The Story

Constructed memory and narratives of trans identity

The fierce heat of the Spanish summer hasn’t really kicked off for the day, not yet. It’s just about ten, local time, and I’m sitting in a gently-flexing brown wicker chair on top of one of the dozen-or-so buildings in the Old Town of Marbella, Spain, that make up the boutique hotel where FacialTeam sends its patients to recover once we’ve been discharged from the hospital. The roof here has an awning the retracts, a couple dozen of the same brown wicker chairs, a few tables, and—blessedly—a small air conditioning unit, for when we want it. It’s no surprise that this is where they do the post-surgical group therapy.

I’m four days past my facial feminization surgery, and starting to feel properly human again, finally.

Four days. A new face. A new hairline. I still can’t really believe it.

The therapists, both young and dark-haired in the way most people in Spain have dark hair of one shade or another, have been chatting cheerfully with me and the two other trans women who’re up here with me, waiting. I haven’t been able to attend one of the appointments since my surgery; my op day was Monday, and on Wednesday my eyes were so swollen that I could barely see; it wasn’t really safe for me to wander around outside of my hotel room yet. They only do therapy every other weekday.

About a minute and a half before therapy is scheduled to start, a fourth girl walks in from the stairs, one I’ve never seen before. She’s young and blonde, in a straw hat and a blue shirtdress, and she radiates valley girl even before sheopens her mouth and gives it away with her accent. She plops down in the chair nearest to the stairs up and takes her hat off to reveal the same fresh hair transplants we all have, and which she’d been protecting from the sun that’d kill them.

Ten o’clock arrives. Time for therapy to start. Alarms on each of our phones go off in unison, and each of us sprays our freshly-transplanted hair with the saline-filled squirty bottles we each carry. Every half hour, this ritual of salt and water, a shared testament to the long journeys we each took to get here.

Therapy starts. Conversation wanders, as it always does, and I find myself growing more and more uncomfortable in New Girl’s presence. I know the others here, have broken bread with them, but not her. She shares… a lot, and bluntly. I fold up on myself a little, tired and sore and a little intimidated by her force of personality.

Ten thirty. The alarms again, and the saltwater benediction for each of us.

Therapy continues. I make more of an effort, conscious, trying to bridge the gap that feels yawning between us. One of the girls is flying home today, a friend who offered me great comfort in the weekend before my surgery, when I was so scared and alone and so, so hopeless. I don’t want her last memory of me to be… this.

New Girl… doesn’t seem to like me very much. She butts heads with me two or three times in the last half of the group therapy session, confronting me on something I’ve said. Nothing crucial. Just… drilling me on my history. My story.

Something about who I am seems to sit as uncomfortably with her as she does with me. That’s okay, I tell myself. Sometimes two people just don’t get along, through no fault of either.

The phones ring again. Finally, it’s eleven, and we shower ourselves in saline that’s more welcome now from the growing heat of the day than it was before. I want to leave, to be gone, but I don’t want to flee—or, at least, to appear to flee.

I smile at New Girl, who I now know is leaving today too. “It’s sure been a wild trip for us all,” I say to her, trying to find an olive branch to offer her. “Heck, I didn’t even know I was trans two years ago, and here we all are now.”

Her stare, a laser. The force of it could probably melt battleship armor.

“What do you mean, you didn’t know you were trans two years ago?” she asks, a disbelieving, acid deadpan.

“I know it’s not the normal story,” I try to recover. “Some of us don’t figure it out until later.” Maybe this will—

“I can’t imagine not knowing,” she says with the same intensity, the same deadpan. “I knew when I was three. It was the first thing I knew. I grew up my whole life needing [redacted for her privacy], and I had to burn my whole damn family down to get away when I was eighteen and start my transition.” A beat. I don’t know whether she’s doing it to give me a chance to recover, to tell her some version of the ‘I-knew-when’ story that’d be palatable to her, or just for effect.

It doesn’t matter. I’m completely off-balance.

She continues. I’m sure she means none of it cruelly, every word spoken with the same incredulity—a litany of her trying to square a life utterly unlike hers with everything she knows and fought for from her first remembered breath. I hear one of the therapists trying to interject, but New Girl rolls right over her, probing, needing to know, now, needing to understand this incomprehensible specimen in front of her.

I flee. There is no other word for it. Head barely wrapped in the gorgeous blue chenille scarf I bought to protect my transplants, I all but run to my hotel room, fighting tears every step. I haven’t felt this worthless, this unreal, since the first tender days of my transition. I burst into tears as soon as I got back, sad and angry and overwhelmed.

