On Being Trans and the Importance of Passing
All names have been changed to protect people’s identities. Content warning: transphobia, mentions of (non-sexual) assault.
The Women who 'don’t care' about Passing
“Passing is not the point of transitioning,” said Jane. “It’s to be who you are and finally loving yourself.”
Jane was an exemplary. Out of the six people I interviewed whose opinions fell firmly in this camp, she was the most articulate. An air of determined confidence. We spoke long about politics and her life as a transwoman.
“Jesus, talking to some people is like speaking to a brick wall. They say ‘pass this, pass that’, they always forget the most important thing.”
“Are you talking about being nice?” I asked.
“Let’s not use that word since it got hijacked by the ‘nice guys’. I prefer ‘good person’.”
We agreed firmly on this. However, passing and being a miserable person were different things.
“That’s my point though,” said Jane. “Their priorities are off.”
I noted that passing seemed to be a gatekeeping issue for many. They had placed such restrictions on their happiness. At this point, Jane made a quick comparison between the people who thought passing was all that mattered and 'incels'.
I didn't understand.
“They’re struggling with self-esteem issues. It’s not really about passing, is it? They’ll just keep raising the bar”—she cut me off before I could say anything else—“it’s the same thing though! These people need to ask themselves whether their transition is about them or other people. I think we both know the answer to that question.”
Jane felt a bit desperate to make the point. I disagreed. Among the people I spoke to, most of them did reach a point where they were happy. Passing didn't always mean pretty. Regardless, something nagged at me; a fact that stared right into the eyes. I felt that Jane was someone who wouldn’t mind if I accidentally said something offensive. We struck it off very well.
“You pass though,” I said. “Even after everything you said—you pass.”
I regretted my words immediately. In hindsight, it was obvious that arguing for ‘not passing’ and personally choosing to be a certain type of femininity was not mutually exclusive.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly.
“No, I get it.”
She admitted that she came from privilege. She started early. Her looks and personality gave her a charisma that was difficult to ignore.
“You should know that I’ve never convinced anyone. People come into this topic with their minds made up.”
Even among those who felt that passing wasn't important (regardless of whether they did), they spoke of hurtful stories related to the matter. Each of them experienced some sort of trauma related to passing. Most of the time, it was someone they held in high regard who told them they didn’t.
The general sentiment was that passing is great, but not the end all be all. It is, and has always been, a forced social obligation placed on trans people. By allowing themselves the freedom to not pass, they gave themselves a chance to explore—truly explore—their own gender and style.
It’s freeing...not like an enlightenment thing—okay, maybe it is—but you do get to the point where you accept and love yourself and dress and present anyway you want.
We're saying this from a point of kindness. You can't start with passing as your end-goal because you may not pass. That's the truth. Not everyone can pass.
If you're always focused on passing, then you're forever giving other people power over you. We shouldn't need cis peoples' approval to exist.
You know the common phrase: HRT isn't a cure for depression or anxiety? This is that, but replace 'HRT' with 'passing'.
These were clear warnings against putting the ideal on a pedestal. When it falls, the only one standing below is you.
Jane—along with the five others I spoke to whose opinions agreed—stated plainly they cared little what others think.
They reminded me of a friend who said that there’s no helping certain people. In fact, reaching out cemented their self-pity. You have to leave them alone for your own sake and theirs.
If you can’t inspire or demonstrate something better, then there's no point. People aren't helped by seeing you suffer. It does nothing to say, ‘I can bear the pain, so can you’.
Jane and the others were going to live their own life. They had left this part of the debate long ago.
The Women who want to Pass
“I fucking get it, alright?” said Willa. “Passing isn’t the point. Shut the fuck up about it.”
In total, I spoke to eight people whose opinions were like Willa’s. Most of them were adamant about it. The subject elicited strong emotions. When confronted, their answers boiled down all the same.
“Because it never answers our question! We’re saying that we’re scared to transition! We keep asking ‘what if we don’t pass’ because that’s what’s important! Don’t fucking respond by ignoring the point!”
Like Willa, many echoed that they felt disregarded. Their opinions didn’t seem to matter.
Why the fuck is it always the people who pass that tell us we don’t have to pass?
I want to be pretty in that particular way. It's shouldn't be hard to understand.
The trans people and medical professionals I spoke to want me to accept that I won’t pass. It’s defeatist to prepare me to lose before I even start.
