Trans Futures, Trans Pasts

04 June 2025 · 3012 words

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“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.