Trans Futures, Trans Pasts
04 June 2025 · 3012 words“The diagnosis of gender dysphoria requires that a life takes on a more or less definite shape over time; a gender can only be diagnosed if it meets the test of time.” — Judith Butler, Undoing Gender1
How does one become trans?
The question strikes many of us as already troubled. Does one, after all, become trans, or does one discover that one is trans? To question whether a metaphor like “discovery” is apt or inapt presupposes a standard of assessment for narratives of transness. Such a standard could amount to a theory of gender, but might instead imply only that some ways of describing the formation of trans identity are more accurate than others.
I wish to challenge the idea of a standard with the suggestion that narratives of transition need not get at any underlying truth (about gender, about psychology, or about anything else) in order to be valuable. Rather, trans narratives are valuable as structurings of the past insofar as they prove liberatory.2 Thus, describing one metaphor as more “apt” than some other makes a mistake, and furthermore, the feeling that some metaphor adequately captures one’s experience as a trans person does not constitute evidence for some or another theory of gender.
Butler’s criticism of gender dysphoria as a clinical diagnosis provides a useful starting point. They point out that accessing medical transition within many healthcare regimes requires submitting to the diagnosis, attempting to embody it in oneself, in order to make one’s gender legible to psychologists. Trans activists have attacked this form of gatekeeping, and in some cases have succeeded in promoting standards of care that admit greater agency.
Yet in communicating ourselves to each other, or collectively communicating ourselves to cis people, we remain similarly beholden to narratives of transness that as individuals we can never fully embody. Archetypes of trans experience make us intelligible to one another and to ourselves. One must have a trans past to have a trans future.
Sometimes these narratives take the form of metaphors for trans experience, and other times they behave like metaphors in that a label describing a shared experience stands in for the complex lived reality of individual trans people. Let’s consider several of the shared narratives of transness that operate in this fashion.
The metaphor of the egg, especially in trans femme circles, provides one possible narrative structure for a trans past. If I was always a girl, how do I communicate the how and why of my long period of confusion to others? If I might be a girl and I’m not sure, how do I think about my own uncertainty, or “brain worms,” in a way that doesn’t invalidate my potential identity before it is fully formed? The egg model suggests that trans identities grow over time, pushing outwards against a shell made of doubt and repression.
In this way, the egg metaphor explains to others why one has only recently come to understand the preexisting truth of one’s gender. Cis-identified people are concomitantly invested with alternative selves which can be imagined, built up, even named perhaps, without threat to the identity of the “cis” individual. “If I were a boy,” one says, “I would do this and wear that, but I’m not, this is only a fantasy.” Eventually the “but I’m not” becomes “alas I’m not,” and soon after that the egg cracks.
When trans people try to break someone free of their shell, one often hears statements of the sort “cis people don’t spend all day wishing they were the other gender.” This statement is logically inconsistent, of course; the belief that one’s activity was mere fantasy disarmed the incipient threat to one’s identity in order to allow one to get to this point. This logical inconsistency itself is part of the humor of egg culture: “very cis of you.” Perhaps too savvily, we might instead say “this pretense of fantasy has taken you as far as it can — it’s time to let it go.” From this perspective, to call someone an egg is harmful not because there is something wrong with implying someone might be trans, but because doing so collapses the vital gap opened up by fantasy which supplies the entire liberatory potential of the metaphor. If you believe you’re an egg, you’ve in some sense already accepted that you’re trans and so the fantasy serves no purpose.
The egg metaphor illustrates one important aspect of trans self-narrativization: it’s necessarily retrospective. One cannot believe that one is currently an egg, because an egg is a trans person who doesn’t know they’re trans. Rather, the metaphor renders one’s past coherent through a particular logic. It composes a rational history of the trans self, a self constructing a potential life before it could consider making that life real. Without the metaphor, one could certainly live this experience of fantasy and denial, but the story would lack a linchpin: one could not, from an abyss of self-doubt, perceive the shared experience that “egg” captures and which promises to make sense of one’s predicament.
