TWO
Gender Trouble
To maintain gender divisions, we must control those bodies that are so unruly as to blur the borders.
—Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 2000
We’re the type of family that does everything together,” Gail tells me when I visit the Shepherds at their home in Brompton, Maine, a picture-perfect New England town outside of Portland, a few months after we first met in Florida. I also interview a group of Ben’s close friends in order to get to know more about his early life. A friend describes the Shepherds as a “cul-de-sac family”—inwardly focused, comfortable, with traditional views. “We were always together,” agrees Bob. There were the annual boat vacations, the trips to Disney World. “We never even went out to eat without the kids.” Not once.
Twenty years ago, the Shepherds moved from the down-to-earth town of Buxton, Maine, to this community where many lawyers, politicians, and professional families live. Even though they were well-educated professionals, the Shepherds were not nearly as affluent as many people in town. Ben was barely ten when they moved. Ben and his brother, Chris, who is four years younger, were inseparable. Ben introduced Chris to video games, skateboarding, and Rollerblading. If Ben became passionate about something, the whole family became passionate. When Ben proclaimed that he wanted to be a biologist, Bob and Gail took the kids to visit every aquarium in New England.
In fourth grade, Ben became best friends with Chrissy, who grew up on a farm a few blocks away. Chrissy was active in 4-H and enjoyed playing rough. A “real Mainer,” not one of the snooty kids, Chrissy was drawn to Ben’s uplifting personality, and the fact that he was “different from the other kids at school.” Ben dressed differently. The Shepherds used to get hand-me-downs from Bob’s cousins in Rhode Island, and Ben inherited a red letterman baseball jacket. Ben loved that jacket and wore it constantly. Kids teased Ben and Chrissy for not having cool clothes. Because of Ben’s large size, and the way he carried himself, he was frequently mistaken for a boy. Kids called him “killer whale,” and they harassed Chrissy, who was physically mature for her age.
In middle school, Allison and Emily became part of Ben and Chrissy’s pack of girls, and Ben’s brother, Chris, always tagged along. He called the gang his “sisters” and looked up to all of them, especially Ben. A high-energy person like Ben was faced with an array of injunctions to “act like a girl.” Things improved when he started playing field hockey and softball: sports became a refuge. Title IX had already been in effect for more than twenty years, expanding athletic opportunities for girls and women at educational institutions.
Gail had also been a tomboy when she was growing up in Vermont. She had worked construction with her dad and hiked all over New England with her male friends. “It was no big deal. I didn’t think anything of it,” Gail tells me. But that was in the 1970s, when hippie style blurred gender distinctions, and androgyny was all the rage. Twenty years later, gendered styles seemed to return with a vengeance. Teenage girls often wore their hair long, and even flaunted their cleavage. Ben was not one of them. While Gail supported Ben’s tomboyishness, she nudged him to be a bit more feminine, twisting his arm to get him to wear a skirt for his First Communion. Ben fought her but often gave in.
Then puberty hit, and Ben grew a large, prominent chest. Ben’s chest was always there, “in your face, and she always hated it,” says Chrissy. Sometimes it was embarrassing, but mostly Ben would just laugh it off. Chrissy was also an early-maturing girl, so she knew how it felt. “We were the easy targets,” she says. “We developed first. We endured a lot.” Ben was always popular, but others saw him as a bit of an oddball because of his failure to be a girly girl. He didn’t care at first, channeling those energies into sports.
Eventually, when team sports proved to be too competitive, board sports—surfing and skateboarding—became Ben’s passion. As soon as he got a driver’s license, he’d go down to the skateboard shop to talk to the guys who worked there about surfing and skateboarding. It was the dawn of Tony Hawk, a pioneer of modern vertical skateboarding. When Ben got into skateboarding, his friends did too. When he learned to surf, he announced to everyone, “All right, you can rent a surfboard. Come out with me. You’re going surfing with me,” and friends became surfers too. When he was fourteen, Ben discovered wakeboarding—water skiing with a board.
