What's It Like to Be Trans?

A Transgender Man—a Female-to-Male Trans—shares his story to help illuminate from the inside the issues involved in trans matters

I received the following letter in response to my several essays and articles in this column and elsewhere, along with X posts and podcast discussions with guests about trans matters. With his permission I am publishing this letter as I share my interlocutor’s belief that by revealing such information about what it’s actually like to be trans, we can all reach a deeper understanding of the issues involved. The writer, a Female-to-Male Trans who is married to a biological woman, wishes to remain anonymous, so of course I will honor that request. I refer readers to the special issue of Skeptic on “Trans Matters”, most notably Lisa Selin Davis’s cover story, still the best overview of the issues involved I’ve ever read, which we have made available for free to read (click on the link above or the image below). —Michael Shermer

Hello Mr. Shermer,

Thanks for all the content you put out there. I don't always agree with your views, but I find you a reasonable person who can weigh the merits of various truth claims.

I have been personally struck by your obsession with the sex and gender relationship. I have noticed that you mention this topic to nearly every guest on your show, whether or not the show's theme has very much or very little to do with it. You tell the story of your young son and how he is "just drawn to boy stuff." You have the same old argument about trans women potentially fighting in MMA and killing someone. I've heard these stories on a bunch of your different podcasts. Then Neil deGrasse Tyson called you "an old man on a rocking chair" because you won't get hip to the changes that our language games around sex and gender are currently undergoing.

If I understand you correctly your sense is that undoing these conceptual categories undoes all claims to various sorts of truth, especially the more concrete sorts around and upon which science is founded. Psychoanalytically and anatomically, you obviously cannot imagine having a vagina and calling yourself a man. You have a relationship to your penis that is very concrete, and that says, "I am a man and I have always known I was a man." It also seems that you feel the current culture wars are throwing this feeling of certainty under the bus, and that seems completely disorienting to you, which is why you keep talking about it. I don't think you're wrong to feel this way, but I want to share my story with you because I've never heard you consider this perspective.

First of all, I am technically a transgender man, although I do not "identify" that way publicly. For many people I am just a man, and only my wife knows exactly how I am configured. Biologically, if you want to split hairs, no, my chromosomes are not XY, I don't make small gametes, and I was not given the set up of genitalia that would place me in the "going to be a man one day" category as an infant. But I am one of those 3-7% of people who exhibited gender dysphoria from a very young age, almost pre-consciousness. I "passed" as a boy from an early age, and dreamed every night that, like Pinocchio, one day I would "become a real boy." Stories about genies granting wishes was also a recurring dream. It was confusing. We didn't have much language around what I was going through at the time (I was born in 1980). Puberty sucked probably more for me than for most people, but I'm a resilient person and I developed coping mechanisms. Through high school and on through college I nearly became a pro in my sport of expertise, but am glad I didn't because I would have never wanted to deal with what I now view as a disability under such scrutiny. I focused instead on doing my sport as a serious hobby and turned to academia. I now have a BA in History and a PhD in English, and am a coach of my sport for a living.

I officially transitioned in my early 30s while in graduate school. Most people already gendered me male for a very long time. This is an interesting part of the puzzle. It was more work to try to tell people not to call me sir when I really preferred to be called sir, felt like a "sir," but didn't know what to do about it. I would alarm women in the women's-only room and that made me feel like shit. Like any good man, the last thing I want to do is freak women out! The work it took to try to understand myself and explain myself as an extra-masculine woman was too hard and too painful, and caused me great distress and tons of social friction. People imagine me with a dick in my pants regardless of what kind of dick or non dick is in my pants.

Does this make sense to you? This being the case, the first thing I did was not to sign up for transition therapy, but instead I went to therapy, for quite some time. When my therapist and I decided a transition might alleviate my hardships, I first changed all the language games around my person: pronouns, name, documents. I changed the language before I did anything to my body. This brought immediate relief. There was some friction in my family, but for the most part it was therapeutic for everyone. They, including my grandparents, were like, "Duh," and we all moved on pretty quickly.

