They Are Not Worth Your Agony
Words by Anthony Delaney (he/him)
CW: discussion of transphobia
My transness has a correlation with compliancy. I have spent years running my hands over the clay of my queerness to thin it, diminish it, and round it into symmetry.
It was all for other people, this horrendous act of contortionism. Slipped discs and hairline fractures did little to dissuade their inhumane lines of questioning. I am familiar with the glaze which smothers one's eye when I am outed, at the very moment they consider me a non-human. I've seen it creep onto a face one hundred times. I've rarely seen it creep back off.
They think they know you.
It is always your job to prove them wrong. That you are the ‘unprecedented’ sort of trans person who holds up to their scrutinies, a three-dimensional human being. But it is only ever your judges who exist on a flat, unpersonified plane.
When I was younger, 'proving them wrong' meant rolling onto my back for others. It was to hate myself so viscerally. To pen this now is to still hear the taunts of prepubescent boys who needed me to be ashamed of myself.
Compliance was a survival mechanism. A cisgender life is not skewered and compartmentalised by mystical intersection between the physical and mental. Gender transcends human understanding, yet those affected by its transfiguration are demanded to frequently and calmly explain it (with a gun to their head, no less).
It is much easier to hide. Though I do not blame trans people who dislike the concept of ‘going stealth,’ as not everybody has that privilege, it did rescue me from the extensive trauma of cisgender questioning.
It was after years of being stealth that I dared to out myself to a supposedly progressive classmate. She immediately implored about my genitals. In desperation to not be seen as 'difficult', I opted not to question her behavior, even though she was well past the point of knowing better.
I get very nervous about my transness and often feel the urge to apologize for it. The agony trans people are expected to feel is, at its most fundamental, shame at having confused people. To internalize that shame is to berate yourself for being incapable of describing how and why you experience your gender. Pray tell, when has a cisgender man ever given an explanation for the experience of his own gender, backed by relevant scientific, philosophical, emotional, biological, psychological, and spiritual factors?
Case in point: you are doing fine.
I’ve observed that trans people have a propensity to self-efface. I accepted abuse under the belief that if I defended myself, I would be harming the trans community by cementing our collective social identity as one which is oversensitive, argumentative, difficult, and defensive. I not only ostracized myself from my identity, but attempted to appease cis people by sardonically looking down on it.
I now understand that we are intuitive, and that is not in the least bit difficult to comprehend. I also know that compliance is not safe. It is deeply endangering to hold your own head underwater.
When I say they are not worth your agony, both you and I are part of that ‘they.’ Trans people are programmed by this world to be agonized. To liberate yourself from your assigned sex, social expectations, and gender roles is only part of what it means to transition. To liberate yourself from your agony (trauma instilled by a transphobic society) is a vital act of transitioning, perhaps the most vital of all.