A little while later, a knock on my door. My friend stands behind it, offering a small smile and my squirty bottle of saline.

The alarm on my phone goes off. Eleven thirty.

The story

I’m certain I’m misremembering parts of that story. Probably a fair bit.

I’m probably being incredibly unfair to the woman—a woman whose name I don’t even remember, whose face is a vague smear in my memory, despite how her words pierced me. I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a lineup if my life depended on it. In all likelihood, I was just overwhelmed, and a normal woman who was just trying to earnestly understand someone who’d lived a very different life than she had accidentally overwhelmed my hold over my own insecurities, made shaky with recovery-exhaustion and the catharsis of vanquishing the greatest dysphoria I’ve ever felt.

I was pretty tender those first few days after surgery. We all are. Hence, the group therapy.

And yet, that’s what my memory tells me happened.

But memory is fundamentally unreliable.

There’s a story about being trans that you’ve definitely heard, whether you’re cis or trans: such-and-so loudly protested that they were a girl from their youngest days—three or four or five. She—because The Story is always and exclusively about trans women, isn’t it?—played dress-up with Mom’s clothes and high heels, always knew she’d been born in the wrong body, fought for transition from as soon as they knew it existed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The Story is so pervasive, so overwhelming that its mere existence keeps many of us from even imagining that we might be trans until we’re well into our lives. Even then, it’s held over our heads through every step of our transitions. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” “But you like beer and trucks and building things!” “But there were no signs!”

As if our identities were written in the stars, to be foretold by blind seers in a Greek tragedy.

The Story is profoundly toxic to the foundations of trans existence at every level. It demands impossible levels of self-knowledge at impossibly young ages after centuries of global gendercide and epistimicide, which is a fancy word for extending genocide not just to the people that are being annihilated, but also their very ways of thinking and speaking about their lives. Epistimicide aims to not only annihilate a people, but to exterminate the very memory of their existence.

Put a different way: The Story demands that extremely young children invent language to describe a thing that their parents don’t even know exists. It creates, in essence, the “Greeks Didn’t See Blue” problem, where not having the words to describe a thing is taken to mean that they don’t experience it. And yeah, I’ve written about this problem before, from the perspective of collective trauma. I’ve learned a lot since this.

None of it is good.

The real problem with The Story is more nuanced. Not having the words to describe a feeling you’re feeling doesn’t mean you don’t feel it—but also—not having those words dramatically changes your understanding of the feeling itself. To quote DiAngelo:

Language is not neutral. The terms and phrases we use do not simply describe what we observe. In large part, the terms and phrases we use shape how we perceive or make meaning of what we observe.

This is an idea known as linguistic relativity. The hardcore version of this idea, linguistic determinism, which you’ve seen if you ever watched the movie Arrival, is total garbage, but we’ve got huge piles of evidence that language, cognitive metaphors, and literacy itself dramatically reshape human consciousness.

Why does all this matter? Well, we have to take two detours. First, we need to cover a little history. Then, we’ve got to talk about some psychology.

Creating The Story

Transness has always existed.

In every culture we’ve ever looked at, at every point in history we’ve dug into, sooner or later we find trans people all over the place. One of my favorite parts of Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny was it’s meticulous description of the day-in, day-out life of various trans people around the world even in the wake of the global annihilation of our people. Even without the deep history she unearths, though, transness has always crept up, no matter how absolutely it was suppressed.

But in the post-WWII West, knowledge of the existence of transness had been all-but-fully annihilated, with the cruelest blow struck by the Nazis against Magnus Hirschfield’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. In 1949, then, when Alfred Kinsey, the famous researcher on sexuality, was introduced to Harry Benjamin, the world changed for trans people. Kinsey had met a then-described-as-a-transvestite who went by the name Sally Barry because Sally wanted more for her life than to live as a man who dressed up as a woman. She’d lived since her childhood largely as a girl, her parents willing to support her, and when at 22 she still hadn’t “outgrown the phase,” as her psychologists had promised her parents she would, Kinsey had been brought in to consult. Kinsey, surprised by the depth of her feeling, reached out to Benjamin, who happened to be staying in the same building at the time, because Benjamin was an endocrinologist.

So began a long, winding journey for Barry, and the turn of Benjamin’s career. Benjamin prescribed her estrogen and ultimately endorsed her for bottom surgery, which she finished around a decade later, in Sweden, from one of very few surgeons who’d learned the technique from Hirschfield.

