The Chick and the Egg
I think that trans culture, especially trans women culture, has a problem with people seeing other people as being one's own past self in need of enlightenment. Like, you feel like you're a time traveler and talking to yourself before you realized you're [insert something here] and you think that if you tell them the truth now you can get back all those years spent not fully living as your truest happiest self.
But other people are not your past self. They're entirely different people. Sometimes cisgender people are cisgender and not waiting to be "hatched." Sometimes straight trans people are straight and not waiting to be enlightened to the joys of transbianism. Sometimes monogamous people prefer monogamy for entirely legitimate reasons that they've fully contemplated and don't need to be preached to about polyamory. Some non-binary people want to be non-binary and some binary people want to be binary. Sometimes religious people like their religions and don't need to be brought into neopaganism or atheism. Not everyone is on their own personal journey towards Jesus.
The Trans Girl and the Crossdresser
I have a dear friend who is a cisgender bisexual man who presents masculine in all elements of his life, and enjoys doing so, but also he has a cross-dressing kink. He is constantly dealing with trans women who assume he is an egg and try to "hatch" him and just will not take no for an answer no matter how many times he explains that like, he's had tons of trans friends for many years and he's put lots of thought into his gender and he's fully concluded that he enjoys being a man, likes his body as it is, and that the cross-dressing is entirely a kink thing for him1 and if he presented that way full-time he wouldn't get out of it what he gets from doing it on special occasions in specific places. He's shared with me many times how frustrating this is for him and how often it feels like gaslighting. Like every time he starts to question himself and feel insecure, only to ultimately come back to the same conclusions about who he is and what he wants. I've had cisgender drag queen friends deal with this too. Trans women who try to sell them on identifying as genderfluid or transitioning even after the drag queens explain that drag is just a performance art for them and they know plenty of queens who have transitioned and they love them but after thinking about it they just know it's not for them.
My Experience with Lesbian Conversion Therapy
I also constantly deal with a version of this which I have been very negatively affected by my entire transition, comprising of nearly my entire adult life, and which frustrates me more and more every time it happens. I guess a lot of trans women, for some reason, believe that to be a real woman you have to be heterosexual; or they perceive being attracted to men as some core component of womanhood they must adopt. So they force themselves to try and date men early on in transition and make themselves miserable only to later realize that they are allowed to just be a lesbian and live happy dating the people that they are attracted to.
I grew up with lesbian neighbors and gay uncles so I truly never perceived "dating men" as some core component of womanhood and don't really understand where this idea comes from. I lived as a gay man before transition and remained attracted almost exclusively to men since transition. Trans women who had gone through their own journey of realizing they can be lesbians would see me being into men and decide that I clearly am under the same internalized heteronormative illusions they were and that if they could only convince me that I'm a lesbian then I would be so much happier.
The ways that other trans women would try to convince me to be into women were honestly manipulative and cruel. I was called an assimilationist gender traitor. I was called an outsider to the community who doesn't belong in trans spaces (despite being the founder and lead organizer of the largest trans space in that town.) I was called a gay man in drag. I was called a Men's Rights Activist and a misogynist and self-hating. I was told that I have "internalized comphet" that I have to "unlearn" and was given thought exercises for "discovering what attraction to women feels like." I was asked to consider if the men I was into were all just eggs so I was "retroactively a lesbian all along." I was told that sapphic love would always be superior and that no man could ever truly love me because I'm trans. I was told that dating a man was centering the needs of men over my trans sisters and inherently heteropatriarchal. I was told that I should consider becoming a "political lesbian" who may not even experience attraction to women but "chooses to prioritize them over men anyway." I was essentially gaslit into convincing myself that I could and should be a lesbian and didn't know myself or what was best for me. Pretty much every trans woman I knew was a lesbian and people would assume I was at least bisexual and then when I did make myself identify as bisexual people would bring out biphobic rhetoric and try to convince me to choose to only be into women.
I even tried de-transitioning at one point because being accepted as a gay man seemed possibly more possible than being a straight trans woman (unfortunately, I got dysphoric, so that didn't last very long.)
