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For me being trans means moving between different gender categories, both in terms of how I feel psychologically and how others perceive me socially. I sometimes I still feel like a woman but I feel like other genders too. Sometimes I feel genderless.
I feel different from women who only see themselves as women. I feel different from women who move through the world being seen and treated like women because I’m usually seen and treated like a man or sometimes like a trans person.
If I want other people to know that I’m a butch dyke/woman, then I need to come out to them about that part of myself. People usually aren’t going to figure that out on their own. It takes work for me to be a woman. I have to make a conscious effort to be seen as one.
I started getting read as different genders when I was fifteen, after I started presenting butch. My body was ambiguous and masculine-looking years before I transitioned. I often passed as male without trying. I feel like my body was trans long before I ever took t.
Since my teens years onward, I've never known what it’s like to move through the world and take it for granted that other people will see me as a woman. I’ve moved through the world as a genderweirdo for most of my life at this point.
I didn’t stop being seen or treated like a man or a trans person when I detransitioned. I didn’t stop functioning socially as a trans person just because I called myself a woman. It’s more like I started occupying another gender category, woman, in addition to man and trans.
Woman, female and butch might have been the only categories I claimed as a detrans woman but they weren’t the only categories I inhabited. After a while, only calling myself a woman felt like a denial of reality. It made me feel crazy.
If the world sees and treats me as multiple genders why not name and claim that experience? It feels more true to say I am a trans person who is a woman among other genders than to say that I am a woman.
It makes more sense to say I have a trans body that is read as multiple sexes and genders rather than as an exclusively female body. My body leads me to get read as a man or trans far more often than it gets me read as a woman.
The whole "woman=adult human female" crap drives me crazy. Insisting that my reproductive organs makes me female or a woman conflicts with my lived experience. People can insist on that definition all they want but to me it's just an idea that doesn't match my reality.
Calling myself trans just seems like the most accurate description of what I am and how I interact with the rest of the world. I'm not rejecting womanhood when I reclaim trans, I redefining my relationship to it in a way that fits my truth better.
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