Trans Questioning Resources

Nobody realizes they’re trans by themselves. I’m no exception. The resources listed here were essential to helping me figure out that this was a real part of my identity that I needed to take seriously. Many of them reference each other, as is often the case in any particular niche of the human experience. By compiling this list here, I hope I might help others who come along after me find their truth a little more quickly than I did.

Essays

  • "Am I Trans?" A Roadmap To Figuring Out The Toughest Question - Cassie LaBelle

    • This is a useful place to start. LaBelle’s piece is a fairly comprehensive treatment of where many trans identity doubts come from and productive ways to think about them.

  • Gender Dysphoria Isn't What You Think - Cassie LaBelle

    • I needed someone to tell me this years earlier in my life. That for many people gender dysphoria is the noise and heat of gears grinding in your head with no discernable reason why. And that, more helpfully, transitioning can finally bring relief for this nebula of dysphoria.

  • Gender Desire vs. Gender Identity - Amanda Roman

    • For many years I believed I was “just” curious about being a woman. Occasionally I would allow myself to admit that I wanted to be a woman, as a treat. My understanding was that trans identity was about already knowing that you’re not your assigned gender at birth (AGAB), before beginning any type of transition. For some people, identity reveals itself as longing way, way before that identity can be accepted. It helped me enormously to see someone else articulate the truth of this experience so well.

  • It's Just a Fetish, Right? - Amanda Roman

    • You can guess the answer, right? I believed my curiosity about female identity was a fetish from my teenage years until my early 30s. I wish I’d seen an essay like this earlier in my life so I’d known how I was harming myself compartmentalizing and labelling this as such. Reading this essay was a revelation for me, a realization that there were other people like me and that I could do something about this.

  • The Null HypotheCis - Natalie Reed

    • Too often trans identity is viewed as something that must be proven beyond all reasonable doubt, else the person in question is cis. The hypothesis of cis identity doesn’t merit such a privileged position. Reed helpfully points out that the question isn’t “Am I trans beyond all reasonable doubt?” But rather “Is it more likely that I’m cis or that I’m trans?”

    Books and Papers

  • Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity - Julia Serano

    • A classic text that covers a lot of ground regarding trans issues, feminism, femininity, and the ways cis society fails to understand who transgender people really are.

  • She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders - Jennifer Finney Boylan

    • Boylan’s story isn’t a 1:1 match for mine, but I felt a startling amount of resonance here. Your mileage may vary.

  • The Gender Variant Phenomenon - A Developmental Review - Anne Vitale

    • I can’t tell you what a relief it was seeing a 20-year-old paper lay out in substantial detail a cohort of trans experiences that so eerily matched my own (labelled “group 3” in the paper). The last two paragraphs of the early adulthood section could’ve been written to specifically describe my life and the moment of my egg cracking.

  • The Case Against Autogynephilia - Julia Serano

    • If you’ve never heard the term “autogynephilia” before, I strongly recommend you move on and not burrow any further here. Trans women of my generation were massively harmed by the promotion of a pseudoscientific theory that trans women attracted to women were actually straight men who developed a fetish around imagining themselves as women and being attracted to themselves. Serano’s paper unpacks how there was never any scientific evidence to support this conclusion, and there are fundamental theoretical problems with it. In short, I was duped, and part of why I worked so hard for so long to convince myself I was cis was that this framework convinced me that being a trans lesbian was a fake, shameful thing. It ain’t right.

Reddit

Reddit has a wonderfully helpful and supportive network of trans communities. Here are a few of my favorites if you’re just getting started.

  • Ask Transgender

  • Trans Timelines

    • Until my egg cracked and I started seriously thinking about transitioning I had no clue what the scope of possible changes was, particularly for people who have already been through puberty. Mileage varies a lot, but the reality is that transition is a much more powerful process than cis people let on. Seeing the stories here gave me hope.

  • Egg_irl

    • I first encountered this subreddit sometime in 2018, and it made me furious. The tone has mellowed out since then, and there are fewer people who will tell you “Stop being an idiot, you’re trans” now (which was not what I needed to hear back then). Trans people who don’t know they’re trans yet often don’t realize how much of the way they relate to life and gender is vastly different than it is for cis people. What better way to discover this than dank memes?

  • My MtF transition story [series] - user 2d4d_data

    • An extremely thorough and detailed account of what progressing through a transfeminine transition is like. I found this immensely helpful. I’m also nowhere near as good at planning things as the author seems to be.

Youtube

There’s a small army of amazing trans content creators on Youtube. Here are some of my favorites.

  • ContraPoints - Natalie Wynn

    • ContraPoints holds a special place in my heart. She was the first trans creator I found after I started to question myself, and her story and transition inspired me. She’s also a brilliant mind, if a bit cynical for my taste. Some of my favorite videos from a trans perspective are as follows -

    • Autogynephilia

    • "Are Traps Gay?"

    • J.K. Rowling

  • Philosophy Tube - Abigail Thorn

  • TransVoiceLessons - Zheanna Erose

    • More inspiration that change is really possible. If you’re transfeminine, there’s good news and bad news regarding your voice if it gives you dysphoria. The bad news: Estrogenic hormone replacement therapy doesn’t do anything to change your voice. The good news: It turns out that by re-learning how to use the muscles in your throat and mouth you can reshape your voice into something more euphoric. This is the best channel I’ve seen for describing the nuts and bolts of how to do this.

  • Jami's Bits - Jami Higginbotham

    • Here’s a trope that’s more common than you might think. Trans girl in denial lives her whole life convinced there’s no possible way she can be trans, because she can’t map her life and experiences onto any role models that feel close enough to her own experiences. Then, out of the blue, she finds out someone she knows is trans, and that triggers the simple thought “If she’s trans, is it possible I might be, too?” One gender chain reaction later and girl-in-denial is now transitioning herself. Jami Higginbotham was that person for me.

    • AMA with Jami - The discussion at 1:36:00 was one of the things that got the ball rolling for me. Holy shit, I thought to myself, what if this is true for me, too?

Other Resources

  • The Gender Dysphoria Bible - Jocelyn Badgley

    • This resource did more than any other single point of information to help me understand that I’m trans, that I belong in this space, and that my life would be better if I began transitioning

  • Turn Me Into A Girl!

    • I should write a blog entry about this at some point. I discovered this site in 2018-2019, around the same time I found r/egg_irl. The fact that I was doing anything on the internet of my own free will that led me to stumble across this should’ve been a sign. I was dense, though, and didn’t know enough for the message to sink in. I forgot about this for a couple of years until I began understanding that I’m trans. What you should know is that the message of this site is correct. Wanting to be a girl is a symptom of being a girl (or substitute gender of your choice if you’re questioning in a different direction). There’s also a lot you can do to get comfy in your gender, even if it’s wildly different from what you were assigned at birth.

Just for Fun