It was only during my seventh year of transition that, for the first time ever, another trans person told me that it's OK for me to be attracted to and to date anybody I wanted and that nobody would or should judge me for it. That it's OK for me to have a boyfriend and nobody should give me shit for it or treat me differently for it. I started crying when they said it. Here's the catch, the trans person who said that wasn't a trans woman and it was a concession in a dispute among roommates because the other trans woman I was living with was uncomfortable with me having my boyfriend over. Apparently if she'd known that I dated men, she might not have agreed to live with me. We're all chill now and she accepts this part of me now but it took a bit.
It was only during my eleventh year of transition that I finally just started calling myself heterosexual/heteroflexible and stopped identifying as "bisexual but like, a Kinsey 2, with a strong preference for masculine presentations." I have two ex-girlfriends who are both incredible wonderful people who I led on for over a year each trying to make myself be sexually attracted to them but finding I could only be emotionally drawn to wanting to be their sister or their best friend. I remember thinking "this must be what it feels like to be a gay man dating a woman."
A lot of what I experienced felt to me like a continuation of the homophobia I faced when I was a gay man, only coming from my own community. I dealt with physical violence and bullying for being gay when I was a teenager. I dealt with people trying to convince me I "should" be attracted to women because being gay would be "too difficult." Transitioning didn't change my experience of people giving me shit and not accepting who I am attracted to. It just changed whether "gay" or "straight" was the word applied to my attraction.
And I still deal with it regularly. Just recently an older trans woman asked me "Ew, why?" when it came up that I'm only into men, and began telling me all about how in 2001 the Susan's Place Transsexuals made her think she had to be into men but she realized she could just be a lesbian and now she's so much happier and like "passed this down to me" as her sage wisdom for trans girls and I had to clarify that I have two ex-girlfriends and have been trans for over a decade and lived as a gay man before transition and am very certain at this point in my sexuality. And then a few weeks later a trans lesbian around my age who I have never met, and seemed earlier in transition, kept trying to invite me to a "femme 4 femme party" and no matter how many times I told her that I'm straight and not into women she kept insisting I should attend anyway because "maybe I'll like it" and "I wouldn't have to do anything with anyone if I didn't want to but I should give it a chance." It just gave the same vibes as a straight man hitting on a lesbian and saying "how do you know you don't like it until you try it?"
The Time Travel Fantasy
I think every trans person at some point has had that fantasy of telling your younger self everything you know now so you could take a shortcut and live more of your younger years as your true self. You'd pass easier, have more time to date who you want to date how you want to date them, and so forth. So when you see someone who reminds you of your younger self, you feel like it's your chance to fulfill that fantasy. You want to give someone what you didn't get.
All of these women who try to convert me to lesbianism think they are helping me. It's not out of malice or selfishness but because they believe they are doing something helpful. They genuinely believe that I will be happier as a lesbian (I tried it and I wasn't) and they truly think that I am simply under the same cognitive distortions and illusions that they had once been under and that they are the time traveler here telling their past self what they needed to hear when they were in this "earlier stage of development." Which gets increasingly ridiculous the further I get into transition and start being trans-older than the vast majority of trans girls who do this to me now.
Supposedly the world is still full of Susan's Place Transsexuals who keep telling all these other women that assimilating into a heterosexual marriage is the ultimate goal for all trans women and a necessary part of transition but I have never met any of these people myself and I kinda wish they were the ones I had met when I started transition instead of the non-binary glitterpunks who told me to "decolonize my mind2" in reaction to my coming out as possibly a trans woman. I think that when the Susan's Place Transsexuals put all these expectations on trans-younger people it's exactly the same phenomenon. They think they're helping! They see these people as their own younger selves and are giving the support and encouragement that they wish they had received themselves, or had received and were grateful for. Unfortunately, these people are not Baby Susan and being treated as such is pushing them to be someone they're not in exactly the same way that I experienced.
