Music to Help Us Resist Internalized Invalidation of Our Truths

On Needing Songs like "Many Ways" by CLARITY and Clairo Now More than Ever

Feb 28, 2025

A particularly nasty and insidious potential impact of widespread anti-trans discourse and systemic oppression of trans people is the erosion of trans and nonbinary individuals’ trust in our own self-knowledge. Music that strengthens our ability to trust ourselves and believe in the validity of our experiences can help us resist this.

This is the third installment of my weekly series of Friday music shares, which will initially be song selections from the TRANSA compilation.

TRANSA (stylized as TRAИƧA) is a project presented by activist and musical non-profit Red Hot Organization and produced by Massima Bell and Dust Reid. In short, this is a musical celebration of transness and what trans people offer the world. In the words of the TRANSA team, this album is "a spiritual journey across 8 chapters and 46 songs, spotlighting the gifts of many of the most daring, imaginative trans and nonbinary artists working today. It softens the edges of the world we know, and invokes powerful dreams of the futures that might one day thunder from its cracks." For Massima and Dust, the word transa means "to love without limits" and "you are more than you know."

The album features collaborations from 100 artists across genres and the spectrums of gender and transness/cisness, from icons and well-known musicians like Sade, Sam Smith, Laura Jane Grace, Moses Sumney, Allison Russell, Perfume Genius, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland to more obscure but equally visionary creators. It also includes multiple spoken word poems (by poets such as Eileen Myles, Marsha P. Johnson, and Nsámbu Za Suékama) set to music.

The chapters of TRANSA follow the journey trans people make as individuals and as a collective: Womb of the Soul, Survival, Dark Night, Awakening, Grief, Acceptance, Liberation, and Reinvention. You can read more about how TRANSA has been a source of radical hope for me here. And check out the full tracklist and order details here.

Today’s song is “Many Ways” by CLARITY featuring Clairo. This collaboration lyrically centers one’s first-person authority over who they are and a bold rejection of outside efforts to restrict or dictate self-definition. The lyrics “I won’t let nobody tell me / I won’t let nobody tell me how to be like” are repeated throughout the song. So to is the refrain “there are many ways,” which seemingly refers to the multiple valid (and I’ll say wonderful) ways to exist in this world - in contrast to the single anatomy-at-birth-linked gender we are each offered by cisnormative frameworks.

CLARITY, who wrote the song and performed most of the instrumentation and some vocals, is a trans musician and producer based in LA, while Clairo, a queer indie musician, provides additional vocals. The full lyrics follow:

Spent too long
Trying to
Get along
Giving you what you want
Now I know
Without doubt
Who I am
Can I be true to you

I won't let nobody tell me
I won't let nobody tell me how to be like
I won't let nobody tell me how to
There are many ways, there are many ways

When I say
When I show
What’s within
Hope you don’t go away
Are you scared to find out
Who you are
Living as someone else

I won’t let nobody tell me
I won’t let nobody tell me how to
I won’t let nobody tell me
I like it just the way it is

Being able to trust one’s understanding of their gender, how they do and don’t fit into society’s systems of gender, and what their needs are around that is critical to wellbeing and healthy development for trans folks. It’s not easy. For most people, messaging from birth is that we are the gender most often associated with whatever anatomy we were born with and the chromosomes we are assumed to have. We are constantly gendered in mainstream society, with these cisnormative assumptions about which gender category we belong within repeatedly reinforced. If you are not trans or nonbinary, I invite you to imagine what it would be like if the world interacted with you as a gender different from the one you know yourself to be. Think about how many times in your day people would use the wrong pronouns for you or give you directions to the wrong bathroom or clothing section; how often you would be using materials (e.g., menstrual products, shoe sizing) that were labeled for the different gender; and how much your particular expression (e.g., clothing and hairstyle, mannerisms, interests) would make you stand out from the people who were grouped with. We are all constantly being told what gender people see us as.

Trans people often report early senses of general and/or specific lack of belonging even before they have a framework or language for gender being at the core of that. For many of us, there’s a nagging sense that something about our internal sense of self is not lining up with what everyone else is telling us - or even more nebulous: a sense that something is (very) wrong. When, out of sheer overpowering discomfort/pain, deep self-reflection, or both, we finally do figure out that what’s off is that our gender is different than what we’re being told, we must then confront that we alone believe something about ourselves that contrasts to the beliefs of the whole world around us - often including the people who know us best, love us the most, and/or on whom we most depend. The self-trust in our authority to know ourselves best must be profound to move into acceptance and coming out phases and the seeking gender-affirmation socially/interpersonally and physically/medically.

It’s understandable, normal (i.e., not maladaptive or indicative of unwellness), and common for trans people to have doubts about their transness and gender throughout their identity development. No real tarrying with one’s internal experience and self-knowledge/understanding could be expected to be wholly certain from the start - and if it appears that way, it’s a recipe for distress later on. I’m going to put on my psychologist hat for a quick bit: A commonly taught general theory of identity development is Marcia’s Identity Status Theory, which expands on Erik Erikson’s work in this area. Marcia’s model categorizes identity development into four identity statuses based on two key dimensions: exploration (actively questioning and considering different identity options) and commitment (making firm choices about identity). The four status categories are:

Identity Diffusion – Low exploration, low commitment: Individuals in this stage have not explored their identity options and haven’t made commitments to any particular identity. They may seem indifferent or directionless.
Identity Foreclosure – Low exploration, high commitment: Individuals in this stage have committed to an identity without exploration. This often happens when someone adopts identities imposed by parents, religion, or society without questioning them.
Identity Moratorium – High exploration, low commitment: This is a stage of active questioning and exploration, but without committing to a final identity yet. It’s often a period of experimentation, uncertainty, and sometimes anxiety.
Identity Achievement – High exploration, high commitment: This occurs when an individual has explored different options and made a conscious, committed choice about their identity. They tend to have a stronger sense of self and stability.