This was a distinction I seized on. ‘Not passing’ and ‘don’t need to pass’ were very different things. They however, felt that it didn’t matter.
Passing is the fucking point because it’s how we stay alive. Nothing else matters. Fuck anyone who says it does.
For some of them—and I want to stress, not all—a common thread emerged. There were a few transwomen in their lives who passed, and these people took upon them strongly. It reminded me of celebrity worship. Every word spoken from passing women was gospel. This was the case despite knowing that bodies take to hormones differently. They did not want to hear about self-care or beauty routines. They already exfoliated, moisturized, used sunscreen, and took care of themselves in every way possible.
In fact, none of the people I spoke to neglected gender-affirming self-care.
Physically, they were working very hard. But the emotional labour was killing them.
Passing was the end-goal. Without it, they hadn’t ‘fully transitioned’ and it hurt to find vestiges of a testosterone poisoned body, irredeemably damaged, staring back at them in the mirror. Not only was this tied to self-worth, they felt that they couldn’t achieve anything else without it. They couldn’t date. They couldn’t love. They couldn’t work without severe judgment.
Some of them told me it was ‘cringe’ to look transgender. When pressed on its definition, one told me that ‘cringe’ was tantamount to ‘failure’. Another said that it made her feel ‘insufficient’. Trying was ‘cringe’. Succeeding was not. She could not look at herself the same way others did. Any compliment could not be assessed on its own terms; they came loaded with observed niceties.
“It’s only true if I pass.”
When I asked if any of these things had a basis in reality, each of them said it certainly felt that way.
Another woman, Melly, straight up told me that she wanted to ‘assimilate’. “I don’t care if anyone calls me a traitor. I’m just trying to stay alive.”
I suggested that perhaps the term ‘assimilate’ did not necessarily mean what she was trying to do. I confirmed if that was the word she wanted, especially because it came loaded with negative connotations in certain trans circles.
She said it didn’t matter.
“Everyone accuses me of it. I don’t give a shit anymore.”
Melly started to cry.
“You understand, don’t you? Waking up and wishing you weren’t trans.”
The majority who felt this way were early in their transition. 'Early’ defined as ‘less than three years’. All of them experienced severe obstacles with the health system and their doctors. Most of them struggled with getting their desired hormone levels.
I hung out with some of them afterwards. Their speech patterns were punctuated by anger and fear. They confessed, over a cup of tea or coffee and often with a laugh, that it was true.
“Of course,” I remember one of them telling me. “We’re all scared. Fuck me, who isn’t?”
I was silent.
“Aren’t you?”
My coffee was bitter.
Sumire is intersex. She asked me to preface her as being 'lucky'. She believed her experiences were far easier than what most trans people go through.
It would be sad if, at the end of the day, I didn't pass. It would be immensely upsetting...it would wear on me as time goes on...but in the end, it would've still been better than if I hadn't transitioned at all. [But if I didn't pass,] the social aspects of my life would change strongly—professionally too—for the worse.
As horrible, vain, and shallow as it is, if I looked HOT and transgender—if I didn't pass, that is—I would still be happy with it. Because we can only build towards what we have access to. It's how the dice rolls. Yes, I would still be happy. Not always out of vanity, but for control.
Sumire noted that all of us existed in the valley between the two binary points. We are forever trying and pushing to get to the other side, because the problems facing us mostly disappeared if we succeeded.
To say that it's not important—well, it is! It's why we're doing all this! It's why we chose to change how we look on the outside!
Her motivation was similar. 80% of her reasons for passing was for safety. 20% for herself. She believed this strongly even before a traumatic assault put her in the hospital and gave her lasting, permanent damage.
Put me back a few decades and I'd say the same. Now, in this psychotic hellscape, it's actively punishing [not to pass]. The ability to blend in is paramount to safety.
The last person I spoke to was an old FFXIV raid member. I did not know it at the time, but she was the first transwoman I ever met. She said, with the air of a wizened sage chortling at the innocence of village children, that “passing can be the point of your transition if you want it to.”
She finished it off with, “Everyone’s different. Me, I just want lesbian sex.”
On Trans Men
I do not know many trans men. This is an obvious blindspot. Of the two I spoke to, both acknowledged that they possessed a certain privilege outside of passing: they were both white and spoke English as their first language in an English speaking country.
It would be remiss to mention what passing can do for people, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally...other than convenience and safety...but also blips of euphoria that everyone wants and should get to have.
