“Why do you care about me? I’m boring.”
“I don’t think you’re boring. You just haven’t found your people yet.”
This moment between two characters in Luke Gilford’s gorgeous cinematic celebration of queer and trans community and the ranch culture of the American Southwest resonated with me so profoundly that I immediately knew I would write about it. I’ve always been curious about the task of finding our people - of feeling belonging, and the relationship between sense of self and sense of community.
During a recent visit, my mother made note of the joy I was feeling planning a weekly bike ride I recently began organizing for queer and trans people (and our allies). She said, “When you think back to when you were 15 years old, do you think you would have predicted that you would be someone so active in community and community-building?” I think she was asking this because at 15, I experienced a lot of disconnection from my peers. At that age, as a freshman in high school, my lunch period didn’t match with my small number of friends and I often ate by myself or with the college counselor or teachers or even with my mom who was the elementary school counselor. I realize now what that might have looked like to her or to anyone on the outside: that I was a loner or socially anxious, withdrawn from community. But my recollection of my internal experience was really different. I wasn’t a loner - I just didn’t have access to my people. When I think back to adolescence, I think about the close and fun relationships I had with a handful of schoolmates (most of whom I’m still meaningfully connected to) and the longing I felt for a world outside of the suburbs where there were more people like me. Though complicatedly, I didn’t quite know what “like me,” meant - I hadn’t settled into a robust sense of self but I knew I wasn’t like the people who mostly surrounded me.
At my high school, it is tradition that seniors write reflective essays about some piece of wisdom they’ve developed and want to share with the school community. I wrote about the ease I felt on the highway when I settled into a group of cars driving similarly and we traveled for some period as a pack. At 18 I was explicitly aware of my yearning for a pack. (This is not to diminish the friendships I’d formed by that time that have persisted beautifully over the decades. Though I will note that I was not yet living as a man or explicitly aware of my transness and was the only one in my friend group with an expressed queer identity.) I went off to college in Boston (far from home) with so much excitement about finding my people - I used the very early form of Facebook to connect with other “lesbians” at my large university and made an effort to make friends, which I did. But there was a distance between me and others that was always present and that I did not yet understand. It was actually incredibly tragic and destabilizing that being around other gay people did not develop into a sense of belonging - of having a pack - that I’d fantasized. I know now that my disconnection from myself and the fact that I was not known by others as a man were serious obstacles to feeling connected to the people around me. I also know now that lesbians were in fact not “like me,” though my awareness of this at the time was incomplete and felt confusing and inexplicable.
I transferred to a queerer college and felt much more at ease among the generally unlabeled gender diversity on campus. When I came out as trans at the end of college, I did so in community. I had been drawn to a group of transmasculine people who were in various stages of coming out to themselves and others, and as my identity crystallized so too did my desire to be in community with other trans people. Some trans friends and I formed a support and social group - we called it “club club” because our desire to be affirming and inclusive conflicted with any effort to name it with specificity. I was finding my people and building my pack. Within a couple years of coming out, one of my first jobs after college was as a youth worker in a community organization, facilitating the trans youth group. This was around 2010 when these trans young people didn’t see themselves reflected in the broader culture at all and typically the only other trans people they knew were each other. I was starting to feel what it was to be meaningfully part of a community, to feel belonging in a cultural space; and I witnessed some of my youth experiencing this too.
The first research I did as a PhD student was focused on trans community belongingness. I argued that while psychology as a field has long acknowledged that sense of belonging is important, trans people didn’t have access to that belongingness in mainstream cultural spaces and communities. This is still true. A poll from 2023 found that only 10% of trans people felt they strongly belonged in U.S. society. 25% reported that they somewhat belonged, while 59% reported low or no belongingness. These numbers were similar but slightly improved within people’s neighborhoods and surrounding communities, suggesting that some trans adults have been able to choose geographic areas where they feel more belonging, but still 50% report low or no belonging in these microsystems. This has a lot to do with anti-trans bias and cisnormativity leading to rejection and hostility, but it’s more than that, too.
In my experience working as a therapist with trans people and holding the stories of many trans loved ones, I’ve come to believe that it’s not uncommon for us to struggle profoundly with a lack of sense of belonging early in life, as well - before we knew to express a trans identity. Our society is so gendered that many of us grew up being regularly grouped and categorized with a gender that wasn’t really our own (i.e., I had to line up in the girls line, was expected to shop in the girls section, etc.), and consequently many of us had a sense that we didn’t fit or belong where others were telling us we should be. Another way this lack of belonging occurs even before coming out as trans: People who do not conform to gendered expectations are likely to be ostracized. In many parts of our society (and especially for earlier generations), gender nonconformity is a fast ticket to otherness and exclusion. I have heard pre-transition/affirmation transness described as fundamentally an experience of not belonging. And I’ll add: not belonging and not necessarily understanding why or what is missing.
We know there are many factors that contribute to sense of belonging in spaces. A primary aspect of this for LGBTQ people (and trans people in particular) is what psychologists have described as relational authenticity. This is defined as believing that others are perceiving or recognizing one’s identity in ways that align with how that individual understands their own identity - so not just an internal experience of “being authentic” but the experience of having your identity accurately reflected back. Relational authenticity is perceiving that the people around you are seeing you authentically… that they get you. In one study that I love on trans people’s experiences in the workplace, researchers found that relational authenticity was associated with trans workers’ experience of “fit” or belonging in their workplace (PDF of that study here). This is related to why affirming our genders (e.g., using the right name, pronouns, and descriptive terms/labels) is so important for trans and nonbinary people. Also, these researchers didn’t explicitly examine the role of authenticity related to additional or intersecting identities, but that is relevant here, as well.
Importantly, we can think of the necessary components of relational authenticity (that contribute to a trans person feeling like they belong in a given space) in two categories:
Experiences of the trans person: This includes a sense that they are showing up authentically, expressing themselves in their multiple and intersecting identities close to fully and close to accurately - which requires that they understand their gender and intersecting identities and are able to express them (which requires some degree of self-acceptance). (For example, the trans workplace research I cited above was titled “The Importance of Being Me” and found that gender transition was associated with greater relational authenticity - sort of a no brainer, honestly.)
Behaviors and qualities of the people and spaces they are in: This includes the extent to which people are affirming of the trans person’s gender and intersecting identities, and the extent to which it is safe in a given setting for the trans person to express themselves authentically.
This fits exactly with my experience that I described above. I felt belonging and experienced the finding of my people through both my acceptance of myself / my understanding of my maleness and transness and my arrival into spaces that were more readily able to witness and reflect and affirm my male identity. Of course, these are all interrelated experiences too. Certainly my capacity to understand and accept myself was facilitated by being in places with more gender diversity and by being affirmed externally. And we see this complex evolution in one of the main characters of National Anthem, as well. There is a bidirectional relationship between Dylan’s experience of belonging in this community of queer and trans people and his understanding of himself, and it is all facilitated by the warmth and shared identities of the community members themselves.
SO this is all a perhaps too-wordy way of saying that we will be limited in our sense of belonging anywhere until we understand and accept ourselves. And that by finding our people, we move toward understanding and accepting ourselves. A beautiful and sometimes messy upward spiral. This is also me saying please see National Anthem. It’s streaming!
National Anthem is streaming. For those in Charlotte NC, National Anthem is playing on the big screen at The Independent Picture House through Thursday, August 22.