What You Can Learn from Trans Folks: A Piece for Cisgender Readers
Trans Liberation Really Is For Everyone
Bearing witness to the world right now is a lot. I won’t list out why - you are likely well aware. It’s all been weighing heavy on me, so I wanted to return to this piece I’ve been working on off and on for a while. It’s a celebration of transness and specifically what trans people offer the non-trans world. I believe trans life offers our world roadmaps for moving forward through an incredibly difficult time. I believe trans people embody creativity and the empowered pursuit of alternatives that transcend the constraints of what most are able to imagine. I wrote this for cis folks, but I also want trans people to read it, in case you’ve forgotten that you’re incredible. In case you resist the idea that you’re incredible. And I don’t mean that in a simplistic hashtag way. I mean that my fellow trans folks belong to a legacy of people who see (and nurture) expansiveness where others feel trapped. I mean that if you’re reading this, you have lived this long by finding ways to create the conditions you need to survive in a world that is withholding and violent out of fear of our power. I mean that you have done things that were at least a little scary (and quite possibly terrifying) because they were what was right and needed for you, and I’m not sure how many people can really say that. I mean that you, dear trans one, are the descendant of healers and guides, and that you carry these capacities, as well.
So whether you’re cis, trans, somewhere between, or unsure where you fit, I hope you will read this and that it may counter or at least complicate the despair and anger and hopelessness we are understandably contending with right now.
“Transness is a blueprint of possibility”
Trans people and gender diversity are under attack and our communities need help from non-trans folks. But don’t let that overshadow the facts that we, as trans people and communities, have so much to offer the rest of y’all. Protect trans kids. Yes. And also, learn from them. Trans rights are human rights. Yes. And also, trans lessons are human lessons. As the liner notes for TRANSA state,
“Trans people have always existed, with many different names across time and culture, often as spiritual healers and leaders. As global systems continue to fail humanity and all life on Earth, the journey taken by trans people – and all peoples who have been oppressed – is a blueprint of possibility. May this be a glimpse of our collective liberation, and the light inside all of us.”
A blueprint of possibility. A glimpse of our collective liberation. Fight like hell for trans people because we’re inherently worth having a chance to thrive, but also you should be motivated toward our flourishing by all that we offer you. Two nights ago, I led a group bike ride for trans and queer people to meadows in a nature preserve that were full of fireflies. It was powerful to witness trans people enchanted and thrilled by the natural beauty of this world even as we live in a country whose government is actively persecuting us. Trans people are suffering right now. And we’re falling in love. And having babies. And dancing. And laughing. And sitting in the sun. And watching fireflies.
We’re also a blueprint of possibility in that we have carved pathways for ourselves so that we could have alternatives to the ones we were given, the ones that didn’t fit. You may be familiar with a quote from poet and author Ocean Vuong: “Queerness saved my life.” It’s from a beautiful interview between Ocean and fellow author Bryan Washington where they get into this idea of queerness as (perhaps forced) awareness and actualizing of possibility, that I think is particularly true when we are thinking of gender and trans people. Here is an abridged excerpt (rather long for a block quote, but trust me - it’s worth the read):
Ocean: Queerness in a way saved my life, because—I always joke, I say, if I wasn't queer, I would probably be at a casino with seven children drinking Heineken [Laughs] Yelling at my Vietnamese wife. Because this is the world that I was brought forth. And this is the world that a lot of my cousins end up in. Often we see queerness as a deprivation, but when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me, I had to make alternative routes. It made me curious, it made me ask this is not enough for me because there's nothing here for me. […]
Bryan: This question of possibility… There's a one-to-one correlation between the expansiveness of what I view as being possible and my queerness. I think that being someone growing up in a place, being different, not finding models for how to be, there are only a handful of choices, I feel like, as a young person, for me, to adapt to the ways to be that are surrounding me. Like trying to fit a square peg into a triangular hole, oval hole, hexagonal hole, to opt out of it entirely, or to give myself permission to create a space for myself and to give myself permission to say that it's okay to do the things that I would like to do, to do the things that I'm trying to do. Which sounds like such a simple thing and yet I feel like one of the most difficult things that a person can do within a family unit, within a community or a geographic point in which the way you are is not the way to, quote unquote “be,” is to choose yourself and to choose that possibility.
