Your gender identity does not make “sense”, even if you are cis. It does not answer to “sense”. It’s an internal state that a person feels. Gender identity is a feeling of fit. There is no “why” that underpins your gender identity. Even if there may be a “why” that explains it, this explanation is not a cause.
This is to say that knowing why you have your gender identity doesn’t change what that identity is. If you don’t know the why, this also doesn’t change what the identity is. Your gender identity just “is”. Whether you can explain a fact or not doesn’t change whether it’s true. And the only evidence for a gender identity is a “feeling of fit”. Knowing why something fits has no bearing on whether it fits.
Have I belaboured this point enough? Good.
SHAKEABLE FAITH
Because the only thing you can do is try to see your gender as clearly as you can, and then accept what you see. This is a hard thing to swallow for many, especially for those who habitually doubt themselves and need external proof to validate their internal state. Those for whom faith is not enough.
Or, those within whom faith is on more equal footing with mind and does not have its more usual power of being able to silence “sense” (even when sense and faith agree, faith still drowns sense in a bucket). For those who do not know what “unshakeable faith” is. For those whose minds mediate their realities and thus faith is not something they ever encounter: for faith is not a thought. Faith is gut instinct and these people have learned (often bitterly) not to trust gut or instinct as ways of knowing. Sound like you? Sure as hell sounds like me.
And like me, you’re faithless towards all things, including (perhaps especially) yourself. You are like me, dependent on intellectualising about things (i.e. making sense of things) because you don’t get anything reliable from the other ways of knowing. You are prone to using your head on matters that your gut should have taken the lead on. Yet, for whatever reason, your gut ain’t been doing its job navigating you through the many things in the world that do not make sense. Such as transition.
SLIPPERY QUESTIONS
Transition don’t make sense. And without your gut to give unquestionable clear signals on which way is north, you’re going to have to think it out, rather than feel it out.
But you’re stuck. Of course you are. You’re trying to get something sensible from something senseless. Trying to see a face in an abstract painting. What “evidence” there may be is lacking or contradictory – it changes depending on how you turn it and the mood you’re in while you’re turning it. How the goddamn do you resolve something as slippery as this?
Part of working towards that way might be to realise that the gender identity of cis is just as non-rational as trans or fluid. The observable or rational evidence for being cis or trans or fluid is independent of whether you actually feel cis or trans or fluid. You cannot prove your gender identity, even to yourself, only accept it.
Still, how can you use rationality to figure out which is right of the various irrational options you’re facing? That is the question I’m going to start tackling in the rest of this article. And there is one crucial mental skill you must have in tackling something so slippery as this. So to start tackling the question we have to talk about that skill first. Which skill? The capacity to tell progressing thought from recursive thought.
This is just a fancier way of saying: telling the difference between thinking, under-thinking and overthinking. Because underthinking and overthinking both amount to thinking around in circles: one through laziness, the other through obsession.
AUTHENTICITY TAKES FAITH
As you question your gender identity, are you asking yourself “why?” questions (e.g. “why am I pre-occupied by my gender identity?) and following them mentally with “because” answers (e.g. “because how I feel I have to live as a man doesn’t fit me”)?
Notice how each “because” begs another “why?” and each “why?” is a demand for another “because”. And on and on.
For non-rational questions like “what is my authentic gender identity?” the chain of why-because is also inherently non-rational. So there are only three states it can settle into:
- Believe a conclusion on faith despite poor evidence (underthinking)
- Non-periodic irrationality where questions and explanations that endlessly branch outwards (progressive thinking)
- A train of thought that eventually loops back on the same track (overthinking).
OVERTHINKING BIAS
Let’s look at that last one a bit more. In this case, a “why?” far down the line eventually joins up with a “because” from previously. So, your mind is moving along the chain but not progressing anywhere. No insight is gained. No light is shed on the matter the brain is occupied with.
Real insights give you more territory to explore and question. Real insights loosen things up. Shortcuts in the loop feel like insights, but they wrap you tighter and shut down questions. They remove doubts from the loop and give you a more efficient way to transit it. Finding a shortcut like this can feel like a breakthrough, but instead of breaking out to the wider world, it’s breaking deeper into your comfort zone.
When your mind starts agreeing with itself, it can be thrilling. It’s easy to mistake the thrill of certainty via confirmation bias for the thrill of discovery via insight. Emotions are inarticulate and the two things supply the same rush. As such, the way to tell the difference is not how they feel, but in their results. Real insight opens new avenues for enquiry, while confirmation bias masquerading as insight closes out questions and shortens the loop you’re on.
AGREEING WITH YOURSELF
In confirmation bias, your mind agrees with itself with no evidence except momentum. It can get away with this because you’ve lost track of how the links further up the why-because chain have led you right back to where you used to be. Your mind agrees with itself with the only “evidence” being the memory of feeling certain about the things you thought before. You can’t hold all of these things in your mind to check the logic while also having the mental bandwidth to advance to the next why-because link. Your choice is either to stay put or to advance along the loop on the feeling of certainty that every step that led you here was correct.
