There Were (No) Signs
Identity, community trauma, and the search for a past
When I was twelve, I met a kid who was a friend of my brother’s and an objectively terrible person. Like, that kid who steals all the time, picks fights for fun, all that jazz? Yeah. This kid. My brother twigged to him being sketchy as hell and got the heck out of dodge, but this dude hooked me hard for a year or two because he had something that absolutely, totally, and completely enthralled me.
If you haven’t played this game, the nutshell version is that it’s Game of Thrones crossed with Call of Cthulu, and you’re playing as Ned Stark. Blistering political commentary, ancient eldritch horrors, betrayal and real, human struggle—and in the middle of it all, you’re just trying to be a decent person, rescue your sister, and keep Satan/Cthulu from taking over the world, all packaged into a crunchy tactical job system that gleefully invites you to break it in half, to the point that some fights in the game all but require that you do so to survive.
I love the game. Still do. I’ve played it more times than I can count, have purchased it on every platform it’s ever been on—I even bought a PSP just to play the War of the Lion remaster—I even play hacked ROMs now, to fiddle with game mechanics and amp up the challenge. It is, by far and to this day, my favorite game of all time.
It also gave you a broad cast of powerful characters to play on your team, almost all of whom are men. I didn’t use them—except the main character, who you’re forced to use in every fight. No. I always used the girls, almost all of whom are a bit underpowered (except Agrias, who is the queen of my heart). The one big advantage that girl characters get in this game is that they can wear special accessories called perfumes, one of which made the character completely invisible, so you could position your team perfectly and execute a monster ambush to start the fight, often winning outright without a single enemy ever reacting. I loved this tactic. After all, if you were invisible, the game wouldn’t even react to your characters being there.
Except… Ramza can’t equip the perfume.
So, instead, I’d equip him identically to the girls, except with the one and only armor in the game that would also make him invisible. To fit in with the girls.
And I always kindasorta headcanoned that Ramza was a girl anyway, and I was just giving her what she wasn’t allowed to have otherwise. (Sneaky pronoun switch there, huh? God, using he/him for Ramza is tough for me even today.)
And from then on, I’d always use Ramza as the name for my main characters in RPGs when I was given a choice.
So… using that special armor to make Ramza look like all the (other) girls… was Ranmza getting a breastplate or a breast plate?
And when I came out to myself, why did it matter so much to me that it was the latter?
The search
This urge is incredibly common among trans folks I’ve talked to—we search and search our pasts for the signs that we were transgender, that we “knew” before we knew. We talk about when we played with Barbies or bugs or when we first crossdressed or any number of other things, and it always seems to dive deep, deep into our childhoods as we hunt and hunt for proof that yes, indeed, we’ve always been our gender.
There is an enormous amount of time and emotional effort that we, as a community, bind up in trying to find these proofs. I was once told by a trans woman that she first realized it when she was three years old, which is shocking to me because children’s physiological ability to do so—to understand that gender is a concrete thing that isn’t changed by a person’s clothing, a process called gender consistency—doesn’t seem to happen until age 6 or 7 at the earliest.
(Author’s note: this is an area of very active work in psychology, and Kohlberg’s work is in dispute in light of our better understanding of trans identities, especially genderfluidity. However, no competing model has received widespread support, and to my knowledge no competing model argues that an understanding of long-term, consistent gender develops younger than Kohlberg proposed—the main areas of argument are why these things happen. In other words, Kohlberg as a whole is in dispute, but this specific part of it doesn't seem to be one of the spots where people are arguing).
Despite all this, you often hear stories from trans folks that they knew at four or five. Dig in, and they often come down to exactly what we saw before—playing with these dolls, congregating with those kids, all of course which fit our lived gender. When we cast a wider net, most of us have stories like mine, with Final Fantasy Tactics or dozens of other, similar stories I could list, where we look back, groan, and say to ourselves “Oh, well, that was obviously about me being trans.” Despite the fact that I ran around and played in the dirt with bugs too. Grasshoppers, especially, were my favorite.
But… why do we do this?