Gail, always the accommodating mother, asked at the time: “What does that entail?” Ben asked his mother to drive them to Massachusetts, where he heard there were good spots for wakeboarding. “Sure, I’ll drive you,” Gail said. Bob had taught Ben and Chris how to drive boats, and Ben would bring friends on the boat to go wakeboarding, and then surfing. Ben liked that wakeboarding was a fringe sport. It felt good; it felt right. It was “about self-expression, art in motion.” He wrote a letter to Shaun Murray, one of the best wakeboarders in the country, one of his heroes, and told him he wanted to meet him, and eventually he did.
On the surface, Ben seemed supremely confident and comfortable in his own skin, but his close friends knew that he hated his body and particularly hated wearing bras, despite his very large chest. “Oh my gosh, why do we have to do this?” he would ask them. He wore hoodies and refused to shave his legs. A couple of times, Gail insisted on taking Ben for manicures and pedicures. Ben did it for his mom, but he never relished those excursions. Despite his Goodtime Charley exterior, Ben felt disconnected, even from his closest friends, and lived with a sense of unreality, a sense that his world seemed different from theirs. Those feelings became more acute in high school.
When his friends started to put on makeup and dress up to go out to dances, “Ben would cringe. She hated it,” Allison tells me, using a female pronoun to refer to her friend, and then correcting herself. “We would say, ‘Let us do your makeup and let us dress you up,’ and he would say, ‘I have no idea what to wear. I don’t know what I’m doing.’ ” Ben tried to take it in stride, and sometimes he made jokes about how clueless he was, but he was never comfortable playing the role of girl. He was far more comfortable rolling out of bed and pulling on cargo shorts.
Ben had what seemed like a typical girl’s room, decorated with posters of buff, scantily clad stars like Usher, along with movie stars and sports figures; he had a particular thing for Harrison Ford and John F. Kennedy. Yet his friends never saw him as a typical girl. While they daydreamed about falling in love and having kids one day, for Ben, the thought of going through childbirth was unappealing, even disgusting. “I would never want to go through that—it sounds like hell,” he told his good friend Allison, who recalls that Ben always wanted to walk around topless and was jealous of guys’ freedom to do that. “You don’t typically hear girls talk like that,” says Allison, who considered Ben “kinda no frills.” Allison recalled that Ben had “such a big personality that you didn’t think of gender so much in relation to him.” He was such a singular character, so exuberant.
Ben tried to date guys a couple of times, but it was always awkward. Sometimes, when he went out with girlfriends, they would get really drunk and would make out with guys. Ben was attracted to guys, but when he had the chance to be with a man, “It was like gross, no. I just don’t actually want that,” he tells me. While Ben’s friends were beginning to experiment sexually, he never went all the way. He felt lonely and wanted to be with someone.
Ben went to the prom with a guy he met snowboarding at Shawnee Peak, after initiating a conversation with him on the ski lift. “Ben was so awkward at the prom!” recalled Chrissy. The senior prom picture shows him in a flowing two-piece black dress with a scooped neckline. His shoulders are hunched over, and his smile is forced. It was the third time Ben had ever worn a dress. “It was horrible for Ben! It wasn’t him at all,” said Chrissy, “but it made Gail and Bob very happy.”
As he grew older, Ben had a difficult time becoming the kind of girl others expected him to be. Deep down, he wondered whether he was “really” a boy. Sometimes he prayed to God to make him one. “When gender-ambiguous young people are constantly challenged about their gender identity, the chain of mis-recognitions can actually produce a new recognition,” writes gender theorist Jack Halberstam. “To be constantly mistaken for a boy, for many tomboys, can contribute to the production of a masculine identity.”1 The fact that others saw Ben as a boy, or as boyish, contributed to the sense that he really was a boy. He never told anyone about this internal conversation.
The years from twelve to sixteen were a roller-coaster ride, according to Gail. “Some days you were like, ‘Okay, what mood is Ben in today?’ All that roller-coaster stuff seemed pretty normal for teenagers.” Yet there was an additional layer of pain for Ben, a feeling of being out of step with peers, a feeling that he mainly kept hidden. Secretly, he thought he was crazy. His moods got worse, and the cold, dark Maine winters didn’t help. He slept a lot, and his room was always trashed. “She would basically just leave stuff all over the place, just trash the place over a period of a day and just walk away,” Bob recalls, stumbling on pronouns again. Ben was clearly depressed.
