Episode eight of the Some Gender Going On podcast: Internalized Transphobia: Disgust and Evil. You can play it or download it here:

SGGO 8: Internalized Transphobia: Disgust and Evil

This one’s a sad episode.

Notes

This time, we’ll be talking about internalized transphobia, and feelings of disgust and of evil.

This is a sad one.

There’s a societal attitude, which was especially pervasive when I was growing up, that gender exploration, especially when visible to others, causes direct harm to others. If I go out in a dress, I am so revolting, so ugly, so monstrous, so threatening, that the people who have the misfortune to see and/or interact with me are significantly and importantly harmed by that interaction.

That gender exploration is actively violent, because the disgust it engenders is normal and that I am choosing to inflict that disgust on others by engaging in this, and being unethical and wrong and violent in doing so. And I could just hide myself, repress myself, and no one would be hurt. Because hurting me doesn’t count as a bad thing because I can’t be hurt just by being cis, everyone wats to be cis, being cis is good and right and clean and pure. Only other people can be hurt, by me sullying them with my presense and my existence.

That was the message I grew up with.

I internalized this message. I internalized it so much that I felt I was being unethical and wrong and violent even by exploring my gender in complete privacy when I was a kid.

And it combined with my dysphoria. I really didn’t like how I looked, how I felt, my body and my emerging masculine appearance. So I was vulnerable to those messages of disgust, prone to feel that way about myself.

And while thinking, believing, even knowing that what I was doing was wrong and disgusting and violent and evil, I explored anyways.

Huck Finn

I resonated with a moment in Huckleberry Finn, which I read around then. Huck is torn between helping his friend Jim escape down the river, and doing what the paragons of goodness in his society, like his church teacher, tell him he should do, which is turn Jim in.

Huck has never been the most moral kid, he’s always getting into mischievous scrapes. But now he’s faced with a desperately important moral decision: help his friend, or turn him in. He knew what was right and what was wrong. Helping his friend is wrong. Turning him in is right. That’s what a good person would do.

He weighs up his options, and picks what he knows is wrong, helping his friend Jim. Because that’s what his heart tells him.

Now, I am perfectly aware that gender exploration isn’t nearly as morally weighty as helping your friend flee enslavement.

But still, I knew there was a right and a wrong. And I chose wrong. Because that’s what my heart told me.

And it is a strange feeling to look back from a distance of decades, and see that my heart knew better than the paragons of my society. Just like it would’ve been for Huck if he grew up and internalized the horror and evil of slavery and see that his heart knew better than his society.

And sure, there’s plenty of people who didn’t learn, who are still transphobic. But they’re not very convincing, because it’s not uniform and omnipresent. Now it’s just some assholes, or a lot of assholes, but it’s not everyone I interact with. Gender exploration is fine and good and cool actually. It’s a lovely world to live in.

Community of disgust

Back then, I wasn’t the only person feeling disgusted at myself, feeling violent and monstrous and evil. There were a lot of other represeed trans people and eggs and aspiring gender non-conformists. And a lot of us were in the same boat. And I found some of them online.

And this was a real negative community. A community convinced of our own disgustingness, violence, monstrousness and evil. And in that group, there wasn’t a strong separation between this kind of thing society disapproved of, and a lot of other things. Bigoted shit, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia of course, and much worse. I never posted - I was terrified of having any online presence, and certainly not in this space. But I spent a lot of time there, and I read a lot of what was being said.

I didn’t like it. I was there for the gender exploration content, which was there and which was often nice, but I really didn’t appreciate all the rest of it. And it kept me feeling gross, even as I started to feel more comfortable with my gender exploration. Because a lot of it was out-and-out garbage, beliefs that set you on the road to being a much worse person.

Because if transness is disgusting and evil, and we’re doing it anyways, then why shouldn’t every disgusting and evil thing be fine? But transness is actually lovely, society just hadn’t gotten the message, and that other shit was most definitely not.

It wasn’t a nice place for a kid to grow up. And it left me with a lot of bullshit to deal with. I didn’t outride belief that garbage, but I treated it as normal or unalarming, when it was in fact very alarming. A lot of garbage to reject. But I’m doing better, over time, doing better now.

Protect trans kids

When I hear “protect trans kids” I never feel like they’re talking about a younger me. Because I have trouble thinking of younger me as someone innocent, fragile, in need of protection. Instead, all I could think of myself of, then, was as someone monstrous, someone dangerous, someone to be protected from.

I’m sure someone will try to twist this all to make me out to be a horrible, ugly, dangerous, violent, monstrous person, somehow. That I’m the monster their kids need protecting from. That some future kid like the kid I was is a monster too. Because a mindset of disgust, fear, and protection will never help me, or people like me or the kid I used to be.

Because the system never really changes. It’s built around the narrative that different is weird is bad is wrong, and that’s not changing anytime soon. So the system still thinks I’m disgusting, even if it’s quieter about it.

But I don’t believe it, anymore. I haven’t for a long time. That’s what’s important. The disgust of the general public never mattered that much, not compared to being disgusted by myself.

I’m not, anymore. I love myself. I am beautiful, to me. I’m the person I want to be.

This is the future. A future where I’m not disgusted by myself. And you don’t have to be, either. Welcome to the future. Isn’t it marvelous?

Thank you for listening, thank you for thinking, and I hope you enjoyed this episode!