But I also think, at least in my case, the first time that I chose myself in that regard, to think of myself as a queer person that is open to the possibilities of the many different ways to be, them not being better or worse than one another, all of them operating simultaneously in tandem. Once I gave myself permission to accept that and to posit that as being true within my immediate and peripheral contexts, everything changed for me. […]
Those initial steps that you take, you can feel like a pariah, you can feel deeply ostracized for the fact of being yourself. But that shift for me, seeing that many things can just be true simultaneously, that my queerness wasn't an impediment, it opened me up to the world outside of the world that I couldn't even have imagined. I did not even know what I didn't know. That felt and feels like such a gift.
Ocean: Yeah. It teaches us to be skeptical of whatever container that people say is available to us, because those rooms or those containers were never safe. And so we naturally became skeptical, and we always have, I don't know about you, but maybe there's something about queerness that teaches me even now—everything I do, I have plan B and plan C before I do plan A. [Laughs]
Bryan: Yeah, yeah. […] Just different ways of finding solace, different ways of finding pleasure. I don't know, I wouldn't trade it for anything.
I think trans people remind everyone that the rules are made up, that there’s more to life than institutions and rigid societies show us, that we ultimately do have autonomy, regardless of what the powers of be say. There’s so much you non-trans folks can learn from this. (This is why fascists hate trans people, by the way.)
“Cis people need gender liberation, too”
That blueprint of possibility is pervasive, but of course one obvious manifestation of that is expressly in the realm of ~gender~.
When I started living openly as a man, my relatives asked me if I wanted them to take down the childhood photos of me in their homes. (Incredibly thoughtful to ask this.) I didn’t want anyone to do this. I felt very loved seeing my childhood school photos in my aunts’ houses, and group photos on dressers and shelves reminded me of positive memories, even if I was presenting outwardly a girl in the pictures.
When my cousin’s son was quite young, he was looking at these various photos of the family and he recognized my sister in one of our early photos but wasn’t sure who I was. He knew me as a man and thought the person in the photo was a young girl. When my cousin told him that he was looking at Sebastian, his eyes apparently got wide as he took it in. And after a beat, he said, “Boys can have long hair?!” with so much excitement. And he grew his hair out. He is not trans. But it seems my visibility as someone who so clearly existed outside of expectations of gender was part of what gave him permission to do the same. Because yeah, boys can have long hair. That doesn’t need to be a gender thing at all.
I happened to catch jasmine.4.t on Sirius XMU Sessions when I was in the car last month - what a treat. Jasmine.4.t is the stage name of British indie rock singer-songwriter Jasmine Cruikshank, who is also a trans woman. I love her music, but was especially thrilled to hear the interview with her. At one point the host asked her to speak on why everyone would benefit from listening to trans musicians and paying attention to trans people. This was the beginning of her response:
“Right now, the whole world that was colonized by the West is recovering from some kind of Victorian doctrine of sex/gender and just weird moral code that doesn’t really check out anymore. I think trans and queer people have always existed and will always exist no matter what you call us. And I think the fact that we’ve recognized this and changed ourselves just shows the falsehoods in these doctrines.”
Even the most “normative” appearing or behaving trans people are inherently transgressing these old, stuffy, rigid ideas about gender and biologically-determined destiny. And because we’ve had to see through these binary and biodeterministic gender systems, a lot of us have figured out ways of understanding and expressing ourselves that aren’t restricted by gender or gender norms at all. Both our bodily changes and our general freedom from gendered rules highlight that what people think they know about sex and gender is constructed and ultimately as flimsy as you want or need it to be. We know that cis men’s wellbeing is affected by gender role pressure and socialization that promotes disconnection from emotion. We know that cis women’s wellbeing is affected by the misogyny that is enacted by gender hierarchies that assume immutable differences between men and women. And everyone’s mental health is affected by feeling pressure to perform inauthentic versions of ourselves. Trans people remind the world that there are ways beyond these oppressive and harmful systems and ways of relating to oneself and others. And we have done a lot of work to promote change societally that allows non-trans people to be more liberated from gender, as well.
