Opening the Black Box

A series on the parts of being trans that don't get talked about much

I hate black boxes.

No, not this.

I’m a technical writer. A black box is a shorthand term we use for something called a convenient fiction. Convenient fictions are something we all use, because the world is stupidly complicated, and it’s too much effort to understand how everything really works. They let us understand the essence of how something works, even if we don’t understand its substance at all.

Let’s take an example here. Most of us have a bank account. We go to work, get a check, give the check to the bank, and take money out when we need to buy food or whatever. Most of us have some level of understanding that the bank isn’t just putting our paycheck in a vault and waiting for us to ask for it—it’s taking that money and doing other stuff with it. If you care enough to think about it, you might think that they’re issuing loans or mortgages, and paying you back from the interest.

Well… kinda. That’s how banks used to work. Mostly, your paycheck lives in complex Wall Street derivative futures. Hell, they might be using it to buy a share in the interest on your own student loans. Banking these days is really weird. But the bottom line is that, when your paycheck gets deposited at the bank, what really happens is that it becomes part of the entire worldwide financial ecosystem, fractured and recombined in a dizzying number of ways that nobody on earth fully understands. And that happens every single time anyone deposits a paycheck at a bank.

So our convenient fiction here is basically “money goes into the box, someone does something with it, and I can get my money when I want it anywhere in the world.” We know the input and the output, and sort of gloss over all the stuff in the middle because it’s not really relevant to us. As long as we can get the money, it doesn’t really matter.

Until it does. Remember the 2008 financial meltdown?

The Things We Don’t Talk About

Trans people talk. We talk, and talk, and maybe more than anything else, we talk to each other. We share stories of transition, the silly moments before we realized we were trans, all sorts of nonsense. We commiserate when a relationship goes sour, or celebrate when it blooms. We swap clothing and makeup tips endlessly.

But there are things we seem to instinctively shy away from talking about publicly.

Three years ago, Amanda Roman wrote an article on Medium called, “It’s Just A Fetish, Right?” If you haven’t read it before, seriously, take a minute. It’s really something else. What it is, more than anything else, is a woman simply saying out loud something we whisper to each other in private: many—maybe most—of us sexualize our true gender before we’re ready to accept it. We do this because the bedroom is a place of privacy, of relaxed rules. It’s somewhere where we can speak terrifying truths aloud, embrace them for a time, and leave them behind later, so we can pretend they don’t exist.

I have counseled hundreds of trans people as they questioned their gender. I have yet to meet a single one who didn’t do this.

Amanda’s article has made a stunning difference in the lives of pretty much every transfeminine person I’ve ever met who’s read it, and quite a few transmasculine people too.

What that article does, fundamentally, is detail the workings of a convenient fiction. Instead of simply responding to “It’s just a fetish, right?” with “No, probably not,” Amanda settles in and not only explores the meanings of these feelings, she tells her own story, on a personal, lived level.

When you get right down to it, there are a lot of convenient fictions about transition, where we reduce huge transformations to checklists and timelines. Here’s what HRT will do to you. Here’s how you can question your gender.

Tick, tick, tick, as if all of this were an Excel spreadsheet. It’s ridiculously reductive, when you think about it.

Opening the Black Box of Gender

The first series of posts I’m going to make is an attempt to open up the convenient fiction of questioning your gender. I want to try to do it the way that Amanda opened up the convenient fiction of sexualizing gender to experience it—not just a description of what a person can expect, but the day-by-day, lived experience of what it was like to be in that situation.

I read a lot of explanations on how to question your gender. I had the support of an excellent gender therapist. But… I still felt like I was completely losing my mind.

I want to try and show other people that this is part of the process. That what they’re feeling is normal. And especially, since I’m a trans woman who never had the faintest idea that I might be trans before 10:00 PM on July 17, 2020, I want people like me to be able to see that they’re not alone, to see just how completely you don’t have to have known, and most of all:

To know that they’re going to be all right.