I have now been on HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) for 10 years. Yes, I had top surgery. What a relief. And I have no plans for bottom surgery because the prosthetics work just fine for me, and because the only person who really needs to know about the state of my junk is my wife. This may have been more difficult if I had made this decision when I still had to change in locker rooms, but I still probably would have figured something out. I have developed a series of tactics and techniques for blending seamlessly in a gendered world with its gendered and gendering language games. This brings me to a point that you miss but that I think would strengthen your overall hunch: there can be no such thing as transgender or transsexual if we do not have a gendered binary! I get just as annoyed as you do at the "non binary" and "queer" radicals who think that they're being avant-garde by "deconstructing gender."

Transitional therapy would not have worked for me if, in fact, I would have and could have been happier not conforming to gender norms. I am happier conforming to gender norms, just not to the ones that my birth sex would suggest. I am a very masculine guy in most respects, including male pattern baldness, which I actually embrace by just shaving my head. I actually don't even know why the hell there's such a big market for hair growth supplements for men. Give in guys! It's part of the compromise for all the other privileges we get. Just shave your fucking heads and move on. Anyhow, I’m a big advocate of "bald is beautiful." In other tropes, I enjoy taking out the trash, fixing shit, opening pickle jars, and having a very pretty wife that lots of people seem to want to have sex with. It’s not the deepest part of masculinity, but ya know, you take the good with the bad.

This brings me to another point, which again would serve in your favor, but which you miss. Here's the part you get right first: the fact that people are lionized for their "bravery" and "coolness" when they undergo a gender transition is annoying as fuck. This is a disability and it should be dealt with as privately as possible with the goal of blending inner feelings with outward appearance as seamlessly as possible. If this is not possible, or for whom this is not as possible, consistent therapy is necessary—screaming at people on social media to read you as a woman when you have a five o’clock shadow does not and should not count as therapy.

But what I want to say is that I am also sick of women transitioning to men to want all of the comforts of being a woman—being treated special, pampered, etc.—with the benefits and social ease of being a man. Just no. If you're going to be a man you need to take on the burdens of masculinity. This means doing all the hard, silent shit that men, especially the good ones who try at being good, do. This means shutting up and listening to your wife even if she's having a fit. This means doing the heavier lifting if it is necessary. I realize that there are more effeminate men out there and that gender is a spectrum, but too often I see this performance of "queerness" as a means to sidestep the compromises that cis gendered people have to make in their everyday lives vis-à-vis their genders. It is hard to live in a sexed body of any sex. And most of the gendered roles sexed bodies play out are culturally constituted, but that doesn't mean that they aren't real for about 97% of the population, including people who transition.

Ok, next point. Groupthink and children. I'm basically on the same page with you here. As I wrote above, did I hate puberty? Yep. Such a let down to be treated like a boy for 14-15 years and then have all that change. Did I try to control my body through things like severe caloric restriction? I did. (I hold to this day, however, that I was not anorexic because there is a fine line between controlled caloric deficit and anorexia—more on that to follow). Would I have picked to be a boy always and forever if I was asked at a very young age? Yes. But still, if I were my parent, I would not have trusted me to know myself enough to intervene at that young of an age. Best case scenario: I would have put me in therapy and just monitored me until adulthood. Maybe, if we all agreed, we'd change names and language first, and see how that goes. It's still not easy, but the effects of turning back are way less devastating.

As someone who truly suffers from this disability, it simply cannot be the case that this many people also suffer. Puberty is hard for everyone, and everyone is not transgendered! That can't be the band aid measure for dealing with the fact of having hormones at all. I liken it to true ciliacs. They exist. But "gluten intolerance" is mostly a social meme proliferating through the "wellness" scene. Most people can process wheat just fine, especially as long as they have a diet high in fiber and low in saturated fats, especially from animals. Most people blame wheat before they even cut out the more obvious culprits.

I actually see transgenderism like this, but with way more drastic measures taken, obviously, because getting gender surgery is a lot more serious than not eating bread. So the amount of true transgendered people is probably akin to the number of true ciliacs—not much. And everyone else has convinced themselves they have these disabilities, which just cannot be the case. And why do they want these disabilities? It has been made to be glamorous and a source of social cache, but it's not glamorous. You're only glamorous if you are, well, glamorous, i.e., have a sense of style and confidence that is alluring and imitable.

