by Robyn Ryle
You’re a cisgender boy. GO TO 40.
You’re gender expansive. GO TO 49.
65
Courtship is the general term used to describe how people come together romantically and sexually. Sometimes courtship leads to marriage and sometimes it doesn’t. What courtship looks like can vary a lot depending on where and who you are.
You’re probably going to have a harder time finding that special someone if you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, genderqueer, or asexual. Because most societies are built on the assumption that everyone is cisgender and straight (which is to say, most societies are heteronormative and cisnormative), it’s harder for you to find someone to love, have sex with, or marry. This is partly because there are fewer people available for you to date, so you’re in a smaller potential dating pool.
Why are there fewer LGBTQ+ people out there for you to date? One reason is that if you live in a heteronormative culture, you’re subject to compulsory heterosexuality. This is the idea that society puts a great deal of pressure on people to be straight. Compulsory heterosexuality makes it harder to come out if you are LGBTQ+, which makes it much harder for you to find other people who might be interested in dating you. In a society without compulsory heterosexuality, people wouldn’t feel stigmatized for not being straight, which would make dating much easier.
But it’s also true that because the society you’re living in is probably heteronormative and cisnormative, you’ll have to be careful about pursuing potential partners. In many times and places, being LGBTQ+ has been or is still seen as immoral or deviant, so trying to approach someone romantically has often been a very dangerous activity. It was only as recently as 2003 in the United States that all laws making homosexual behavior illegal were ruled unconstitutional. Up until that point, some states still had laws that would allow for the prosecution of people caught engaging in same-gender sexual behavior. Today, homosexual relationships are illegal in seventy-four countries. There are thirteen countries in which being homosexual is still punishable by death. Across the globe, violence against LGBTQ+ individuals persists, as in the 2017 mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which resulted in 49 deaths. In some places, you might find yourself putting your life on the line in pursuit of love and intimacy. This is part of the reason why gay and lesbian subcultures have been so important in the past and continue to be important today. People in the LGBTQ+ community need spaces, like gay bars, where they can safely find each other.
COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY
n. /kəm-ˈpəls-rē ˌhe-tə-rō-ˌsek-shə-ˈwa-lə-tē/
The pressure from society on individuals to be straight.
Most recently, online dating sites are making dating and courtship somewhat easier. These sites allow even LGBTQ+ people who are in relatively isolated locations to find each other.
You get married. GO TO 104.
You don’t get married. GO TO 105.
66
Before you have surgery, your doctor will probably suggest that you start with hormone therapy. If you’re in the United States, you’ll have to receive a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria before you’ll be allowed to have surgery. Gender dysphoria refers specifically to the distress that results from the mismatch between your gender assignment and your gender identity. In the twentieth century, being transgender was considered a mental disorder that was known as gender-identity disorder. It wasn’t until 2012 that diagnostic guidelines were changed to gender dysphoria. Today, medical professionals focus on the psychological and emotional distress that results from how people react to your transgender identity—rather than treating your identity itself as an illness.
GENDER DYSPHORIA
n. /ˈjendər disˈfôr-ē-ə/
The condition of feeling one’s emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite to a preassigned gender.
But because a medical diagnosis is still required for surgery in the United States, doctors, surgeons, and psychiatrists serve as gatekeepers, making decisions about who can have access to hormone therapy and surgical procedures. In the past, you’d probably be denied hormones or surgery if you were a woman who’d ever been pregnant or had a child. Doctors were also likely to turn down patients whose sexual identity didn’t line up in the way that doctors felt that it should. For example, one trans man was denied treatment because he wanted to live as a gay man. Doctors could not comprehend how a woman could want to become a man and still be sexually attracted to men.
As a trans man undergoing hormone therapy, you’ll probably be taking testosterone, and there are many changes that you can expect to see to your body. Your skin will become thicker and oilier. Many of the experiences of taking hormone therapy are like those of puberty. For instance, you might develop some acne. Your breasts will probably not change in size, but you might have some soreness. The fat in your body will shift away from your hips and thighs. You might see more fat develop around your belly and midsection. Your arms and legs will become more muscular. Your overall muscle mass may increase, depending on factors like diet and exercise.
The muscles of your vocal chords might thicken, resulting in a deeper voice. Just as this doesn’t happen for all cisgender boys at puberty, it doesn’t happen for all trans men with hormone therapy. But like cisgender boys going through puberty, your voice may scratch and break until it settles into a normal range. Your hair will probably get thicker and grow faster. But how much and where your hair shows up still depends on genetics. If most of the men in your family have little facial hair, you probably won’t have much facial hair, either. After all, not all cisgender men can grow a beard.
