The heroes in our favourite stories all start out as ordinary people. Their journeys often follow a similar pattern as they face trials and tribulations, discover their inner strength, and return triumphant. Joseph Campbell orginally described this story arc using 17 stages (and fairly problematic language). It has since been revised into 12 stages, most recently by Christopher Vogler.
As it turns out, these stages match the emotional stages of a gender transition pretty closely. Which means trans people are all heroes or heroes-in-training!
Here’s how it looks:
There are three parts: Departure (the beginning), Initiation (the middle), and Return (the end). These are broken down into the 12 stages.
The journey starts with the hero in the ordinary world living in a harsh and unforgiving external light in a state of unhappiness, stress, ignorance, and/or confusion.
They move to a new, extraordinary, or special world during the Initiation phase. Here they move through darkness as they struggle to discover their own internal source of light.
They then return to the ordinary world in a state of triumph and rebirth, having learned how to shine brightly from withinwith. They now have a new perspective, skill, or, in our case, identity.
As I was thinking about the steps in the Hero’s Journey and lining them up with the experience of gender transition, it was interesting how easy it was to see. Some of the original wording even makes sense without changing much except the context.
Let’s break it down and look at each of the twelve steps:
Stage 1: Ordinary World
Classic: The hero is uneasy, uncomfortable or unaware. They are living a life at the mercy of their enviornment, heredity, and personal history. The hero feels pulled in different directions and is stressed by the dilemma.
Trans: You are living with confusion and discomfort, just trying to get by with no language or understanding of why you feel different, that there is a way to relieve your distress, or what path your life is going to take.
Stage 2: Call to Adventure
Classic: Something shakes up the situation, either from external pressures or from something rising up from deep within, so the hero must face the beginnings of change.
Trans: You discover that your discomfort might be gender related by meeting a trans person, seeing a trans person represented in media, or learning about language, labels, or experiences that feel right for you.
Stage 3: Refusal of the Call
Classic: The hero feels the fear of the unknown and tries to turn away from the adventure, however briefly. This uncertainty may be voiced by someone else rather than the hero themself.
Trans: You have immense fear about the enormity of what this would mean for your life. This fear takes over and you ignore what you have just learned, bury the knowledge deep down, convince yourself that you don’t need to transition or don’t need to think about this. You try as hard as you can to fit in with what is expected of you or numb/ignore this awareness.
Stage 4: Meeting the Mentor
Classic: The hero comes across a seasoned traveler of the worlds who gives them training, equipment, or advice that will help on the journey. Or the hero reaches within to a mentor from their past or an internal source of courage and wisdom.
Trans: You meet someone who sees you for who you are and encourages you to delve into yourself. This could be a trans or queer person from the community who is living their best life and provides the experience and support you need, a therapist that starts helping you unpack your gender identity and dysphoria, or a close friend or family member who is no longer willing to let you hide from your truth.
Stage 5: Crossing the Threshold
Classic: The hero commits to leaving the ordinary world and entering a new region or condition with unfamiliar rules and values.
Trans: You come out to yourself, accepting yourself for who you are, accepting your true authentic gender identity. You are flooded by understanding, fear, excitement, confusion, discomfort, and determination.
Stage 6: Tests, Allies, Enemies
Classic: The hero is tested and sorts out allegiances in the new, special world.
Trans: You now know why you’ve felt uncomfortable your whole life and being able to point to and name dysphoria makes it so much bigger, louder, and more constant. You search the internet for trans information and find a huge community on social media platforms and many local and national organizations that offer support. At the same time, you start recognizing all the transphobic and cisnormative language around you and feel like no one in your life will accept you for who you are.
Stage 7: Approach to the Innermost Cave
Classic: The hero and newfound allies prepare for the major challenge in the special world.
Trans: You collect information from allies about coming out and navigating transition which helps you clarify for yourself what you want/need. This intensifies the dysphoria which gets harder and harder to deal with, especially when you haven’t told anyone yet. The internal pressure of knowing what you want, who you are, and how you want to be seen builds, pushing against the confines of the closet until…
Stage 8: Ordeal
Classic: The hero enters a central space in the special world and confronts death or faces their greatest fear. Out of this moment of ‘death’ comes a new life.
Trans: You decide that coming out is worth the risk, worth the loss of those that don’t support you, worth the potential harm in order to be who you are. You take the first steps to telling others who you are, breaking down that wall one brick at a time, or by driving a bulldozer straight through it and coming out to everyone at once.
Stage 9: Reward (Seizing the Sword)
Classic: The hero takes possession of the treasure they won by facing death. There may be celebration, but there is also danger of losing the treasure again.
Trans: Some people you come out to start using your correct name and pronouns and you have your first real taste of gender euphoria and what it could feel like to live as the person you are. Not everyone is supportive or consistent and dysphoria continues to fight it’s way in. You fight to hold onto your confidence in who you are and your resolve to seek what you need, using the bursts of gender euphoria as your guiding light.
Stage 10: The Road Back
Classic: The hero is driven to complete the adventure, leaving the special world to be sure the treasure is brought home. Often a chase scene signals the urgency and danger of the mission.
Trans: You learn how to integrate your new trans identity with your life at work, home, and school, with friends and family, and in social activities, hobbies, and sports. You struggle to navigate and access the medical care and legal services you want/need in order to be safe and feel authentic in your body and identity. You are desperate for the changes and progress yet they happen at a maddeningly slow pace.
Stage 11: Resurrection
Classic: The hero is tested once more on the threshold of home. They are pruified by a last sacrifice, another moment of death and rebirth, but on a higher and more complete level. By the hero’s action, the polarities that were in conflict at the beginning are finally resolved.
Trans: You start to recognize the person in the mirror, be recognized correctly by people around you more often than not, and feel more comfortable in your body. You come up to and cross a milestone of significance for you in your transition (starting hormones, top surgery, changing your gender marker, bottom surgery, etc) with all the doubt, fear, excitement, relief, pain, re-learning, and celebrating that comes with it.
Stage 12: Return with the Elixir
Classic: The hero returns home or continues the journey, bearing some element of the treasure that has the power to transform the world as the hero has been transformed.
Trans: You reach a sense of completion related to your transition or have found confidence and peace in the sense of an ongoing and lifelong gender discovery and evolution. You are living authentically, supporting others who are questioning their gender or know someone who is, expanding your society’s view of gender and authenticity, and maybe even advocating for trans rights. Huzzah!
What an epic journey! Can you see yourself, or the trans person you love, as a hero? What stage of your Hero’s Journey are you at?
I know everyone’s transition is different. Are there stages that line up differently based on your experience?
If you add in specific details that match your own experience, what story does it tell? Who were the mentor, allies, and enemies? What tests did you face? What treasure do you carry with you to this day? What final milestone did you face and overcome during your stage of resurrection?
What was the timeline of each stage, and the journey as a whole? Did it progress in a linear fashion the way it sounds like it would here?
Share your story in the comments or send it to me in an email! If you’re willing to share it, I’ll publish it here as a post! The more stories the better. We need more variety of trans experiences and we need more trans heroes!
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- When the Stereotypical Trans Story is Wrong
- Why Labels Matter
- Finding Support
- Let’s Talk Gender S2E5: Coming Out as Nonbinary
- The Coming Out Equation
- Lost and Found in Transition
- Trans Affirmations