How to change your gender by accident

26 May 2025 · 2970 words

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Amid the excitement of the first months of my transition, I wrote an essay explaining my view of why it took many years from the time I first acknowledged myself to be genderqueer for me to transition. Rereading that essay today, there are portions I find deficient, but I still see much to commend: the dismantling of all forms of gender essentialism, the emphasis on what agency can do for you (and what it can’t), and the idea that non-binary identities serve as a place-holder for something that does not exist within Western social consciousness.

Perhaps most significant for me, however, is not the failure or success of that essay’s central argument so much as its misdiagnosis of the very question I wrote it to answer.

If I knew that my voice bothered me and that I wanted to change it, that I wanted to wear nail polish, and style my hair differently, and that having these desires didn’t make me any gender in particular, then why didn’t I just do those things, and stop worrying so much about what “gender in particular” I was?

Truthfully, the reason I didn’t do those things is that like most people I usually do not want to be perceived as gender non-conforming. I don’t want people to look at me and say “there’s a man who’s doing gender wrong, someone breaking the rules.” There are social rewards and punishments for conforming more or less to one’s gender which discipline behavior even when one’s identification with that gender is only marginal. If I was a man, at the end of the day, then I felt I needed to behave as one.

The most obvious issue with this view is the tension it creates with the essay’s conclusion about the nature of non-binary identity. If (outside of select queer spaces) non-binary identity receives no social recognition, how does it help to assume a non-binary identity if what you’re after is social acceptance of your gender expression? After all, I went on to write:

When you introduce yourself as non-binary in most places, you are likely to be read as a more-or-less non-conforming member of the gender that is associated with your presumed “sex”. In queer spaces you may receive recognition, but outside these, you are likely to receive the same treatment that a non-conforming person would.

This leaves anyone transitioning for the reasons the essay suggests in something of a predicament. The justification for changing your identity is that identity matters for who you’re allowed to be and what you’re allowed to do — or at least, your identity might matter if norms are sustained in which the gender you live under is determined by self-identification. The issue, of course, is that we don’t live in a society where this is the case. So while the argument would perhaps justify non-binary identification as a form of activism, it doesn’t explain why I felt it solved my problem.

To understand what went wrong, consider the centrality of gender identity to my argument.¹ In part of the essay where I explained my early misreading of the trans femme aphorism “if you want to be a girl, you can just be a girl,” I emphasized that my interpretation had changed from a metaphorical one to a literal one. I wrote “I think identity itself is within your grasp, that it is yours for the taking.” While I still believe this, it indicates that I had accepted yet another reading that is not quite literal: if you want to be a girl, you can just identify as a girl. These aren’t the same thing: self-identifying as a woman ought to be sufficient for social recognition as a woman, but currently it is not.

When I elided the difference, I did so in a way that correctly discerned gender identity as a site of agency. By abandoning gender essentialist theories like the idea that all people (or all trans people) directly apprehend their true gender, it became possible for me to accept that I could choose to be trans. This doesn’t mean that I could choose a gender (e.g. literally be a girl), but it did mean that I had every right to call myself one, act like one, and change my body to look like one, if I wanted to. Those are, at any rate, rights trans people are fighting for.

In my essay, I seem to have been led astray by the idea that the opening of this possibility is what made the difference for me. This can’t be completely wrong, after all. It is hard to seriously contemplate taking drugs that will make you grow breasts when you believe there is a literal thing that exists in the brains of women that makes them women, and that you don’t have that thing, even if hypothetically you would endorse allowing anyone who wanted to grow breasts to do so.

Neither, however, can this be the whole story. I began hormone replacement therapy almost immediately after embracing the term “non-binary” for myself. While I certainly had some degree of dysphoria (e.g. strong feelings about losing my hair), this seems like a radical act for someone whose primary concerns were wanting to change some aspects of their gender expression, and who in fact actively did not want to grow breasts. Furthermore, as someone who believed their primary obstacle to be the social stigma around gender nonconformity, it’s unlikely that I could have seen HRT and changing my gender identity as a solution to that.

In fact, even if I was foolish enough to believe that calling myself non-binary would solve this problem for me, I was quickly proven wrong. I struggled with many of the social aspects of transition. I didn’t come out to my family for more than a year after starting hormones. I bought no women’s clothing. I put off voice training despite this being one of my earliest and most consistent sources of dysphoria.

