I Am a Trans Man: A Second "Coming Out" and Retrospective 🏳️‍⚧️

12/07/24

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

I am a trans man.

I've been transitioning since 2018; I've known I was trans since 2011, when I was thirteen years old.

I went stealth¹ a couple years ago, somewhere around my second or third year of being on testosterone. It was never a conscious decision on my part. The more I started passing², the less being trans came up in my life. To continue coasting on this new status quo felt like the easiest, simplest, and safest thing to do.

My early transition was spent only passing half of the time, during which I constantly battled dysphoria³, self-harm, addiction, depression, and anxiety. As my transition went on and I became more masculine/male in my appearance, my dysphoria decrased as well as my depression and anxiety. This relief allowed me to grow more confident and socialable. It also helped me focus less on my gender identity/transition, which I had been hyper-fixated on since puberty. I could finally attend to other areas of life that had been neglected for so long.

I gained a new lease on life. I was no longer operating at a social disadvantage on account of being percieved as half-male and/or half-female. My existence was no longer met with open scorn, confusion, and/or derision. Internally, I was at peace with myself for the first time since I could remember, unburdened by feelings of all-encompassing despair, shame, and discomfort.

I wasn't fighting against who I was expected to be, nor was I fighting for my right to be myself and have that reflected in how people percieved me.

For the first time in my life, I was just...me.

2. Why I went stealth, the safety it gave me, and what made me rethink my non-disclosing status

It's hard to put to words how drastically my inner and outer life changed. Since passing full-time, I've been able to accomplish things I that would have been otherwise impossible.

For example, I:

• Overcame my driving phobia and got my lisence at 25
• Entered my first healthy romantic relationship
• Got married
• Went back to school
• Revisited Buddhism and adopted a formal Buddhist practice
• Started making art again
• Started writing again
• Went 100% sober
• and more

As it turns out, it's a lot easier to be productive when you aren't constantly beseiged by feelings of existential discomfort.

Upon reflection, I think living stealth was a defensive measure on my part to help protect everything that I had gained since transitioning. I worried that by living as openly trans, I would open myself up to the same scrutiny I experienced during my early transition, and jeaporidize the sucess and happiness I had found since.

But I never chose to become stealth; it just happened out of passive omission. And it wasn't always easy. For the past few years I've overheard much about anti-trans politics and sentiment. I kept my mouth shut, scared that if I commented on the matter it would invite people to speculate about whether I was "really a man". I've had people who are friendly with me tell me about how they dislike trans people—leaving me to wonder whether their opinion of me would change if they knew the truth.

Being stealth felt like living in hiding. I couldn't risk associating myself with the trans community for fear of being "found out". This also meant that I had no support, sense of community,⁴ or outlet during times that I desperately needed them.⁵

Let's not forget the recent 2024 US election, which resulted in an unprecedented, nationwide lurch toward Republicans (at least on the presidential level; serveral down-ballot races were favorable toward Democrats, leading to what is shaping up to be the slimmest House majority in nearly 100 years).

For the first time in over 30 years, LGBT acceptance has gone down, and anti-trans messaging played a huge role in the right's courting of the general public.

Seeing all of this take place, I could no longer bear to remain silent. I went online, made anonymous alt accounts on Reddit and Mastodon, and started posting/discussing trans topics with other trans people.

A massive outpour of thoughts, feelings, and ideas that I had kept buried for years immediately followed.

3. Being stealth online and re-entering trans internet spaces

I hadn't thought much about trans discourse since I was sixteen years old, chronically addicted to Tumblr. The verocity with which I began speaking through my keyboard took me off guard. It was clear that my views had changed in the decade since my time as a teenaged philosopher, and I desperately needed to voice them in a forum where they could be read, discussed, and validated.

But something wasn't right. I still felt like I was hiding in the same way I did during my day-to-day life in the meatspace⁶. My IRL life was divorced from the context of being trans, and my presence in online trans spaces was divorced from the context of my IRL self.

I was moderating my own existence.

I was leading a double life, online and off.

After an entire childhood spent denying who I was, I had gone back into hiding as an adult.

As soon as that realization took root in my mind, I couldn't let it go. I was beseiged by self-doubt and confusion. I spent many nights staying up late, debating between the pros and cons of "coming out" a second time, or remaining stealth in an artificial closet of my own making.

4. "Going" stealth

I've known about being stealth since I was young. It never much appealed to me, though that was mostly because I thought I'd never be able to achieve it; at the time I was either pre-transition or very early on, and struggled to pass on a consistent basis.

Once I started passing more, I went stealth out of convenience, not on ideological grounds or in favor of my own needs. I didn't "go stealth" as much as I simply chose not to offer up the information that I was trans.

Some people have a goal to be stealth before they even begin transitioning. For them, going stealth is necessary to feel safe, comfortable, and authentic.

That was never the case for me. My only goal was to become happy and healthy. Having achieved these goals, I started examining what being stealth continued to provide for me. Upon inspection, I discovered cracks in the self-justification that laid beneath my decision.

5. My views on trans politics, how they've changed since I was young, and the culture/history I enjoyed as a youth

I came into myself, and my trans identity, in the early-to-mid 2010s. This was before Donald Trump, before social media turned into the bot-maintainted propoganda conglomerate it is today, before populism⁷ became the dominant form of politicking, and before the Omnicause⁸ took over left-leaning social movements.

