Online trans communities as zero-gravity chambers

Paula Modersohn-Becker

My latest at Genspect (you can read the rest over there!):

The Reddit community r/questioning describes itself as “a helpful community for those questioning their sexuality and/or gender.” In practice, online communities like this serve as one of the first stops along a process of indoctrination, a place where people newly confused about gender find their disorientation and dissociation reinforced.

Take this 15-year-old, who started questioning her gender two years ago, who identifies herself as “possibly FtM” [female-to-male]:

My thoughts are more often “I want to be a guy” rather than “I am a guy”

But sometimes, I sort of stand where I stand and from my own perspective am standing there as a guy. Until someone passes by and goes “good afternoon young lady”.

Basically, sometimes I feel like I exist in the world as a guy – but living as a guy feels unreal. I’m born female, I guess that’s what I’ll live as. There’s not point even changing it, the first 15+ years will always have been lived by a female version of me.

It feels really weird and alienating and kind of painful to call myself a girl (even typing this just…). And being called by my name or she/her feels like being stabbed and it’s so triggering, but that only started recently after like 2 years of questioning. Although any other pronouns or names that I use online sometimes feel alienating as heck. He/him is weird and feels a bit funny (idk how I feel about it), they/them is basically as triggering as she/her.

My sister often tries to insult me by telling me that I look like a guy. I really hate it when she does it. Not really because she calls me a guy – it’s just, I need to defend myself and say “nah, I’m a girl” or something like that and the sentence just doesn’t come out right. And sometimes my mum will ‘help me’ defend myself by saying “No, she really looks like a girl”. or something and I just get triggered.

I don’t even know if I have dysphoria. People say it’s like hating your body, but I don’t feel that way. I don’t mind my body as a whole or something like I feel neutral about it but also a bit disconnected. I don’t really see my body as something connected to myself or something – it’s just there when I look in the mirror. But the way shirts and pants fit me because of my chest and thighs does make me want to rip off my head. I can still look at those parts standalone though, but I hate them for destroying how I look in clothing and making me hate swimming.

Lower dysphoria-wise, in a lot of situations I want male parts, but I don’t hate whatever I have right now. I still don’t want to describe it, refer to it, talk about it, interact with it or have people interact with it in the future or whatever (I might also be asexual though).

Unfortunately I can’t really experiment with gender expression until I’m a legal adult. I don’t know about men’s clothes, but women’s clothes don’t really work for me.

I have sort of talked about questioning with a friend of mine, who is trans himself. Sort of explaining these kind of thoughts (although more focused on body things and I never specified disliking my name or she/her or whatever). And he seems to agree that I am a cis girl. He does say that what I feel might be dysphoria though. But in a cis woman way or something?

Edit: probably forgot to mention a lot of things, I will likely add whatever I want to later, but one thought I had was that I can say “I want to be a guy but I don’t want to be trans”, because it’s true. But I can’t say “I am a guy but I’m not trans” and that hurts a bit. It’s not possible.
And another addition: I feel like if I were (am?) trans, it’s already too late. I might have fucked up 15 years and even if I came out right now and got on a waiting list or something, I would be 17 or 18 by the time anything would happen. And at that point my body would already be hopelessly poisoned by estrogen puberty.

I started questioning myself at age 13, but still haven’t figured out if I’m trans or not – I’m 15 now. If I were (am?) trans, wouldn’t I have been sure in those 2 full years? Surely I would have. But still just living my everyday life it just doesn’t sit right and it takes so much energy.

TLDR; there’s plenty of reasons that I ‘am not trans’, but I keep coming back to questioning everything.

She describes everything feeling weird—he/him, they/them, she/her. She writes about feeling triggered by her own name, but then notes that she only started feeling that way recently—“after like 2 years of questioning.”

She feels disconnected from her body and cannot avoid objectifying herself. She doesn’t talk about her body as something she inhabits—the “radiation” of her “subjectivity,” as Beauvoir put it—but as something she sees in the mirror, something that “destroys” how she looks in clothes.

Like many teenagers, she is uncomfortable with her body and its potentialities. She doesn’t want to “describe it, refer to it, talk about it, interact with it or have people interact with it in the future or whatever.” She thinks she might be asexual, but she might also just not be ready for the sexuality she sees everywhere on display.

She’s being bullied by her own sister and struggling to defend herself. She has trans friends, who only confuse her further. (What does it mean to feel dysphoria, “[b]ut in a cis woman way or something?”)

She wants to be a guy, maybe, but not trans. She recognizes the impossibility of this desire. If she carries on in online trans communities, she may forget these limits later. She may pursue something she once knew she could never become, something she knew would never be enough.

Like so many young people further down the road to transition than she is, she has that clock already ticking in her head. Maybe 15 is already too late. She imagines herself coming out and spending the next two or three years on a waiting list: “at that point my body would already be hopelessly poisoned by estrogen puberty.” The pressure is on.

After two years of questioning, she feels like she should know the answer. But she cannot let it go. Because she cannot reject the idea, because she cannot pin anything down—least of all whatever it might mean to be a ‘guy’ or a ‘girl’—she cannot move on.