Or maybe your gender? Our genders?
Last summer, my neighbors in my political group asked me to speak to them about my gender, gender journey, and also the current state of trans rights. (The latter’s not great!) This is a modification of what I discussed with them.
Header photo by Lindsay Ladd of Ginger Fox Photography.
Before I share my own journey: Leveling setting
If you do not believe that trans people are real, please hit “x” to close your browser. If you believe your sky daddy deity of choice is against transness, you have bigger problems and attend to your own house before throwing rocks at others. If you believe trans people don’t deserve human dignity and rights, to quote the late David Lynch on this topic, change your heart or die.
Terminology and concepts to discuss gender (so we’re all on the same page)
Transgender (trans) is an umbrella term that simply means you don’t identify with your gender as assigned at birth. It is a value-neutral word.
Cisgender (cis) is a term that simply means you identify with your gender as assigned at birth. It is a value-neutral word.
Nonbinary is a term that simply means you do not identify as strictly male or female. It is an entire spectrum with outliers and currently ever-evolving. It is a value-neutral word.
Transition means that a person has changed something about their gender presentation, usually to the outside world. Social transition contains things like changing your name or pronouns or dressing differently. Usually things that are completely reversible. Medical transition contains things like using hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or getting surgeries, and may be less irreversible (but not always!).
Gender and sex are different terms. Gender is your expression and internal identity (how the world sees you and how you see yourself), and sex is your biological characteristics expressed through genetics that can be modified through modern medicine.
Gender and sex are both social constructs. This means that our culture and society dictate what that means.
For example, with gender, pre-WWII, it was customary for baby boys to wear pink, as pink was red diluted and red was the color of blood (warrior), while baby girls wore soft baby blue. Post-WWII, this flipped.
For example, with sex, people assume that if you grow facial hair, you are a man, and if you grow breasts, you are a woman. Anyone can grow facial hair or breasts, depending on your hormonal makeup which is a reflection of genetics or genetics and modern medicine. (Also, if your cis male relatives cannot grow beards well, you won’t either; same with your breast size aligning with your cis female relatives.)
The male-female gender binary and sex binary are made up, outdated, and reinforce misogyny and patriarchal power. Humans made up the categories of male and female to classify people into. Nature, including human biology, constantly proves that this is a social construct.
The Schizophyllum fungus has 23,000 sexes. Clownfish change sexes depending on group survival needs. Are humans less complex than fungi or fish? Sex hormones — like Testosterone and Estrogen — are value-neutral biologically; it is our culture that assigns them traits like “more likely to gamble” and “good at raising children.” (Read Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society by Cordelia Fine for more on this.)
Was that Nemo’s mom, dad, or both? Image from southeastasiadiving.com
The gender binary is steeped in white supremacy and is used to reinforce racism. For example, when cis white women are beaten in Olympic sports by cis Black women, those Black women are accused of being “biologically male,” and white supremacist beauty aesthetics are applied to Black women’s bodies to “prove” this.
Intersex people are real. They are people whose genetics mean they have a mixture of “male” and “female” biological traits in an infinite number of combinations. Some people know they are intersex all their lives, but many do not know until they hit puberty, try to conceive children, or have other medical issues. Such as a 70-year-old man who went in for hernia surgery, and the surgeon discovered he had a uterus.
As we learn more about biological variation, it turns out that more than your chromosomes determine your reproductive organs and characteristics, and more than genitals determine your sex or gender. Science is neat!
Gender identity is separate from sexual orientation.
While LGBTQ+ people are often talked about together, gender and sexual orientation are separate functions. For instance, a trans woman who is attracted to women only is a lesbian, and a trans woman who is attracted to men only is straight. As I’m bisexual — which I’ve known since I was 9 and been able to articulate and understand in culture since age 12 — regardless of my gender, I am a queer person, and my dating/sexual relationships are queer as I’m nonbinary.
This doesn’t even add in romantic/aromantic and allosexual/asexual factors to sexual orientations.
Suggested reading for more Trans 101 stuff: He/She/They: How We Talk About Gender and Why It Matters by Schuyler Bailar
Modern trans history
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera at an early Pride march in NYC in the 1970s. The two are Mothers of the modern US trans rights movement.
There have always been trans and gender non-conforming people across cultures for as long as there have been people.
Modern Western conceptions of LGBTQ+ people as a group of people who needed rights (compared to a behavior) started coming together in the 1880-90s. Oscar Wilde’s criminal conviction in 1895 in England for gross indecency and practicing homosexual acts brought LGBTQ rights to the world stage. The earliest known LGBTQ rights organization was the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, founded in Berlin in 1897. A German publication in 1913 is the first published use of the word transgender (a German equivalent) and discussions of trans people and perhaps gender being different from sexual orientation.
The Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) in Germany was founded in 1919. Under its founder, Magnus Hirschfeld, it became the first place to study queerness and link using science to further justice for all LGBTQ+ people. For trans people, the first sex change surgery (vaginoplasty) was done there, as well as modern HRT. The Institute lasted until the Nazis burned it down in May 1933 and fully criminalized all trans and queer people. Those famous Nazi book burning photos are of this!
A group of queer people at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. The man on the right with the round glasses and large mustache is Magnus Hirschfeld.
Since then, trans people have worked hard to reclaim this knowledge and reform medicine and psychology. But as a reminder, modern HRT (for trans reasons) is older in practice than insulin, heart valve replacement, and many other common medicines and medical procedures you wouldn’t question.
I will now be skipping to our current time, which is a ton of LGBTQ+ history! Transgender History by Susan Stryker — getting its 3rd edition this year — is a solid resource for learning about the trans rights movement and associated figures and institutions in the United States.
A little on my own gender timeline
How do you know you’re transgender? Only you can know if you’re trans. There isn’t a test or a secret way to figure this out. (Many have tried, failed, and sometimes hurt people!)
There’s a joke in the trans community that if you think you might be transgender for more than 5 minutes combined in your lifetime, you might be trans. This is because most cisgender people do not question their gender. They find it innate to their self-understanding. So flip this, and transgender people find being trans as something innate in them.
I identify as a nonbinary trans masculine person. I mostly use they/them pronouns, but he/him is acceptable in certain queer circles and contexts. Like most trans people, I do not have an easily digestible (by cis cultural standards) trans narrative. My gender is a lot more everywhere and nowhere, versus a narrow path from A (AGAB or assigned gender at birth) to B (now at age 42).
My brother and I “helped” build the back deck at our family home in 1991. My flip-flops were not approved work footwear.
On growing up
When I was growing up in the 1990s (ages 7-17), we lacked terminology and understanding of transgender people. Especially if you lived anywhere not NYC or San Francisco and were a child.
I lived in an extremely homogeneous community (white! “Christian”! Republican!) in Central Oregon with parents who enforced a binary gender structure. I don’t know if I ever told my mom I was a boy, but I did dislike that I couldn’t run around in my itchy party dress as my younger brothers could in their beige Fred Meyer pants.
There were also other weird gender things, such as I was the only child who had to be officially taught how to drive. I wasn’t interested in automobiles (still aren’t!), but my brothers were driving the riding lawnmower, tractors, 4-wheelers, motorcycles, go-karts, and even trucks and cars long before they were driving age. My mother was absolutely flabbergasted that driving wasn’t a hereditary skill.
I grew up on 20 acres with a variety of farm animals, and I wore those dresses for major Christian holiday church services and piano recitals, not when mucking a barn stall. Most of the time, I ran around in jeans and t-shirts. I liked painting my nails and playing with Barbies, even if I never got into makeup, didn’t want my room pink, and my mom would still like to fight me about my hair. I was never particularly “butch,” except that time I shaved my hair at 16. I don’t even hate dresses, except that society finger points “lady!” when you wear one.
Me in high school shortly after I shaved my head.
As a child, I didn’t align with any adult examples of masculinity or femininity, and for a long time — after reading Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women at age 12 — I blamed Central Oregon’s homogeneity and felt like I just hadn’t found my people. Especially other queer people, since I knew, like Star Trek’s Jadzia Dax and Babylon 5’s Susan Ivanova, that I was bisexual. (Dax is also trans!) Clearly, I just needed to move to a “big city.”
At 14, I “discovered” David Bowie. He was my first “that’s my gender” feeling, but I had no idea what to do with that besides becoming immediately obsessed.
On a dial-up modem, I ran across the term “genderqueer” to describe someone who didn’t feel quite male or female. It seemed to fit me. But I also didn’t know what to do with that.
I didn’t want to be like any of the adults I knew. In high school, I knew three trans femmes my age, but I didn’t know what to do about my gender, even as my trans friends left our hometown and started socially and medically transitioning. When it came adult possibility models, I didn’t even meet another openly queer person, not of my age range, until I was an adult myself in college. In a college oil painting class, I was assigned two huge self-portraits. For one, I couldn’t even paint my own face, and instead put in a piece of pottery I’d made as my head.
Adulting in gender dysphoria
Nonbinary only become a well-known term in the 2010s. By then, I was in my 30s, living in Seattle, and established in my career, which had largely been my focus. More people I knew started coming out as nonbinary and some even using they/them pronouns.