While egg narratives structure trans pasts around themes of denial and fantasy, a repression narrative seeks out evidence of queerness that was discarded from the official account of one’s life. Narratives of repression have the potential to liberate because our constructed histories are always overdetermined. Any rationalization of one’s past always leaves a surplus — a part of what happened that is incoherent within the story yet nonetheless real. Surplus from the past always has the potential to resurface. If I have forgotten wearing dresses as a child, and one day seriously consider the possibility that I am a woman, I might recall this memory and have it take on significance it did not originally have. It would become a sign, in the sense one means when one says “the signs were there all along.”
To recognize that what one took to be surplus could be a sign is to see within oneself the potential for an entirely different life. But to do so is not to already realize that life, or even to come to believe that it ought to be realized. An actual memory of mine serves as a useful example: I once imagined a young child calling me “mommy,” and this momentary fantasy had so much unexpected emotional weight for me that I immediately burst into tears. I have no plans to be a mother, and so this strange experience simply doesn’t have a place in the way I narrate my life. It goes into the surplus of memories with latent and incongruous significance. If I begin to look for reasons to believe that I ought to become a mother (or identify as a woman for that matter) this memory might be a part of a story I tell about why.
Narratives of repression orient the trans subject toward the past’s forgotten alternatives rather than a fantasized set of possibilities, but the goal is the same: to hear in the cacophony of lived experience a recognizable melody. I can choose ways to tell my story that feel more authentic, or are more legible to others, or are more likely to get me what I want from the medical establishment, but they are not by virtue of any of those metrics uniquely true descriptions of my past. In telling my story, even if it is a story intended to make sense only to me, I rely on archetypes, on logics of how it makes sense to be in and move through the world.
We regularize our identities by relating our present selves to a constructed past that serves to retroactively predict the changes we underwent. Your ability to see yourself as trans, communicate your trans identity to others, and convince the psychiatric profession of its authenticity may rest on your success in discovering within yourself a recognizable trans history, in telling with your own body the same story told by others. I wonder, as Butler does, whether this does not make us “more regular and coherent than we necessarily want to be.”3
As part of this process, one must find a place for otherwise unexplained experiences such as dreams, feelings, and urges. One looking to self-diagnose as transgender might take these disparate events and infer from them the brain’s “true” sex, validating the choice to transition and seek treatment if needed. If one is really a man, or really a woman, then one possesses an account of why transition is medically necessary, and why conversion therapy practices are doomed to achieve no more than psychological harm.
As with the practice of inferring from observed behavior and preferences to an innate psychological foundation (an Enneagram type, for example), the power of brain sex narratives lies in their ability to read tenuous aspects of the self (e.g. intrusive thoughts about living as a man) as symptomatic of unchanging and irresistible drives. This underwrites the useful feeling that one must transition, regardless of consequences or criticism. Notice that brain sex behaves in this case like a metaphor; we take an archetypic concept that we already understand (being driven to do something by an inexorable force) as a means of representing that which we grasp only with great difficulty (the complex lived experience and contradictions of an individual trans person).
On the other hand, take a trans narrative leading in essentially the opposite direction — one that is maximally agential. “I felt trapped in my former life,” one might say, “and I chose to transition because I just felt that living as a woman would be better.” The metaphor of escape from entrapment centers the desires of the trans subject and creates space for others to do likewise; “if you want to be a girl, you can just be a girl.” In locating the reason to transition in an escape from an unhappy life, the metaphor has clear potential for liberation in that one is not required to discover a truth of gender within oneself, and one is thereby freed from policing oneself over whether one’s motives are valid.
Individuals, of course, may or may not find any particular metaphor useful. Metaphors of entrapment and agency, for example, are likely to help only if one is prepared to take drastic measures. Most of the time, individuals embody one gender norm or another. When I lived as a man, I performed masculinity; being trans doesn’t mean that I was bad at it. Walking away from the default course for one’s life usually requires something more than the mere feeling that one is stuck in a particular life or a desire for the trappings of some other.
More importantly, the potential of these self-histories to be liberating is always reduced by tying them to a theory of gender, particularly one that is supposed to encompass all of trans experience. As an example, consider Julia Serano’s internalist account of gender in her book Whipping Girl, 4 wherein gender, while not understood in essentialist terms, nevertheless involves a subconscious sense of one’s true sex. The typical experience of a “transsexual” 5 person, on this view, is a slowly building sense of wrongness and sadness in and with their body until they recognize and accept transition as the solution.