If we reframe self-doubt and questioning as part of the exploration process in a person’s gender / transgender identity development, we can understand that to be a normal and welcome part of ultimately reaching the more stable status of identity achievement. We know that identity foreclosure can be damaging (though in the case of gender identity development, identity foreclosure more aptly applies to the unquestioned gender identity of a cisgender person… just sayin.)

Anyway, I’ve gotten off on a tangent here. My point is that some self-doubt is merely the manifestation of holistic exploration that will serve people well. Self-doubt becomes a risky or harmful thing for trans people when it is attached to shame and internalized transnegativity - beliefs that transness is pathological, and/or when it prevents someone from moving toward affirmation steps that would better their wellbeing.

I have had multiple conversations in the past month with trans friends and clients who have found themselves doubting their identities after years of living comfortably, confidently, and even proudly in their affirmed genders. Suddenly the totally misinformed narratives we have been battling against together seemed plausible to them and held enough weight to lead them to question their own authority on their identity experiences. “Did my trauma make me think I’m trans?” (I’m currently working on a peer-reviewed, evidence-based rebuttal to this deeply harmful etiology myth.) “Did I transition out of misogyny?” “Did I transition because I was afraid of my masculinity and male responsibilities?” “Am I just trying to access spaces I don’t belong in?” “Am I doing something wrong?” “Should I have tried harder to change my beliefs about my gender before I accepted them?”

The last question, I should note, resulted immediately in reflection on the years this person spent trying to resist their gender and how torturous this was - which links directly to the opening lines of this week’s song, “[I’ve] spent too long trying to get along, giving you what you want.” Ultimately, open and compassionate engagement with each of these questions helped my loved ones and the people seeking my care re-stabilize in their understandings of their transness as non-pathological and true for them. This ultimate re-stabilization further underscored my belief that rather than coming from an internal evolution in who they are and what they need, the identity turbulence folks were bringing to me was the result of internalizing shitty and inaccurate messages of transness being promoted by right wing politicians and society.

Florence Ashley has written about how inaccurate narratives of the etiology of transness like so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria” and social contagion theories are rooted in epistemic injustice or the denial of trans people’s (particularly youths’) first person authority over who they are. I’ve written with colleagues about this phenomenon in the misuse of psychotic disorder diagnoses with trans people (e.g., your gender identity isn’t valid because it stems from psychotic delusion). And this in turn leads to more epistemic injustice, because as such misinformed theories take prominence in sections of the discourse (e.g., through the poor journalistic practices of people like Emily Bazelon and through politicians working to ban access to care and civil liberties), trans people’s self-knowledge of gender identities become more scrutinized and met with increased skepticism. Society’s acceptance of the legitimacy of our first person authority over our genders is eroding.

And as I describe above, what I am witnessing is that this is causing some trans folks to internalize that third person authority is more relevant than first person authority in matters of gender. It is causing some trans folks to lose trust in their sense of their gender and to lose trust in their ability to know themselves, which has the potential to be incredibly destabilizing. The people who are going to be the most vulnerable to this are the people who are exposed to more systemic and interpersonal invalidation of their identities and those who lack access to adequate validation and affirming spaces, as well as folks experiencing stressors and reduction of resources that facilitate better emotional regulation (e.g., people who are overworked, demoralized, underfed, under-rested, multiply oppressed).

As I considered what song I wanted to share with folks this week, I thought about which components from TRANSA I thought folks most needed to hear right now. The government is only becoming more aggressive in its stance that transness is delusional and should not be supported by society, so invalidating messages and systems will be all around us in the coming years. What we can do is amplify counter and liberatory messages from allies and from trans people: we trust you, we believe you, I know who I am, trust yourself, transness is wonderful, transness is natural, trans people have have always existed and we always will, we are ever-changing and no one can constrain us, indeed: “I won’t let nobody tell me how to be.”

This song by CLARITY and Clairo can even be experienced meditatively with the refrain serving as a mantra that helps us resist these efforts for outsiders (with agendas that are not in our best interest I should add) to define who we are and how we engage with society and our bodies. As the music builds in the closing part of the track, with both CLARITY and Clairo repeating this, there is a sonic and emotional experience of empowerment that I find moving and powerful.

One final note about this song is that the line “Are you scared to find out who you are - living as someone else” reminds me so much of I Saw the TV Glow, a film that functions as an allegory for gender dysphoria and the awakening to transness, and is just incredible. I wrote about it in my first ever substack post.

So yeah - listen to the song and let me know what you think. What else is helping my fellow trans folks resist the internalized transnegativity and invalidation? Further more academic-y reading listed below the youtube video, too.

Sebastian Barr’s Substack

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