If you are reading this, you’re already trans or gender questioning. That’s assumption one. Assumption two is that transitioning may be important for fully integrating your character. That’s a dull thing to posit, but let’s build on it. Let’s focus on the “fully integrating” bit for a second though. It implies a progression:
- stripping away your delusions
- correcting your misapprehensions about yourself
- disposing of the unhelpful parts of your character
- being familiar with all that remains
- accepting all that remains
- figuring out how to connect it all up in a way that makes you content
- … then living with the result.
And by living, I don’t mean “existing”. I mean striding forth into the world with a sense for what actions will make you persistently present and thus “happy”. This sort of thing – whether dressed up in Freudian psychobabble, hinted at by a mystical mountaintop monk or spelled out bluntly by an oldtimer whittling a piece of wood – is the goal of all self-development. Where does transitioning fit into it all? It fits at every step, but it isn’t one of the steps.
CHANGING CONTEXT OF SELF
Transitioning, more than anything, changes the context of how your selfhood is manifest. It does not change your who, only your how:
- HOW you apprehend yourself.
- HOW society apprehends you.
- HOW you apprehend society apprehending you back.
These are the three simultaneous contexts where each social identity exists. You are always these three people at once. (We’re using “apprehend” here in the sense of understand, realise, recognise or discern, not in the police sense of arrest or capture.) See, social interaction boils down to a stimulus-response mechanism: you put something out (stimulus for response), something else comes back (response to stimulus), and you respond to what comes back (this response becomes now the stimulus for your new response).
SOCIAL A-B-C, 1-2-3 and X-Y-Z
Let’s do some symbolic representation around social interaction models. Yay!
- Before you transition: you put out Message A with Subconscious Vibe 1 and it generates Response X from whoever.
- While you are visibly transitioning (i.e. not passing): you put out Message A with Subconscious Vibe 2 and it generates Response Y from them.
- When you meet your own self-regard: you put out Message A with Subconscious Vibe 3 and it generates Response Z.
Your message has stayed the same, but your vibe changes so the response is categorically different. The state of your transition and the state of your process through the self-development bullet points above, these govern how you apprehend yourself and how society apprehends you, etc…
Before you engage in self-acceptance (that is, while you are still in self-repression) you are in Subconscious Vibe 1. You tend to be uncomfortable or guarded and people pick up on that. All your interactions have a falseness to them. There is a great distance between who you wish to be and who you appear to be.
While you are visibly transitioning, your vibe is more honest and vulnerable, and this can be very engaging among the right people and very dangerous among the wrong people. But the distance has been closed somewhat. Those who empathise with you will span the distance on your behalf.
When you are at Subconscious Vibe 3, you are finally genuine in how you interact – your character is honest and apparent – and you have charisma. The falseness is gone. The distance between who you wish to be and who you appear to be has been closed.
Transition may be a necessary part for reaching Subconscious Vibe 3 (or it may not), but it is not the same as Subconscious Vibe 3.
YOU’LL STILL BE THERE AFTER YOU TRANSITION
The key here is that your “you” does not really change when you transition. It is just that the social appearance and inherent self-concept have been brought closer together. Accessing a different set of social expectations through transitioning can be a crucially important tool in self-development – in closing the social-to-self gap – but is it not self-development per se. To think otherwise is to confuse means and ends. To use analogies for this point:
- The airline is not the holiday.
- A career is not a bank balance.
- The shovel is not the hole.
- Transition is not fulfilment.
To transition is not to become new. It is to reconfigure what you already have. It may be necessary, but it is not a finale.