Some of them were extremely annoying people. Again, another joke in trans community is that even if you cannot come out, you will clap loudly for the most annoying person you know who comes out. I hope I’m someone’s annoying trans person source of hate-spo.
In 2014, I took a burlesque class. Everyone in the class (mostly cis women) wanted to be a sexy lady taking off her clothes. For our recital, I dressed as Olaf from Frozen (a boy child snowman) and stripped to “In Summer.” Again, I didn’t know what to actually do with this information.
Sometimes, you’re just a little boy snowman comic relief. I started off in the most clothing possible and was the least naked by the end.
Obviously nothing. Even as it became painfully annoying to be a “woman in tech” when I was not. But I was too old to make any changes! Even if my internal sense of alignment was more male than female, I am not butch, so this felt impossible to ever present to the outside world. I was just going to have bad tummy feelings when named in “women in tech to follow” social media posts and feel guilty that all my fictional story protagonists were men. (Don’t worry, literally had a college professor lecture me about this during a story “critique”!)
Look: I’m doing something about this
In 2017, I changed my pronouns on all my social media bios to she/they, and let me tell you, no one noticed at all. (Okay, my one friend Sayed did.) No one ever used “they” for me.
In 2021, I came out as nonbinary to my partner and close friends and told them to use they/them pronouns. I also applied for a dream job with they/them pronouns on my application. (Dream job fizzled because they required me to move to LA for an entirely could be done remotely job.)
But after coming out as nonbinary and changing my pronouns to the world, in January 2022, I didn’t have quite the gender feeling I wanted. I farted around trying to socially present more masculine and then would get immediately ma’am’d and feel like shit. I still had a “feminine” name because I liked my old name, and I couldn’t figure out a new one. In 2022, I ditched my tubes, and even if no one could see I was missing reproductive organs, it was so gender affirming and empowering!
Me in 2023 in New Orleans for my 40th birthday.
There was no way of knowing if going on testosterone HRT would do anything for me, but in 2023, I decided to try it. I could/can stop at any time, and changes are not magic potions and do not happen overnight. One of my worst misgenderings — which involved me verbally sparring with a drag queen on a boat on the Mississippi River in New Orleans during an Xmas drag brunch — happened 6 months into taking testosterone.
Testosterone immediately made me feel better inside. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have PMDD. (Even if my stupid period hung on for another 8 months.) The other changes have been net positive as well. Even if they took “forever” to kick in, thanks to my genetics and my terrible first HRT doctor.
(There is a whole separate essay about the horrors of trying to access gender-affirming healthcare, but anyone who believes it’s simple and easy should be forced to schedule some for a trans person, using US health insurance.)
By 2023, I’d already developed a robust in-person “big blue city” community (a project started in 2016) and have only expanded to connect with more trans people and cis queers. Unlike a lot of other trans people, I chose not to document my changes on the internet. I had plenty of people to ask directly. I also had a trans masculine therapist and a trans masculine HRT doctor (second and better doctor), with professional training and sometimes shared lived experiences. Also largely, my medical care is none of your fucking business.
In 2024, I changed my name to Theo. Last December, I said goodbye, boobies, and had top surgery to flatten and masculinize my chest at age 42. Even if I’m too old to be a twink.
What things look like now
Look! Me and my award-winning Aeschynanthus longicaulis at the Indoor Plant Festival in April 2026.
Presentation-wise, I still struggle. Because I was 39 before I started HRT, so many people knew me “before,” and some of those people “forget” or prioritize putting their own comfort before mine. I get misgendered all the time by strangers. Though slightly more “sirs” than before. But even that’s not quite correct.
Changing my name has helped some, but I cannot change things like my height, muscle mass (due to other genetics), or a greatly deepened voice. Yes, my voice has deepened on testosterone, but not dramatically compared to society at large, and my cis brothers don’t have particularly deep baritones.
My former therapist once told me, David Bowie was always a man, regardless of how he presented. My gender identity is most closely aligned to an effeminate queer man; but in society, I often don’t know how I get read. (Or more deer-in-headlights, which bathroom to sit down to pee in.)
With single interaction strangers, I tend to roll with whatever they assume as they internally assess, “Is this a man?” (Because our patriarchal culture means we aren’t actually asking what gender someone is, but if they are a man or not, which, in my opinion, is part of the obsession with trans women.) Rolling with a stranger’s perception seems safer than pushing up my glasses and saying, “Well…actually…” and then divulging my entire history.