Taken on its own, this is a reasonable hypothesis that we might argue about or try to examine empirically. Subconscious mental attributes are just that — subconscious — and much more work is needed to explicate from this theoretical perspective how subconscious sex determines the subjective experiences of the diverse trans community. The danger enters when, acting on the basis of this theory, we take the narrative of subconscious sex to be the normative description of the trans experience. Serano is careful, but she approximates this error at several points, as when she proposes the following bargain:
If I offered you ten million dollars under the condition that you live as the other sex for the rest of your life, would you take me up on the offer?6
Serano finds that nearly every cis person who hears this question says that they would reject the offer. This doesn’t surprise me at all, because I would have done likewise — even with my first dose of estradiol under my tongue. When I was considering HRT, I stood staring at myself in the bathroom mirror for a long time, imagining what I would look like with breasts. The truth is that I really hated the idea; having them on my body felt wrong. Now, two and a half years hence, I have breasts. If you offered me ten million dollars to have them permanently removed, I would turn you down. I would fight you to keep what now feels like a normal part of my body.
I reject the idea that my previous feelings were wrong or misguided, or that I was somehow repressing a desire to have breasts even while beginning HRT. Perhaps even the opposite is true. It is possible (though unlikely) that a counterfactual version of me who decides not to transition would look back on this same memory as a crucial sign that transitioning would have been the wrong decision, and even happily identify as male. The significance of this moment is determined not merely by what literally happened in that instant but by my present efforts to contextualize it within a total narrative of my life.
Serano argues that cis people turn down the offer because it allows their conscious minds to apprehend their subconscious sex in a way that ordinarily they could not do. I think this is a mistake, and propose that the majority of presently cis-identified people who will eventually transition five or more years in the future would also turn her down, and for much the same reasons that cis people do. To be sure, many trans people do arrive at their identities via experiences of dysphoria, and the profound sense of wrongness they feel with their bodies can appear to them to suggest an innate and immutable sense that they are or ought to be a particular sex, which in turn yields a persuasive reason to transition. We can affirm their experience, however, without assuming that feeling subconscious sex to be an apt narrative framework for one’s self-history implies that one has observed the very thing that makes someone trans or cis according to our preferred theory of gender.
Because Serano conflates these two claims, her language takes on a gatekeeping tone:
… if they [presumed cis people] are not battling a constant barrage of subconscious thoughts about being the other sex, then their subconscious sex most likely matches their physical one.7
This, as I see it, welds the metaphor directly to the theory in a way that vitiates its potential to liberate. The clear implication is that the normative trans experience involves understanding one’s own transness through the lens of subconscious thoughts and images which reveal who one “really” is. People not fitting this pattern are, at the very least, presumed to be cis.
Serano goes on to write that “virtually all transsexuals describe experiencing a profound, inexplicable, intrinsic self-knowing regarding their own gender”.8 This statement is not just exclusionary.9 It actually empties the idea of subconscious sex of its explanatory power; rather than a hypothesized invisible force driving feelings of dysphoria in many trans people (and perhaps other effects in some) it is something that trans people literally, even consciously, apprehend.10 The view makes it difficult to understand how a questioning person who will come to identify as trans could ever be confused about their own feelings.
Even if it were true that every transsexual person found the subconscious sex narrative an apt one for their experience, to infer a normative status for that narrative would require circular reasoning. The trans people who are able to exist, who are able to find themselves, who are able to transition in the social world we inhabit are at best a subset of those who might benefit from transition in some other, better world. In order to choose transition, a person must have a plausible discursive path to coming to see themselves as trans, which means that the preferencing of some trans narratives as normative performs a filtering function on who survive to tell their stories in the first place.11
The danger, then, in judging metaphors of transness apt or inapt is that we run the risk of thinking they can tell us the truth of the trans experience. I don’t think we have that kind of access, not even to our own thoughts. It takes effort — difficult conscious work — to consider the possibility that one ought to transition. This work can be made easier when it is possible to situate yourself as a potential trans person in a discourse that includes other trans people and their stories, and it can be made harder when any one story is taken to directly and uncritically reflect a truth of gender by which others are to be judged.
