You and Your Gender Identity: A Guide to Discovery

Disclaimer: The contents of this book are presented for informational and supportive purposes only and are not intended to replace the services of a mental health or medical professional. Should you have questions about the presented material, contact your own doctor or clinician. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact 911 (if it is available in your area) or go to the nearest emergency room.

Copyright © 2017 by Dara Hoffman-Fox

Toward a Transformation of the Self © 2017 by Zinnia Jones

Introduction © 2017 by Sam Dylan Finch

Foreword © 2017 by Zander Keig

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Jean Mangahas and Jane Sheppard

Cover photo by Shutterstock

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2305-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2307-8

Printed in the United States of America

To the hundreds of counseling clients I’ve worked with since opening my private practice in 2008. Theirs are the faces and stories that inspire me to continue forward on my mission: to support and guide those who are transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse, and to create a welcoming, safe, and supportive world in which these individuals are free to be themselves.

Table of Contents

A note on this book: This book was originally conceived as a print edition. Many of the sections contain prompts or exercises that would normally require a written answer. Due to the limitations of e-readers, you can't fill these in on-screen. Feel free to use the exercises as a template and write down your answers in an alternate format.

Toward a Transformation of the Self, by Zinnia Jones

Foreword by Sam Dylan Finch

Introduction by Zander Keig, LCSW

Preface by Dara Hoffman-Fox, LPC

The Ins and Outs of This Guidebook

Self-Care Checklist

Stage One: Preparation

Introduction to Stage One: Preparation

Chapter 1: Why Do I Need to Find Out the Truth?

Chapter 2: The Role of Fear on Your Journey

Chapter 3: Feeling the Fear and Doing It Anyway

Chapter 4: Building Your Support Team

Stage Two: Reflection

Introduction to Stage Two: Reflection

Chapter 5: You and Your Gender Identity: Childhood (Ages 3–11)

Chapter 6: You and Your Gender Identity: Adolescence (Ages 12–17)

Chapter 7: The Role of Shame and Guilt

Stage Three: Exploration

Introduction to Stage Three: Exploration

Wisdom Tips

Chapter 8: Keeping in Mind the Big Picture

Chapter 9: Deconstructing Gender

Chapter 10: Finding Support Through Connecting with Others

Chapter 11: Listening to Your Gut

Chapter 12: Wrestling with Uncertainty

Chapter 13: Actively Exploring Your Gender Identity

Chapter 14: Putting It All Together

Conclusion: What Now?

Parting Thoughts

Acknowledgments

Contributors

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

—C. G. Jung

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

—Joseph Campbell

How am I not myself?

—Brad Stand, I Heart Huckabees

Toward a Transformation of the Self

BY ZINNIA JONES

Gender feels fundamental to the self and seems as if it should be the most obvious thing in the world to us. Instead, some of us find this occluded by a dense fog of uncertainty, misconceptions, anxieties, and stereotypes—animated by self-doubt and amplified by harmful cultural messages about what’s expected of different genders. For those who find we can’t comfortably fit within a given gender assignment, there is a strained relationship between ourselves and the world: we’re given so little exposure to the conceptual, metaphorical, and literal language needed to recognize and describe who we are. Who could be expected to look at the crude caricatures and shallow sensationalism that represent the world’s understanding of gender variance and see themselves in these depictions? In a very real way, we find ourselves unable to speak. It’s this starvation of understanding that continues to deny us such a key element of ourselves—and when we’re still so uncertain of who and what we are, how can we find our place in the world?

For me, the distance from myself—from the world—took on an almost physical presence. Straining to hear my own thoughts, I often found nothing but static. It was impossible to visualize my own form or mentally place myself anywhere. Even my skin felt as if its surface were unstable, flickering, somehow ill-fitting, forcing a blurry-edged separation from reality itself. Such an alienation from life exacts a heavy toll on us as we simply try to continue existing in this world.

You’re likely reading this book because you have questions about yourself that are significant enough that you’re prepared to work at finding the answers. You’ve been giving serious thought to your experience of gender, its role in your life, and how this may need to change. In terms of value in clarifying such questions and providing meaningful direction toward self-understanding, Dara’s book is revolutionary. Most media depictions emphasize the most physically striking outcomes of gender questioning: visuals of applying makeup or shaving, of hospital beds or operating theaters. They offer little in the way of education about the necessary steps that precede this—the introspection and deliberative self-exploration that’s far less flashy and photogenic, yet absolutely fundamental to everything that may follow. This book is an ambitious endeavor designed to facilitate achieving a basic realization of one’s gender and deciding what should be done with it.

Dara’s comprehensive guide presents a detailed walkthrough of the process of more firmly establishing your gender: breaking through the fears that can cloud your self-perception, taking a clear and thorough look around the current landscape of your gender, and determining where to voyage outward from there. It is one of the most complete collections of such advice that has ever been compiled. Techniques for gender exploration have typically been scattered across the Internet, circulated by individuals and communities offering a listening ear and a helping hand. I’ve personally been contacted by hundreds of gender-questioning people who simply wanted someone to help them clarify their thoughts and hopefully find a new coherence in their selfhood. It’s an experience I’ve been through myself, seeking out other trans people and scraping together as many insights as I could find from those who had worked through this before.