The period of repetition in the thought loop can be long. Parts of the loop may pass so far out of sight that they are apparently inconsequential to where you are. Yet at each mental cross-road, you’re taking the same turn because it feels correct. And you don’t get anywhere.
ILLUSION OF PROGRESS
See, the terrain of thought you’re on may seem to have changed since you last passed this way. The words and examples you’re using to reframe and rethink the same old thoughts may fool you into thinking that you’re thinking new thoughts. If you were to liken it to a train on a circular track, you might say that the stations are the same but have been remodelled since you last called through. Appearances deceive. It doesn’t matter what the stations of thought look like if they still function the same way – if the track still comes from the same origin and runs in the same direction to the same destination.
When you’re trying to understand your gender identity, then being on a train going around in circles does not have a station called Understanding Square on its circuit. No matter how comforting, habitual, distracting, pre-occupying or convenient it is to ride that train, the train is not going where you want to be. If the track is very long or confusing or you spend a long time figuring out one of the stations, it can be near impossible to even realise you’re in a loop. You need a map. You need a journal.
Much of what I am writing springs from my own journals. What you’re reading are my own attempts to escape the unuseful habits in my own thought processes. My own misapprehensions and fears and the unquestioned conclusions that resulted from them and which have furnished the room and locked the doors of my comfort zone.
MENTAL TRAVEL DIARY
As already stated, when your brain doesn’t have the answers, you either ask around or do your own exploration. The more you cultivate a reasonable distrust of the things you think you already know (especially if you “know” them without ever having examined them) the sooner you’ll be able to bust out.
Journalling the stations on the why-because train (“I think X, the reasons why are Y, and this begs the question Z, of which I think A”) is how you fill in the map of the mental territory you’re in presently. It’s also how you can come to realise that you’ve been through here before in a different season. The weather and plants looked so different then, but yet the soil and the hills are just the same. Journaling gives you a longer view, a better sense of place and a better sense of direction.
The examined life expands. The unexamined life evaporates. When you write your journals and flick back through them, make note of the recurring themes and recurring conclusions.
You will soon find useless loops in the grand network that is your selfhood. And when you have found a loop, your job is to find a way out of it.
Your job, as someone trying to develop yourself, be happier and understand your gender identity is NOT to use the self-confining nature of the loop as momentum (the rush and thrill of “certainty”) to race onward to the next stations on the loop saying “yes, yes, YES – it all make so much sense now!” Your job is to get to a crossroads and go “well, if going right feels comfortable, then I have to go left.”
USELESS CERTAINTY, USEFUL DOUBT
Why is all this recursive thinking so dangerous? Because if your thoughts are feedback loops, you’re not thinking. You’re obsessing. And when you are obsessing STOP the fucking train. Pull the emergency brake. DO something!
Otherwise, you are wearing yourself into a rut and that is bloody dangerous. The rut will get deeper the more you go around it. This is literally how dogma brainwashes people into believers. And you’re at risk of doing it to yourself!
As you go around, the rut walls mounting on either side begin to shut out reality. You can’t see or imagine anything other than what’s in front of you. And you are racing ahead so fast that you can’t entertain the thought that you’re going in circles. You don’t care. The self-confirmation bias that “you’ve cracked it” is too thrilling to question. Only the immediate next station in the loop of why-because can fit into your tunnel vision at this speed. The walls or the rut become battlements of belief, and you’ve disappeared behind them without even realising that you’ve shut the world out.
REALITY CRASH
If you trap yourself in a rut of habitual belief, watch out! Reality is going to derail you one day. The more stuck in your rut you are, the worse the crash will be. And that’s something I don’t want to happen to you. You’re under enough strain as it is in trying to figure out if you’re a man, a woman, a crossdresser or someone who’s genderfluid.
Drinking the social justice kool-aid, adopting dogma, believing things that other people tell you about yourself without examining those things properly – none of these will ever reveal you to yourself. It’ll just turn you into someone’s bitch.
I don’t want that for you. And to be able to fight it off, here’s a precept for you to grapple with in your own way: mental activity without mental growth is always a dead loss.
If your rationales seem self-evident, look for counter-evidence. If they seem unquestionable, question them. If you aren’t even aware you hold them, allow yourself to feel the niggles of doubt. Do not labour in semi-consciousness of where your thoughts arise or how they form or where they lead you. Be in charge of your mental process by asking questions.
FREEDOM ISN’T COMFORTING
It is when you stop asking questions that you become passive. When you become life’s bitch. Certainty is surrender. Eventually, we all must surrender, of course, so we must be wise about which absurdities and inconsistencies and doubts we allow in our surrender. For where we surrender, we stop growing, we ossify, we crystallise and eventually die.
In your explorations, do you want to find what is true or what is comfortable? They rarely go together.
You have to reach a state where you’re either able to explain your gender identity to yourself or find the premise of the question too boring or unquestionably self-evident to bother with because you have better things to do than ask it. Once your gender identity reaches one of these states, it becomes irrelevant to living your life. And you’re now free to get on with that.