I dont think the person in question was saying that you can’t be stealth. They’re saying that the cisgender world as the default cannot continue to exist. Trans people have to be visible, for many of us it’s not even a choice but. Trans people have to be normal. It has to be a normal okay thing for a trans person to exist.
Going stealth is okay. A lot of us want to do that. But not everyone can, nor does everyone want to. It’s also not something most of us can just up and go do. And for trans people who must be visibly trans, how the public perceives trans people has an extremely huge impact on their daily lives. If trans people are not normal, if being trans is not a normal thing to be, if being visibly trans is not a possibility, then we can’t be ourselves at all. In this context, retreating into the shadows means going back into the closet for many of us and not being able to transition and be ourselves. Trans people have to be visible. Not every one of us, but a lot of us. So we want to be accepted. We do not want to be pushed back into the closet.
It’s also for the next generation of trans people. So that trans youth growing up see trans adults in their community, so that trans adults see older trans people. So that trans people can see that life is possible as a trans person. So that people feel like they can be themselves and to see trans people living happily as themselves. To show trans youth who are just coming out that trans joy is real and it is possible to be happy and be trans. Trans people have lived in the shadows forever, we’ve lived behind closed doors and inside closets. It can’t be that way anymore. No one should feel like they have to conform to cisgender society. And so trans people have to be visible. That’s a lot more what people are talking about when we use the phrase “trans visibility”.
So that trans youth growing up see trans adults in their community
When i was a teenager back in the early 00s, i went to a trans support group. It largely consisted of older transitioners, age 50+, who were not living good lives, through no fault of their own. But it was a very dark experience for me. I expected that my life would play out like theirs, and i would join the 41% club. I never thought that I’d get to experience just being a regular girl, and that part still seems surreal a decade later.
This is a common experience for young trans people seeking support. This is “trans visibility” and it harmed me profoundly. What would’ve been really nice back then were successful role models who make their trans-ness an incidental detail. We have those now, and they’re not what I’d call “visible” to cis people, although they don’t hide who they are.
so that trans adults see older trans people.
I’m still waiting to find older rolemodels. Most of us are really sad when we get older. I don’t know how similar this is to the general lgbt population, but I’m concerned. My goal is to build a little family, and then just live a quiet life and keep each other close.
You’re allowed to be stealth. There’s nothing wrong with that. I will never be stealth. Neither will a lot of trans women. Do you see how I can’t just have a quiet life alone and have transness be an incidental detail about me? You’re kind of talking like being stealth is like pushing a button and BAM you just magically conform perfectly to cisgender society and are forever invisible.
That’s not the common trans experience. Most trans women are visibly trans, and most of us will always be visibly trans.
Your experience was at a time when there was no trans visibility. The average population was entirely ignorant of trans people. Being trans was not a “normal okay thing to be”. So yeah no kidding the people you met were older and depressed. Have you ever thought about why they felt that way? Do you think they transitioned knowing their communities their families and their societies would accept them? Do you think they saw trans women out and about in the real world visibly living happy lives even though they’re trans?
I’m sorry you had that experience. But you still don’t seem to understand what trans visibility is. We aren’t cisgender. We never will be cisgender no matter what we do. We will always be trans. Non-binary people also exist and are also trans. They will always be visible and have to explain their identities to others. Trans visibility means seeing trans people at the grocery store. It means seeing trans people at the gym. It means having trans co-workers, trans family members, it means having trans politicians and trans people working in public facing roles. Trans visibility means being trans is okay. That being trans is an okay thing to be. That you can be happy and be visibly trans.
Cisgender society has to come to an end. Society has to embrace gender diverse people and normalize them. You don’t have to be visibly trans if you don’t want to and are capable of going stealth. I for instance can’t do that. Do you understand that? No matter what I do I will always for the rest of my life be a visible trans woman. Do I not deserve happiness too? Should I be forced to hide who I am because I don’t pass? Cause you’re coming off like that’s how you perceive non-passing depresses trans people. Passing is a privilege. If you have it and want to conform to cisgender society by all means. That’s your prerogative. Do as you please. I can’t do that. I will never be able to do that. It’s either detransition and pretend to be a man or go outdoors visibly being a trans woman. I will never go back to pretending to be a man. So I will be visibly trans, and live the best happiest life I can so that trans people who see me know that it is possible to find joy in being trans.
I don’t think you’re understanding my point. Trans-ness is, for me, defined by gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria, by its very definition, is the pain i experience by not looking like a cis woman. Visibility is not a thing i want to celebrate. Visibility is the affliction.
