Let’s Talk Gender S1E3: Personal Transition: Gender Exploration

OVERVIEW

The first stage of transition is the personal exploration of your gender. We discuss what the process of exploring your gender feels like, how each of us figured it out in different ways, and what it’s like to be the partner of someone going through the gender exploration process.

Sorry for the variable sound quality. We are still trying out different set ups to find something that works for us.

SHOW NOTES

• Exposure to a concept or identity that resonated with us
  • Looking up other people’s experiences on YouTube
  • Being fascinated by people’s experiences without knowing why until later
• Finding language to express ourselves and define our identities
  • Other people’s labels don’t necessary feel right for you
  • The labels that feel right shift throughout the exploration process
  • The trans label comes with a lot of weight
  • Takes a while to find your own meanings for labels that fit
• Exploration is often driven by the feeling of not fitting with the gender you were assigned at birth and how people relate to you as a result (dysphoria)
  • Trying to minimize it guides us in a direction towards our actual gender
  • Often have been experiencing dysphoria for a while but didn’t know what it was called and once we have the word for it it feels huge and way more painful than it did before
  • Physical dysphoria, social dysphoria, mental dysphoria
  • Fairly easy to tell what you are dyphoric about
• Sometimes we encounter gender euphoria and exploration is driven by finding that experience again
  • Trying on different clothes when playing dress-up or secretly raiding a family member’s closet

Jake’s Experience

• Minimal physical dysphoria, mostly social dysphoria
• Voice causing people to gender him as female
• Explorations
  • Cutting hair short
  • Wearing a binder
  • Trying a packer
  • More masculine style
• Very nervous that people would notice immediately
• Very scared of what the implications were of this feeling good, progressed very slowly
• Looking for a new name
  • Flipping through baby books
  • Making a short list
  • Ordering different things online with a different name each time
  • Kept coming back to Jake and eventually it stuck
• Eventually decided that he definitely did not feel comfortable being female
  • Even if he didn’t do any medical transition, he still felt more male than anything else
• Exploration doesn’t end
  • Now that he is more comfortable in his maleness he is exploring some of the female things that he would never have done before
    • Longer hair
    • Nail polish
    • Earings back in

Meaghan Ray’s Experience

• Exploration was a lot easier because they already new their identity but needed strategies to manage dysphoria, especially at work
  • Similar strategies as Jake
• Had a very clear gender related experience in Grade 10 where they were a boy named Ray for a few days, then back to Meaghan, then back to Ray
  • Kept up for 2-3 months
  • Was very confusing and frustrating and destabilizing
  • Ended up making a list of personality traits for Meaghan and a list of personality traits for Ray, drew lines between the ones that matched, and from then on lived as that person
  • Buried the whole experience very deep until Jake started talking about gender and they found language and space to explore it in a positive way
• Needed something more concrete to follow for exploration than Jake
  • You and Your Gender Identity: A Guide to Discovery by Dara Hoffman-Fox
  • Created a gender tracker to see how much their gender fluctuated between male and female for both physical and social sense of gender
  • Learned that their period affects their gender and that their physical and social sense of gender can shift separately which they will use different strategies to manage
• Trying on a dress privately
  • Thought it would feel wrong but it felt like a non-binary person wearing a dress
  • It did not erase their sense of identity which was encouraging
• At the end of exploration, they now have many more strategies that help and a much better understanding of who they are and how to express it to people

Partner Experience

• Seeing Jake with a flat chest in a binder helped change Meaghan Ray’s mental image of him
• If the partner is cis it can be very difficult to understand what’s happening
  • Some trans people are not willing to include the partner in their exploration process and just show up as their new self which is very threatening and sudden for the partner
  • Instead, Jake included Meaghan Ray in the process and they helped look stuff up, break things down into smaller steps so it was less scary, tested things out during a camping trip, provide encouragement and support
• Your experience is your own
• Need to find your own sources of support as a partner
• Don’t know how to talk about it yet because everyone is still just figuring it out
• The more open we are with each other the easier it is to keep our relationship strong
• We happen to both be AFAB and heading in the male direction
  • Some strategies worked very well for both of us
  • Some things worked very differently for each of us
  • Some things worked for one of us but not at all for the other

Resources

• FTM
  • YouTube Channels: Chase Ross at uppercasechase1, Ty Turner, Jammiedodger
  • Books: This One Looks Like a Boy
• NB
  • Podcasts: Gender Rebels, They/Them/Theirs
  • YouTube Channels: Ashley Wilde, Ash Hardell
  • Instagram hashtags to create a community for yourself

RELATED POSTS

• My Husband’s Transition – A Partner’s Perspective (Part 1 – Exploration)
• My Initial Gender Exploration Process
• My Experiences of Gender Dysphoria and Euphoria
• My Physical vs Social Sense of Gender
• Interpersonal Dysphoria
• Exploring My Gender Expression
• Gender Experiments: Wearing a Dress
• Different Ways to Explore Your Gender
• What’s in a Name and How to Pick One

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