At fourteen, Ben tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself with a pair of scissors. When Chris unexpectedly walked into the room, Ben quickly put them aside. At the time, Ben says, “I felt like something was wrong with me, but I had no idea what.” Bob and Gail took their kid to different counselors. Some read Ben’s difficulty “settling down” as a sign of attention deficit disorder. It was true that he had a hard time with follow-through and suffered tremendous mood swings. Ben tried medications but didn’t like how they made him feel: jittery, nervous, depressed. One counselor thought he had a problem with his father. Although the two had certainly clashed while Ben was growing up, sitting in that therapist’s office, they looked at each other and thought, “This lady’s nuts. We’re out of here.” They never went back. “Those years were some of the hardest ever,” Ben recalls, “but during that time I could not have told you why.”
“To maintain gender divisions, we must control those bodies that are so unruly as to blur the borders.”2 This quote, from a feminist biologist, speaks of the ways our society regulates individuals, punishing those whose bodies fail to conform to conventional standards of what men and women should look like. Anne Fausto-Sterling’s research focuses on intersex individuals, whose bodies mix male and female parts, such as a girl who is born with an unusually large clitoris, or a boy whose scrotum is divided so that it has formed more like labia. But people like Ben, whose external physical bodies fit conventional standards of gender, more or less, but who use their bodies in ways that flout gender norms, are also punished. The boyish girl who loves rough-and-tumble sports. The boy who refuses to be competitive with other boys.
Gender is never merely an individual matter, or simply a product of our biological makeup. It is also a cultural accomplishment, which “involves interactions between small groups of people,” writes Fausto-Sterling. In other words, in playgrounds, at schools, in our families, at work, we become boys and girls, and men and women—but not entirely as we please. Classmates, teachers, parents, and friends unwittingly shape gender differences into “essential” male and female natures. This is how a boy acts. This is how a girl acts. Gender is also a system of social classification. At the time of this writing, identifying as either male or female on legal paperwork is still compulsory across North America—with the exception of Oregon and Washington, D.C.
Failing to respect gender categories has consequences: teachers and parents nudge and reprimand you, kids call you names and sometimes even slap you around and isolate you. You’re declared a freak. While Ben had an unusually supportive group of family and friends, they still policed the boundaries of acceptable gender, reining in his nonconformity, often unwittingly. Those on the outer edges of his circle did so much more blatantly, even at times bullying him.
By the time Ben graduated from high school, he had spent years trying to conform, rebel against gender norms, and find a place to belong. It was a subtle disaffection, a search for a place where he could be himself. He flitted from school to school. Fiercely devoted to family and friends, he frequently placed their needs before his own. He seemed to have difficulty figuring out what he wanted. Clearly very bright, but never a good student, Ben had trouble focusing and easily lost interest in his studies. Yet he was always challenging himself, searching for the thing that would make him happy, looking for his calling, and trying to make a difference. His is the story of what happens when a female-assigned individual fails to respect the rules of gender. While not necessarily representative of the transgender male experience as a whole, Ben’s story illustrates the ways gender norms, and specifically the belief in the gender binary, structure the early course of our lives, stigmatizing those who fail to conform.
Ben spent most of his twenties drifting. He enrolled at the University of Maine at Farmington, in the foothills of the mountains in western Maine. He didn’t go to any classes and got kicked out after a semester. He then studied digital communications for two semesters at Lynn University in Boca Raton, but quickly tired of that. Bob and Gail were footing the bill, and Ben got Bs even though he rarely went to classes. At the time, he was getting more deeply involved in wakeboard sports and the wakeboard industry. He felt he was wasting his time at a party school. He also missed his friends in Maine.
Ben, Chrissy, and Allison continued to go on “ladies night out” romps and weekends away, where they did girly things like go to a nail salon. “We’d walk around in our swimsuits and go down to the hotel lobby. We’d get our hair done and have a spa day,” recalls Chrissy.