In Undoing Gender, Butler criticizes at length the process by which gender is diagnosed in psychiatry. Yet much of their criticism applies equally to the norms of intelligibility by which we trans people judge ourselves. Just as the clinical concept of gender dysphoria forces one to subject oneself to the diagnosis, the potential problem with trans narratives is that when they are read as normative descriptions of the trans experience, the questioning person must force their desire, their sense of self, and their past to fit a preexisting narrative in order to see themselves as trans.
Celebrate trans narratives, then, when they liberate queer people from oppression and repression. But hold them loosely. In understanding that they do not reflect any final truth of the trans experience, we make space for those who will follow us to tell their own stories. We should think of trans pasts as possibilities that like trans futures one can try on. They are strategies for rethinking the significance of one’s history in order to better understand what one wants to do and who one wants to be.
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Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 1st ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 81. ↩
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Liberation can mean many different things and the practical struggle for liberation involves an intersectional focus on the concrete challenges we face as a queer community, but for my purpose here, trans liberation means a world in which every person who would not be harmed by transitioning or would be harmed by not transitioning is given the mental resources necessary to realize this, anyone who desires to transition can do so, and trans people live under conditions of full social equality with cis people. ↩
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Butler, Undoing Gender, 81. ↩
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The majority of this essay was written before I had finished Whipping Girl. Having finished it as I write this, I found the last chapter to contain some statements that I must address before publishing this essay, because I take them to be horrifically transphobic. I can make no assessment of Serano’s intent, but if she has clarified this elsewhere I believe these additional words can only serve as a revision to what the text itself appears to say on a responsible reading.
The 20th chapter of the book is dedicated to the idea that the word transgender has become too “inclusive,” and that this has marginalized the perspectives of transsexuals, particularly trans women. I disagree with Serano, but there is at least some possibility of justifying this view: it’s certainly possible that the perspectives of people who choose not to medically transition have become dominant in trans spaces, to the point that desiring bodily transformation is itself taken to be a fault in the individual. If this were to happen in any particular queer or trans community, it would indeed reflect a grave issue. Perhaps Serano has even experienced this among queer people in San Francisco.
However, this is not, or not only, the justification she gives. Rather, she claims that it is lesbians in particular who are the cause of this problem. On her account, lesbians take up space within the transgender community because of:
(1) previously lesbian-identified people transitioning to male, (2) dykes who now take on genderqueer or other FTM spectrum identities, and (3) non-trans queer women who seek a voice in the transgender community because they are partnered to FTM spectrum individuals. (p. 355)
It is these people (at least, these are the only examples she gives) who are responsible for “the fact that cissexual queers now dominate transgender and queer/trans communities,” and ultimately for the “cissexualization” of trans community and identity.
To talk about Whipping Girl as if it were primarily a theory of gender or an account of transmisogyny without addressing these words would be to wrongly neglect the harm they do. Insofar as I have any right to be heard with a trans woman’s voice, I resolutely deny that lesbian-identified people who transition and become male are taking space from me, I oppose the implication that they are less legitimately transgender than I am, and I affirm that people with non-binary genderqueer identities are my trans friends and comrades who share so much more experience with me than medical-transition exceptionalism could ever suppress. ↩
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Serano frequently uses the word “transsexual” to describe herself and a portion of other trans people. While I have no objection to the term, its use creates two problems within the text.
First, transsexual is given a specific meaning that is external, objective, and descriptive. Transsexual people are “those who live as members of the sex other than the one they were assigned at birth.” (pg. 25) I, for example, am a transsexual woman. However, the abbreviation “trans” is given a meaning far more specific and limited than its common use: trans describes
people who (to varying degrees) struggle with a subconscious understanding or intuition that there is something “wrong” with the sex they were assigned at birth and/or who feel that they should have been born as or wish they could be the other sex. (pg. 27)
The issue is not just that the terminology can be confusing (in that it stands in stark contrast to the ubiquitous modern use of “trans” as an umbrella term). Rather, the issue is that Serano’s use of “trans” has almost no daylight with how she understands transsexual people. As a result, the idea of transsexuality slips throughout the book into meaning something that is instead internal, subjective, and based in identity.
