Signs you may be a gender non-conforming trans person
If you already know that “trans” and “gender non-conforming” are neither the same thing nor on a spectrum, you’re way ahead of the game.
In my words, anyway, “trans” just means that I am* male despite the birth assignment, while “gender non-conforming” means that I don’t always act like one according to some current definition in the zeitgeist. For example, I know nothing about sports and was more than thrilled to wear my half-decade-old maid of honor dress to Pride this year.
In other words, if I wasn’t trans, I would be a relatively gender-conforming woman, since I was never a tomboy or anything you would call ‘butch’.
As you might imagine, this is outlandishly hard to get across to people. As if trans people in general aren’t despised enough, there are entire segments of the adjacent queer community who don’t even believe we exist, exactly because they think transgender itself is just ‘gender non-conforming with low self-esteem and extra steps.’
And yet, as an arguably sane and successful adult, I still came out as a trans man nearly four years ago. I’ve been walking my own social and medical walks ever since and am now 32 years old, boringly integrated into society, and just as boringly satisfied. Surprise! It’s possible.
Without further ado, here are a few signs that you might be both transgender and gender non-conforming, as told through my own life experiences.
You only really identified with non-human characters — if you identified with any at all
I didn’t have cable television growing up, but I did have a whole lot of Saturday morning cartoons (and/or more coveted Nickelodeon cartoons at Grandpa’s house) to enjoy with my siblings and cousins. But I never felt a connection with the human gals like Misty or Katara, or even the human guys like Ash and Aang. Instead, I fell naturally into non-human male characters— a way of getting at my own gender without violating the subconscious boundaries of my very black-and-white thinking style.
From Spike and Petrie in The Land Before Time to Pleakley in Lilo and Stitch, animals and aliens were a safe haven for projection that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows, my own murky and deep-seated shame’s included.
I also had a particular fondness for robots, like Buzz from Cyberchase, XR from Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, and, of course, my own set of made-up non-humans that I loved to draw and play pretend with.
The one thing they all had in common? Male.
I guess Pajama Sam and Xiaolin Showdown’s Jack Spicer are slight exceptions, but given that’s because of their humanoid appearance and not their sex, they’re not exactly hurting my case…
“But Norm!”, you may cry. “MeDiA is problematic, and there were never strong female choices to begin with!”
Sure, fair point.
But given I was into cowardly pterodactyls and flamboyant little green aliens over the likes of Avatar Korra, I’m not sure the Bechdel test was the root of my problems.
Anyhow, enough about me for the moment — the point is that if you happen to fit the gender-nonconforming and trans circumstance, you might notice a childhood pattern like this: being stubbornly and almost exclusively attached to all kinds of characters of your true gender — no matter how badass, socially palatable, or decidedly neither of those things they happen to be. When they’re not human, they just feel more accessible.
You were fine until puberty hit
As a little girl, my only objection to a dress would have been uncomfortable fabric. Social categories were a nonissue to me, and though I had the occasional ‘unconventional’ interests like snakes and Hot Wheels: Stunt Track Challenge, I was just as eager to create a kingdom of Barbies with my little sister or accessorize our committee of Bratz dolls, well into my early teens. (I got my first phone at 15 and first smartphone at 22, okay? Kids these days…)
Anyhow, even as a child of conservative Texas, the dominating conventions of my early years did not cause much in the way of existential dread. As long as my chest stayed flat and the neckline was high, picking out sleek getups to shyly slink about in at Homecoming or the band banquet was actually a point of quiet pride.
The real issue with me — and many other gender-nonconforming trans folks — was entirely weird and primal and body-centric, and entirely hard to put a finger on, especially back then.
I could passively be a “she” or a “female” no problem — just not actively a “woman.” I could stand in whatever lines I was told and happily pick from one clearly-delineated side of the wardrobe, as long as I did it my way and limited things to a particular little subset of said side of the wardrobe that was perfectly feminine in every way, except for the way it fit over the most feminine parts of the (my?) body, if that makes any sense.