Can everyone be stealth? No, absolutely not, and being trans should be normalized. But i still feel very uncomfortable with my debilitating endocrine disorder being used as a point of pride, in the same way gay pride is.
I’m gay, and I’m out and proud of that. I love being visibly gay. But being trans is different because it’s not a thing i want to be.
That’s your own internal transphobia. You are trans. It’s who you are. You cant go back in time and make yourself cisgender, neither can i. I’ve got gender dysphoria too, I’m aware of what it is. I had reassignment surgery because I’ve wanted to have a vagina since I was a child. I’ve been on hormones for almost 9 years and meticulously tracked my facial fat and breast development and hip development, even adjusting my own doses to get the absolute best results I could. I’m going to south Korea next year and spending over 12 thousand dollars to get vocal cord surgery to undo the damage that puberty did to them.
I understand that feeling. I’ve always wanted to be a normal cis girl too. And I love my friends who don’t treat me any differently than they do any other girls. I don’t understand men, and my friend groups are composed almost entirely of cis queer women. I like being seen as a woman without any other identifier, because that’s my gender that’s who I am.
But I am proud to be trans. I have had people I knew in real life tell me that seeing me transition and be happy and be confident was what convinced them that they could transition too. I met with one of my friend’s teenage kids who was questioning if he could transition. I’ll never forget the way his eyes nearly fell out of his head just to see a trans person, a trans adult just living a normal life. I loved that experience. I loved being able to show him that if I could do it so could he, and he has since started T and come out to his friends and family. I’m proud of that. I always will be. My best friend in high school, who at the time identified a cis gay man, transitioned because she saw me do it. She sent me a letter years later thanking me for being brave enough to do it when she was so scared to. I cried like a baby reading that.
Trans people can’t be hidden anymore. When trans people aren’t visible only pain and repression happens. I’m doing everything I can to rectify the dysphoria I feel in my body. I want to pass, I want people to see me for who I am. But I’m okay with being trans and I’m okay with showing that world that trans people can be happy. It’s not something anyone is responsible for. Like I said, there’s no shame in going stealth. It’s okay to not want to be visibly trans. But it has to be okay to be visibly trans.
Being trans isn’t simply a diagnosis on a piece of paper. You can act like it is but it isnt. We would hardly be talking about it in these terms if that was the case. Being trans is a life experience, the experience of being raised in a body and gender presentation that was incompatible with who we are. It’s the most awful painful alienating experience in the world, and many of us are literally killed for being trans. It’s not just a medical diagnosis. It’s not that simple. It’s a social class. Society does not treat trans and cis people the same based solely on our being trans.
When i was a teenager back in the early 00s, i went to a trans support group. It largely consisted of older transitioners, age 50+, who were not living good lives, through no fault of their own. But it was a very dark experience for me. I expected that my life would play out like theirs, and i would join the 41% club. I never thought that I’d get to experience just being a regular girl, and that part still seems surreal a decade later.
Older cis/het here. This was striking to me, because there has really been a change in my anecdotal experience interacting with trans people. The ones I met (usually through work) early on, especially in the 90s and early oughts were . . . difficult to be around. Not because I had anything against them, nor even because they wanted to be – rather, they were doing everything in their power to fit in, to be “normal”, even just to “pass” if you want to use that word. But it was just difficult, because (I think) they never knew when they were going to be attacked, including by people who acted friendly, so there was a lot of aggression in situations that didn’t necessarily call for it, and emotions injected into situations that were, for others, devoid of emotional content altogether. It was just hard all around.
At the time, they were not even remotely seen as normal by society. And it was sad, because they were regular people, just like everyone else, once the armor was dropped and work started. (One of them I knew was absolutely brilliant: she saw the potential for the web back when the web was still text only.) But looking back, and older now myself, it seems that they had gone through SO MUCH SHIT at every level of their lives, shit that was STILL going on, everything from familial rejection to mere strangers being assholes, that I think they were just through their individual stores of natural resilience. I think they couldn’t readily navigate normal “unloaded” civilian interactions because their entire lives had been turned into a battlefield by any passing asshole who wanted to make it one, and at the time, there was NO end in sight.
A lot of that has changed today. And at the very least, one of the best things that has happened is the normalization of trans people as human beings in the media and entertainment. Elliott Page, for example: that show carried on without a blink. That’s possible now. It absolutely was not back then. And even just speaking for myself, back then I’d have noticed if someone was trans or seemed so. Now I don’t even care anymore: you’re just you, and I’m just me. And that’s how it should be, IMO.
