Hello World, I’m Trans.
Hi, I’m Talia. I’m a tenure-track professor of computer science at a major research university in the United States. About a year ago, I finally accepted a truth about myself that I had been repressing and denying for my entire life— there is a fundamental conflict between my internal gender identity and biological sex.
If you stopped by my office or bumped into me on the street, you wouldn’t even think to refer to me using a female name. The person before you would appear to be, by all outwardly observable criteria, a fairly unremarkable cisgender white man. This is the lie that I have been telling myself and the world, a disguise I have perfected so well that I don’t know how to begin removing it. Three decades of meticulous self-regulation while playing my societally assigned gender role have made the camouflage entirely reflexive and automatic. Unlearning all of these ingrained behaviors would be a monumental undertaking.
It wasn’t always this way. The process of self-reflection has led me to revisit numerous events of my life through a fresh lens, and previously disconnected experiences now fit together to form a more coherent tapestry. An early memory that stands out occurred in second grade, when my classmates noticed that I was crossing my legs and engaging in other body language that was perceived as feminine. Growing up in the 90s, “gay” was the most prevalent pejorative among adolescent boys and the ultimate mechanism for social punishment. As a result, I made the conscious decision to erase all behaviors that could attract attention. This was the genesis of the self-regulation that would go on to dominate my teenage years and persist into adulthood. How do the other boys sit? How do they position their hands? What body movements are permissible, and which actions will result in derision from my peers? I stopped being able to exist in my body authentically and became extremely risk averse. I was unwilling to perform any novel behavior unless I explicitly observed that it was socially permitted and felt reasonably confident that it could be replicated well enough to avoid standing out. To this day, I remain extremely uncomfortable receiving any sort of personal attention, even if it is positive, and I feel most content when I am invisible. Anonymity makes me feel safe.
As a teenager, it had become painfully obvious that there was something different about me compared to most of my peers. I often experienced intrusive thoughts that I had been born in the “wrong” body, and constantly fantasized about being female. However, concepts like “gender dysphoria” simply did not exist in the public lexicon, and there was no distinction in my mind between gender and biological sex. The only examples of transgender people in media were caricatures, often portrayed as sex workers or in the worst cases, committers of perverse crimes. Representation matters. Had there been even one positive counterexample of a transgender person in popular media that I could connect to my own experiences, then these preconceptions would have been questioned more critically, and I suspect my life trajectory would have been significantly altered. When I look back on my formative years into adulthood, there are so many instances of existential distress that I explained away to myself or others through shaky rationalizations. Now, they come into focus for the first time to form a cohesive narrative. I plan to do a deeper dive into these past experiences in a future post.
In my 20s, my understanding of gender identity had somewhat matured, but was still underdeveloped. At this point in time, I was in graduate school working on my Ph.D., and most of my energy was devoted to research, teaching, and service — all the things you’re supposed to do to be competitive for a faculty position at a research university. My conception of being transgender was limited to people that had socially and/or medically transitioned, and non-binary gender identities had not yet become integrated into my world view. On a personal level, I viewed any gender non-conformity as being potentially stigmatizing and therefore mutually exclusive with my academic career. One practical concern was that I had already started generating papers using my given name. For someone that was incredibly insecure about a future in academia, publication continuity seemed like the most important thing in the world. But perhaps the biggest reason was fear of losing my treasured invisibility, and becoming a successful academic would necessarily require being a public figure. During these years, my personal narrative was that, in the event that if I failed in academia, I would at that point likely choose to be transgender, quietly and in obscurity. The problem, of course, is that I never encountered even just one successful academic researcher in my field that also happened to be trans, which would have inevitably prompted me to question these assumptions. (In retrospect, I most certainly did encounter them, but just didn’t know it, because so many of us are hidden.) Representation matters.
My life was not all doom and gloom. I was very fortunate to have been born intellectually gifted, and my parents and not-so-great rural public school did not have the first idea what to do with me. I was finally challenged in graduate school, and I found a great deal of fulfillment in my academic accomplishments. I centered my life almost completely around my career, and over time, this became so ingrained that I had no real self-conception outside of my research and other scholarly pursuits. This process become self-reinforcing — I was rewarded for it, both internally and externally, and every time another paper was accepted for publication, my existence felt validated.
Whereas my teenage conceptions of gender identity are largely the result of the society and community I grew up in, I often blame myself for systematic and willful denial as an adult. I frequently find myself grieving for the missed life experiences I will never have, for all those years where I depersonalized myself and denied my inner voice.