“Everything I know about love I learned from trans people”
Multiple people have sent me the link to the new shirt from trans- and queer-led shop Ash and Chess. It reads “Everything I know About Love I Learned from Trans People!” and lists off all these love lessons:
there is no wrong way to be you
family can be chosen
joy is precious and powerful
you don't need to fit into a box
you know yourself best
honor those who paved the way
your identity can be fluid
your life is for you and only you
following your joy is an act of love
our community is strong and has always existed
the right people will love you for exactly who you are
every piece of your self was made with love
you are the creator of your self
joy and love come from within
the world is expansive
it takes courage to see yourself
we protect each other
I love that so many people know this would resonate strongly with me. One of the people who sent this to me enthusiastically, was Joonwoo Lee, a doctoral candidate in counseling psychology and my research partner for the past few years on a project he first intiated looking at how trans and nonbinary people experience and heal from relational trauma with parents. We just submitted our first manuscript stemming from this research. It’s titled “Transness is Our Salve: How Trans Identity Facilitates Healing from Relational Trauma with Parental Figures,” and focuses on the myriad ways our participants discussed how being trans facilitated healing pathways. (That paper now must undergo peer review and it will be a while before it is published, but we are soon launching a free zine summarizing some of our findings and including art by Britchida and some of our participants. That will be hosted at transnessishealing.net.)
One of the major findings in this project was that trans people experienced corrective and healing relationships in trans community. The trans people in our study had been harmed by their parents and that loss of relational safety in family of origin was damaging, but it also forced them to build their own communities and chosen families. When participants did so with fellow trans people, they were able to feel seen, cared for, held. Notably, participants with intersecting experiences and oppressions related to race found that this was particularly true in relationships with fellow BIPOC trans people.
[The above image is one of the pieces of art Britchida made to express the themes our research participants shared.]
In jasmine.4.t’s interview, she expanded upon what is special about trans folks and what we can offer or teach others. And she gets at this capacity for really loving and connecting and showing up for each other.
“I think [our experience of change] has opened us up to seeing the capacity for change in others. And because we’ve experienced so much oppression against us, it enables us to empathize with others. And I think this capacity for empathy and solidarity is really valuable and is a huge part of queer life and something that’s just so beautiful to see around me every day… to feel so safe, and so welcome, and so seen… ”
To just further drive this home, let me tell you a bit about the group bike ride I organize. Every week, I lead a trans- and queer-centered group on a casual-paced ride to local coffee shops at 7:30 in the morning. At first, I was shocked at how wonderful everyone who shows up to these rides is. There is kindness and active inclusiveness. There is mutual support and warmth, even amidst awkwardness. I wondered how I got so lucky that the people on these rides were so great. But the more Joonwoo and I talked about our research and what we were hearing about communities and experiencing or witnessing about communities in our own lives, the more this felt like of course. Because existing as a trans person - and to many extents existing as a queer person - does often develop in a person this empathy, solidarity, belief in the beauty of the self and others, awareness of and commitment to changeabilty, and a desire to make spaces relationally safe for others. Some of us are lucky enough to have been reared in families or communities that also helped us develop these traits, but many pockets of our society doesn’t inherently nourish these capacities. I believe trans people’s unique experiences (in part because of our oppression and marginalization, yes, but not entirely because of this) particularly equip us to create safe relational homes for each other and for others. I will say here that non-trans people and relationships can offer this safety and deep love, too, of course. (My beloved spouse is not trans.) And the world at large could learn a lot from trans folks about loving and being in relationship and community.
The power to know oneself in the face of forced repression
My last point in this piece is more muddled and in flux, a work in progress. But I didn’t want to leave it out. I think trans people can teach the rest of the world a lot about knowing ourselves/yourselves. I remember a few years into my transition, my mother reflected (offhandedly I think) that it seemed that trans people probably exhibit greater critical thinking on average than the general population, because we’d have to to realize we were trans and make sense of that. It’s been at least a decade since she said that and it’s stuck with me. And in the past ten or so years, I’ve gotten to know a lot of trans people - as friends and as psychotherapy clients. While the intensity of dysphoria many of us experience combined with increased cultural awareness of gender diversity means that deep self-reflection isn’t always necessary to recognize one’s transness today, I do witness a profound capacity for and drive toward self-understanding among trans people.
