I think what the social contagion "theories" (purposefully) fail to get is that, whatever the trigger to your transition, feelings don't just pop up spontaneously
ex-nihilo. In my case, while I will shamelessly admit that interacting with trans people online was the trigger to my transition, that doesn't change the fact that - despite spending my entire life around cishet people in a conservative country - I still spent the past 20 years explicitly wishing I was a girl, with increasing frequency and longing, to the point of maladaptive daydreaming. If anything I wish I had had
more exposure to queerness, because that would have saved me a lot of grief and internalized self-loathing.
So... the essay was thought-provoking, and some of the following comments by Gargulec and others perhaps even more so. I would like to throw in my two cents - though keep in mind that I come from STEM rather than humanities so my perspective on things is gonna be different and I'm not gonna be as articulate.
First I'm gonna check my privilege - since my biases are inevitably going to color my introspection despite my best efforts:
- I had the sort of 'by the books' dysphoria symptoms that make for a very clear narrative: increasing alienation from my own body and my male peers during puberty, strong gender envy, and the aforementioned conscious desire to be a girl, which got stronger and stronger despite an ostensibly successful life and no shortage of affection (I have a very close family, and over the years had multiple women interested in me, even if my dating efforts didn't really work out) - heck arguably the moments of my life when things were going objectively better for me were the ones where dysphoria was at its strongest.
- I had an extremely smooth coming out, where everyone I cared about in my life accepted me readily (if with some initial questions and doubts). I have a supportive family. I didn't lose a single friend. This in a very conservative country. I count myself extremely lucky.
- I started passing (and male failing in boymode!) before I reached a full year of HRT. I dare say, based on what people tell me, that while no bombshell I am conventionally attractive. Most of the time I like looking at myself in the mirror now.
- I even have a girlfriend now, and my relationship with her is... completely unlike what I imagined dating would be like as a guy. It's so, so much better. All in all living as a trans woman has been so much happier, if certainly not anxiety-free.
- On the other hand, living in a conservative country and not having access to informed consent but having to go through a 'screening process' and (subpar) therapy in order to transition took a toll on me. Self-doubt and intrusive thoughts were my own worst enemy.
Here are my two cents then, with the caveat that these are obviously just my personal opinions.
On gender identity:
Current medical consensus says that gender identity is something which is either innate or developed in the very first stages of one's life, and that this can sometimes not be a good match for one's AGAB, resulting in gender incongruence, which in turn can lead to dysphoria. I do believe this, that there's a gender-y core to our psyche, but I also believe that one's internal gender is a spectrum in variance, fluidity and intensity and that, of course, the very concept of AGAB and its associated expectations is a largely arbitrary box society places on people - sometimes in an extremely ruthless manner (see intersex people) - so in some cases it gets hard to define the border between
internal and
external gender incongruence.
In short, I feel that it's not that we are born into Male/Female/Nonbinary boxes, but more that we are born on an extremely complex spectrum along which society has traced a number of zones and demanded people belong to one. The closer you are to the zone that gets assigned to you, the easier time you have.
...that analogy got away from me - let's try something more practical.
Imagine the standard man/woman templates as slots, or molds. Say cubes and spheres. Some processes, whether innate or in the very first phase of your life, give you a shape. You could be a cube or a sphere, sure, but you could also be a rounded cube, a pyramid, an ellipsoid, heck an icosahedron. Gender is a complicated mess. Your shape might be more or less able to fit either of the molds, whether because it's similar to the slots (variance), because it's smaller than the slots (intensity), or because your shape is more or less malleable (fluidity).
From what little I've been able to gather, cis people are just people who are comfortable inside their boxes for one of the aforementioned reasons. Some are legit proud of their gender, some just plain don't think about it, and some are just either very flexible about their own identity or able to scratch little notches into their mold to fit comfortably.
In this metaphor, super-binary, 'traditional narrative' trans people (the exasperated trans woman stereotype, if you will) suffer significant trauma from being spheres placed in a cubic slot or vice-versa. They don't fit, their "gender shape" is clearly too big and not malleable enough to fit - this causes very recognizable dysphoria which is immediately significantly alleviated by changing slot.