Now, in my mid-to-late 30s, I have established a reasonably successful tenure-track career trajectory at a university and department where I am extremely happy. I have an amazing partner, a nice house, financial security, and a two-year old toddler that marches into my home office, kicks me out of my chair, and demands that I turn on the music so he can dance. By all accounts, I have achieved all the goals that I had set for myself back in my 20s, excepting tenure, but there is a clear path towards that now. However, I fear that the singular focus that I had so effectively leveraged to get here is not sustainable indefinitely.
Gender dysphoria was a variable that I had not entered into my long-term calculus. I did not realize that the inner voice would continually grow louder and louder over time, until it became such a monumental force that I had no choice but to confront it. How could I have known? I did not even have a word to concretely describe what I was experiencing, nor did I have any idea how atypical it was. Aren’t most people curious about what it would be like to be the opposite sex? That is probably true on some level. However, it turns out that for most men, their first thought upon waking up each morning and their last thought before going to sleep is not “Your body is wrong. You should have been born a girl.”
So far, I have primarily written about body dysphoria, but I have not addressed the other aspect of the equation, which is the existential distress of being socially perceived as a man. This comes up in frequently in small ways — every time someone refers to me as “man,” “dude,” or the dreaded “bro,” I recoil internally and have to fight the urge to visibly wince. Each individual incident is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but it happens pervasively and often, and they all add up cumulatively. Of course, people have no way to know that they are misgendering me, but that doesn’t make it any less painful to hear. It’s not their fault, because my presentation is unambiguously male. After a conversation is over, I will often go over in my head how I must have appeared and sounded, and more than than not I am left with a profound sense of self-loathing. This manifests in other ways; for example, I have long avoided being in photographs whenever possible. I make excuses about being concerned with internet privacy, which is not entirely false, but not my primary motivation. I can’t stand to look at pictures of myself, and would prefer they simply didn’t exist in the first place.
Work contexts excepted, I generally avoid social situations with groups of four or more men unless women are also present. I have found that this is the critical mass after which conversations become tend to become more gendered, or even worse, it provides the environment where so-called “locker room talk” can emerge. If you are a woman, you might be surprised how often otherwise well-mannered men actively participate or remain complicit in these types of conversations. It doesn’t happen in every gathering, of course, and there are plenty of men that don’t do this, but it’s happened often enough in the past that I systematically avoid situations where I could find myself in exclusively male social groups. I will often make excuses about social anxiety to get out of them, which is not an accurate characterization, considering that I can speak in front of a group of hundred students or a packed conference hall with over a thousand people without any hint of nervousness.
One might think that I would be more comfortable interacting with groups of women, and for the most part that is true. However, in these situations, I become acutely aware that I am not one of them, which is yet another trigger for gender dysphoria. Even if I were to magically wake up tomorrow in a female body and begin publicly identifying as a woman, I will never have any of the lived experiences of being a woman for the first several decades of my life. I am also reminded that I have also have benefited tremendously from the privilege of being perceived as a man and still continue to do so. I am judged primarily on the quality of my work, and not my physical appearance. When I speak up at work or any other context, my voice is usually heard, and I am rarely interrupted. My opinions on topics related to my research area are generally viewed as authoritative, and nobody questions my expertise or credentials. The values of society and my profession provide me with an excuse to work long hours on nights and weekends, while my partner takes on the brunt of the child care responsibilities (side note: I am actively working to make this more equitable). I can move through life without worrying about being physically or sexually assaulted. The list goes on. Women continue to have to fight for rights and privileges that I have by default, and yet, I would gladly trade them away in a heartbeat to have been born female. I feel no small amount of guilt over this, which I try to channel positively in my professional life by actively mentoring women and directing a program that provides opportunities for underrepresented students.
Of course, I would not be writing all of this unless something had changed. There were several catalysts that came together to form a crack in the elaborate facade I had constructed, which ultimately led to me coming out, first to myself, then my partner, and then a few close friends. I am fortunate that all the close people in my life have been extremely supportive. I plan to write another post about the experience of coming out, but there is one important factor that I would like to highlight here — the candid writing of Amy J. Ko, a professor at the University of Washington, who I was already tangentially familiar with for her research in computer science education. The language that she used to describe gender dysphoria, and the unique challenges of transitioning in academia, were powerful and immediately relatable. As a highly visible trans academic in my field, her story was the missing counterexample to my false preconceptions and inspired a process of self-education, reflection, and acceptance. Because, guess what? Representation matters. After decades of repression, I finally found both the agency and the language to name my truth:
I didn’t have to choose to be trans. I already was, and had been all along.
