Changing Time Back: Transgender Lost Youth and Queer Theory

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Hello everyone, my name is Brittany, and I am a non-binary trans femme.

So, recently I thought of my past and what could have been. I helped my parents clean their basement and inside the aged boxes were relics of the past: my childhood, yet I felt terribly disconnected, this was one of many times I’ve reflected upon my past and youth. I intend this to be an introduction and overview of facets of the transgender experience using my own to serve as examples, but even others, from a twitter thread.

Imagine what would have been for the adult identity you have and your childhood matching. No women with boyhoods and no men with girlhoods, and nonbinary people not having either.

Imagine the world of difference it would make for one to transition as a child, even before puberty, and not have permanent masculinization or feminization in the wrong way. I also wish I could have been an enby girl as a child.

It’s one thing for an AMAB person, or a “boy” to wish that they were a girl, but also to wish that they were nonbinary.

What would a nonbinary childhood and adolescence look like?

I only have the girlhood and boyhood models as references, until we see nonbinary children grow up and represented in the cultural fabric and media. 

Gender dysphoria makes no sense. It is very irrational, yet can be powerful and does distort our thinking, it is our pain.

Pain and suffering do not have to be the sole trans experience, we can and should be happy with our lives, but transitioning tends to do that for us.

Transitioning in media and being trans, in general, has an adult reputation to it.

Trans people often report feeling different in their childhood from their cisgender friends and even experience dysphoria in puberty without knowing it.

Looking back on childhood as an adult trans person can set this off.

I cannot help but think of how many trans people would feel less alienated with themselves and their situation if they had the childhood they wanted.

If I had known that I was trans and nonbinary in my youth, even if I were binary,  just being trans had less awareness then.

I was born in the 1990s and grew up in the 2000s, and came of age by the 2010s.

Trans kids weren’t thought of as a thing, partly because it was either association with either LGBTQ people or with pornography.

The timeline of awareness changed significantly in the generation I was in.

What is a boy? What is a girl? (This is just a rhetorical set up) That’s gender. One factor in those are the roles and social norms they get told.

Congratulations, your child was born under the star sign of Penis, and they will have an affinity of power tools and trucks,

or your child was born under the sign of Vagina and they will have an affinity for dolls. You get the idea. 

This reminds me of a scene from Monty Python Meaning of Life, in which a woman gives birth to a child and she asks the doctors the sex of the child,

and Graham Chapman replies “I think it’s a bit early to start imposing roles on it, don’t you”. This but unironically! It is what should be done.

The assignment of gender at birth based on the appearance of sexual traits is the root of the trans and cis distinction, this all part of the sex-gender system.

The roles and hierarchy of gender come from the assignment, and they are extrapolation. Most of the time, people’s sex assignment and gender do match, t

hese are called cisgender, but transgender people do not have this, their gender is not that what they had assigned. The defenders appeal to tradition and a majority.

They basically say  “well .6% of the population is trans, why break down this thing just for that?”

To that I say, it’d be a matter of expanding gender, and give a space for trans and non-binary people to be a thing, or even break down the baggage between cis and trans.

Without any trans awareness, the idea of gender seems deterministic.

You are either born or a boy or a girl, and nothing else is possible, but that is wrong.

The ignorance of youth is one facet.

Youth means different things to others, and this part of the larger conversation we have on socialization especially gendered socialization.

The socialization changes, we do not stop being socialized, every interaction you have is socialization, even consuming media is a part of it.

I was assigned a certain gender, and that did impact my life, it was not truly me.

I am transfeminine, so that means my gender is feminine of center,

I'm nonbinary, similar to a trans woman, but not exclusively a woman.

I was wrongly assigned male at birth, simply because my body appeared to match one end of a strict binary of sex.

Being transgender means that my gender is not the one that was assigned at birth.

I am transitioning, that means a lot to many different trans people.

My transition has had many facets, social, legal, and medical.

I had changed social roles, expressions, pronouns, and even my name,

which in turn meant a legal name change.

I had to make sure the State had to see me as the sex that was closest to my identity.

And sadly, most do not recognize non-binary as a legal sex. So I picked female, as opposed to male.

which was the closest to my gender, which also was possible because according to my provider,

I have had "...appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition to the new gender of [] male [x] female".

Taking cross-sex hormone replacement therapy is a second adolescence

so I went back in time, to become the non-binary girl that I really am.

My time growing up is not the linear timeline that is typical to most people, especially to cisgender, heterosexual, and heteroromantic people, people who are not queer or LGBTQIA. My time growing up felt, in retrospect, lost, wasted, and inauthentic. Now, I claim I am living my true life, I am finally me. However, I have no frame of reference, especially compared to the elders in my life, especially my family, and my parents in particular. I still feel othered and different, while that is okay, it can risk alienation and depersonalization.

Queer theory offers an explanation. Queer time, as opposed to straight time. For example, at the time of writing this, I am now 22 years old, which was the same age as when my mother got married to my father. Five years later she had her first child. That is one example of queer time differs from straight time, since queer people aren’t expected to follow the life script, and that can be a source of pride, but also it means that queer people do not have the same references in life such as getting married, have 2.3 children, work the same career, retire to Florida, and die, no that is not the queer adulthood. The expectations of the future of adulthood that one has as a child is usually the same as straight time, rather than queer time. Realizing that I was queer was liberation, a liberation from heterotemporality.

Sex vs gender: Not exactly the same but not completely different. People think they are the same and they are just two of each, or maybe they say out of good intention that they are different but may say just two or more, maybe a gender trinary instead of a binary.

Perhaps, when trans awareness turns to trans acceptance we might see more trans youth and even non-binary youth growing up as neither boys nor girls, no matter what their assigned sex would have been. Maybe assigning one's gender at birth will go out of style. I don't know, but it was part of my experience, and they, my parents, the doctors at that hospital back in the 90s, etc all got it wrong, even though they don't always, I had my own life influenced by the wrong gender until I found the right gender.

Overall I am grieving. This is grief. My grief can be dulled. This grief will be something I want to heal as part of my gender transition. I hope this blog can spark more conversation and become a bigger story to help not just me, but just everyone, especially in the trans community.

So share this and follow me for more!

Thank you for reading! This blog is a bit longer than usual, yet still glossed over a lot.

Pink News Article about lost childhood.