This hard-won awareness and the activation of a new understanding of the self is of the utmost importance to those figuring out their gender. With an impressively detailed toolkit of exercises, Dara’s book has the potential to streamline and accelerate this process in an extraordinary fashion. This is the book I wish I had on hand when I felt helpless in the face of my anxiety about my changing body. I wish I had this book when I was struggling to come to grips with the reality that my intimate relationships only ever worked when I could be a woman. And while I’ve always regretted not having the time and resources to work with everyone who’s asked me for help with their gender, I believe this book is exactly the resource all of them deserve to have.

Foreword

BY SAM DYLAN FINCH

When I started my gender journey, no one gave me permission to be uncertain or afraid. And further, no one told me what I should do if I was. I started exploring my gender without a guide, without comfort, and without a clue—and as you can imagine, I felt like a queer fish out of water.

A lot of questions ran through my head. If this is my truth, why am I so unsure? If I’m transgender, why am I so scared? If this is the path I’m supposed to be on, why do I feel so confused?

If this sounds like you, let me be the first to tell you this: everything that you’re feeling is not only okay, but it’s also completely normal.

Examining your gender—something we’re told we should innately know—can be an overwhelming process, especially when you feel like you don’t fit the mold of what someone who isn’t cisgender should feel or look like.

But no matter how sure or unsure you are, I promise, this book is for you.

You can be young or old or anything in between; you can feel like you’ve been questioning for a long time or have just started wondering about it yesterday; you can have a vast vocabulary for your identity; or you can cling to the only word you know: questioning.

Whether you feel like you’re living a lie and you’re ready to embrace your truth, or you’re simply unsure of what’s been pulling at your heart, this book is for anyone who wants to explore their gender more deeply—regardless of what your gender may be or how far along you are.

You are not required to have any certain experience, any kind of feeling, any particular desires, any sort of history—all you need to begin this book is a little curiosity.

This is important, above all else: all you need is curiosity.

Looking back at the beginning of my gender journey, I wish someone had reminded me to be curious. To be joyful. To remember that exploring who we are doesn’t have to be a painful, dramatic, gut-wrenching experience.

Gender is beautiful, mysterious, and even strange, and we’d all be better off by embracing the mystery.

This is your adventure. This is a time to be playful, to ask questions, to open up and peer inside your heart. This is a time to let the possibilities surprise and delight you. This is a time to imagine what could be, to daydream about your own becoming. And while all of this may be, in its own way, scary—it’s also beautiful.

If I can give you any advice as you begin this book, it’s this: allow yourself this happiness. With every new discovery, celebrate the journey. With every new question, embrace the enigma. Get wrapped up in the puzzles, the surprises, the affirmations, the discoveries. Get lost in everything this book has to offer you—and I promise you, there’s a lot.

And remember: if you focus too much on the destination, you’ll miss all the amazing stuff in between.

Introduction

BY ZANDER KEIG, LCSW

Iwish a book like You and Your Gender Identity: A Guide to Discovery had been available when I began to question my gender identity back in 1997. Had I been exposed to the concepts found within these pages back then, I might have been spared some of the intrapersonal and interpersonal struggles that ensued. I have been trans identified for nearly twenty years, and medically transitioned for eleven years, yet I was still able to gain more insight into my gender identity and transition process as a result of reading this thought-provoking guidebook.

I first publicly disclosed my trans identity to the world in my essay Are You a Boy or a Girl?¹ written in 2000 and published (under my former name Gabriel Hermelin) in the anthology Inspiration for LGBT Students & Their Allies in 2002. However, it was in 1997, while attending college in Denver, Colorado, and working as the outreach coordinator in the office of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Student Services, that I was introduced to and began using the term trans to refer to transgender and transsexual people.

Over the years, I have used many terms to describe my gender identity: tranny, intergender, genderfluid, virago, genderqueer, trans, male, trans male, female-to-male (FTM), trans man, transsexual man, and man. Each term I used matched a particular level of awareness and understanding I possessed about my own trans identity at the time. For instance, early in my social transition, prior to starting testosterone (T), I used the term intergender to communicate that my gender was somewhere between conventional notions of female and male. Soon after starting T, I used the term virago (mannish woman) and even facilitated a workshop on that identity at Gender Odyssey (2006)² in an attempt to distance myself from the stereotypical notion of masculinity and maleness. It was during this time that I realized that being seen as a masculine female vs. a man was an entirely different experience and it was quite eye-opening. Needless to say, not everyone responded favorably to the ways I chose to self-identify.

