imagining my life turning out differently
15 January 2025
As I have grown as a transgender woman, I have necessarily viewed my own experiences and future as being fundamentally altered and constructed by my identity. I am a trans person, I always will be, and whether I choose to apply that label to my younger self, that aspect of myself has certainly always affected my life. Therefore I naturally have at times wondered what my life and self would be like had I not been transgender.
I recall when I was younger, a newly cracked egg, considering the possibility of “not being trans” I tended to view it through the lens of being a cis man. I considered how my past relationships would have gone, what path I may have chosen for myself, how my various friendships and self-discovery would have gone. Maybe I would’ve stayed close with that friend. Maybe this relationship wouldn’t have fallen apart. Maybe I would’ve loved myself a bit more.
This lens rather fascinates me as it highlights that, at the time, I did not fully allow myself to even accept myself as a woman. The difference between being transgender and being cisgender wasn’t simply that in one reality I was trans and in another I was cis. It was that my gender itself would have gone “unaltered” from how I expected it.
It makes a lot of sense, looking back. When I was younger, I always naturally viewed my future self as man, just as I was expected to. How would I even realistically view my future self as a woman? Obviously, transition wasn’t ever a part of my projections; transition was for other people, something I could not even allow myself to consider. No, my future self was always to be inherently presumed a man, bound against my own subconscious (or, at times, not so subconscious) desire.
That I assumed the cis version of myself to of course be a man reflects an unconscious acceptance of everything I had been taught to view normal. My whole life I had been raised, socialized, conditioned, to view my body as something that simply was a man, regardless of my desire, and therefore that even had I transitioned my default state would of course always be a man. How could it not be?
Recalling Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble reminds me that gender is oftentimes “inscribed” onto the body, making a surface out of the body. In other words, the construction of gender demands the body itself act as a manifesto of it, serving to propagate the ideology of binary and essential gender/sex to those sufficiently socialized. When you see a silhouette of a body with narrow shoulders, wide hips, long hair, and read it as a “female body,” that is the inscription of gender reproducing your socialization. When you listen to the radio and hear a gruff masculine voice and quietly think to yourself, “that’s a man,” that is you silently accepting the idea that a body can somehow convey a gender.
When I think back to the time when “cis me” was actually a man, I can’t help but realize that was a tragic product of my own indoctrination that somehow my body conveyed a set gender, and that to be trans was to deny that and work to subvert that “truth” through whatever means possible.
Nowadays, when I think about what my life would be like if I were cis, I naturally start from the assumption that I am a woman. In some way, my identity as a transgender person has been utterly cut away from my identity as a woman (while intersections remain) to produce a feeling that is rather freeing. It is not that my transness subverts my body’s inscription, but rather, my body is more like a canvas to play with, to paint, to dress, to appreciate, all utterly disconnected from gender.
If I were cis, what kind of people would I have made friends with? Would I still be as close with my sister? How would my parent’s attitude towards me change? Interestingly, whether I am wondering what my life would have been like as a cis man or a cis woman, I do not really see my future at all; it doesn’t quite exist. I look in retrograde to my past experiences, wondering what might’ve been. When I look to the future, I necessarily start from what is; I am a transgender woman, that is not changing, so what will happen? To start from “what if I were a cis woman?” would require a kind of paradoxical understanding of events, to know a functionally non-existent present self from whose lens to consider the future.
I know one thing though. If I were cis, I would not be the person I am today. I would lack my experience, my perspective, my history, my growth, my challenges, my being, in a way where I don’t think I would quite recognize myself. Would I have my own set of these things? Sure. But they would not be mine, and I wonder if this person would be me. It’s lines of thought like this that make me appreciate my existence as the person I am. It’s times like this where I really look myself in the mirror and think to myself, I’m glad it’s turned out this way.