It's not fun to have a disability. It is something you cope with and manage, not something you celebrate openly. When you're crushing it with your coping mechanisms that shows up as a flourishing life, you can celebrate your wins in therapy. I am afraid, however, that both the trans and gluten-intolerance memes have bred too well and have charted their own courses of evolving human culture, human culture itself be damned. I'm obviously invoking Dawkins’ theory of memetics and cultural evolution here, which I think would be useful for your thoughts on these subjects.

As to your question you wrote about here, "What is a woman?", a woman is a person who appears to be a woman and identifies as a woman. If you look out of the corner of your eye and all of your language game sensors read, "woman," then that person is a woman. She can be cis or trans, and if she is the latter and you didn't know it until you started dating her, good for her, and hopefully you two will sort out the rest on your own. If she is trans and it's obvious then that's just a more difficult negotiation for everyone. If she is a drag queen then she is a man in drag, so temporarily appearing as a woman, but not identified as one overall. This person picks different gendered appearances. A cisgendered woman has XX chromosomes and a vagina. She will go through female puberty, and many studies show that her "innate" sexual attraction will be more bisexual than will a cisgendered man's. There are some good psychoanalytic studies about why this is the case. See Dr. Lucy Holmes’ work here. I highly recommend it.

All of this is the case for men. A "man" is someone who appears to be a man on the quickest scan. It is also a person with a penis and XY chromosomes who feels his junk lines up with his gender assignment. For the most part we use appearances to orient ourselves in our lifeworlds, so appearances matter. A lot. I could wear a skirt and heels and you'd still think I was a man. Five o clock shadow. Male pattern baldness. Small hips. Large shoulders, biceps, and pecs. I should not be in women's bathrooms regardless of whether I'm wearing a skirt or pants.

Now, the issue of passing for different trans people is touchy. Some people really "feel" they're the opposite gender than their original sex assignment would suggest, but they simply cannot do enough therapies to get the world to read them "correctly." Well, I think that must be painful for them, but it should not be the rest of the world's burden to conform to these people's "feelings." Most women do not have an Adam's apple, and most men do not have child bearing hips. So if you have these things you need to be more real with yourself and the world that you may just get read "incorrectly" or incongruously with how you "feel."

But I'd also say, that such people should probably also get more in touch with why they feel how they feel, and get help coming up with strategies for coping with this disability. Because again, 97% of us do identify somewhere on a binary sex/gender model. And those of us who feel our appearances match our feelings nearly perfectly can be said to flourish in our gendered identities, regardless of the "reality" of our sex assignments at birth. The only people who need to know about those, again, are our spouses or sex partners and our doctors.

Sports. Ok this one is hard. First, read Iris Marion Young. I think her work would be enlightening to you. As for me, I am better at my sport than most people of any chromosome configuration. Could I beat an XY chromosome person at my sport? Most of them, but not the best of the best. I also couldn't beat the best of the best XX chromosome people at this point either. Little girls are now being socialized into sports at a much earlier age, and some sports, like the board-sports, don't privilege XY or XX chromosomes for excellence, at least that is turning out to be the case, but only recently. In sports like tennis, you have mixed doubles. Men serving to women, and women serving to men. I watch a lot of tennis and the men are still hitting slightly faster than women, but the women are catching up. Many sports that have to do with technique don't require a chromosome difference to make the difference. Sports just aren't fair all the way down the line.

That said, I think we're going to have to let the jury be out on sports for some time. I think you're a little too vehement about the trans swimmer woman [Lia Thomas]. She sucked as a guy and is now better as a woman. Ok. But women are still beating her. She's not winning everything. As to your MMA thing about what happens when a trans woman kills another woman? Dude. C'mon. What happens when anyone kills anyone in MMA? The rules have to change at that point. Killing people isn't cool. Boxers and footballers get the concussion disease. They are killing one another. It's not ok just because it's men killing other men. That doesn't make it more "fair." If a woman wants to go get killed that way she should be able to.