As Dara points out in Clearing Up a Damaging Myth (see page xxv), many of us are told there is only one way to be trans and/or to transition. I definitely heard that message from trans men much further along in their transition on a number of occasions when I was pre-transition. As a matter of fact, the first time I spoke with another trans man about the possibility that I was trans, his dismissive response resulted in me delaying my medical transition two years. It also caused me to be reluctant to discuss my thoughts and questions with others out of fear that I would again be dissuaded in my attempt to assert a trans identity. Thankfully, I persisted. I also became involved in the FTM community as a support group facilitator in an attempt to provide a more affirmative perspective to the many attendees questioning their gender identity or early in transition. I remained in that role for three years. It was then that I realized that my own development into a man was unable to progress, as I was entirely focused on being helpful to others and not paying attention to my own needs and wants.

As a licensed clinical social worker, I am very familiar with and attentive to the concept of Self Care (see page xxix) and agree wholeheartedly with Dara that it is not only an essential component to a gender transition, but it is a useful lifelong practice for placing importance on defining for yourself what you want and need in the moment and going forward. Setting boundaries around whom you will and won’t spend time with, which activities you will and won’t participate in, and steps you will and won’t take to live an authentic life is necessary to ensure the path you elect is right for you and not influenced heavily by others’ persuasions. In my experience of being dissuaded and persuaded regarding medical transition, it dawned on me that my own ideas about my life, body, and role were so open to challenge from those who either disagreed or agreed strongly with my intentions. I needed to assert my intention to transition in my particular way and become the particular kind of man I was to be. It was a freeing and frightful journey I was to pursue.

In addition to the kinds of repressed fears Dara mentions in Peering into the Trunk (see page 16), I feel the many messages communicated via the media about men being dangerous and testosterone being responsible for men’s violence and aggression directly contributed to an eight-year delay in beginning my medical transition. My two primary fears centered on Would testosterone make me angry and violent? and Would I ever actually look and sound like a man? My first fear was put to rest while attending a workshop presented by a medical doctor with at the time twelve years of experience working with trans patients. It turned out I wasn’t the only person in attendance with fears concerning testosterone and violence. The physician assured us all that there was no direct correlation between healthy hormone levels and violence. The second fear would take longer to quell. Because I was nearly forty years old when I started my medical transition, the physical changes happened more slowly. As a matter of fact, I was two and a half years into my medical transition when a friend remarked, You still look like a dyke. I am happy to report that starting from the three-year mark until now, eleven years on testosterone, I am never misgendered.

A year into my transition, I was fortunate to encounter FTM pioneer Jamison Green while attending a community meeting. Like Dara encourages, I had recently begun to think about needing to have a Mentor (Finding a Mentor, see page 33), someone that I could ask questions of and glean some wisdom from. I was happy to encounter Jamison’s story in 2000, when I discovered the FTM international web page while doing research for a class on violence prevention and intervention in graduate school. I was writing a paper on trans violence and wanted to learn more about the impact of violence on the lives of trans men. Sometime between 2000 and 2005, I read Jamison’s memoir, Becoming a Visible Man,³ and learned we had similar histories. We were both previously lesbian identified, both had an interest in knowing the history of our communities, and both started our medical transitions at age thirty-nine. Because of that, I felt a connection with him prior to even meeting him. I then met him in person in 2006 at the Compton’s Cafeteria Commemoration Committee meeting and mustered up the courage to ask him if I could walk with him to catch public transportation. During that walk I asked him if he was available to be my mentor. Thankfully, his response was yes and he told me that he was working on a project to get archival material from FTM internationally organized. He offered that if I came to his house once a month and helped him with the archiving project, I could 1) get a chance to look at and read all of the archival material to learn about the FTM community around the world, and 2) listen to him tell stories about his involvement in the community and the role that trans man pioneer Louis Graydon Sullivan (1951–1991) had in founding an international network of FTM groups. It was enriching so early in transition not only to be exposed to those ideas but to peer into the hearts and minds of the men who came before me and made it possible for me to do what I would end up doing over the course of the last ten years. One of the significant aspects of our time together was being able to read hand-typed letters from the eighties between Sullivan and other trans men seeking support, friendship, and advice. Reading those letters was the inspiration for my book, Letters for My Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect.⁴

Once others began to see me as a man and treat me like a man, I found myself asking the question, What kind of man do I want to be? It was through the wisdom of hands-off mentors that I was able to answer those kinds of questions and delve more deeply into those issues. I was doing a lot of research online, looking for examples of positive masculinity, good men, kind men, generous men, references to a type of maleness that I could relate to, and I discovered that there was a whole field of men’s studies and texts written by men about male experiences and perspectives regarding relationships, emotions, trauma, and bonding. In the search for that information, I landed on the blog The Art of Manliness,⁵ written by Brett McKay, which is dedicated to uncovering the lost art of being a man.⁶ Through this blog I learned about the myth of the normal testosterone level and read mini biographies of great men in history such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry David Thoreau. As a social worker working almost entirely with men, I was also very happy to come upon their series Leashing the Black Dog,⁷ all about men and depression. Another hands-off Mentor I find invaluable