Stop and think about it for a moment. Why is this such a common thing, something every single trans person I’ve ever met, without fail, does? Modern psychology has really settled on the truth that simply wanting to be another gender—gender incongruence—is the whole entirety of what it means to be trans. Go into any space where people are questioning their gender and you’ll see, over and over, each of us telling folks that there don’t need to have been any signs that you were trans in your past, much less a bunch of them, for them to be trans. That simply wanting to be another gender is enough.
So why do we all go digging for those signs in ourselves if we’re all saying they don’t matter for other people?
Psychology doesn’t have firm answers for those questions right now, because the changeover from gender dysphoria to gender incongruence is pretty recent. it takes time to develop new data when a major theory or perspective is overturned.
But I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of why pretty much all of us do this.
Collective trauma & trans history
The first part may be a bit painful, because we’ve got to get into some history to understand things. Now, if you want a more detailed look at everything I’m talking about in this section, Stryker’s Transgender History and Serano’s Whipping Girl are phenomenal resources.
For almost the entirety of the last century, being trans has been incredibly hard. There’s been a lot of discrimination, brutal disenfranchisement, savage abuse by police and governments—huge groups of people who tried very hard to label us as deviants, to be thrown into mental institutes or prisons at best, and outright murdered at worst. We were shocked, beaten, harassed, and lobotomized.
And that’s just by the healthcare professionals who were ostensibly there to “help” us.
Modern transgender healthcare was started by Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist inspired by the pre-World War 2 work of Magnus Hirschfield, which was almost completely destroyed by the Nazis. Early in his career, Benjamin encountered a young trans child with a loving mother who wanted to help her but didn’t know what to do. Benjamin ultimately helped the child transition, and over decades developed a diagnostic system and an entire society of medical and psychological professionals, which was named for him, to support work with trans people.
The Benjamin Sex Orientation Scale did a massive amount of damage to the worldwide trans community. It reserved access to gender-affirming surgeries for only Type 6 “true transsexuals,” and centered as essential to all trans identities a revulsion with one’s penis, that the person in question was fundamentally and inescapably a man, and that that person was exclusively attracted to men. Transmasculine people essentially didn’t exist, according to the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), and almost none were able to obtain care of any type until recently. It required that transfeminine people, amongst other things, dress and behave exclusively as stereotypical women—in their opinion, and nobody else’s—and that they demonstrate clear signs virtually from birth that they were trans. Anybody who failed to produce these sorts of signs was immediately classified as a Type 2 Transvestitic Fetishist at best and outright delusional at worst, and barred from any hope of gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy or surgery.
I want to repeat that. To receive gender-affirming treatment of any kind, a trans person had to prove exhaustively that they had always known that they were trans.
Why? Members of the HBIGDA considered it central to their mission to exclude as many people from care.
Don’t believe me? These are the introductory principles for the HBIGDA’s Standards of Care, Version 5, published in 1990 (emphasis mine):
4.1.1. Principle 1.
Hormonal and surgical sex reassignment is extensive in its effects, is invasive to the integrity of the human body, has effects and consequences which are not, or are not readily, reversible, and may be requested by persons experiencing short-termed delusions or beliefs which may later be changed and reversed.4.1.2. Principle 2
Hormonal and surgical sex reassignment are procedures requiring justification and are not of such minor consequence as to be performed on an elective basis.4.1.3. Principle 3.
Published and unpublished case histories are known in which the decision to undergo hormonal and surgical sex reassignment was, after the fact, regretted and the final result of such procedures proved to be psychologically dehabilitating to the patients.
The very first three principles for treatment the HBIGDA published are focused on the importance of excluding as many people from care as possible, often based on pure hearsay.
Let me repeat that. The published, official standards of care for trans people, until just twenty years ago were more concerned with forcibly reducing the total number of trans people than they were about caring for our needs.
I could go on, but really—read the 1990 Standards of Care for yourself, if you’ve got a strong stomach. These Standards were in force until 2001, and even Version 6, which was a massive step forward, focused on excluding trans people from the care we need.
In short, until very recently—we’re talking within the last two decades—it was absolutely necessary to have a deep history of a trans identity to have any hope whatsoever of medical support for a transition. And the HBIGDA? They’re the same organization as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the organization which continues to set the worldwide standards for our care. They rebranded themselves in 2006. Wanted to get away from a bad reputation, you see. Goodness knows where such a bad reputation came from.