When I come out to people as bisexual, I am telling them my current lived reality. Which is different than coming out as trans, which means I am telling you my history of who I was before this moment, which we may not be close enough to share. You certainly don’t need to know “what’s in my underwear,” if you aren’t a sexual partner or (in relevant medical situations) my doctor.
Being trans is wild because you start to realize how much people do obsess about what’s in someone else’s underwear on a gender binary and how much this is policed. Whether it’s a seemingly innocent “are you having a boy or a girl?” or part of a malicious political policy designed to destroy anyone it deems lesser and inhuman.
Speaking of…
The current conservative US political project to exterminate trans people
As mentioned previously, I gave a version of this essay to my neighborhood political group. Part of what I wanted to share with them was ways for them to identify conservative and GOP/Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 attacks on trans people, without necessarily always asking me. Liberals have proved susceptible to the “just asking questions” line, and it’s important to understand anti-trans dog whistles in the same way you need to understand racist, anti-immigrant, and misogynist ones.
Trans people are already 4x more likely than cis people to be victims of violent crimes, including sexual assault, and 50% of trans people (across the gender spectrum) have been sexually assaulted, with higher rates amongst trans people of color. Unemployment rates for trans people are 28% (the same level of general unemployment during the Great Depression!) versus 4.3% general US population unemployment in April 2026.
Transphobic policies and attacks are widely politically unpopular. Despite this, there are currently 773 anti-trans bills happening federally and in specific states and cities across the US. Most of them are mirror copies of each other, written by the same 2 “think tanks.” All of them target basic human rights that trans people have had for decades, like the ability to change ID gender markers or make our own healthcare decisions.
These transphobic policies have triggered trans people or supportive families with trans children (and other queer people) to flee “red” states passing these laws. The majority of trans people in the US live in the South, not in “big blue cities” as media tells us. As someone in Seattle, I have met many trans people who’ve left places due to these laws. We haven’t seen this level of intra-US migration since the Great Migration, and that happened over several decades, whereas this has been condensed to the last 5 years. In Seattle (where I live), the city’s LGBTQ Commission has recommended that the mayor declare a state of emergency because Seattle isn’t equipped with enough service providers, housing, public health, and more to receive this influx. (If in Seattle, please write Mayor Wilson!)
I don’t have enough bandwidth to go over everything happening politically, but I wanted to focus on the aims of the current group running the US government, pull out some highlights, and get into four specific transphobic policy attacks to fight against. Plus, for my WA-based friends, the upcoming transphobic ballot initiatives we must defeat.
Protesters at a trans rights march. Photo by Nikolas Gannon.
Trump’s anti-trans policies started on day one.
Trump didn’t win on anti-trans promises in 2024; he won on a bad economy he could blame on Biden, plus his gutter racist die-hard cultists would rather die of measles than vote for a Black woman, and the Democrats do not act like an opposition party. Voters are not moved by wanting to ban trans people from bathrooms, especially when gas is $7/gallon.
This didn’t stop the Trump admin from releasing Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” on January 20, 2025, Trump’s first day in office, part two. This anti-science EO rigidly defines binary gender, and it instructs all federal agencies to only recognize two genders, have all federal documents only reflect AGAB (assigned gender at birth), and more.
Here are some of the heinous, cruel actions they took:
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who Democrats widely confirmed) immediately took away the ability for people to change their sex marker on passports and removed the option for X. (US passport holders could change their sex marker on their passport since they started including sex markers in the 1970s, with various red tape being different throughout the decades. The X marker was a more recent addition.)
- The DOJ stopped supporting trans athletes and sued children’s hospitals providing gender affirming care for minors.
- Rep Nancy Mace got a bathroom ban passed for the federal Congressional building, despite having a personal gender neutral one in her office.
- Secretary of Defense and former talk show host Pete Hegseth banned trans people from the military and took away the pensions and other retirement benefits for trans people who’d previously served.
- The IRS keeps track of gender, despite it not being listed on social security cards. You can no longer change it, and it must match your AGAB.
These were “easy” actions to do. Because they could, and they knew that cisgender people wouldn’t care loudly enough. Voters aren’t moved on anti-trans issues, but they aren’t particularly compelled by social justice issues that don’t directly affect their lives. Also, the vast majority of mainstream media didn’t cover any of this. (The culpability of The New York Times in all of this is another essay entirely.)
The MAGA project is to eliminate trans people by making it harder for us to live our lives and be in public.
They also want to put binary gender definition into law for their ongoing Christofacist project. If binary gender definitions become law in the US — the same way race wasn’t a thing until it was defined in US law — then it becomes much easier to make sure women are second-class citizens and take away women’s rights. Which we have already seen with the repeal of Roe V Wade.