And I know so many people who have had similar experiences when it comes to polyamory versus monogamy, vanilla versus kinky, religious versus spiritual/atheist, etc. etc. It's a classic issue where non-binary people will have binary trans people assume that the non-binary identity is just a bridge to feeling comfortable with a binary identity, or where non-binary people assume that binary people are only conforming to gender norms because they don't know about the joys of being non-binary yet.
People feel like when they finally discovered what they prefer, that surely everyone else is just as miserable living that way. They see all those miserable years as lost time, void years that could be been spent living life the way it's meant to be lived, and not as a part of their journey to discovering what they want in life. They want to give you the shortcut.
When you look at another human being, you are not looking at a window into your own past. You are looking at someone else's present.
Whatever journey they are on is not your journey, even if you do end up being right about certain intersections down the road. You can privately make predictions to yourself, or even gossip with your friends, but you should not try to tell people who they are, argue with them about who they are, or try to convince them that they are like you and not who they think they are. Let them figure it out on their own. You very likely might be wrong.
Accept people for who they say they are
I made a friend who constantly threw red flags for signs of gender dysphoria. I kept my thoughts to myself, because by now I know better, but I really did keep thinking like... this guy has got to be an egg, right? Only then I learned that he has had tons of trans women in his life since he was a teenager. This guy is in his 30s. He's been surrounded by trans women even longer than I have. I am absolutely confident that if he was ever going to transition, he would have done so by now. Maybe down the line he'll transition, maybe he won't, but it's ultimately none of my business and by presenting as he does and telling me the pronouns he prefers, he is actively telling me to treat him as the gender he is presenting as. Trying to convince him he's something else is fucking shitty and I know very well how awful it feels to be on the receiving end.
He is not Shel, age 18, hanging out with trans people and on the verge of realizing she has dysphoria after painting her nails just feels a little too good. He is himself, age 30-something, living as he is choosing to live, whether it's what makes him happy or not, it is his choice and not for me to fix. If he wanted to transition, he would have by now, and if he wants to and is choosing not to, then that's not for me to argue with. People make all sorts of personal choices for personal reasons. For now, the only conclusion I should draw is that he is exactly who he tells me he is: a cisgender man. They're real. They exist! There's tons of them, actually.
I am not Lesbian Susan, age 20-whatever, forcing myself to date men only because it's gender-affirming to be next to someone larger than me. I'm Shel, age 30-whatever, who knows very well by now that at age 12 I realized I was only attracted to men and the only thing that has changed since is my gender presentation, and the knowledge that non-binary people exist and kinda have to be taken case-by-case.
So can we please try and scrub out this part of our culture and let people be who they say they are, let them figure themselves out on their own without judgement, and not push on them whatever normative or alternative ways of living we personally think are better. Some people try poly and realize they like monogamy. Some people try monogamy and realize they like poly. Some people are trans, and some people are cis. Some people find tits hot, and some don't. To me, they are about as arousing as a cantaloupe. Everybody is different. No two people are the same.
We are supposed to be the community that's all about people being themselves, even when it flies entirely in the face of what other people expect. Let's include our own expectations in that, and apply that acceptance to everyone else too. People are the genders they say they are, including cis people!
You cannot read their minds. You cannot see the entirety of their lives. You do not know them better than they know themselves. You should not project your own past onto someone else's present. Let people have their own journeys.
- Before you judge harshly that this is a transmisogynistic kink or something, consider that what other people do in their private lives is none of your fucking business and if he isn't involving non-consenting people then nobody is being harmed. Kink isn't always about degradation and humiliation either, sometimes it fulfills some sort of unusual emotional desire deep inside that isn't sexual at all (or becomes sexual because of how much it is desired, even though it's an unrelated emotion). Consider how many ASMR videos there are about someone attentively doing your hair and makeup. There is a lot that someone can get out of "feminization" as a temporary experience which is not being a closeted trans woman or treating being feminine as something degrading. ↩︎
- because the gender binary is a product of colonialism so identifying as a woman is colonial inherently or something. they were gender studies majors. ↩︎