Trans discourse was still firmly rooted in its own lane of gender identity, presentation, and transition. There were no other political metrics by which people substantiated or measured their trans identity; "queerness" was a mode of self-identification and community, not an ideological praxis⁹. The trans community shared a common ontological basis, instead of the bifurcated, mutually exclusive factions advocating for gender assimilation or abolition.¹⁰

There were many examples of binary trans men in the community, and the FTM community in particular was strong and healthy. My mom bought me a copies of the now-defunct FTM Magazine (which I've since lost). I spent hours researching Lou Sullivan. I wrote about being trans on Tumblr. When my family visited San Francisco during Pride, I bought a trans flag tie-dye t-shirt.¹¹

I was so early into my transition I could not hide my transness. I was visibly trans, and thus openly trans, whether I liked it or not.

6. On being visibly trans, and how it felt when I started passing

I was proud to be trans. My only other option was to be ashamed.

This isn't to say that I later went stealth out of shame; rather, I no longer had to weaponize my pride in order to compensate for the internal pain and external discrimination I suffered as a result of being trans.

By the point I could finally pass full-time, I was exhausted. I wanted a break. Short of surgical interventions (that I am still in the process of saving/preparing for), I had achieved my goal of transitioning: my body finally matched the male self-concept I had held since I was a child.

I looked like a man. I walked and talked like a man. People saw me as a man. I was, and am still, a man.

7. How my life changed when being trans no longer defined who I was

I spent so long struggling with dysphoria that I had no idea who I was without it. I wanted to explore myself and my identity outside of being trans. I didn't want to worry about my gender identity or presentation. My being a man was a given; every other aspect about my personality was not. I wanted to learn who I could become, confident in the security and safety that my manhood, maleness, and masculinity now provided me.

Thus, my trans identity took up less space in my mind. Some days I hardly thought about it at all, which was foreign to me. Soon enough, I'd go multiple days in a row without thinking about it, then weeks, and so on.

All of a sudden it had no bearing whatsoever on what I did with my life, who I met, or how I socialized. It was a level of freedom I'd never experienced before. I became more confident and outgoing. I got back into hobbies and interests I had long since forgotten. I laughed more. I made new friends. I grew closer to my family. I fell in love.

This period of my life was hard won and much needed. It taught me a lot about myself and who I am. It gave me the confidence I needed to take back control of my life.

8. Deciding to "come out" again

Having accomplished so much, I was once again faced with an opportunity to reflect and re-evaluate.

As evidenced by this post, I decided to no longer remain stealth.

My decision was motivated by two things:

1. I never really intended on being stealth in the first place (read above ↑)
2. Representation of binary trans men (read below ↓)

9. Trans male visibility: what it meant to me then, and what it means to me now

When I was younger trans rights were still a burgeoning social movement, which TIME Magazine aptly dubbed as the "Transgender Tipping Point" in 2014 (I can't believe that was a decade ago).

Outside of my Tumblr enclave I hardly heard about transgender people, let alone transgender men. Trans men have been a historically underrepresented group, as quoted in the TIME article referenced above:

Even in the trans community, male-to-female transitions are thought to be more common than female-to-male, though experts caution that exact figures are unknown.

Pause for a moment and see if you can think of any transgender people off the top of your head. How many of them are transgender men? I'd bet money that most of you answered few to none.

The lack of trans male representation is its own topic of discussion, which I am greatly passionate about. For fear of escaping the scope of this post, I'll decline going into further detail here.[^12]

As previously stated, I found a lot of solace in the trans male representation available to me. Most of it was online, but I did have one IRL experience that really helped.

Through some circle of mutual friends, my mom knew of a trans man who wasn't that much older than me and arranged for us to meet. Our acquaintanceship merely lasted a single afternoon, but it has stayed with me all this time.

We went for a hike in the woods outside of town. He spoke to me about transitioning, binding, changing his name, and even left me with a small collection of books that I still own. Merely having someone more experienced and knowledgable about I was going through meant the world to me. Not only that, this guy was just cool. He had a girlfriend, tattoos, and his own car. He exuded a level of confidence that comes with age and transitioning.

Flash forward nearly ten years. I've got tattoos, my own car, and whole ass wife. I've been around the block. More than that, I'm the type of man that I looked up to in my youth.

I though about what it would have meant to me as a teenager to see someone like me: just a regular dude, married and cis-passing, casually repping the trans flag, being active in the trans community, and speaking out online. It would have meant the world. It means the world to me that I've been able to accomplish so much and become the person I am today—not in spite of being trans, but beacuse of it.

10. Conclusion

So...that's that. I'm trans. I'll be talking about it now. Not all the time, but sometimes.¹²

If you have questions, comments, thoughts, etc feel free to email me or sign my guestbook. You can also find me on Mastodon (I will be making a trans-specific Mastodon account too, which I will link here).

Take care.

✘ Posted on — 12/07/24
✘ Last modified — 4 months, 4 weeks ago
✘ Link — https://blog.xavierhm.com/i-am-a-trans-man-a-second-coming-out-and-retrospective

Footnotes

#blog #essay #lgbt #politics #trans