When you grow up you will be a transgender guy, but for now, pretend to be a girl (Picture: Daylife)

Not long after I came out as trans I found myself having a conversation with my granny in which I had to explain why some women are happy living their lives as butch lesbians and why others feel that they need to transition from female to male.

I had to tell this then-78 year-old woman about the difference between sexuality and gender at a time when I was only truly trying to get a grip on it all myself.

So how do you know if you are a man or a woman or one of the other thousands of gender variants that lie outside the binary?

It’s tempting at this point to just say ‘you just do’ because that would be a perfectly reasonable and acceptable answer, but it helps no-one who is trying to get their head around this whole thing for themselves.

You might just know – in which case, how do you explain that certainty to those around you?

And what if you don’t just know?

What if your blanket of denial has been so thick you are only starting to see through it now and need some help deciding if this really is the right thing for you?

All other things being equal and assuming that there is no psychological issue in play, if you are asking the question of yourself the chances are there is an answer waiting to be found.

If you find yourself wondering if you are an addict, chances are you probably have a problem as that isn’t a question most people ask themselves.

The same, for me, holds true when it comes to transitioning – most people might have an issue with a part of their body but they don’t wonder if it is because the parts themselves are wrong entirely.A CIS woman who dislikes her breasts does not think if it is because she shouldn’t have breasts in the first place.You may very well have grown up with a lot of people saying you were a tomboy but, equally, you might not. I remember fighting with my mum when I was six years old because she had put me in a dress for my sister’s christening and I wanted to be allowed to put on my trousers and go play football with my friends. When my dad took me swimming around the same age, although he sent me in to the women’s changing rooms on my own, I came out wearing only the bottoms of the bikini he gave me because I wanted to be like him. Even as I told my granny for the first time that I was about to transition, she said to me ‘I always knew there was something different about you’ before regaling me with stories of the times she tried to take me in to the girls department and I wanted to go in to the boys. For others it isn’t that clear cut to others. My mum saw me grow up in the same way that my grandmother did but she took a lot longer to get her head around it and has yet to admit that she saw the signs when I was a kid. Some people are surrounded by people like that. And, alternatively, some people manage to keep their identity so well hidden that they are able to replicate the perfect ‘girl’ child on the outside for the world to see. Many overcompensate and become extremely feminine. None of these are markers that clearly identify a trans or cis person. Only how they feel about themselves can do that. So I guess, in the end, while it is about more factors than I can fit in this blog, it really will come down to ‘you just know.’

Advertisement Advertisement