The Trump administration is actively calling for more violence against trans people.
Four political issues that people who care about trans people cannot fail on.
1. Gender-affirming care for minors
Ultimately, they want to block all trans-related gender affirming care, even for adults. This is an attack specifically on trans minors because all their laws have carve-outs for using puberty blockers, HRT, and genital and gynecomastia (top) surgeries on cis minors. Genital binary surgery still happens on intersex babies. Puberty blockers are ruled safe to give to cis minors with extremely early puberties. Gynecomastia surgery (top surgery) is okay for cis boys with breast development. (The first person I knew who’d gotten top surgery was a cis man my age who had it as a middle schooler because of excess breast-like tissue.)
2. Trans people, especially girls and women, in sports
There are very few trans athletes, especially ones playing at seriously competitive levels. A Utah law banned 1 trans girl from playing girls’ sports across all youth sports teams in Utah. No cis man will transition to win at women’s sports. In an extreme why is this a gender thing, World Chess recently banned all trans people from competing because apparently, you move chess pieces with your genitals or they’re so heavy that you must have the most strength.
The bigots writing these laws don’t care about women’s sports; otherwise, they’d fund them and pay female players what their male counterparts make. Women’s sports were invented because cis men were mad that women beat them. Some cis men are demanding genital checks of girls playing youth sports, and it sounds like those cis men should be investigated for wanting to look at children’s genitals.
3. Bathroom bans
There have been 0 ever reported “attacks” in public restrooms with trans people as attackers and cis people as victims. Trans people just want to pee and poop and maybe cry in the bathroom. We all pee and poop in the same place in our gender neutral home bathrooms. It’s hard enough to choose the safest public bathroom without being policed. These bathroom bans are laws designed to keep trans people out of public life. Lack of public restrooms is a general problem — challenge: try to pee in Downtown Seattle — and trans people report higher instances of UTIs due to holding it in.
4. Prisons: medical treatment and assignment to men’s or women’s facilities
Trans prisoners face a higher percentage of violence (sexual and non-sexual) in prisons, especially for trans women put in men’s prisons. This often leads to long stints in solitary confinement to “protect” the trans prisoner from more harm, but it is a harm in itself. Often, HRT and other gender affirming care is withheld due to transphobia, general neglect, or a belief that someone must further be punished for their crimes.
In “blue” Washington state, police decide where to put you based on how they read your gender, not what’s on any document or by asking you. Prison violence against trans people is worse when it’s known that you’re trans or your gender expression isn’t the binary of which side of prison you are in.
For fellow Washington State friends, we have 2 anti-trans ballot measures to defeat with a resolute majority in November: VOTE NO on IL26-001 and IL26-638.
The following is from No Hate in WA State:
“A mega-millionaire from California is spending millions on two poorly written initiatives that threaten the safety of all Washington kids. IL26-001 and IL26-638 endanger Washington students with invasive genital exams, forced LGBTQ+ outings, and restricted access to help when they need it most, exposing them to more hate, bullying, and harassment. This November, VOTE NO on IL26-001 and IL26-638.
Forced Outing Of LGBTQ Students (IL26-001)
- Puts LGBTQ+ students at risk of abuse and homelessness by forcing schools to “out” them to unsupportive families.
- Allows parents under criminal investigation for crimes against their own children to access students’ counseling, social work records.
- Costs taxpayers by inviting expensive lawsuits and empowering extremist groups to disrupt children’s classrooms.
Invasive Genital Exams on Girls (IL26-638)
- Hundreds of thousands of girls who want to play sports will have to get medical certification of their sex, defined in IL26- 638 as a physical “reproductive organ” exam, or costly genetic or hormone testing. Boys are exempt.
- Rolls back WA’s successful sports policy in place since 2007 with a statewide blanket ban on any trans girls in girls sports.”
Exactly. Photo by Raphael Renter.
Discrimination is all about control, and the gender binary will always be weaponized for transphobic purposes.
All trans people will be argued to be weak women, who must be denied autonomy, when it is convenient to control us with misogyny, and all trans people will be argued to be dangerous men, who must be kept away from women and children, when it is convenient to control us with toxic masculinity. We will always be ostracized from social protections for either binary gendered category based on our transness. There is no transmisogynistic narrative without a complementary anti-transmasculine narrative, and vice versa.
My ask for anyone reading this is to be actively anti-transphobic: to root out useless and harmful gender binary social assumptions and to fight against these transphobic laws. Our future literally depends on it.