If you want to call my transition an experiment, it certainly looks like a failed one. I was out socially to friends, I put on nail polish sometimes, I wore feminine (men’s) shirts. But I couldn’t bring myself to buy and wear women’s clothes, or work on my voice, and I didn’t practice makeup and certainly never wore it in public, despite these all being things I had set out to do. Was this caused by a fear of judgment that I slowly got over? I don’t think so. Some trans people, either pre-transition or in early transition, buy clothes online and wear them only at home. They practice makeup incessantly until they get up the nerve to wear it out in public. I couldn’t bring myself to do any of this. Why not?

Recall what I wrote:

If I was a man, at the end of the day, then I felt I needed to behave as one.

Maybe we need to consider the simplest hypothesis: the reason why so late into medically transitioning I still felt compelled to behave as a man is that I was a man — just one who was uniquely unhappy about it.

Obviously, this is a statement that requires some clarification. Have I taken up an essentialist account of gender once again? Do I think that I possessed a subconscious sense that I was a man which overruled my foolish attempt to identify as non-binary? No, I don’t. In suggesting that I was a man, I mean to say something extremely specific.

I presented gender norms in All the stupid reasons as a set of external impositions on human behavior. They operate through systems of shame and reinforcement, reward and punishment. People like me feel trapped by the oppression these forces represent, and the apparent solution, however easy or difficult in any particular case, is a quasi-voluntaristic claiming of a new gender identity that allows what one wants to do. While this doesn’t imply choice of gender (which is understood to be the system of social control as a whole, not individual identification), it nevertheless suggests that individuals are usually conscious of the ways they are harmed by gender oppression, and can take steps to remedy this if they are willing and able.

This now strikes me as hopelessly simplistic. After all, many people do experience gender as if it were a real thing that existed inside them. They’re not making that experience up and they deserve to be respected. Gender does not operate as an external force that controls what you are allowed to do. Rather, it structures from the inside your very desire — what you want to do.

When I say I was a man, then, I mean this as a shorthand way of saying that my subjectivity was (in a complicated and internally contradictory way) a masculine one.² I became a man not by forcibly adhering to an external set of norms, but by embodying to the best of my ability a set of norms that I myself was primarily responsible for enforcing.

None of this undermines the wish I had to live differently, to escape the box I found myself inside. I’m certainly not making the claim that I was/am male simpliciter in an essentialist fashion, and even more emphatically am not saying this experience is typical of trans people. Yet I could not escape from the controlling logic of masculinity because it was not an external force, but was something inside me. My transness consisted of the fact that it was not exclusively inside me to the point of crowding out all other desires, experiences, and possibilities, and this is why the agential idea of transition held out a light. I existed at an odd intersection of identities, problems, and experiences.

As I have indicated, a change in my gender self-identification alone did not resolve this dilemma. What changed everything was something unexpected, life-altering, and unbelievably profound that happened remarkably quickly: I became a woman.

This occurred over a period of several months. I went from passing as unchanged from my former self with family to being seen profoundly differently by most strangers. It started with achieving enough breast growth that it was clearly visible under any clothing; around the same time I finally dragged myself to a laser hair removal clinic (where I was misgendered the entire time) and pierced my ears. Within several weeks, people whom I had been out to for ages began to spontaneously treat me differently.

It is hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t been through this experience what it is like to have people suddenly stop behaving as if you are a man. One evening I went out to dinner with my partner (I finally wore a women’s sweater) and the nice middle-aged woman who was our waitress greeted us with “how are you ladies tonight?” and I felt myself change in response to that. There’s no other way to put it.

One might suppose that HRT itself solved my problem by changing my body so that I no longer had to fear looking like a man in women’s clothing. This can’t be right, because I still have this fear; I think all these people knew or could guess I was trans. The difference is that while I previously felt an unexplained sense of shame about presentation that was “too” feminine, in mere weeks I began to feel that exact sense about presentation that was “too” masculine. The experience of having others perceive you to be a woman changes your subjectivity, even if they know that you are trans or your body looks “male” in some way.³ My behavior changed in spite of my anxiety about how I’m perceived, not as a result of it going away.

In my case, instincts I didn’t know I possessed automatically activated themselves. Vocal training techniques that I had experimented with only in private began to appear uncalled for in my speech. I suddenly couldn’t bear to wear anything but women’s clothing. I now go out shopping for clothes carrying a purse and wearing makeup, and think absolutely nothing of it.