(Probably not. But if you’ve been there, you know.)
At 14, 15, and even 16, I would spend late nights researching things like “MRKH syndrome” and praying to my Catholic God that I somehow had it. I could be a pixie or a female cyborg or something in the middle, and I was eternally grateful to never have to deal with facial hair (in fact, I still hate that stupid, scraggly stuff), but all bets were off when the real physical consequences of my genotype started to creep in.
All this is to say — if you’re gender non-conforming and trans now, the notion that something was off might’ve stayed just buried enough for the majority of your young life, until it wasn’t.
If you were lucky, you learned what was going on before it morphed into something like an eating disorder instead.
You second-guessed your sexual orientation instead
I’m into guys. This was confirmed for me one summer afternoon in the 11th grade, while volunteering at a “St. Patrick and the Holy Trinity”-themed VBS program to accumulate Confirmation service hours.
The lead volunteer was a dreamy, charismatic brown-haired boy two years older than me, and he was positioned right next to me for a group photo. To this day, I remember the holy WOW! feeling of being wrapped by one of his arms for the pose. It was like fitting into a warm little glove of absolutely delicious firmness that no photo op in my family or school history had ever felt anything like. Standing arm-in-arm with the other girls I worked with didn’t do that, and I wanted more.
Fast forward to my early 20s, when I finally first learned that the LGBTQ+ community was even a thing. From all those years of tacitly making do with my birth sex, I knew something was up and always had been.
But despite the obvious, male-exclusive physical attraction I had felt since puberty, I assumed I had to be bisexual, even if I didn’t feel it in my heart of hearts.
Gender stuff was literally that foreign to me. ‘Trans,’ which I still hadn’t heard much of anything about — not even on the budding internet, let alone in real life —was reserved for the roughest and toughest of tomboys. Me, I was just confused and hadn’t thought about the right girls. But, of course, they didn’t exist.
Before getting all of that straight (no pun intended), I attended a few Pride events in my early twenties while donning bi-related stickers, pins, and even a t-shirt I designed myself. Any time I half-heartedly did anything like that, I found myself instinctively wanting to hide — not from outsiders, but from real members of the bi community, where my gut knew I didn’t belong.
As a young female engineer in the tech startup scene, I already knew exactly what real impostor syndrome felt like. This was something else.
You tried being gender non-conforming as your birth sex, and it felt even worse
My straight hair was never once cut above my shoulders from the time it first reached that length to the age of 24. As a little girl, I may or may not have actually cried whenever any more than the promised inch was removed during a trim.
That said, it was a few years after those initial, off-target explorations in my 20s that I blindly assumed I would feel more like myself — whoever she even was (or they even were; that was available to me now) — if I tried a decidedly gender non-conforming hairstyle.
Long story short, ya know why there aren’t any surviving photos of me with an undercut? Because I never felt so off-brand in my life.
Meanwhile, shortly before that:
Until the very end, I was all about my longer hair. It didn’t matter in the slightest what message it sent (or didn’t send) on a female form.
The only reason I don’t wear my hair long nowadays is that I’m not confident I’d pass. I love earrings, bracelets, and tight pants, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re 5'4" and completely disinterested in facial hair.
Anyway, if you were anything like me, you might’ve tried something similar. Growing out your hair as a “guy”, chopping it all off as a “gal”, and feeling even more confused and less congruent than before.
My hot take from all that is that you don’t have to know who you are to know what you already like.
How unfortunate it is that a lack of representation can derail us and cause such needless strife, in a world that just isn’t ready for the nuance of being trans and gender non-conforming together, let alone having either circumstance on its own. For every tomboy without a role model lamented by the likes of J.K. Rowling, there’s an actual little boy of the same genotype who never saw the likes of Terry in the Dragon Prince.
The bottom line of it all?
Trans people of all kinds exist, and we’re not going anywhere.
