The Words Transgender People Dare Not Speak to Cisgendered People.

You're not gonna like me saying this.

A table of actors, writers, theatre-makers, all scribbling notes in the margins and posing questions to the room. We’re laughing and joking; we’re debating line readings and intentions and meanings and staging. We’re wading into the deep waters of a new play that needs to be daring, that needs to be provocative.

So, of course it’s about sex. Sex and queer discovery.

Amongst the gaggle of allies, queers (and queer-adjacent) there are two trans folks. Myself and a man, a theatre veteran, who on countless occasions has whisked me away to other lands all while I sat in the dark of the auditorium. One of my co-writers has taken yesterday’s notes and bashed out a new monologue for this man to read and when he does, I hear my own words come from his mouth.

Not text I wrote, I’m writing the scenes for other characters in the play, but the snatches of phrases I uttered in the writer’s room. My co-writers, these cisgendered friends and confederates, have been exposed to my rambling rhetoric for years. They’ve been steeped in my brewing rants, witnessed me seethe and roil about so many topics as I utter them into the ether. Turns out something else had been happening while I, unvarnished and raw, vented my spleen about the world. Turns out they were doing the thing that good friends and allies should do.

They were listening.

So, now I get to sit and I watch a man I admire, using my words, to rant and argue. I get to watch a beloved member of the trans community, an astounding artist, describe the thing that transgender people dare not say to cisgendered people. The monologue that feels like it’s from my own lips and I think, “Fuck… Maybe this is too much to put out into the world?”

Maybe this is getting too provocative?

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The Thing I Cannot Say to Cisgendered People

Dear cisgendered folks, before I say the thing I’m not supposed to say I want you to know that your conception of gender is a garbage fire. While it’s been causing you harm for as long as anyone can reckon, it seems that now the “gender war” is on everyone’s lips, trans people well and truly are going to be the scapegoat.

It was never us who was doing things to y’all in public bathrooms, but it looks like we are gonna be the ones to suffer. Long before trans people became an iota more visible in the last few years some things had already been happening. You grew up in a world where the slightest sign that a kid in the playground was limp-wristed he’d have the shit kicked out of him. A world where girls who don’t have the body-shape-du-jour are mercilessly brutalized into hiding if not into outright self-destruction. You’re all so caught up in expectations of “men do this” and “women do that” that there’s a pile on to anyone who shows the slightest difference.

No matter how strange we seem, how bafflingly alien, we didn’t do this to you. The question of your gender and how much or little it should define your life has always been there. The only thing that has changed is that trans folk are just trying to carve out a little place for us.

Prometheus didn’t invent fire. He just showed it to people.

Trans people are the proverbial messengers who are being shot. We’re also being stabbed, and strangled, and beat, and legislated out of existence because we represent an uncomfortable truth that cisgendered people struggle to face.

You live in a shell of containment. You’ve lived in it so long that you think it’s some innate characteristic of your identity, your DNA, your chromosomes. It isn’t and never has been. Your gender expression is learned. It’s cultivated, curated and coerced into you. In classrooms, in church, in your homes.

This is why trans and gender-non-conforming people are so fucking dangerous.

We reveal that you’ve been groomed. Groomed to be good little factory workers, good little housewives. Groomed to yearn for the validation of authority. So much so that you think it’s in your nature to submit to a higher power, a god, a boss, a father, a husband. You’ve been taught to think that “only staying in your lane” is a virtue, that the rigid identity you’ve been assigned is a gift, despite never asking for it. Yeah, we understand, it’s terrifying to see someone existing outside of this.

So, what’s this awful thing I cannot say to cisgendered people?

It’s that your gender is a prison, and I feel pity for you.

Do you feel that coil in your chest? “A trans woman just said she feels pity for ME for NOT being trans?!? How dare she behave like there is something wrong with ME, when she’s the one with something wrong with HER!?!”

Yeah. That’s what I said. I pity you.

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Get the Pitchforks, She’s Gone Too Far This Time!

Trans people have spent so much energy trying to educate the world about the nature of gender dysphoria and here it sure sounds like I’m trying to say it’s a good thing but I’m not.

I’m saying that “Things can be two things”.

I know, I know… big shock that a trans person would have this perspective.

I can suffer, literally suffer, under the weight of gender dysphoria so much that it drags me down beneath the waves AND at the same time be grateful that I’m trans. YOU can be blessedly free of this suffering, exempt from this particular pain and unfortunately be less aware of the world. This pain, and it is pain that trans folk experience, reveals to us the truth of the world. Just as it does for non-binary and agender folk, just as it does for those brave souls who decided to fuck around with their gender and confirm that yeah, the doctors got it right when they made the declaration at birth.

Every day it’s revealed to us just how much your gender is used to control you.

Worst of all you’ll never have the chance to examine yourself, truly examine yourself in the way that trans and gender non-conforming people do. These are the words I heard spill from the mouth of a man I admire, a trans activist and artist, reading a monologue cribbed from a rambling diatribe I went on in front of my friends. A monologue that I still don’t know if we can get away with publicly speaking into the world. How much are we willing to alienate the very people we will rely on? To estrange the very people who’ll help save us from this crusade to have every trans person chained to the rock with their livers eaten by scavengers? How could we take such a terrible risk and tell cisgendered people that they can never truly know what this is like?

Because friends and allies listen, and they believe you when you speak honestly.

So, with heart-felt honesty, I can say: It isn’t your fault.

I understand why so few examine their gender the way we do. It’s easier to just… not. It’s easier to float along, buoyed up by the constant support and validation of conformity. Easier to suffer under a whole host of other things and leave this one in the “too hard basket”. Most people don’t even notice that the conversation for them is at best about “how terribly women are treated” and not “the fundamental underpinning of subjugation in western culture and how it is killing us all”. I wish more people could have a taste, just a tiny morsel of what this is like, but you’re just going to have to believe me when I say that as awful as it is sometimes, I wouldn’t trade my transness for anything… not even a shiny, pristine cisgendered body. Now that I’ve seen the world, how could I go back to pretending the grooming and coercion isn’t happening?

As lofty as all this is, what does it matter?

Because unfortunately, just like the rest of you, I’m still subject to capitalism and patriarchy and authoritarianism. In some ways more so now than ever before. This is part of the price for living true to myself, the price of refusing to be held hostage by my assigned gender. The layers of captivity run deep, but ultimately, there’s one less prison holding me back. For all the attempts to legislate us away there are parts of me that’s more free than you’ll ever be.

I know you won’t like being told this by someone like me, someone who, in the current rhetoric is almost universally seen as broken and in need of fixing or an aberration needing eradication. You wont like hearing from me that I feel sorry for you because you’ll never know what this feels like.

–S