There’s a term for when a group of people have sustained a cataclysmic event, especially a sustained one: collective trauma. Collective trauma usually refers to the aftermath of genocide or horrible natural disasters, and the brutal suppression the trans community has faced for the last century has been argued (chapter 11, by Brown, specifically) by many scholars to be exactly that—genocide.
So, what does collective trauma have to say about what happens in the wake of those sorts of events?
The tragedy is represented in the collective memory of the group, and like all forms of memory it comprises not only a reproduction of the events, but also an ongoing reconstruction of the trauma in an attempt to make sense of it. Collective memory of trauma is different from individual memory because collective memory persists beyond the lives of the direct survivors of the events, and is remembered by group members that may be far removed from the traumatic events in time and space… These chosen traumas are conceptualized as narratives emphasizing that ‘walking through blood’ is necessary on the path to freedom, independence and group security.
For victims, the memory of trauma may be adaptive for group survival, but also elevates existential threat, which prompts a search for meaning, and the construction of a trans-generational collective self.
If we accept that what has happened to us is a form of genocide—not what most people think of when they think about that word, obviously, but unquestionably meeting the United Nations definition in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide—then the search for a personal trans history makes an enormous amount of sense as a safety ritual. Perform these steps in this way, and you will be accepted, safe, as a trans person, even when the reward/punishment system that originally enforced it is gone.
But collective trauma is a collective thing, and the actions we’re talking about here are as individual as they are collective. I don’t think that trauma is the whole story here.
Personal narrative
There’s an idea in psychology called the theory of narrative identity, sometimes called the personal narrative for convenience. The simple version of this idea is that the totality of who each of us is, as a person, is created by the stories we constantly tell ourselves about who we are. And it makes sense, in many ways; storytelling is one of the deepest, most important cultural activities there is in every culture in the world. It’s how we make meaning out of the chaos of events in a world that is, ultimately, profoundly random. Given that our lives are just as random as the world itself is, in the end, and that we generally don’t want to feel like a chaotic assemblage of events and biology, it makes sense for us to use the same tools we use to make sense out of the world around us to make sense out of ourselves.
But the thing is, when we come out to ourselves, the story we’ve been telling ourselves not only doesn’t fit—it’s plainly and obviously wrong.
People generally fight very hard to have a strong, cohesive sense of self for many reasons, but amongst the most important is that most people find that cognitive dissonance—when you hold two beliefs which are mutually incompatible—is intensely uncomfortable.
Reconstructing a narrative identity is a major task in all sorts of psychological growth and healing, and it’s a very normal part of evolving as a human being. What's involved, in a nutshell, is that we go back over the events of our lives, in light of new information—maybe the understanding that we were survivors of abuse, or that we benefited from powerful privilege, or, in our collective case, that we weren’t the gender we had assumed—and see how the notable and mundane bits and pieces fit together, like a temporal puzzle, into a coherent this-then-that narrative that explains how we came to be as we are now. A bildungsroman, for each of us.
But this process is usually pretty private. After all, it often involves some of the most tender moments of your entire life, moments we generally hold pretty close to our hearts in any other context.
So, if what’s going on here is reconstructing narrative identity, why do we overwhelmingly do it in public? Especially to other trans folks?
Trauma narratives
Things make better sense, I think, if we bring these two together. The ability to declare one’s self to be trans and have that recognized and respected has, historically, been severely gatekept. A public and exhaustive proving of one’s trans identity was until very recently an absolutely essential part of that—and, for fun, note that it also explains why truscum still persist to this day. They're wrapped up in this and other safety rituals that they’ve held over from the Bad Old Days, and fear a greater disaster if we all don't perform their safety rituals.
Trauma narratives are a really important treatment strategy for survivors of traumatic events, because reconstructing the history of your trauma—and in trans peoples’ cases, especially those of us who realize we’re trans later in life—is a profoundly healing process, which reduces pain and helps build a cohesive, strong sense of self, while resolving major pieces of the traumatic event itself.