It is absolutely horrible that you even have to fight the battles that you do, and I am frightened for you in terms of the way cruelty and even the wish of extermination is being normalized, not just toward you but all LGBTQIA+ and anyone quantitatively “different” on sight. But I wrote all of that to say this:
Today is a different day, even with all the hate. Like it or not, even the people that use their voices to openly wish you harm are validating your existence and your humanity even against their own will. Back then, it was a low-level kind of simmering dislike and fear of “the other,” but now there are a great many cis/hets like myself who are very firmly in your camp simply because we hate hatred, and we’ve been forced to take a stand because the trans discussion is everywhere now. And that’s in your favor.
You don’t have older role models because they all lived in a hell of isolation, ridicule, and societal rejection that is impossible to even describe now. They didn’t have anything left to be nice or heroic people with, because it was already all used up by the time you met them. But that’s not the case anymore. I was a young adult when the Renée Richards thing came out, and I don’t even want to tell you what a common trope that was at the time; but today you’re not one in a hundred million, not even one in a million, and all of those trans people have helped to normalize the whole thing on a societal level.
Back then, you could fully expect to hear ongoing wisecracks on Johnny Carson about it; today no one in the mainstream media will risk their employment that way. That’s how much it has changed. Today, you have social media; back then it was television and the newspaper, and if the tv laughed at someone or something then it was okay for you to laugh too – and people did, openly and repeatedly, ad nauseam. Today, you might get a laugh – OR you might get properly told off by people that recognize causeless hatred for what it is.
For as much shit as you have gone through and are going through now, I have to say you literally have a normalcy and even a basic acceptance today that the transpeople before you knew nothing of.
From the outside looking in, I personally think you’ll be the hero you were looking for back then. Too late for yourself but in time for those behind you. Society has changed, and if, IF we can avoid the descent into authoritarianism that makes your very existence a political football, there will be a day when you are just as “normal” and accepted as anyone else. That’s where we were headed before Trump, anyway.
My apologies if I have offended in any way; I just wanted to share with you how it was back in the days when you were looking for a hero and there were none to be found; older role models that weren’t models of anything but sadness after a life full of rejection. There were reasons, many of which have changed, many of which you and yours are changing even now. Maybe it will round out the understanding of what they went through a little bit better for you.
I dont think the person in question was saying that you can’t be stealth. They’re saying that the cisgender world as the default cannot continue to exist. Trans people have to be visible, for many of us it’s not even a choice but. Trans people have to be normal. It has to be a normal okay thing for a trans person to exist.
Going stealth is okay. A lot of us want to do that. But not everyone can, nor does everyone want to. It’s also not something most of us can just up and go do. And for trans people who must be visibly trans, how the public perceives trans people has an extremely huge impact on their daily lives. If trans people are not normal, if being trans is not a normal thing to be, if being visibly trans is not a possibility, then we can’t be ourselves at all. In this context, retreating into the shadows means going back into the closet for many of us and not being able to transition and be ourselves. Trans people have to be visible. Not every one of us, but a lot of us. So we want to be accepted. We do not want to be pushed back into the closet.
It’s also for the next generation of trans people. So that trans youth growing up see trans adults in their community, so that trans adults see older trans people. So that trans people can see that life is possible as a trans person. So that people feel like they can be themselves and to see trans people living happily as themselves. To show trans youth who are just coming out that trans joy is real and it is possible to be happy and be trans. Trans people have lived in the shadows forever, we’ve lived behind closed doors and inside closets. It can’t be that way anymore. No one should feel like they have to conform to cisgender society. And so trans people have to be visible. That’s a lot more what people are talking about when we use the phrase “trans visibility”.
When i was a teenager back in the early 00s, i went to a trans support group. It largely consisted of older transitioners, age 50+, who were not living good lives, through no fault of their own. But it was a very dark experience for me. I expected that my life would play out like theirs, and i would join the 41% club. I never thought that I’d get to experience just being a regular girl, and that part still seems surreal a decade later.
This is a common experience for young trans people seeking support. This is “trans visibility” and it harmed me profoundly. What would’ve been really nice back then were successful role models who make their trans-ness an incidental detail. We have those now, and they’re not what I’d call “visible” to cis people, although they don’t hide who they are.
