"Why Do You Need to Know Any Trans People?"
A genuine, genuine question.
Last summer, when I was in London getting my hair done
yes, I flew from Cork to London to get my hair done, it’s a long story
I met my sister the night before the appointment.
We sat in a pub and talked.
My sister is a smart motherfucker. Analytical. Deeply conceptual. She doesn’t waste words. She pauses, thinks hard, and then injects something that’s been properly processed. She’s blunt, mathematically minded, allergic to fluff. A sophisticated piece of machinery.
At some point I mentioned that I’d been spending time in trans groups. Chats. Servers. WhatsApp threads. The swamp you inevitably end up wading into once you transition.
She looked at me and said:
“Why do you need to know any trans people?”
And I didn’t have an answer.
That should have been my first clue.
Because yes, if you’re transgender, you will end up knowing other trans people. There is some shared experience. Some reassurance that you’re not entirely insane, although frankly you have to be at least a bit mad to do this in the first place. Some practical information is occasionally useful, though I don’t actually need a committee to tell me how to transition. I’ve managed that just fine on my own.
And sometimes, if you find the right ones, it’s genuinely funny. The sheer absurdity of what you’re doing reflected back at you by someone equally unhinged in the same direction.
The problem is what you have to wade through to find those people.
There are a lot of frogs in Transgenderland™.
A lot.
This isn’t a trans-specific phenomenon. I’d encountered the same thing years earlier when my wife and I were expecting our first child. We signed up for NCT, the private prenatal classes. An old friend of mine had done both private and state-run classes. When I asked him about the difference, he paused and said:
“Oh dear fucking Jesus. Some of the questions.”
He wasn’t being cruel. He was describing what happens when the only thing selecting a group is pregnancy.
No cognitive filtering. No curiosity filter. No “can you follow a sentence with subordinate clauses” filter. Just the full, raw distribution.
I’ve always lived in environments where selection happens implicitly. Geography. Education. Profession. Curiosity. If you live somewhere like middle class East Dulwich, the people around you are not a random sample of humanity. Pretending otherwise is dishonest.
I remember sitting in A&E once for hours and thinking, oh right. This is what the rest of the world looks like. Not in a judgemental way. In a statistical way.
Trans groups are like that, except with an added twist.
They select on one axis only: transness. And transness is not a neutral axis. It is strongly correlated with anxiety, trauma, depression, neurodivergence, and people who are still very much mid-unravelling.
That’s not a moral judgement. It’s just how statistical distributions work.
What you end up with is not just a wide range of intellects, but a conversational environment that is permanently volatile. Everything is symbolic. Everything is sacred. Everything is personal.
As long as you stick to the ritual, it’s fine.
“Love you babe.”
”You look amazing.”!
”Good morning beautiful.”
It feels like a fucking episode of the Waltons. “Night-night, John-boy”!!
It’s a mutual reassurance cult. And I don’t mean that as an insult. Some people need this at the start.
But the moment you stop performing the ritual, things detonate.
Which brings me to what I now think of as Stevie’s Greatest Hits, a short compilation of things I have said without malice, but with insufficient regard for the emotional fragility of the room.
Stevie’s Greatest Hits
“Breast enlargements are not gender-affirming care. They are better tits. If you want better tits, pay for better fucking tits.”
“I don’t see why a bus driver should pay taxes so I can get new fucking tits.”
“No, I’m not a progressive. I’m a free-market capitalist. Go and buy some fucking Bitcoin.”
“Are you mad? By any real textbook definition, we are biological males. You can only change that by changing the definition. I live in reality”
“I wouldn’t be carrying tampons. I’m not fucking mental. That would be like me carrying a hearing aid. I’m not fucking deaf.”
Ouch!!!!
None of these statements are designed to be cruel. They are literal, analytical, or dryly jokey. But they land like blasphemy because these spaces are not built for thinking. They are built for soothing.
Now for the part that actually implicates me
There’s another uncomfortable truth here, and it doesn’t flatter me. Part of why I stayed in those spaces is that they fed my ego. I knew perfectly well that when I posted a picture of myself it would land a certain way. My transition had gone well, aesthetically speaking, and I was aware that this quietly placed me higher in an unspoken hierarchy based on appearance. I wasn’t competing overtly, but I knew what I was doing. And I always felt faintly disgusted with myself for it. So, like some lapsed Catholic in search of confession, I’d then wander off to X and have myself ritually abused by a pack of TERFs
“Ugly beast of a man with a massive chin”
“Man in a dress”
“Delusional freak“
A quick rinse. Back down to earth. If I ever needed proof that none of this should be taken too seriously, a few minutes on X usually did the job nicely.
Then something finally clicked. I was becoming someone who fed on reflected admiration. That’s when my sister’s question came back.
“Why do you need to know any trans people?”
And the answer is: I don’t.
Not as a category.
I’m not going to lie. I like smart, funny people. People who get nuance, who can sit with ambiguity, who can think in abstractions without taking it personally. Some of them might be trans. Most of them won’t be.
And in the end, it wasn’t a waste of time. I did meet a couple of people who are very clearly my people. Funny. Sarcastic. Self-mocking about the sheer ridiculousness of what we are, without turning it into either tragedy, theology or a fucking “micro-aggression” to be “triggered” by. I despise that term, by the way 😠.
That, it turns out, was the point of wading through the rest of it. You find the odd little princess amongst the frogs.
Haaa yes, glad you had the Balls (or not) to say pretty much what I was thinking.
Wonderful. I’m very new to this and don’t yet have any kind of network, but I’m starting to see that people relate to being trans in very different ways. Accepting myself has been unsettling, but it’s also made me think about the difference between who you are and how you show up. For me, this feels quite private and fundamental.
I also feel like a lot of the louder or more defensive stuff often comes from people who’ve had to mask or be on guard for a long time just to get by. That makes sense to me, even if my own experience is quieter.