Neil deGrasse Tyson's point that sports merely need to be spectacular and have a good tension is the case. No one likes to see a team or a player get creamed. It's just not good watching. And it still happens a lot of the time no matter how you segregate people. Sometimes a weakling slips through a weak side of the draw. Scientifically, we need to let the jury be out on the trans women in sports question. We also need to think about more creative solutions. It's just not the case that people born XY are ipso facto stronger than people born XX. There's too much variation, even on average. You could go try and play on a pro women's basketball team and you'd get crushed dude. You have zero advantage. But if Michael Jordan became Michaela Jordan? I say let her play. Freak athletes make teams win. And guess what? It's not "fair."

In the sport of surfing, for example, Kelly Slater won 11 world titles. 11. Is that fair? Should we test his hormones to see if he's cheating the other guys or is it fair just cuz everyone in his field has a penis? We simply have no precedent of a trans woman cleaning up in women sports, so any hand wringing is entirely premature. I actually am a coach at my sport and I can tell you that some of the trans women I coach have zero advantage. In my sport you're better off being short and compact. If it became the case that it was so glaringly obvious that transwomen were wiping the floor with cis woman all over the place then I think we'd need to take stock, but it's really not happening on a large enough scale. [See my analysis to the contrary here —MS.]

It's also reasonable to see why cis women are pissed off that transwomen are getting more spotlight. In most sports (professional tennis is the exception) women are still not paid the same or respected for their athletic capabilities. I don't watch premier league women’s soccer and never will. Doesn't matter to me what kinds of women play in it. Even if Rinaldo became Rinalda I wouldn't watch. But I do watch men’s premier league soccer and I watch women's tennis and surfing because they're awesome. It's very weird and peculiar. None of this bit on sports ramble really makes sense except to say the jury is truly out. Sports aren't fair. I think we'd all do well to keep working towards promoting sports for young girls and aiming for equality in women's pay in sports. We should take trans female athletes on a case-by-case basis and look at their performances over time. And yeah, we probably do need to make sure that they have low enough levels of testosterone at least to maintain some kind of consistency for what constitutes "femaleness."

As for making sure trans male athletes have enough testosterone? No one cares. That's fine. And any male trans athlete who crushes it at sports probably just wants to be known as a great athlete anyhow. But he should not get special privileges because he's trans. And he should NOT be allowed to compete with women. Per above, that's part of the trade off for trans men. You wanna be a dude? You're going to have to compete with dudes. Take it or leave it. But you don't get to be celebrated by just participating. That's is a load of bullshit. I'm seeing that in my sport all over the place right now, also with the race card. People are getting promoted in the media spotlight for their race or gender identity and not because they're actually virtuous athletes.

Last, training for sports, going on diets, etc. Something you never mention or research, but which is very interesting, is how a trans person has to navigate diet and fitness in a body with a sex that does not line up with gender, but who can regulate this with HRT. I will use myself as an example again. I workout and pay very close attention to my diet. When I enter my stats in a calorie calculator I have to pick M or F. Which do I pick? Is my metabolism M or F? What does hormone ratio have to do with my metabolism? In my case, I pick M. I'm 155-160 lbs and probably around 10-11% body fat. This means that the 10 years of HRT have changed my metabolism to that much more like a cis man than a cis woman. I eat maintenance calories of anywhere from 2300-3000 a day. I lose weight at 2100 calories a day. You'd be hard pressed to find a 43-year-old woman for whom that's the case. My wife, also 43, the same height as I am, eats 1600-1800 calories a day to maintain weight. She needs to eat 1400-1500 a day to lose weight. She is active. We're both 5'8" but she is 130-135 lbs. I appear thinner overall because of my lean body mass, despite weighing almost 20 pounds more. Normal male/female differences here. When I work out I add lean body mass quickly. It takes her forever. If I put the F in the calorie calculator and eat for an estrogen-based body, I'd look like a concentration camp victim. It's a look, for sure, but not one I'm going for.

So that brings me to the end here. I'm the last person who wants to be famous for my gender identity, which is why I don't mention my specific sport or share my name with you. I find the idea of promoting myself for anything other than doing my sport well and caring for others to do it well absolutely distasteful.

I hope that my story helps you in your process of thinking through these very thorny issues!

Thanks for all the great content you put out.