And I think, ultimately, that’s what’s really going on when trans people comb through our pasts for signs that we’re trans. We know the “safe” narrative of transness. And so, as part of the construction of a collective traumatic memory, we reenact these rituals of safety, where we declare our history to prove that yes, we belong here, with all of the other obviously trans people, even when we feel like an imposter, undeserving, next to them. In doing so, and especially in doing so collectively, it allows us all to reprocess the traumatic history of trans people in general, to find meaning in the brutal oppression of it all while reprocessing our individual traumatic histories of being unable to live authentically, as our selves. After all, especially for anyone who realizes or faces their trans identity later in life, part of that acceptance means each of us must also accept the history of our collective oppression as our birthright, whether we want it or not.
It is, in short, an act of collective healing and a ritual of collective safety. We protect us, given form and urgency.
So, was I really transing Ramza Beoulve to live out my own gender as a heroine, vicariously? Was my favorite childhood anime heroine Iria because she let me dream of being a badass, feminine redhead with a pixie cut? Or was my obsession with Ranma because I desperately wanted an easy way to transition? (Goodness, there are an awful lot of busty, short-haired redheads in there, aren’t there? 😅)
Honestly, I don’t know. I don't think I ever will. It makes sense to me that these were expressions of my subconscious self, trying to be seen and heard.
But recently I went to my twentieth high school reunion, and had a chance to look through copies of the old yearbooks I’d long since thrown away. Four years of photos of the most dead-eyed teenager you can imagine, and not the faintest hint of a smile on any of them. Just a desperate, empty-hearted visual plea to let me out.
I was miserable as a man. I’m happy as a woman.
That’s the only sign that matters, in the end.
Thank you for another highly impactful piece. Since I woke up last week, I've looked through my past to see indications of the incongruity that led me to last week. Like you, I wanted to play games using female avatars, but I usually felt guilty about doing so. I didn't want to intrude into "female space." I knew a lot of the female avatars had male humans behind them, some of whom were intruding for purposes that were actually intrusive, and I didn't want to be mistaken for one of THEM. More importantly, I didn't want to be one of THEM.
Writing has always been a way for me to live vicariously. When I start writing a new story, my impulse is always to write my protagonist as a woman. I've hardly shared any of them with anyone, though. I remember a social media account years ago about "men writing women." Most of the submissions were so over the top, I couldn't believe anyone would actually publish or post something like that. But I shied away from sharing my work because I "was" a man writing women. I feared that my perspective would be ridiculed, which was a huge barrier because I needed to be accepted by other women.*
I guess my writing has always been an important part of my narrative identity. Stories really do define humanity, from the simplest one-line jokes to the profound examination of the human condition from authors such as Terry Pratchett. (Have you read Monstrous Regiment? At the time I had no idea why I cried so hard at the end.) It lifts my heart that I can finally write my own story the way I've always needed to write it. It's not a vicarious adventure anymore!
*It still feels surreal when I say *other* women. I'm still anxious about being a *real* woman, afraid of being mistrusted by those who have always lived as women. But my fears are gradually falling away. I had dinner with some friends on Saturday, who accepted my new name, complimented me on my somewhat awkward attempt at eye makeup, then passed the evening as if this is how it had always been.
I also adored Final Fantasy Tactics as a kid—I love Agrias to this day, but shout out to Reis for being a dragon and keeping her dragon breath even after she turns back into a human. I made a point of levelling Reis a lot so I could use her alongside Agrias and kick butt.
But to the main point of the article: 100% all of this. I went through the standard narrative identity reconstruction, raiding my childhood memories for evidence of my womanhood. But I feel it's a bit odd in my case—I had *essentially* two narrative identities, an identity of myself as a woman formed at 17, and an egg shell of a safe male-passing identity that protected that self-understanding, and it was the egg that had to be convinced to be a woman in order to begin transition at 31. After that, the wound between my two identities healed over and there was just one narrative.
I wasn't plural, but I think I was on my way there. I know plural trans people and for some of them transition was a matter of a fully-formed female head mate asking the egg head mate to step aside and let them take control.
I wish I'd grown up in a world and a time where these narrative gymnastics hadn't been necessary, where I'd just gone to my parents after the first time I pulled on a bra at 13 and said "I need puberty blockers yesterday". But I got here. I'm incredibly happy. The dead-eyed grimacing teenager in my very similar high school photos is gone.