These changes aren’t all positive. After years of not understanding why some women do it, I suddenly feel compelled to keep my legs shaved. I find myself putting on mascara before I go to the grocery. I’m absolutely not proud of this. I would never say it makes me more of a woman to do it. But something inside me makes it really hard to live any other way, in exactly the same way that as a “man” I self-enforced masculine normative behavior. I’m not under the delusion this is natural — you’re not a real woman for having noticeable breasts, pierced ears, softer and brighter speech, shaved legs, and so forth. Neither was I born, so far as I can tell, with a desire to do any of this. I’m driven to do it by an unseen and scarcely resisted force.

Likewise, I found myself slipping into binary feminine social roles that I previously took feminism to question. I pointed this out in my essay:

After all, feminism rightly asserts that some gender roles are harmful, and that compulsory roles for women (in particular) are part of a system of gendered oppression.

Yet without consciously intending to do so, I’ve ended up taking on caring responsibilities. I sit and talk to friends who are mothers at length about their experiences, their philosophies of child development, and so on. I adopt rituals for maintaining and strengthening social bonds. Again, I should emphasize, I don’t see these things as natural; even the estrogen in my blood and brain did not (alone) cause this shift. I take a feminist view of these questions that is essentially the same as before. It’s just that I cannot deny that my subjectivity has been profoundly altered.

Of course, as a non-binary person, this is in a sense the funniest possible outcome. I am a woman — just one who is uniquely amused about it. It’s comical that while my experience is sure to make transphobes angry, I’m not particularly thrilled about it either. It happened and there’s not a lot I can do about it, except detransition, which I positively don’t want to and am not going to do.

It remains unclear, given my rejection of essentialist notions of gender, why I lighted on non-binary as my identity of choice around the time my transition began. I could not, after all, point to any internal sense that I wasn’t a woman to rule out such a designation. Likewise, why do I continue to adhere to this identity now?⁴

One thing to make clear is that it’s not because I’m unhappy. Taking hormones profoundly altered my life for the better, even if it was not estrogen itself that made most of the difference in the end. Being a woman is working for me pretty well to this point! There are certainly other women (both trans and cis) who feel about the same about being a woman that I do, so I don’t believe I’m such an outlier that I don’t belong in the category.

Recall that for me, non-binary identity is unique in that unlike male and female identities, it points at something that does not yet properly exist. Calling oneself non-binary signals something about what one is trying to achieve, but in and of itself cannot summon into being a set of social norms and conditions of subjection from the void. This is why transitioning did not make me non-binary despite my positive self-identification as such; instead it made me a woman.

Thus, my taking on the label of non-binary does not reflect identification with a concrete way of life, a psychic “identity,” but instead corresponds to what I called my sense of living “at an odd intersection of identities, problems, and experiences.” It is queer to feel one’s gendered subjectivity change; it is confusing and wondrous to know that you are one of the people for whom this can (apparently) happen; it is funny and sometimes alienating to find yourself subject to a whole new set of social norms you previously professed no attachment to. Truthfully, I wish I was not trapped by gender in the way it appears I am. I feel envy toward people who pull off androgynous looks, and I hope one day to develop the bravery to nonconform much more than I do.

It’s this bundle of facts and experiences, some of which I recognized prior to transition and others I identified only recently, that motivates me to call myself non-binary. I suspect that there are many transfeminine people with similar experiences who reach this point, decide they’re basically okay with a female identity, change their pronouns, and move on with life.⁵ That’s a choice I think is entirely legitimate. I don’t think that choice is for me, although on the other hand I tend not to volunteer pronouns and let people assume I’m a woman. Maybe I wonder if this is not all a little too conscious for me — if a genderqueer identity is not made inevitable by reason of my incessant analysis.

Being as open as I can about these experiences, and writing this as an update to my previous essay, is something I think benefits questioning people. Perhaps the biggest problem I had before I transitioned was that I had notions of transgender experience taken entirely from popular culture’s translation and appropriation of trans life. Coming to see that one does not have to feel “born this way” allowed me to think that I too was transgender, and what I hope to have shared in this essay is an aspect of transfeminine experience that I have not (to date) seen expressed in this language or with this depth.