I’m still waiting to find older rolemodels. Most of us are really sad when we get older. I don’t know how similar this is to the general lgbt population, but I’m concerned. My goal is to build a little family, and then just live a quiet life and keep each other close.
You’re allowed to be stealth. There’s nothing wrong with that. I will never be stealth. Neither will a lot of trans women. Do you see how I can’t just have a quiet life alone and have transness be an incidental detail about me? You’re kind of talking like being stealth is like pushing a button and BAM you just magically conform perfectly to cisgender society and are forever invisible.
That’s not the common trans experience. Most trans women are visibly trans, and most of us will always be visibly trans.
Your experience was at a time when there was no trans visibility. The average population was entirely ignorant of trans people. Being trans was not a “normal okay thing to be”. So yeah no kidding the people you met were older and depressed. Have you ever thought about why they felt that way? Do you think they transitioned knowing their communities their families and their societies would accept them? Do you think they saw trans women out and about in the real world visibly living happy lives even though they’re trans?
I’m sorry you had that experience. But you still don’t seem to understand what trans visibility is. We aren’t cisgender. We never will be cisgender no matter what we do. We will always be trans. Non-binary people also exist and are also trans. They will always be visible and have to explain their identities to others. Trans visibility means seeing trans people at the grocery store. It means seeing trans people at the gym. It means having trans co-workers, trans family members, it means having trans politicians and trans people working in public facing roles. Trans visibility means being trans is okay. That being trans is an okay thing to be. That you can be happy and be visibly trans.
Cisgender society has to come to an end. Society has to embrace gender diverse people and normalize them. You don’t have to be visibly trans if you don’t want to and are capable of going stealth. I for instance can’t do that. Do you understand that? No matter what I do I will always for the rest of my life be a visible trans woman. Do I not deserve happiness too? Should I be forced to hide who I am because I don’t pass? Cause you’re coming off like that’s how you perceive non-passing depresses trans people. Passing is a privilege. If you have it and want to conform to cisgender society by all means. That’s your prerogative. Do as you please. I can’t do that. I will never be able to do that. It’s either detransition and pretend to be a man or go outdoors visibly being a trans woman. I will never go back to pretending to be a man. So I will be visibly trans, and live the best happiest life I can so that trans people who see me know that it is possible to find joy in being trans.
I don’t think you’re understanding my point. Trans-ness is, for me, defined by gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria, by its very definition, is the pain i experience by not looking like a cis woman. Visibility is not a thing i want to celebrate. Visibility is the affliction.
Can everyone be stealth? No, absolutely not, and being trans should be normalized. But i still feel very uncomfortable with my debilitating endocrine disorder being used as a point of pride, in the same way gay pride is.
I’m gay, and I’m out and proud of that. I love being visibly gay. But being trans is different because it’s not a thing i want to be.
That’s your own internal transphobia. You are trans. It’s who you are. You cant go back in time and make yourself cisgender, neither can i. I’ve got gender dysphoria too, I’m aware of what it is. I had reassignment surgery because I’ve wanted to have a vagina since I was a child. I’ve been on hormones for almost 9 years and meticulously tracked my facial fat and breast development and hip development, even adjusting my own doses to get the absolute best results I could. I’m going to south Korea next year and spending over 12 thousand dollars to get vocal cord surgery to undo the damage that puberty did to them.
I understand that feeling. I’ve always wanted to be a normal cis girl too. And I love my friends who don’t treat me any differently than they do any other girls. I don’t understand men, and my friend groups are composed almost entirely of cis queer women. I like being seen as a woman without any other identifier, because that’s my gender that’s who I am.
But I am proud to be trans. I have had people I knew in real life tell me that seeing me transition and be happy and be confident was what convinced them that they could transition too. I met with one of my friend’s teenage kids who was questioning if he could transition. I’ll never forget the way his eyes nearly fell out of his head just to see a trans person, a trans adult just living a normal life. I loved that experience. I loved being able to show him that if I could do it so could he, and he has since started T and come out to his friends and family. I’m proud of that. I always will be. My best friend in high school, who at the time identified a cis gay man, transitioned because she saw me do it. She sent me a letter years later thanking me for being brave enough to do it when she was so scared to. I cried like a baby reading that.
Trans people can’t be hidden anymore. When trans people aren’t visible only pain and repression happens. I’m doing everything I can to rectify the dysphoria I feel in my body. I want to pass, I want people to see me for who I am. But I’m okay with being trans and I’m okay with showing that world that trans people can be happy. It’s not something anyone is responsible for. Like I said, there’s no shame in going stealth. It’s okay to not want to be visibly trans. But it has to be okay to be visibly trans.