Your emotional state might change due to testosterone, just as it does for cisgender boys going through puberty. You might also experience a change in your sexual desire. Your clitoris will begin to grow and will become even larger when aroused. The way you experience orgasms may also change.
Your period may become lighter and shorter in duration before you eventually stop having a period altogether. While testosterone greatly reduces the chances of becoming pregnant, it’s not impossible. If you want to become pregnant later, you might still be able to once you stop taking testosterone. However, taking testosterone for long periods of time will likely make it harder for you to conceive.
You may feel as a trans man that the bodily changes brought on by testosterone are enough to give you a body that you matches up with your gender identity and gender expression. But you might also realize that some sort of surgical intervention is what you need in order to get the body that feels right to you.
You have gender-confirming surgery. GO TO 86.
You don’t have gender-confirming surgery and you live in a place where gender and sexuality are seen as connected. GO TO 87.
You don’t have gender-confirming surgery and you live in a place where gender and sexuality aren’t seen as connected. GO TO 88.
67
You feel that surgery isn’t for you, and that’s okay. There are as many ways to be a trans man as there are to be a cisgender man. Maybe hormone therapy alone gives you the body that feels right for you. Maybe you don’t pursue hormone therapy at all. You might be okay with dressing as a man, changing your name, and asking people to use masculine pronouns.
Because the dominant stories of the transgender experience focus on sex reassignment or gender-confirming surgery, you might find yourself having to explain your decision to other people, both within and outside of the transgender community. Because having gender-confirming surgery is seen as normal to the transgender experience, you might be questioned for not following that norm.
If you don’t have surgery or take hormone therapy, you might find it more difficult to achieve social maleness. That means that you might have difficulty passing what some trans men describe as the “sir test.” Do people who interact with you in your day-to-day life perceive you as a man and call you sir? If not, then your gender attribution might remain ambiguous to most people
. Gender attribution is the gender that other people assign to you when they interact with you. We engage in gender attribution all the time, using a series of cues in order to help us figure out what a person’s gender is. We pay attention to what a person looks like, but also to things like who they’re with, how they interact, and how much power they have. We might also have access to textual cues—a driver’s license or job application. Or we may use mythic cues—the stories we tell each other about gender. So, maybe if you see someone changing a baby’s diaper, you assume that it’s a woman, because your culture’s stories tell you that a woman is much more likely to be changing a diaper than a man.
Our default when it comes to gender attribution is men. That is, because being a man is seen as the norm or the “right” gender to be in our society, we start by assuming that people are men and then look for cues that tell us otherwise. This works in your favor as a trans man. It might make it slightly easier for you to achieve social maleness without hormones or surgery.
GO TO 87.
68
You’re the first in your class or your group of friends to hit puberty. You develop breasts before all the rest of the girls. You start your period and hair starts growing in new places (in your armpits and between your legs). Being first seems like a good thing, doesn’t it? Maybe.
The bodily changes that happen to girls at puberty are stressful enough by themselves. But there are also a lot of cultural meanings that get attached to these biological changes. Your culture might send you messages that your new body is something you should be ashamed of. Before you hit puberty, you might have been able to go without a shirt sometimes, like boys, but not anymore. You have to wear a bra. Maybe your parents and other family members celebrate your period, but they will probably also warn you about all the unpleasant implications of your new status. Men and boys will look at you in a different way now, your parents and other adults might tell you. You can get pregnant. If you were a tomboy, your family might suggest that you give up the boyish parts of your gender expression at puberty. No more acting like a boy. Many girls experience puberty as an entrance into a scarier world with a lot more rules. Hitting puberty early doesn’t really help with all these negative implications. In fact, it might just make them worse.
Puberty is one part of how your experience of gender will be embodied, which means that gender as a category interacts with our bodies in important ways. One of those ways is through ability or disability. Gender intersects with the degree to which your body is seen as able—“normal” and capable of doing the things required of bodies in your society—and therefore incapable to some extent of doing the things expected of “normal” bodies.
You have a temporarily abled body. GO TO 93.
You have a disabled body. GO TO 94.
69
It seems like you’re the last girl in the whole world to hit puberty! All the rest of the girls have breasts, and your chest is still disappointingly flat. Your period doesn’t come, and all the parts of your body that are supposed to be growing hair are still bare. Being last sucks.
When puberty comes late, you might feel like you’re stuck in place while everyone else is moving ahead. There are a lot of negative meanings that get attached to puberty for girls, but there are some things to feel positive about. You might really be looking forward to the grown-up feeling that comes from shaving your legs for the first time.