Second, a strict reading of how Serano understands transsexuality suggests that it strongly contrasts with the concept of gender identity. But this clear cut divide is problematized by the idea of “subconscious sex”. Certainly, it sometimes seems that subconscious sex really is on the “sex” side of the divide — Serano describes the feeling of wanting to be female as existing prior to her having the sense that she is a woman. But on the other hand, this distinction disappears when she writes (for example) that social constructionists “[dumb] down gender by excluding subconscious sex” (pg. 150) and adds that “virtually all” transsexual people have a strong intuitive sense of their gender — one that seems to come from their sense of subconscious sex.
For these reasons, the word “transsexual” creates problems for anyone wanting to talk about Serano’s work charitably and reasonably, as I do. If you take the word and its definition at face value, it obscures some of the issues that I raise in this essay, because it involves no inherent assumptions about how transsexuals conceive of gender. On the other hand, if you ignore Serano’s distinctions between “transsexual”, “transgender”, and “trans”, you open yourself up to the criticism that you’ve misread her work.
In this essay, I stick mostly to the language of “transgender” although I have tried to do so guardedly. I believe this is justified because of the overlap I’ve described above: frequently, even when describing transsexual experience, Serano lapses into the language of gender, and I don’t think this is coincidental. But I acknowledge this has one significant limitation: insofar as I critique Serano as “exclusionary”, this comes with the significant caveat that she does sometimes try to carve out space for “cissexuals” with non-cisgender identities. ↩
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Julia Serano, Whipping Girl, 3rd ed (ebook). (New York, NY: Seal Press, 2024), 87. ↩
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Serano, Whipping Girl, 89. ↩
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Serano, Whipping Girl, 151. ↩
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I confess that I can’t critique Serano’s view in any objective fashion, if for no other reason than that the clear implication of this statement is that I am not trans (despite literally transitioning and living for most intents and purposes as a woman). In addition to the difficulty of considering a possibility that would void a large portion of my identity, if the implication is correct then I am yet another “cissexual” speaking about trans experience with no right to do so. Of course, if the definition of “transsexual” is so circumscribed as to exclude anyone who doesn’t feel they have a subconscious sex, it should be no surprise that all of them agree that they do. ↩
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Serano sometimes vacillates between different ways of expressing the same view. On the one hand, her sense of her sex is “subconscious”. She even writes, in a passage that resembles statements I’ve made about gender identity and essentialism, that no language suffices to “accurately capture or convey my personal understanding of these events”. (pg. 80) At these points it really can seem that subconscious sex is just a hypothesis that happens to explain her subjective experience very well. On the other hand, as I’ve indicated, she’s comfortable with this metaphor to the point she often seems to encounter it directly in “subconscious thoughts” (unclear what those are) or even as an “intrinsic self-knowing”. So, charitably, one probably should not assume that Serano intends to be quite as exclusionary as the literal implication of her words would suggest.
Moreover, when Serano begins to describe her conscious experiences, rather than her inferred subconscious ones, she and I become nearly indistinguishable. She points to “body feelings” that changed in response to taking hormones, as well as the social implications: “I experienced a dramatic change. It felt like the world suddenly shifted around me. Almost overnight, I sensed that everything was very different.” (pg. 218) I’ve felt that!. She and I have shared this absurdly specific experience that resists being put into words. In fact it was precisely this sense that resulted in her decision (after several years of transition) to identify as a woman, rather than as genderqueer.
What seems to separate Serano and I is not what we’ve directly experienced (who knows, maybe I’ll find myself comfortable with simply “woman” instead of “genderqueer” one day too), but rather her decision to read her own history through the lens of subconscious sex, and from there to infer that it is a real thing that she was born with. I can’t do either of these things; while I fully admit it is possible that I have a subconscious sex that caused me to transition, I find it a hopelessly impoverished way to understand my life, and seem to have no conscious means of getting access to it.
I’ll leave this over-long footnote with the best thing Serano says in Whipping Girl about gender:
For all of us, gender is first and foremost an individual experience, an amalgamation of our own unique combinations of gender inclinations, social interactions, body feelings, and lived experiences. (pg. 225)
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I’m thinking, of course, of myself. I believed for many years that I was not trans because I had absorbed the “born this way” cultural narrative of transness. I have never, so far as I know, had any form of intrinsic self-knowledge concerning my gender, nor have I (so far as I know) experienced subconscious thoughts about being a woman or living as one. If this had remained the only narrative structure for trans experience I had available to me, I would never have transitioned. ↩