One told me that even when he was 'clocked', it didn't seem to matter. He meant that with every implied insidious connotation.
I feel kinda looked down on, you know? People see me as a rebellious girl wandering out of her pen. Nobody takes me seriously. They think it’s cute when I ‘try’ to be a man. In that sense, yeah, I want to pass.
While both rated safety at around the same scale as trans women (i.e. 8/10 for safety, 2/10 for themselves), they also noted that it was convenience that mattered more.
As a white trans man, I'm not scared every time I go into the bathroom, but I am bracing for stressful confrontations that literally don't threaten me. Hence convenience, not safety.
Non-binary
I also don’t know enough non-binary people. Within the communities I frequent, most of them haven’t even heard the phrase.
The non-binary person I spoke to on discord told me, “If you realize that gender is just a construct, we’re all non-binary in some way.” I found their joy both infectious and exhilarating, but they were unable to give me specific thoughts on passing. While I did ask how they presented in their day to day, it was irrelevant to the point they were trying to make.
Another reported, second-hand experience was that non-binary people don't have it any easier.
My spouse comes back from work and not a day goes by where they aren't misgendered. That's just reality and it's disheartening. Whatever 'non-binary' passing ends up being, they don't get a 'they/them' by default, which is what I would call passing, and my heart breaks for them.
On Social Media
Halfway through the interviews, a thought occurred to me:
Did they use social media? If so, which one?
Social media seems to be many people’s first exposure to transgender people. It certainly was mine. This turned out to be true for them as well, especially Twitter. If anything, it was how they made friends with other trans people. While one of them told me, "nobody looks at trans people who don't pass and go, yeah, I want to be like that" (a statement I found far too absolute and in my experience, not true), I found no correlation between opinions on passing and social media usage.
This should've been explored further. I should've asked about the type of people they followed, whether they felt engagements were positive or negative, whether they only followed people who passed, etc. Thankfully, other writers have already tackled the harm of being exposed to only pretty, passing, photoshopped trans people on social media.
To my surprise, many refused to give up Twitter no matter how much harassment transpired. Twitter was how they discovered themselves. Leaving it meant giving up their only connection to their fellow queers, people who started them on the journey in the first place. It was a shared struggle.
Offline, there was nowhere else to go.
(I did ask if there was anywhere else to go online, and a few people said ‘Tumblr? I don’t know, I’ve never been there.’)
I also inquired whether they followed any trans people on social media. Most said they did. Looking at the ones who did pass gave them hope. Others said they did not—“it sucks”, but they intentionally curated trans people away. It didn’t matter how well-meaning they were, following them invited transphobic posts onto their feed because of the algorithm.
Despite it feeling like participating in erasure, they stated it was important for their mental health. Later, they reported that it didn't make them feel any better. Removing trans people from their timeline made them feel lonely.
“But at least I don’t have to read about the NHS,” said one.
Breaking down the Importance on Passing
Passing is important because the risk of getting hurt increases dramatically if you don't.
Wanting to pass because it helps you survive is very different from wanting to pass to look a certain way.
Society has set beauty standards for women. Being "ugly" (i.e. deviation) invites harm. This is not a trans-specific issue, but trans women who don't pass are severely affected by it.
It is therefore important to ask oneself that if trans rights were normalized over-night and you were treated like a woman, would passing still matter to you?
It is unfortunate that some trans women will not pass through no fault of their own. This is a matter of bodies reacting differently to hormones, age, etc. Not everyone gets to be pretty, but not being pretty doesn't make them any less of a woman.
It is reasonable to then think that instead of trying to get trans people to pass, we should double our efforts on making sure trans people have rights and are accepted. Doing so would vastly reduce, if not eliminate, the burden of not passing.
Until that happens, trans people are in danger, especially if they don't pass.
Is there something that passing trans people can do to help non-passing people pass? Not a lot. They can recount what worked for them, but ultimately your mileage may vary. This goes back to the point where passing women are likened to celebrities. At the very least, they seem to be leaders of the pack.
From the people I spoke to above, it seems unhelpful for passing people to reiterate that passing isn't important. Either there is an issue of conveying the message, or it is what it is—people don't want to hear that, regardless of good will.
Likewise, is it helpful at all to ask passing trans people "What if we don't pass?" Because they don't know.