Around the time they hit puberty, many girls experience a big drop in self-esteem. Regardless of whether you hit puberty late or early, as a girl, you may find that your self-confidence decreases. You might not feel as good about your body as you did when you were younger. You may feel less optimistic about your future possibilities. Research suggests that this isn’t biological, but partly a result of what your culture tells you about what it means to be a woman. While the process of becoming a man is seen as a good thing, entering into womanhood can feel scary instead of exciting.
Puberty is one part of how your experience of gender will be embodied, which means that gender as a category interacts with our bodies in important ways. One of those ways is through ability or disability. Gender intersects with the degree to which your body is seen as able—“normal” and capable of doing the things required of bodies in your society—and therefore incapable to some extent of doing the things expected of “normal” bodies.
You have a temporarily abled body. GO TO 93.
You have a disabled body. GO TO 94.
70
Though your gender may have been assigned as a girl or boy at birth, and you’ve lived your life up until this point assuming that gender assignment was correct, at puberty things don’t go exactly as expected. You may be an intersex person. Some intersex conditions are apparent at birth, but others don’t emerge until puberty. Perhaps you’re a boy and you start to develop breasts and menstruate. Or you’re a girl and you don’t develop breasts or get your period. What happens now?
Your intersex condition is very unlikely to be dangerous or bad for your health. But your parents and doctors may still want to intervene to “fix” you. If you’ve been raised as a boy and doctors discover that you have ovaries, they might suggest surgery to remove them. You’d think that by the time you’ve reached this age, it would be too late for doctors and parents to try to conceal the facts of your condition from you. But, in fact, many doctors and parents choose to do just that, even when intersex conditions are discovered at puberty. One intersex woman was told that the series of surgeries she had was to prevent her from getting cancer, instead of to “treat” her intersex condition. It’s not surprising, then, that many intersex people are relieved when they finally find out the real reason for surgeries and other medical treatments.
Your experience of puberty, which is already a stressful time for most people, will have an added layer of fear and uncertainty. Maybe your parents and doctors will be open with you about what’s happening to your body, and you’ll be allowed to participate in your own medical decisions. Maybe you’ll come to some sense of how you want to live your gender going forward.
You feel like a woman. GO TO 50.
You feel like a man. GO TO 87.
You feel like something else. GO TO 18.
71
When you were born, or at some other point along the way, you were assigned a masculine gender. You also feel like a boy inside. Your gender assignment and your gender identity match up, which means that you’re cisgender. So what? What does it actually mean to feel like a boy or a man?
You’re a boy, sure, but does that mean that you’re never allowed to show any interest in things like clothes or makeup or the color pink? Maybe you really like pink. And you’d like to wear glittery barrettes in your hair and play with baby dolls. Maybe you cry a lot and never get over the fear of having a ball thrown at you very fast and very hard.
The truth is that even if you’re cisgender, not every part of your gender identity will necessarily match up with your gender expression, or the way your culture tells you to perform your gender. As Kate Bornstein, a transgender activist, points out, at some point gender as a system lets all of us down. At some point in your life, you will have a thought, have a feeling, or engage in some behavior that does not perfectly match the rules laid out for your gender. As a boy, the repercussions of a mismatch will vary depending on your racial background.
GENDER EXPRESSION
n. /ˈjen-dər ik-ˈspre-shən/
The aspects of one’s behavior, mannerisms, and appearance that are associated with that gender in a particular cultural context.
Your gender identity, gender assignment, and gender expression all match up, and you’re white. GO TO 55.
Your gender identity, gender assignment, and gender expression all match up, and you’re African American. GO TO 60.
Your gender expression doesn’t match up with your gender identity and gender assignment. GO TO 61.
72
When you were born, everyone assumed that you were
a boy, but you suspect that everyone got it wrong. You don’t feel like a boy, so your gender assignment and your gender identity don’t match up. You might start telling people that you’re not a boy when you’re as young as two or three years old. You might tell your parents that you know you’re not really a boy—that you don’t want a penis and you prefer wearing dresses. You didn’t get any say in the gender assignment that was given to you when you were born, and now you’re letting everyone know that they might have gotten it wrong. If something about the gender you’ve been assigned doesn’t feel right, you might be a gender-expansive or transgender person.
Transgender is the umbrella term that’s generally used to describe when your gender identity doesn’t match your gender assignment at birth. It can also refer more specifically to people whose gender identity is “opposite” or “across from” the gender they were assigned at birth. In your case, the opposite gender would be girl.
The term gender expansive includes those who are transgender, but also anyone who expands their own culture’s commonly held expectations about gender, whether that means how they express their gender, how they identify, or the norms they choose to follow or not to follow. People with nonbinary identities would be an example of what it means to be gender expansive.
TRANSGENDER
adj. /ˈtranz-ˈjen-dər/
Relating to or being a person whose gender identity differs from the gender the person was assigned at birth.