Being trans isn’t simply a diagnosis on a piece of paper. You can act like it is but it isnt. We would hardly be talking about it in these terms if that was the case. Being trans is a life experience, the experience of being raised in a body and gender presentation that was incompatible with who we are. It’s the most awful painful alienating experience in the world, and many of us are literally killed for being trans. It’s not just a medical diagnosis. It’s not that simple. It’s a social class. Society does not treat trans and cis people the same based solely on our being trans.
Older cis/het here. This was striking to me, because there has really been a change in my anecdotal experience interacting with trans people. The ones I met (usually through work) early on, especially in the 90s and early oughts were . . . difficult to be around. Not because I had anything against them, nor even because they wanted to be – rather, they were doing everything in their power to fit in, to be “normal”, even just to “pass” if you want to use that word. But it was just difficult, because (I think) they never knew when they were going to be attacked, including by people who acted friendly, so there was a lot of aggression in situations that didn’t necessarily call for it, and emotions injected into situations that were, for others, devoid of emotional content altogether. It was just hard all around.
At the time, they were not even remotely seen as normal by society. And it was sad, because they were regular people, just like everyone else, once the armor was dropped and work started. (One of them I knew was absolutely brilliant: she saw the potential for the web back when the web was still text only.) But looking back, and older now myself, it seems that they had gone through SO MUCH SHIT at every level of their lives, shit that was STILL going on, everything from familial rejection to mere strangers being assholes, that I think they were just through their individual stores of natural resilience. I think they couldn’t readily navigate normal “unloaded” civilian interactions because their entire lives had been turned into a battlefield by any passing asshole who wanted to make it one, and at the time, there was NO end in sight.
A lot of that has changed today. And at the very least, one of the best things that has happened is the normalization of trans people as human beings in the media and entertainment. Elliott Page, for example: that show carried on without a blink. That’s possible now. It absolutely was not back then. And even just speaking for myself, back then I’d have noticed if someone was trans or seemed so. Now I don’t even care anymore: you’re just you, and I’m just me. And that’s how it should be, IMO.
It is absolutely horrible that you even have to fight the battles that you do, and I am frightened for you in terms of the way cruelty and even the wish of extermination is being normalized, not just toward you but all LGBTQIA+ and anyone quantitatively “different” on sight. But I wrote all of that to say this:
Today is a different day, even with all the hate. Like it or not, even the people that use their voices to openly wish you harm are validating your existence and your humanity even against their own will. Back then, it was a low-level kind of simmering dislike and fear of “the other,” but now there are a great many cis/hets like myself who are very firmly in your camp simply because we hate hatred, and we’ve been forced to take a stand because the trans discussion is everywhere now. And that’s in your favor.
You don’t have older role models because they all lived in a hell of isolation, ridicule, and societal rejection that is impossible to even describe now. They didn’t have anything left to be nice or heroic people with, because it was already all used up by the time you met them. But that’s not the case anymore. I was a young adult when the Renée Richards thing came out, and I don’t even want to tell you what a common trope that was at the time; but today you’re not one in a hundred million, not even one in a million, and all of those trans people have helped to normalize the whole thing on a societal level.
Back then, you could fully expect to hear ongoing wisecracks on Johnny Carson about it; today no one in the mainstream media will risk their employment that way. That’s how much it has changed. Today, you have social media; back then it was television and the newspaper, and if the tv laughed at someone or something then it was okay for you to laugh too – and people did, openly and repeatedly, ad nauseam. Today, you might get a laugh – OR you might get properly told off by people that recognize causeless hatred for what it is.
For as much shit as you have gone through and are going through now, I have to say you literally have a normalcy and even a basic acceptance today that the transpeople before you knew nothing of.
From the outside looking in, I personally think you’ll be the hero you were looking for back then. Too late for yourself but in time for those behind you. Society has changed, and if, IF we can avoid the descent into authoritarianism that makes your very existence a political football, there will be a day when you are just as “normal” and accepted as anyone else. That’s where we were headed before Trump, anyway.
My apologies if I have offended in any way; I just wanted to share with you how it was back in the days when you were looking for a hero and there were none to be found; older role models that weren’t models of anything but sadness after a life full of rejection. There were reasons, many of which have changed, many of which you and yours are changing even now. Maybe it will round out the understanding of what they went through a little bit better for you.