The Story. As pure as it gets, isn’t it?

Well… except that Barry didn’t ever ask for surgery or hormones or anything but women’s clothing until she was 22, and stumbled across Lili Elbe’s memoir, Man Into Woman, during a hospitalization. Before that moment, she had no idea that such things were even possible.

Benjamin, meanwhile, went on to increasingly specialize in trans patients, as he discovered more and more of us in his work. He was the sexologist who supported Christine Jorgansen’s headline-grabbing transition. Eventually, in 1966, he published The Transsexual Phenomenon, coining the word “transsexual,” to describe people like Barry and Jorgansen as a group of people distinct from crossdressers.

In it, inspired by Kinsey’s sexuality scale, he created his own six-point Sex Orientation Scale, to describe what he saw as the gradiation of transvestites into “true transsexuals.” And central to that scale? A single quote from Benjamin’s sixth patient, which she uttered once in session: that she felt she’d been “born in the wrong body.”

Two resources here rise above others at this turning point. Stryker’s Transgender History describes the founding of several gender clinics across America, following Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon, expecting that maybe 1 in 50,000 people were trans. They were immediately inundated with an initial wave of applications for their programs that far, far exceeded that estimate. Terrified at what this might say about society at large, they banded together and used Benjamin’s Scale to begin “weeding out” those they didn’t believe to be “True Transsexuals.

And how did they justify this? Here, our other source presents itself: these doctors demanded from their patients The Story, specifically seizing upon the Wrong Body Narrative as being the heart of True Transsexualism, and thereby denying access to anyone who didn’t magically produce the right words in the right order.

Words most of their patients couldn’t possibly have known.

And now we come to the most important part of this history: the whole, entire purpose of this was to artificially shrink how many trans people they thought existed. This is not in dispute. We have their notes, their letters. They admitted to these things privately, to each other. These doctors were terrified at the possibility that there might be vastly many more trans people than they thought. So, they drew from Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon and minted The Story, out of whole cloth, to turn away most of their applicant pool.

To deny them care.

Think about your transition. For most of us, it saved our lives. I know it did for me. Now think about all the people these doctors cast out into the cold, to freeze and die, consumed by their dysphorias.

The Story was created to deny care to trans people. Denying medically necessary care to someone typically kills them.

The Story kills. It’s whole purpose is to kill, and has been ever since it was invented by these cisgender doctors.

The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, as this loose alliance of psychologists, endocrinologists, and surgeons calcified into in 1979, became the international gatekeepers of transition. Eventually, even Benjamin himself was horrified by the strictness and often-cruelty of their standards and the demands they placed on their patients. He became a minority voice for the liberalization of transition by the time he died.

That organization rebranded itself as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in 2003. Despite the slow liberalization of transition in that time, they remain the gatekeepers of transition around the world.

A trans person would not serve as President of WPATH until 2022.

The fallibility of memory

I want you to think of your most treasured memory for a moment. Maybe it’s the birth of a child, your wedding-day, when you first fell in love, or maybe even your first experience of gender euphoria. Hold it in your mind. Cradle it.

Got that?

You don’t remember the actual event. What you’re holding in your mind is the last time you remembered that event—a copy of a copy of a copy. The real memory is long gone, lost to time.

This is most commonly known as the eyewitness effect, though what’s actually going on is much bigger and broader, and it affects us across every possible aspect of our lives. In some ways, it’s good! The whole principle of trauma therapy relies on the fact that memory is malleable, and that by taking a painful memory out, trotting it around, and putting it back, we can move where that memory is stored, from the amygdala to the midbrain, and heal the trauma.

This happens because memory is constructive. That means that when you remember a thing, you’re not bringing up an image, a time capsule, of either the event or the last time you remembered it, as this perfect or even generally-accurate image. What’s happening is that dozens of neuron clusters in your brain are firing together, and your active memory is reassembling those shards into a story that makes sense to you now with the benefit of your judgment and knowledge in the moment that you’re assembling that recollection. In short: how you think and feel now rewrites and recreates the memories you have. Constantly.

Without you noticing any of it.

Ever.

Memory is fundamentally unreliable.

