“Is it my imagination, or are there more trans people now than there used to be?” Henry asked me recently over Zoom. Henry is a fifty-something black cisgender gay man; a fellow therapist, Henry and I have compared notes about client issues for years. He took several classes I taught years ago, preparing himself to work with trans clients.
Henry’s question isn’t easy to answer. We were never counted before, so how can we know how many of us there have been? And even now, we don’t all want to be counted, so how can we know how many of us there are today?
I had to come out to everyone in my world when I transitioned, asking them to change names and pronouns for me. On the other side of that process, I had a choice of coming out or not. If I didn’t, no one would ever know I wasn’t a cisgender man. Every use of the right name and pronoun affirmed my identity, and for a year or so I reveled in that, not coming out much to people who didn’t already know. I was out of the fishbowl of early transition. I have words to express this feeling now, though I couldn’t articulate my feelings so clearly at the time: it was the transition process itself that was marginalizing, not the identity on the other side of transition.
There is a dividing line in trans experience, and that is marked by the advent of the internet. Prior to that time, it wasn’t easy to form connections with others who had also transitioned. Invisible within the larger culture, happily living our lives, we were also invisible to each other. The concept of transition at that time was: “I have always hated my birth gender assignment, so now I’m going to happily ever after be a man (or woman).” Putting on my therapist hat for a moment: if a trans person expressed a desire to connect with others of their own identity, this wasn’t seen as seeking community; it was seen as regression to an earlier stage of transition. We were supposed to want to become men or women and blend into the binary, never looking back. (The logical extension of this view: there was no such thing as a non-binary, in-between identity at that time.)
The advent of the internet made it possible for us to more easily find each other, bypassing therapists who saw us as regressing. This was the beginnings of forming community. But many came before us. With little incentive to come out, living in authenticity while also being private, how in the world can we ever know how many people have transitioned since the process became medically possible some 70 years ago?
Another factor to consider is the cultural effect of second-wave feminism. The messages of that brand of feminism: Respect yourself. Be true to yourself. Don’t let others define you. Several generations down the road from the women who defined feminism, we are seeing youth growing up with these messages internalized. They are coming of age much younger, respecting their own and their peers’ search for identity. It would never occur to them to be in the closet, unless forced by family or life circumstance. (In part, it is this openness of identity that has conservatives scared for the future. But that’s a whole ’nother topic.) These youth have formed community under the common umbrella Q=queer, embracing all kinds of various sexual and gender identities in a fluid manner that defies pigeonholes, making it appear there are far more such youth than in previous generations.
In fact, it appears to me that there is far more freedom of self-definition and self-expresioin than in previous generations. The elders among us fought hard and long, stalwart in our determination to carve out cultural space for our L, G, B, and T identities at a time when we were mocked and beaten down for doing so.
Trade union activist Nicholas Klein said in a 1918 speech, “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.” Trans people were happy to be ignored for several decades. When we started coming out, ridicule was the initial result, leading to being attacked. We haven’t reached the monument stage yet, but we have established a place for ourselves among the people who have included our letter in the acronym for quite awhile without fully understanding what it means to do so.
So, there may or may not be more trans people these days, that’s impossible to say. But I can say with confidence that many more of us are out about our identities, willing to be counted.
Reid Vanderburgh 