But it is my opinion that 'perfectly shaped adamantine spheres and cubes' are not the majority. One can be a parallelepiped, a tetrahedron, a rotational ellipsoid, a dodecahedron or even a shapeless blob. Most people are comfortable in the mold assigned to them, some can mold themself to fit, others clearly fit in one slot better than in another and transition because of that, and there are people who change shape back and forth or fit in both molds or neither, but there is still a sizeable "queer gray zone" at the edges. People for whom the mold
kinda fits but still
chafes. I think it's inevitable that people like that would share many experiences with more 'traditional and stereotypical' trans people, because the underlying incongruence is the same, but at the same time they might not necessarily consider themselves trans. In the end when the mold chafes different people will react differently, depending on their shape - some will be content carving out little notches in their mold, some will adjust their own shape a bit to fit, some will just judge the chafing not significant enough and 'deal with it' - and yes, some of them
will change their mind later and transition - because they couldn't stand the chafing any longer, because they couldn't shape themselves to fit, or because they outgrew the mold - they will move to another box, switch between them, carve themselves a new mold entirely - but not all of them will. And I think that, as trans people, we have to stop projecting and stop assuming that these 'reluctant eggs' will
inevitably be worse off because of it. Some of them will be content, or even perfectly happy, as they are.
On transitioning:
I think that too often we reduce 'transitioning' to coming out and taking hormones. It can be a huge part of it, sure, but I think that transition starts when we tell ourselves that we're not gonna accept the mold that has been given to us and that we're gonna try another. We rip ourselves away from that mold (sometimes slowly and carefully, sometimes in a rush) and the experience changes us. Some parts of us crystallize, some become more malleable, others frankly are torn away as they got stuck to the mold. We take what remains and either bring it to the box that will fit us better or try and carve a new one for ourselves. And as we brace for the journey and settle into that box, we inevitably end up adjusting our shape further to fit. We look back on our lives and recognize our discomfort and find patterns (humans are very good at pattern finding) reinforcing our idea the new box was the best one all along.
Especially if we live in a country that doesn't have informed consent and have to express our thoughts to a cis therapist in order to access HRT. Some of the time we will admittedly be too enthusiastic about this kind of pattern finding and probably make signs out of some pretty ambiguous, confusing and contradictory experiences, but I'd argue that our
will to interpret the facts that way is as important - if not more so - than their actual consistency - it implies a desire, a longing, a sense of direction. And that has value.
Because in the end I very much agree with the queer idea that gender is either a formless construction
or as varied as there are humans, and it is, at the same time, profoundly influenced by the binary society we live in. So I think we shouldn't try to define 'man' and 'woman' as anything more than the boxes they are: they are a set of physical and social expectations, and therefore anybody who
wants to fit in that box,
who is happy with it, belongs in that box by default. If you feel a box is a good fit for you, it's because you're a good fit for the box. If you
want to be a woman, that means you
are a woman.
On online communities, catgirls and the egg narrative:
I "cracked" before even knowing what an 'egg' was supposed to be, so my experience on the subject is limited to my transition period, and I also have little to no idea how things work on the transmasc side of online queer communities, so I can really only speak of my own experience as a transfem:
I will freely admit I am something of a weeb. Not too extreme, but I got into anime and manga after almost a decade of wrestling with my gender dysphoria and my growing desire to be a girl and I really liked them. Especially anime with a large female cast but little to no fan-service. Eventually I ended up drifting to all-female franchises, where I would strongly identify with one or two characters per franchise and really see myself in them. Anime and manga and associated games, for all of their at times
problematic takes on women (again, fanservice and hurtful traditional stereotypes can both go burn in a fire) were instrumental in:
- letting me get a picture of women interacting among themselves in a way that was relatively normal, instead of the continuous "glitter, dresses and gushing about this or that guy" you see all too often in western media - where often it looks like women have no purpose but to be there as love interests for the male protagonist, and
- took a sledgehammer to my sheltered, conservative cishet upbringing, giving me a new perspective on queerness, same-sex relationships and, most importantly, over time, dispelling my preconceptions on lesbians
I think this is an aspect that is often overlooked when talking about how lots of trans people people are watching anime, playing videogames or just spending lots of time online: lots of people do these things everyday and demonstrably the overwhelmingly majority of them do not transition, but very often trans people - especially transfems - themselves can point to those as a key element in their self reflection.