After finishing photography school at the end of 2007, Ben moved to Central Florida with Meg, whom he had met and become close friends with while working at a photography shop in downtown Portland a few months earlier. Meg and Ben had decided to start a photography business together. Meg would run the consumer side of the business—weddings, portraits—and Ben would do action sports photography in Orlando, where the wakeboarding industry was based. While they were living together neither ever brought anyone home. Meg stayed over at boyfriends’ houses at times.
Meg was the first person Ben ever heard talk openly about being attracted to women. “That rocked my world,” said Ben. Though Meg identified as straight, she openly admired female bodies. “I couldn’t even do that,” Ben said. “I remember we would have shoots at our house, and female athletes would come over, and I always had to make super clear that I was into dudes.” Meanwhile, Ben was falling in love with Meg. When Meg rebuffed Ben, it was a bit awkward afterward, but they worked it out. Ben was a rare kind of friend, Meg tells me. “He would give you the shirt off his back.”
They shared a mutual love of water sports and photography, and Ben put his heart and soul into the wakeboarding industry. But being female photographers in a male-dominated industry wasn’t easy. Once, Ben and Meg had trouble getting paid and had to go without hot water for two weeks. “We weren’t taken seriously,” says Meg. Ben was also acutely aware of the fact that homophobia was rife in the industry, and “gay” was a commonly used slur, even if he did not yet identify as gay. He missed Maine. “Sometimes sunshine can be overrated,” he posted on Facebook. “I kind of want to get a dog and a piano. Is that random or what?”
In November 2009 Ben moved back to Maine, beginning a new period of soul-searching. “Every major change I go through I always question my decision: Am I doing the right thing? Am I giving up too easily? Am I giving up at all? Did I fail? Did I succeed? What’s next? I suppose we all do this. I guess that’s what makes us all so connected, that on some level, you understand and can connect.”
Before they left Florida, Meg told Ben, “You should really try dating a woman.” When he was ten or eleven, Ben recalled seeing a program on TV, the news magazine 20/20, about being gay, and thought to himself: “Boy, it would suck to be gay.” In retrospect, he recognizes he was deeply homophobic and imagined being gay was “the worst thing I could’ve been.” When Ben was a teenager he once even went around telling everyone that Chris, his brother and close friend, was gay (he was not)—perhaps as a way of deflecting attention from his own attractions. The truth was that Ben didn’t know anybody who was actually gay, or at least anyone who was out and proud about it. In high school, Ben told me, “there was one person who was openly gay, and he got so much shit.” Ben recalled hearing a family member talk about “shipping away the gays.” Up until that point, he hadn’t “seen or heard a single positive thing” associated with being gay.
But with Meg’s encouragement, upon moving back to Maine, Ben began to explore his same-sex desires and started dating online. There he met Jo. It was his first sexual relationship. He never explicitly told his family or friends, or came out to them; he just introduced them to the girlfriend. “I thought I had finally figured out what was ‘missing’ for me, that odd feeling of never quite feeling whole but not knowing why,” Ben recalled. Jo joined the Shepherds’ annual trip to Disney World, and in December 2009, Ben posted: “My face hurts from all the excessive smiling I’ve been doing. I can’t help myself. Life is good. 
And it’s getting even BETTER! Which is the crazy part, who knew it could? Yay for happiness!”
Sometimes it seemed that Ben and Jo were playing out butch-femme roles. If they went camping, Ben built the fire and protected Jo, but often Jo seemed to be the more masculine one in the relationship, according to Ben. You don’t need roles to make a relationship between two women work, of course. In the postfeminist era, butch-femme roles are at times played out with a knowing wink; yet gender differences do persist among many female couples. In November 2011, Ben reported that he “spent the day with my lady hiking,” and talked about proposing marriage, but Ben’s family and friends never really warmed up to Jo. Eventually the relationship frayed.