There is a great deal of harm associated with the idea of 'passing is the ultimate goal'. It expects passing people to have all the answers. It places them on pedestals, and the harm that comes with that is immeasurable.
Is it the responsibility of passing people to answer this question in the first place? No. And I fear the dogpiling and harassment onto passing trans people by those who don't.
By thinking 'passing is the ultimate goal', it forces trans people onto a timeline. They may end up thinking: HRT, boob job, FFS. Putting tremendous money costs aside, none of those are required for a trans person to be who they are. This perpetuates the harmful notion that only by conforming will you be 'accepted'.
Therefore, one must also ask if being 'accepted' is the good life or just a dreamt up fantasy. Even people who pass experience discrimination under our current binary system, where circumstances cause one to either out themselves or eventually be forced into disclosure; the latter is seen as a betrayal and invites violence. What does being 'accepted' truly do other than reifying the hierarchical systems that we are all struggling under?
And yet, pain makes us do crazy things. You cannot reason away the feeling of wanting to pass. Few care about social structures or the philosophical aspect of it. They just want to pass and feel safe. Nothing else matters.
Notes from the author
Everyone I spoke to had medically transitioned with two exceptions: one non-binary, the other intersex. The intersex person did not feel that they should be included under the medical transition umbrella given that their circumstances were vastly different.
I had barely started the first draft of this post before I questioned whether I should write this at all. This was after I had finished my interviews; it occurred to me that I could be doing harm, especially by separating the views into ‘care’ and ‘don’t care’. Easy distinctions, but potentially harmful by inviting the reader to join one of these camps. Opinions are a spectrum. I spoke to a few writers and came away with various answers. These ranged from: ‘ease of reading matters, breaking the subject matter into two and inviting them to figure out their own opinions is fine’ to ‘hold up, Maddie, sounds like you don’t trust your audience and that’s a reflection on you’. Some also asked if I felt that this binary representation was indicative of the people I spoke to. I replied that it did feel that way. It was a subject that elicited strong feelings; by nature, it pushed people into one of the extremes.
Almost everyone self-reported safety as being 80% of the reason why they wanted to pass. The two variations I got were 70% and 90%.
On the subject of ‘cringe’, I did not mention it being the possibility of right-wing social control and how they were trying to shame people back into the closet. It's been successfully weaponized, not just against trans people, but among them, by forcing trans people to cringe at their own. I left it out because I felt my role was to listen.
There was a point where I asked other writers if I should go into this with some sort of agenda/angle, given the perilous nature of our lives and the increasing amount of violence, political and otherwise. It pained me to present these views with the possibility of exacerbating anyone in a precarious situation. The more I spoke to those who were insistent that passing was the only thing that mattered, the more I was tempted to twist the issue. In the end, I continued with the exploratory, open-ended aspect of the interviews.
I left out a great deal about my conversations with people who cared about passing. Those interactions took many dark turns, far darker than expected. I became ill for days after.
One of them told me, "We're inconvenient to be around." Somehow, this was the statement that hurt me the most. It was the one that broke my heart.
Pain makes us crazy. Doing this forced me to confront and admit I was deeply, abysmally in pain.
I think I need therapy.
This part below was a follow-up after reading some comments:
Some of you have been sending me private messages. Thank you. I appreciate them.
People rightfully brought up that I neglected to mention race. This was something I realized very early on when I looked at my list of people. The majority of the people I interviewed were white, Asian, and all spoke English quite well, if not all on a natural level. Properly westernized, one might say. There is a very obvious bias here lacking in BIPOC. It is no surprise then, that most of them did assume that passing meant living up to the western ideal: white, skinny, and pretty in a very specific way.
Some people in the comments also pointed out that this kind of beauty standard erases a lot of ethnic features. This is true too! Growing up, everything I heard was about removing our flat faces and getting Asian blepharoplasty so we could have white people eyes. In fact, a significant trauma from my childhood was when my mother looked at me and sighed.
"Aren't you glad you're not a girl? You have such Asian eyes, you'd have to get surgery."
Our Asian round faces were a curse. They called us dinner plates. Weak and soft, we lacked the chiselled clarity of white people. The white person's nose, tall and defined like pyramids, was something to be envied. It is true that FFS' goal is to break us down and emulate the western ideal, starting from the brow to the chin.
I am hopeful that someone will see the deficiencies in my writing and fill them. I'm sorry to say that I do not know any BIPOC trans people.