One of the pieces that drives my deep sense of felt kinship to trans people, even upon just meeting them, is the awaremess I have that all trans folks have found ways to know and assert ourselves despite living in a world that tries to tell us what we know about ourselves is wrong. In high school, before I understood my transness, I read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Most critically, Ellison’s masterpiece is about living as a Black man in deeply anti-Black America. It is also about getting to know yourself outside of and beyond and in spite of all the messages about you and “who you are” that everyone wants to throw at you.
I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled.
This book and the above quote in particular resonated powerfully with me before I could fully understand why. When a trans person shares their chosen name, whether it’s their third time speaking it aloud or 15 years into having it legally changed, I know that they had to resist other people’s ideas about who they are to come to see and then claim their own understanding and identity.
Invisible Man is not a trans book. It’s a book about identity, self, and belonging as a member of a violently oppressed class. And it speaks to conflicts about self and other/society that extend beyond transness and beyond even oppression or marginalization. What happens to people who move through this one, short life merely taking in and adhering to what other people say about them and their lives? My spouse is a primary care physician and sits with so many (so many) people who have not thought critically about who they are or what they want out of life, and carry a deep (albeit often “functional”) depression and mutedness because of this. The unexamined life and whatnot.
Trans people, for the most part, offer beautiful and bountiful examples of resisting the unexamined self. We have to combat narratives of both cisnormativity and transnormativity that project onto us that we are a certain gender because of our birth anatomy / chromosomes or that our identities and relationships with gender are a certain way because we are trans. Philosopher and trans woman Talia Mae Bettcher wrote about this on her substack, suggesting that the experience of navigating other people’s inaccurate theories about us and who we are makes most trans people amateur (or professional) philosophers:
While I can’t climb inside anybody’s head, I will venture that for many of us there is, at least to some degree, a lack of fit between our own experiences and the various theories about transness that are out there. […]
I would also venture that in addition to this lack of fit, many of us engage in our own critical thinking about these theories and develop our own views. Most of the trans people I’ve met have been veritable philosophers, whether degree-holding or not. We critique, argue, theorize.
In my work as a psychotherapist, I strive to also help non-trans people engage with themselves and the theories or assumptions and projections about them this way, too. Trans people’s self-work is a model for recognizing and deconstructing other people’s ideas about you and your life.
Our commitment to ourselves and our needs around our identities and expression are also fierce models of resistance and defiance. No, we shouldn’t have to be engaging in resistance just to be ourselves and be comfortable. And also, for the foreseeable future fascists will walk amongst us and find their ways to power. I don’t think trans people are alone in having to resist fascism and other rigid doctrines just to be ourselves and be comfortable. I think non-trans people maybe don’t feel the urgency we do (thanks dysphoria, you nasty creature), but also I think they don’t realize they can. Trans people remind the world that you can defy this colonization of mind. We do it every day.
Conclusion
As I conclude, I am reminded of my time with PFLAG Charlotte, an organization that until recently I sat on the board for, and that is full of parents for whom I have deep admiration. We once asked the parents in our community to share what they had gained from having a trans child, and there was an abundance of responses. Not only had parents been transformed in deeply positive ways through their journeys with their children, they were thrilled to be able to share that. (I suspect they were used to people assuming the story was just that it was hard.) This is clear in the research on parents’ experiences of having trans kids, too. A 2025 systematic review of this research found that parents consistently report personal growth as a result of their child’s transition and the journey through supporting them.
You and your life have been transformed positively by the existence and fierce living and loving of trans people, whether you have previously recognized that fact or not. And the more non-trans people show up for us, actively welcome us into your spaces and deconstruct the barriers that keep us at the margins, the more you will grow and learn from us. I will close by quoting this powerful writing from a group of Aboriginal activists in so-called Queensland, Australia, in the 1970s:
“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Trans people rock. You can rock, too. Join us in our collective march toward liberation.
This piece fills my heart with gratitude, thank you Sebastian.
Thank you for returning to this piece and sharing it. Bearing witness to the world is a LOT right now,*yes.* I'm so glad to know about this Ellison book. That quote pierces to the marrow.