How the Current Wave of Anti-Transgender Legislation Threatens Cis People, Too
For a while since my gender transition, I took up the mantle of masculinity. It was impressed upon me, with my secondary sex characteristics like my new facial hair, deeper voice, and flat chest indicating to the general populace that I was to be catagorized as “he”, rather than “she”. And so I was and am treated as such. Some might think that this is what I wanted by taking hormones and getting gender-affirming surgery.
It’s strange how the gender binary can seem wholly objectifying and limiting to someone who just identifies as a human being, beyond all gender archetypes and ideas. Some might argue that if this was true, why did I feel the need to take medical steps to transition in the first place?
The answer is hard to pin down, but the easiest way to explain it is that I didn’t have a choice. I’d reached a point in my life where I felt so disjointed between my internal experience of myself and the external presentation of my body that I was dangerously close to suicide. I deeply feared the unknown gulf of gender transition. I didn’t know what it was to be a man, and I never wanted to be one in the first place. But I also felt so trapped in my body as it was, that I didn’t feel that I had any other recourse.