To make a very complicated process overly simple—and lose a little bit of important detail in the process, but bear with me—your brain is essentially an old Victorian house wired by a drunken electrician. Wires got put where they were most convenient at the time, and every time you think, electricity—your cognition, in this metaphor—travels along these haphazardly-laid wires in a fairly unpredictable fashion. Sometimes, turning the upstairs bathroom light on will make the porch light turn on too. Every now and again, a circuit breaker will trip despite the fact that no lights are turned on at all. And sometimes, a wall socket will break and you’ll have to pull it out and replace it with something new.

That rough patchwork network is how your brain works, both for active memory and memory storage.

Because it’s a patchwork, it fails. Frequently. The older a memory is, and the more frequently it’s been referenced—and remember, every time you remember something, you replace it, new recollection overwriting the old, at least in part—the more likely it is to have an error, or to be different from what actually happened, way back when.

And that effect? It’s more powerful the younger you are when the memory was first experienced, because the brain develops and becomes more complex over time. Very young brains, especially, belonging to very young people, haven’t yet developed enough to do a lot of the things that they’ll be able to do when they’re older. Memory is one of those functions that develops over time.

Gender constancy

There’s one last piece of developmental psychology we need to talk about, and it’s called Gender Constancy. Now, this one is the one link in the chain that’s the least solid, because the original idea was proposed by a dude named Kohlberg in 1966, and as such it bears… shall we say some bias from incorrect beliefs about gender in general at the time. As a result, the details are under a lot of dispute right now, and the existence of trans people is one of the main reasons why.

Problem is, we don’t have a better model yet. It’ll come, or a further overhaul of Kohlberg’s work once more data comes in. For now, we work with what we have.

Let’s start with a pretty simple version of things. When you want to play with a baby, one of the universally-favorite games is peek-a-boo. That’s because babies’ brains haven’t developed to a stage where they have object permanence, which just means that they understand and can hold in their minds that something they stop seeing continues to exist despite the fact that they can’t see it anymore. They smile every time you peek at them because, in that moment, you’ve suddenly returned from total oblivion.

Now, when do those babies develop object permanence? It’s hard to say for sure. The original theorists thought it was around 18-24 months of age, but some researchers now argue that it can sometimes happen as young as 4 months. There’s a lot of variation, because that’s just how biology works.

This same basic pattern happens in stages for every abstract concept that kids learn, moving from less complicated to more complicated things as the brain develops in general. The development of gender constancy, which is the ability to understand that a person’s gender exists and persists regardless of how they present themselves and that that concept applies to the child as well, follows the same general pattern. As the brain becomes complex enough to wrestle with the level of social abstraction that gender exists in, it first recognizes that gender exists, then comes to understand gender-based rules and roles prescribed by the world, then explores it as a fixed, stable concept that applies to themselves and the world around them, and finally solidifies the concept as a permanent part of their own identity and of the identities of those around them.

The first stage of this process—the mere awareness of gender—usually solidifies by age 4. The second—understanding that gender-based rules and roles exist—happens between 3-5 years of age, but sometimes taking as long as age 7. The third stage—that gender is stable long-term—generally happens between 6-8 years of age, and gradually increases over time.

There’s an important asterisk here, as there always is when we talk biology and psychology: some people are outliers, and either get to these stages really early or really later. People are messy and imprecise.

Which is kinda the point.

The impossibility of The Story

You may have noticed the problem baked into the very heart of The Story by now. If you haven’t yet, here it is:

The Story demands that children at the youngest possible ages—4 or 5 or 6—show clear and unambiguous signs that they’re not the gender they were assigned at birth. Problem is, the overwhelming majority of children that young haven’t had enough brain development to be able to do so, and won’t really hit that stage for at least a few more years.

Do things slip through, instances and indications of nascent transness-to-be? Surely they do, for some trans kids. But for most? They’re just wading through the normal, slow process of developing brain structures just becoming able to comprehend and work with gender, and part of that development is playing with gender itself.

That’s why parents say “there were no signs.” In a very real way, there weren’t. Sure, Jenny put on a play-dress or played house a few times when she was little, but basically all kids do that, regardless of gender, because their ability to fully understand gender hasn’t solidified yet. Where it became a sign to Jenny, and maybe to her parents, is how their memories of that event were constructed, reconstructed and changed after Jenny came out to herself and to them. Jenny, who in this imaginary example, came to realize her transness on her fifteenth birthday, looked back on her life and snagged on the joy and delight of that early play-dress escapade. It became a beacon to her, foreshadowing of what she would come to truly understand later on. Her parents, meanwhile, don't even remember it—to them, it was just a Tuesday.

