In Search of Truth Among Myths and Misinformation

To be transgender is to be among a minority that challenges the status quo simply by their very existence. In the last twenty years, the Internet changed everything: it opened a whole new world of communication to transgender people who thought they were alone in the world.

And I want to be clear about what that meant, because it saved people. Before the forums, there was a magazine you ordered in a plain wrapper, and a post office box, and a lot of nights convinced you were the only one. The Internet ended that, and I’ll never say a word against it for that reason alone.

But it did something else at the same time. It gave every opinion a microphone, a timestamp, and the authority of appearing in print. And a thing typed confidently at midnight by a stranger reads exactly like a fact.

Like many of you, I belong to several online forums: places where people exchange ideas, have discussions, and to some extent make friends. What astounds me, no, startles me, is that I’ve heard statements “as fact” about a broad range of topics, from what motivates gays, transsexuals, drag queens, women, and CDs, to what a trans person can come to expect at different levels of their evolution. And most of it is stereotypical rhetoric, failing to realize that there is a wide spectrum to the word transgender and that not every experience is or will be the same.

You can watch it happen in a single thread. Someone new posts — frightened, usually, and careful with their words — and asks some version of “is this normal, is this what I am?” And within the hour three people have told her what she is. Not what they are. What SHE is. With certainty. Having never met her.

Because someone has a compulsion as a child to wear mom’s clothes — and in later life buys their own and continues that practice — doesn’t mean they actually understand it. What it does mean is that they understand how it makes THEM feel, no more, no less. It isn’t fact, it isn’t truth; it is merely an opinion subject to change based on future life experience. Still, many search for headlines and theories to support pre-adopted positions rather than gathering information and experience first, then forming an opinion later. And anyone who challenges their adopted truth is quickly dismissed: “You just don’t get it.” In fact, many times some of us do get it because we’ve been there. We don’t happen to agree.

Here is the error: a sample of one. You have lived exactly one transgender life — yours — and no matter how closely you’ve examined it, that is still one data point out of millions. It tells you everything about you and nothing whatsoever about the woman three posts down. The feeling is real. The conclusion drawn from it is a guess. Those are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where most of this trouble lives.

“You just don’t get it”

I want to stop on that phrase, because it’s the most effective four words in the community, and it does more damage than anything else on the board.

It can’t be argued with. That’s its function. It isn’t a rebuttal; it’s a door closing — and it converts any disagreement into evidence of the other person’s ignorance. If you agree with me, you understand; if you don’t, you haven’t got there yet. There is no answer you can give that the phrase doesn’t already absorb.

And the maddening part is that sometimes it’s true. Sometimes a person really hasn’t been where you’ve been. But used as a reflex, it ends the only conversation worth having. I’ve been dismissed with it by people half my age who had been out of the closet for eleven months. I didn’t get it. I’d simply gotten somewhere else.

Some have not explored their own transgender behavior (or others’) beyond the bedroom door or perhaps an annual transgender social outing, yet continue to make careless statements about the community at large that they defend with the veracity of a lioness protecting her Pride — all based on experiences they have never had. This doesn’t help the individual or the community, and it further confuses an already confused mainstream that we should be educating.

Notice the pattern there, because it holds almost everywhere: certainty tends to run in inverse proportion to experience. The people I know who have lived the longest in this, who have transitioned or decided not to, who have lost marriages and kept them, are almost always the ones who answer with “well, for me it was…” The absolute declarations come from somewhere closer to the beginning. That isn’t a criticism of beginners. It’s just what the beginning sounds like.

The cost of a confident stranger

Some are too quick to latch onto party lines, someone else’s story, and repeat it as their own. And you have to wonder whether this comes from impatience to learn the truth of oneself, or from how they want to be perceived.

I’ve written more about that borrowing problem in Someone Else’s Story, because it deserves its own column. But I’ll say the short version here: a ready-made story is a relief. Finding out who you are is slow, frightening, and has no deadline. Adopting a story somebody else already finished because you like the way it sounds takes an evening, and it comes with a vocabulary, a set of answers, and people who will agree with you. Of course we reach for it. But it’s lazy.

The cost falls on whoever reads the thread next. Picture her: forty-four, married, up at two in the morning with the door locked, reading. She is not weighing competing views. She is looking for a map. And whatever the most confident person in that thread said is the map she leaves with — and she may follow it for years before noticing the roads don’t match the country.

That’s what’s actually at stake when we state our opinions as facts. It isn’t a debating point. It’s somebody’s decade.

And there is the second cost, out past our own doors. We complain — rightly — that the mainstream understands nothing about us, that the coverage is a caricature, that policy gets written by people who have never met one of us. Then we hand them the caricature ourselves, pre-assembled, in our own words, in public. If we can’t manage accuracy about ourselves among ourselves, we are in a poor position to demand it from strangers.

Which, I’d point out, is the same disease that produces the sort of federal report I took apart in Ask a Crooked Question — a conclusion reached first, evidence gathered afterward to dress it. It wears a lab coat there and a screen name here. It’s the same animal.

While some may, in fact, be “A woman trapped in a man’s body,” or “A man that has a feminine side,” there are others that use it as a shield to protect them from being categorized in some other way, less attractive in their own mind. They cringe at the sound of saying, “I cross-dress because I like the feeling of it.” But to adopt a false truth and then sprinkle it with your own experience inhibits any legitimate effort to unravel the transgender puzzle.

What honesty sounds like

I’m not asking anybody to stop talking. I’m asking for four words at the front of the sentence.

“In my experience.” That’s it. That’s the whole reform. It costs you nothing, it’s accurate, and it hands the person reading the one thing they actually need — the knowledge that they are hearing a life, not a law. “The truth is” closes a door. “In my experience” leaves it open, and on the other side of that door is somebody still deciding who she is.

I’ve asked myself the same questions in Play It Again Sam-antha, and the honest answer I keep arriving at is that my reasons have changed more than once, and will probably change again. If I’d written my 1998 certainties in stone, I’d have spent the next twenty years defending a stranger’s position.

Be suspicious of anyone who has it all worked out. Be most suspicious when that person is you.

Agree? Disagree? You’re entitled; tell me what you think below.