work past the first babystep. Maybe the comic goes into it, but this article definitely doesn't. Instead it dives further into the gender binary, with both authors realizing that breast size was inherently tied to gender in their minds - without any emphasis on the internal questioning of that or the "larger breasts to feel more feminine" and vice versa - and without emphasis of that in this article literally examining the trans journey. It's not that it's not good and helpful in a lot of ways, and these are a lot of people's baby step experiences or things summed up into easy binary packages. But if an article was going to take thousands of words to talk about them and cherry pick examples and frames, doing so without critical analysis of those choices and what is left out of the picture by doing so, or mention of nonbinary realities beyond some definitions at the beginning, would've been a lot more helpful to a lot more people than the way this was presented.
First of all, thanks for the detailed comments!
Second, the long explanation of the trans experience at the beginning is there because this was presented at a conference which was not a dedicated gender studies conference--indeed, I was one of only, so far as I know, two trans women who presented there. Because of this, a lot of Trans 101 was unfortunately necessary for the meat of the subject matter to be comprehensible to my audience--and even then, there were several questions about it after the talk!
Secondly, I can certainly understand your revulsion at shaving, given your gender. This is why the two primary examples we dove deeply into featured one transfeminine voice--Mae Dean, and one transmasculine voice--Nate Stevenson. Moreover, it was one binary trans voice and one nonbinary one, as Nate is bigender; we tried quite hard to be balanced in that respect. The Brooks comic you refer to about shaving is present only to demonstrate parallel structures with Galaxy, a traditional comic, which we needed to do in order to demonstrate that webcomics are part of the larger scholarship on conics. Unfortunately, there is very little work that's been done on webcomics in the scholarly literature, so we felt this was necessary to demonstrate the foundational validity of the work itself.
We constrained ourselves to the hatching and coming-out moments of these comics because that's how scholarship is performed--you do one very specific thing at a time, and only after a lot of work and enough critical mass can you make big, sweeping arguments. Even still, this talk ran more than double the length of a normal conference presentation; doing more than the "baby steps" would've been impossible, given time constraints.
I am deeply puzzled by your claim that the presentation doesn't feature transmasculine nonbinary perspectives, as not only is Nate Stevenson's The Weight Of Them explicitly about the transmasculine nonbinary experience, it highlights what many transmasculine people have told me is the most important intervention in their transitions. Unfortunately, I am not nonbinary, so it's not appropriate for me to speak to the nonbinary experience with authority, and the same is true to the transmasculine experience; it'd be like a white critic trying to speak with authority on the Black lived experience. It's just not my place! Nevertheless, we featured The Weight Of Them as the climax of the critical presentation, giving it top billing, and because I cannot speak with authority on the transmasculine or nonbinary experiences, the only way left for me to contextualize that comic is to relate it to experiences I *can* speak with authority on. The first draft of this presentation included material from Hyperfocus as well, for what it's worth, but that had the presentation running well over 40 minutes, so it had to be cut.
Again, thank you for your feedback! I'm sorry that there was so much material that you didn't care for.
This is exactly what I think a lot of educators need to read. We’re out there. We’re teachers too. And in some states, it isn’t safe for us to come out. My students call me Mrs. Lastname.
(Minor error: you have pages 2 and 3 of the Real Life Comics story backwards.)
Thank you! I'll get that fixed--Substack is great for most things, but it orders pictures by whatever uploads first. 😒
Once again, you strike so many chords in me. Wonderfully broken down to help me further understand myself. I can see and understand where and why I am stuck. Thanks for another excellent post.
I'm very glad you enjoyed it--and if you need help, I'd be happy to offer, or to point you towards safe space to get it.
Brilliant and emotional as always. That was a great read!
Hey, just registered to let you know that this popped up on my Lemmy feed after a really hard week (I'm 30) and it cracked my egg.
Thank you, Zoe and Jamie.
Congratulations, hun! I know how hard and surreal this time can be, so please be gentle with yourself, okay?
Thank you! It's been a wild 3 weeks, but overall I'm feeling excited and very relieved. The first 10 days were such a mental rollercoaster.
Ohhhhh yeah, no kidding. It was a few months for me before every day stopped feeling about a week long.
It gets better. Promise.
The funny thing is I found all these comics soon AFTER my egg cracked. Which helped a lot with accepting that what I was going through was not unusual.
My first attempt to transition in my 20's was marred by a therapist who made it clear that he wasn't in this business to "create any damn lesbians" and that my goal was to turn me into a fully functioning heterosexual woman (some assembly required). I managed to convince him I was asexual, but the unrelenting demand to conform to his idea of what a woman should be (complete with points given or taken away by how feminine IN HIS VIEW I was presenting at each session.
I hadn't really thought of this as a contributing factor to my cPTSD, but in retrospect, yeah, this behavior did a lot towards causing my rapid detransition, followed by a trauma response as I tried to keep who I was protected and safe behind a mask I was never good at wearing.
30 something years later, and finding I could no longer lie to myself about who I really was, I started looking for a therapist fully expecting to have to jump through all those hoops again. And was absolutely astounded and amazed by how much had changed and how much more agency we had now as supposed to then. It did a lot towards crystalizing my decision.
In a sense, I don't see myself as making a second attempt to transition, I see it as picking uo where I left off, only now I'm also making up for lost time. Only now, instead of trying to be someone else's idea of who I should be, I'm being my idea of who I should be.
This is so true. I guess I never realized how much easier it is to relate to the visual + emotional combination that these transgender materials provide. I did find myself crying reading the self acceptance portions of these examples. It is an absolute comfort to see such common experiences.
Beautiful work as always 🙏💕 thanks Zoe for continuing to inspire
Thank you! And it's not just me--I couldn't have written this without Jamie!