Memory is fundamentally unreliable.

In many ways, it’s a cruel trick that our memories play on us this way. I have a clear-as-a-bell memory of myself, somewhere around 6 or 7, sitting in the back of a car on the drive to my first in-person major-league baseball game, and daydreaming about how beautiful Rainbow Brite’s dress was, and wishing I could feel it. I sat there, hand in the oiled leather of my baseball mitt, bright new baseball in the glove, and longed for a poofy skirt.

I know that this happened.

And I also know that I had never taken that memory out, dusted it off, and considered it until I was already months into my transition.

Did I know I was trans there, in that car? The time I played Barbies with the other girls at day-care, my little seven-year-old heart fluttering in my chest as I did so? When I happily played house with girls when I was six, sad that they didn’t let me play the Mom?

Or was it that I liked cooking from a very, very young age, and in their rules, Mom Got To Cook? The first dream I ever had of a career was to be a chef.

Memory is fundamentally unreliable.

I know what it feels like those things meant, in retrospect. Looking back, with the knowledge of who I am now, years of transition, a full wardrobe, a renovated body, and a happy family—how can that not color and shape my understanding of those moments early on in my childhood? Because in the same moment, I’m ignoring my avid enjoyment of the Power Rangers at the same age, how I’d compete with my brother for which Ninja Turtle we would each be (Donatello for me, as if you couldn’t have guessed), or any number of other things.

Because to quote Mae Dean, “It’s all just stuff!… It doesn’t mean anything!”

Can anyone fit The Story?

We know that trans kids exist, and have always existed.

We know that there are a few out there who figure out their gender at astonishingly young ages.

We also know that, for those who experience the most severe gender dysphoria, that their first memory of it was around 7 years of age, well after the gal in Marbella said she knew she was trans.

We know, too, that The Story, and the repeating of it, makes trans folks feel safe in a world that’s increasingly dangerous to us, despite the fact that it amounts to trauma porn.

Because we also know that the average age that people figured out that they were trans is about 15 years of age. That means, inescapably, that a lot of us didn't realize until much later.

Oh, and our imaginary Jenny, who figured out her gender when she was fifteen? That wasn’t picked at random. I tried to write her to be as average as possible.

Trans people exist in a world where the complexities of our existence, and the very language that we can use to describe our lived experience, has been annihilated in a grim and calculated way. Each of us has to live with the Greeks Didn’t Have A Word For Blue problem for much, if not most, of our lives, regardless of how young we knew something was wrong. We can see the blue, but the only word we have for it is, if you’ll pardon me for quoting Homer, “wine-dark.”

And knowing something is wrong is not the same thing as knowing why it’s wrong.

Memory is fundamentally unreliable.

When we finally, finally have a word for that blueness… well…? How fully do we rewrite the story of our lives, painting Blue over everything we once called wine-dark? Especially when our ability to transition, and how physically safe we are, has often been determined by how young we can claim that we knew our genders, even to this very day, but psychologists who still cling to the Bad Old Ways.

I think that’s the heart of the reality here, when you really get down to it. If you were held at gunpoint, and told that whether you lived or died depended on how young you could make the person holding the gun believe you knew you were trans? Well, I’m pretty sure a lot of us would make ourselves believe to the soles of our feet that we knew from a very young age, wouldn’t we? It’s the only rational response.

Because my life, like the lives of so many other trans people, was saved by transition.

Passing through that gunpoint-reality was the only way we could transition—survive—for so, so many decades, because WPATH made damn sure it was the only gateway there was through which trans people could access any of the medical parts of transition. Make no mistake: by demanding The Story from us, they sentenced more people than we will ever know to a slow and torturous death.

As I said earlier: The Story kills. It’s intended function has always been to kill, from the moment it was minted.

That’s why I so adamantly and proudly own the fact that I had no clue whatsoever that I was trans until I was 35, no matter how many times I daydreamed of Rainbow Brite or played Barbies or house or any number of other things that might’ve foreshadowed my transness like Chekhov’s gun, hanging on the wall of my life’s first act.

Because memory is fundamentally unreliable.

And repeating The Story—this endless race to the chronological bottom, in an effort to prove that we’re valid by shouting to the world how young we knew who our transness? It damns so many of us, even today, to a wine-dark oblivion that they might never—maybe can never—escape. Every repetition tells them that they cannot be one of us, because surely they would’ve known so very young if they were.

All because they never had the word for blue soon enough.