When they broke up the following month, Ben was, he says, “a hot mess.” He rented a house at his favorite beach, Higgins, near Portland, and stayed there on his own for a month. He said it took him six months to understand that “Jo had not been good for me.” Since then he’s had a lot of crushes. He gets obsessed with one person for a few months and then moves on to the next person. He tends to pick the “wrong people,” according to Allison: people he works with, or friends. Ben’s friends encouraged him to “get back on the horse, and find somebody that you don’t know!” But Ben wondered whether he really was cut out for a serious relationship with someone.
Even when he was in a relationship with Jo, says Ben, the word “lesbian” never rolled off his tongue. It implied that he was female, and he never felt like a woman. He called himself “gay.” And even though he knew he was attracted to women, he never had what some gay people describe as a kind of coming-out epiphany, a sense of “coming home,” of finally finding himself. Even while he and Jo were together, they never felt like they were part of a queer community. There were gay characters on television and a lively queer scene in Portland, but for Ben, who was hooked into family and friends in Brompton, it hardly existed.
“Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes,” Ben posted on Facebook, along with a series of New Year’s resolutions:
Start working toward bachelor’s in leadership and organizing
Spend a week or more on the West Coast
Lose another 30–40 pounds
Work up to be able to do 100 consecutive squats
Run a 5k in less than 25 min
Get health insurance
Start wearing contacts
Do a 3-day backpacking trip
Do 100 consecutive push-ups
Learn how to read sheet music/play guitar
Learn how to play the harmonica
Camp on a beach
Try one new recipe a week
Hike Mt Katahdin
See DMB in concert
Attend a Wellstone seminar
Journal at least once a week and keep a “campaign journal”
Read a book a month
Pay off credit card debt
Create plan to complete BS degree in 3 years
List making was a way to account, aspire, and plan for the future, to engage in a kind of existential seeking, and to hold many of those questions at bay. Meanwhile, Ben’s brother, Chris, was preparing to marry his fiancée. “Bra shopping for the dress fitting for Chris and Elise’s big day was a success!” Ben reported on Facebook, next to a photograph that pictured him in an emerald-green bridesmaid’s dress with a halter top. Elise had to tutor him in the art of wearing high heels without falling flat on one’s face. Still, he wore the dress and heels to please his brother and parents.
During a family trip later that summer to Celebration, Florida, Ben posted a quote from Walt Disney: “We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” For Ben, that path led, in the spring of 2012, to volunteering for the Maine marriage equality campaign. His world began to open up. Once he became involved with a community of activists, many of whom identified as queer, who saw themselves outside of heterosexual norms, Ben became more empowered to acknowledge his queerness publicly. On Facebook he posted an eighth-grade picture of himself, short hair parted in the middle, wearing a boy’s shirt and bangs off to the sides, and the question: “Remind me again how I didn’t know I was gay?” Little did he know that his coming out would eventually lead him to claim a transgender identity.
The strategy of coming out, of disclosing one’s same-sex desires as a way of disrupting the “heterosexual assumption”—the belief that everyone is straight unless proven otherwise—had succeeded in lessening the stigma of being gay for many Americans. By 2012, thanks to the fervent efforts of legal advocates and activists, same-sex relationships were increasingly recognized in the law. On the edges of that movement, some activists were challenging gays and lesbians to celebrate gender variance, and asking questions like: Does the gender binary—the belief that the world is divided into men and women—do justice to the way many people really experience their lives? Should those who cross over, and “change their sex,” have a place in the gay and lesbian movement?3
For decades, open transsexuals existed outside of gay and lesbian subcultures. This division was imposed, in part, by mid-twentieth-century gender transition medical protocols that required those seeking out sex reassignment surgery to affirm that they were not homosexual and promise that after their bodies were aligned with their minds, they would live “normal” heterosexual lives. Gender variance has certainly long been an element of gay and lesbian subcultures, and many of the movement’s most visible activists, such as the leaders of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, were butch lesbians, “sissy” men of all races, and trans women like activists Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Yet in search of respectability and cultural power, the gay and lesbian movement often disavowed gender variance, emphasizing the manly men and femme women in their ranks. In 1993, when transgender people tried to openly join the March on Washington they were rebuffed by the organizing committee. “As gays and lesbians have found their pride,” sociologist Aaron Devor noted, “many have retreated in shame from the transgendered and transsexual people who had always been among them.”4