My hypothesis is this: we live in a society where homosexuality is unfortunately still stigmatized. Accepted, yes, but the peer pressure e.g. growing AMABs are under
not to be gay is frankly still a huge factor. At the same time we all face the immense social weight of cisheteronormativity. The end result is, according to my personal experience and to the huge but admittedly anecdotal weight of personal stories I've seen online, that AMAB people whose assigned gender does not really fit simply do not consider something else because, despite being intellectually aware of lesbians, in their mind being a girl is inevitably associated with liking guys and liking guys is something they are extremely conditioned against. "I wanted to be a girl, but thought I wasn't a girl because I did not like guys, but cracked when I found out I could be a trans girl lesbian/ace" is an extremely common narrative nowadays. And for most people the contact with queer concepts necessary to make that realization ends up being through anime, manga, games and online communities.
Ironically some of these girls then end up being bi. A few of them even end up being straight. Because once they progress in their transition and become more confident about their identity as women, the taboo against liking guys starts to crumble.
I confess I am a bit more skeptical instead of claims that these manga/anime/game communities could actually push someone with an undefined gender identity in one direction or another - not because they would not have any influence on someone 'sitting on the fence', so to speak -
everything we deal with in life tries to push us one way or another, and some people's gender is definitely somewhat malleable and fluid (in which case it is their
right to go for what makes them happier and it does not make them any less valid) but because any such influence has to contend, again, with the enormous, omnipresent weight of cisheteronormativity. It'd be a lot like discussing the chances of gay movies possibly turning bi people gay when actually 90+% percent of the media anybody consumes is ridiculously straight.
And the weight of cisheteronormativity is one of the reasons why, despite profoundly disliking when someone tries to
push a trans narrative on people who do not see themselves as trans and are very content with their current gender (even if their behavior can be very gender-non-conforming at times), I do think that the so called 'egg prime directive' where you
never even ask people if they thought they might be trans is excessively limiting. Some people just do have a blind spot because of how they grew up, and are repressing
hard. Pointing out the possibility to them, gently, without pressuring or projecting,
and respecting their own opinion, can help.
Never push,
never impose, just be willing to talk and share your experience if there are follow up questions. In short, use that vanishingly rare thing known as common sense. I took me an
enormous amount of time to crack on my own precisely because no one approached me about it and let me know my feelings were
normal. I had to stumble into trans people talking amongst themselves to realize it.
But anyway, getting back on topic, is it a surprise or an anomaly when people who owe a good part of their liberation from the weight of cisheteronormativity to certain media (like manga, anime, open world rpgs) and their fellow fans are shaped, in part, by that process? I don't think so. I don't doubt that for some people catgirl and egg memes can be a scaffold to refine their identity, ready to be dropped once they "mature", but I see it more as a forge, where every part of the process that you use to refine your identity and shape yourself into who you want to be is gonna leave a mark on you, not unlike making a sword (or better, in keeping with the weeby theme, a
katana). Growing up "socialized male" and then using a very nerdy view of what a woman is as an inspiration when building your female self
is probably gonna lead to what Gargulec calls an 'alternate trans history' - heck it's probably going to lead to a slightly variant
identity than someone who approached femininity from another direction. But no matter the embarrassment more "traditional" trans women might feel towards this paradigm, this doesn't make these "catgirls" any less women.
As for me? Well, I
do have a catgirl avatar right now, don't I?
I actually personally lost
a lot of interest in all-women anime, manga and games by transitioning. I still very much like them for what they are, but now they're no longer coping mechanisms for my dysphoria (that actually led to a small crisis as I tried to rearrange my interests and hobbies around this sudden void). That said, they're still an integral part of the process that led me to be what I am. Just as I consider the way too long period I spent as a guy as part of what I am. That makes me different from a cis woman or from a trans woman with a more traditional history, sure. I'm not, to use a previous metaphor, a perfect adamantine sphere. I'm probably a weird, uneven icosahedron with some rough edges and some sanded-off corners. That's fine, because I nonetheless find the spherical mold very comfy. I'm the proud girlfriend of an amazing girlfriend, and I'm very happy with that.
Oh, and if you offered me cat ears and a tail I would totally take them, thank you.