But in subsequent years, transgender people organized to demand a place at the table—adding a “T” to “LGB”—and to gain access to hormones, surgery, and more say over how psychologists, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, and surgeons treated them. Male-to-female trans people showed up at feminist-inspired women’s music festivals, which were designated as “woman only,” defying those who sought to turn them away on the grounds that they were not “really” women at all. In 1997, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force amended its mission statement to include transgender people. In 2000, three transgender speakers were included at the Millennium March for Equality in Washington, D.C. In April 2000, an article in the Boston Globe declared, “Issue of Transgender Rights Divides Many Gay Activists.” But the following year, in March 2001, the Human Rights Campaign, which is perhaps America’s largest gay and lesbian organization, amended its mission statement to include trans people. Female-assigned individuals began to demand access to medical technologies to modify their bodies, and in 2001 they established Gender Odyssey, an annual Seattle conference for those on the “trans masculine spectrum.” A burgeoning trans movement created a new vocabulary to guide gender-questioning individuals (“misgendering,” “cisgender”), and promoted technologies—such as plastic prosthetic devices for peeing in public bathrooms, and chest binders, among others.
By the time Ben began to work on Maine’s marriage equality campaign, trans people had become much more visible. At campaign headquarters at the start of every training session, staffers and volunteers would go around the room and introduce themselves, specifying their “preferred pronouns.” Preferred pronouns? Was a pronoun something you could choose? That had never occurred to Ben before. He replied: “she, her, hers.” But the question lit a fire. Hey, wait a minute, Ben thought to himself: Those are not my preferred pronouns. Those are the pronouns that have been assigned to me. And he began to meet trans-identified people.
Holy shit. This is a thing?! I could be a dude in THIS lifetime?!
Meeting trans guys on the marriage equality campaign blew Ben’s mind. He had never heard about hormones or top surgery, or the possibility of growing up with a particular gender assignment and then opting for another. But as he became involved in organizing, he became increasingly aware of the transgender movement that was rapidly gaining traction. He heard the term “gender dysphoria” for the first time. That marked a turning point.
Ben began a process of questioning and scanning his biography for clues from his past. On the playground, kids would ask him if he was a boy or a girl. Ben recalled, “I never knew how to answer that. Sometimes I’d say, ‘Well, technically I’m a girl.’ ”
Ben remembered that as a teenager he once joked that he felt like a “gay man trapped in a woman’s body.” When he had his first physical, the doctor told him he had a male hair pattern and naturally high testosterone. But Ben had to bury the sense that he was masculine. It wasn’t normal. He thought about the ways his body had been a problem since puberty—first because of the large breasts, and later because he naturally had what some considered to be excessive body hair on his face, chest, and legs, and had been diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome—which meant that he had more androgens than the typical girl.5 The combination of a large chest and a profusion of facial hair led to embarrassing mockery. By the time Ben was in his late twenties, the transgender movement presented a possible solution: he could affirm a sense of maleness.
When I suggested to him that had he been twenty years older, he might have gravitated to the lesbian world, Ben countered: “Lesbianism never felt like a good fit. I had a lot of internalized misogyny. I hated anything remotely feminine and/or anything that would admit my association or connection to womanhood.” He reflected, “I was exposed to butch subcultures long before I ever came out as trans, and had I found what I was looking for in those spaces I don’t believe I would have felt it necessary to come out as trans. My transition felt like an undeniable truth. Like the grass is green. No matter how hard I tried to look at it as yellow, brown, or any other color, I know it’s green. And thus have to act accordingly. As soon as I learned about pronouns I knew innately this was my path and it was never a matter of ‘if’ for me.”
Transgender people (and the psychologists and physicians who work with them) often take issue with the idea that being transgender is chosen at all. One does not choose to be transgender; one is transgender. To assert otherwise, some say, is to open the door to conversion therapy, and the claim that people can be “made normal.” And, in fact, similar arguments have been made about homosexuality: one doesn’t choose to be gay or lesbian; one is “born that way.”6 But while our bodies and our desires are powerful influences, they alone do not make us who we are. Because humans are meaning-making creatures, identifying as transgender, or as gay or lesbian, or even as Jewish or Italian, is a sociological process, and as such it is in flux. In the early twentieth century, scientific and other experts observed variations among individuals with respect to gender and gave a name to such variations (“transsexual”). With time, activists partially challenged these medical definitions with another name (“transgender”), and by doing so they shifted the population who would identify with such labels, making the barriers to entry much lower. Though people often experience their gender variance as an aspect of themselves they have little choice over, they exercise personal agency when they name themselves transgender, and when (and if) they undergo body modifications on the basis of those identifications. So it’s about a lot more than biology.
In our culture, the label “transgender” has, for the past couple of decades, offered a space for gender nonconformists and gender crossers to come together and affirm a sense of difference. In 2016, researchers estimated that about 1.4 million American adults identify as transgender, signifying those who move away from their assigned gender, at times by surgically or hormonally modifying their bodies.7 This constitutes about .6 percent of the population—doubling a prior estimate. The actual number of transgender people is probably even higher than that and is bound to grow even further. “Due to growing visibility and medical access,” writes columnist Diana Goetsch, “millions of trans people are manifesting what in previous times remained buried.”8 As actress Laverne Cox recently told Time magazine, “We are in a place now where more and more trans people want to come forward and say ‘This is who I am.’ More of us are living visibly and pursuing our dreams visibly, so people can say, ‘Oh yeah, I know someone who is trans.’ ”9
As he came to think of himself as transgender, Ben thought about his suicide attempt at fourteen, and the way every homophobic and transphobic “joke” he heard as a kid had been “seared into my mind the way a burn scars your skin” and had nearly destroyed him. He thought about his bedroom growing up, and the fact that it was covered with posters of beefy half-naked guys. Was he attracted to them, or did he just want to be them? Whenever he kissed guys, he felt like he was kissing his brother. “It didn’t feel right,” he told me. But then kissing girls didn’t always feel all that right either—not while he was still trying to be female.
He put the pieces of his puzzle together. Oh, so is this why I’ve felt out of step with those around me. Ben acknowledged his long-term depression. He also learned that there was a way out. It was possible to transition, and to begin to present himself as a man. He no longer thought he was crazy. For the first time, he realized, “it’s okay” to feel the way he felt.
This is me. I’m a male who was brought up as a female. My gender identity is at odds with my assigned sex. As Ben and others described this process to me, discovering the transgender category and identifying with it helped them to make sense of so much in their lives that had previously been confusing. The realization also presents options. One can do little about it, living as the sex one was assigned at birth to the best of one’s ability. Another option is to choose to transition socially but not physically—that is, to change one’s pronouns and name without modifying one’s body. A third option is to change one’s pronouns, adopt a new name, and undergo some body modification, such as masculinizing one’s chest but not taking hormone supplements, living “in between.” A fourth is to transition “completely,” changing one’s name and pronouns, and undergoing chest masculinization as well as injecting testosterone, and to try to fully assimilate into the gendered world and live in a “stealth” fashion, out of the glare of others. Finally, one can transition and live openly as a trans man.
These identity options are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and at different points in their lives, as we shall see, individuals may embrace different strategies. Furthermore, different contexts, particularly work environments, may demand different modes of self-presentation. If you’re working in the corporate world, for example, you may have little choice but to go stealth—if you can. If you’re an artist, or if you live in a particularly progressive town, living openly as a trans man is more possible.
Ben wasn’t sure what his life would look like. But as soon as he knew that transitioning was possible, he knew he would do it. It terrified him, and he did a lot of careful thinking about it. And yet he had a “gut feel” that he should—it seemed like the logical end of having acknowledged his trans-ness. Oh shit. I see the road I’m going to have to go down at some point, he thought, but I’m going to ignore it for now. He couldn’t bear to do it to his parents—they were too important. So Ben kept this desire to himself.