Whether it’s your name, your pronouns, your sexuality or your favourite music, we’ve all had parts of ourselves that we’ve felt we were ready to let go of and transform. Honouring these calls to change can bring a whole new sense of vitality into our lives.
But what if we don’t feel free to take ownership of these changes? What if instead of unwavering love and acceptance from our loved ones, we were met with resistance and judgement? Many know this response well and have acquired their own ways of coping.
Meeting change with acceptance, trusting that each person is capable of choosing what’s best for them (once they are aware of all the potential consequences and benefits of their actions) and taking risks without knowing with certainty how they will go, is what keeps life alive. In this article, we will talk about why we need change (especially in gender and sexual identity), why we resist it and how we can envision a world where this knowing becomes embodied.
The concept that a stable identity is high value
Let’s get this out of the way first: maintaining a consistent identity throughout your life is not inherently good or bad. It’s predictable, and predictability makes others feel safe. When others can predict your actions in ways that suit them, they reward you for it, and so we’ve come to uphold identity stability as a good thing.
I remember when I was a kid, my friends all had their “things”. These were little obsessions that seemed to define their personalities. It wasn’t just my friends, though. It seemed to be everyone. One might really like frogs, another, rainbows, another was all about horses and yet another was into dogs. Or they would get fixated with a certain trend or movie. This made gift-giving super easy because there didn’t seem to be discrimination within the preferred category.
I remember being in awe of what I thought to be great self-knowing. I had trouble choosing my favourite things. I enjoyed a lot of things, and I was changing all the time, but I saw this inconsistency as a flaw. I felt that I needed to discover what I connected to and make it my whole personality.
Fear of being seen
Part of my reluctance to choose favourites was the idea that once chosen, my favourites would have to remain the same forever. I’d be trapped. You were supposed to have only one favourite of each thing (food, colour etc) and it was supposed to reveal deep truths about your personality.
I liked change, but I didn’t think that was an answer I was allowed to have. I feared that if I was honest about not having favourites, that it would reveal that there was something deeply wrong with me. But what if the concept of favourites was less enduring? Some brave kids I’ve met since becoming an adult have embraced the idea that your favourites can change, and that’s a big step forward. It shows a willingness to accept change.
But back then, I worried about the consequences of declaring favourites. What would that choice say about me? I wanted the freedom to change, so I resisted definition.
Fear of the unknown
Humans like to be able to look at something and immediately know what to expect. So many heuristics, or mental shortcuts, exist to reduce ambiguity. At one time in our history these shortcuts were adaptive, but in a modern context, they can get in the way.
One of the most common fears in humanity is the fear of the unknown. This fear is so strong that often people who are in horrendous circumstances will stay there simply because they’d prefer to stay in the hell they’re familiar with than risk landing in something worse. We don’t know what happens when we die, so many of us do everything we can to extend life, even if the quality of life is poor.
Similarly, when people reject the old, familiar labels, or take on new labels we aren’t familiar with, it often triggers this fear. We liked knowing who our loved ones were and we worry that a new change in that self-definition might alter things for the worse.
Stagnation
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against labels. Labels are great. We may go along feeling uncertain and unseen until we discover a label that gives voice to exactly how we feel. Then, with this label, we can suddenly find community among similar others. Not only do we feel less alone, but we also have a handy term to whip out anytime someone wants to understand us better.
Life offers many opportunities to grow and change, but if we’ve become rigidly attached to a label, we might resist integrating these changes. Resisting our natural flow of change takes us further away from our inner sense of self, not closer. Similarly, forcing change when we’re not ready, or in a direction that isn’t right for us, also takes us away from ourselves.
Most of us have been stuck in a rut. We know that the way out of it is change. Knowing what to change and having the courage to do it is essential for our wellbeing, but it isn’t always easy. Sometimes stagnation sets in and we might even lose touch with our own feelings about it. This stops the flow of life and can feel like a curse. It’s not, you’re just ready for change.
The harder you fight for something, the harder it becomes to let it go
What happens when you want to explore something that others try to convince you not to try? You typically then have to justify to others that it’s worth trying. If you’ve put in a lot of effort to win the right to try something, and it doesn’t fit as well as you thought, or maybe it does but not permanently, it becomes much harder to set it aside.
By contrast, if there is no resistance or attachment to the choices you make from outside influences, then you are truly free to explore and see what resonates. If you start walking a path and it stops feeling right, it will be easier to backtrack if no one else is particularly invested in a specific outcome.
Once we’ve explored as much as we want and have learned what we like and don’t like, we may happily stay that way for a long time. We all have different tolerances for change and consistency.
Accepting change
Remaining fluid in a rigid world isn’t easy, particularly when you’re looking outside of yourself for validation. But how do you become strong in your sense of self? There are many ways.
Follow your whims and try whatever you’re curious about.
Particularly in matters relating to sex and gender, we have certain ideas of permanency, like the magnetic powers of dicks (which I have previously written about here ). Not only do we attach permanency to certain sex and gender expressions, but we also tend to think that a change, particularly one that returns to a previous state, invalidates the rest of our journey to get there.
In queer circles, I would often hear disparaging comments about women who would only be lesbians until graduation, aka LUGs. This is just one example of the many ways in which we can unintentionally hinder one’s self-knowledge journey. You don’t want to be a LUG? You have a few options. Option 1: never explore same sex relationships. Option 2: become a lesbian and stay a lesbian well past graduation. Option 3: wait until well past school days to experiment with your sexuality.
Transitioning and detransitioning
A few years ago, it seemed that detransitioning was on everyone’s mind. Stories of teenagers who transitioned early in life and decided it wasn’t for them anymore were sensationalised. This narrative that kids were being medically messed up for life served to reinforce the status quo in several key ways. It reinforced the idea that young people can’t be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies. It served to invalidate trans identities. It also undermined the advances we’d made in trans rights.
But what’s the truth? The truth is that all types of surgeries have a certain proportion of people who will regret having done the surgery. This is known as the regret rate. The regret rate for gender-affirming surgery is generally lower than the regret rate for any other type of surgery. As with every choice in life, some people will choose an option they will regret. Seven times more people regret having children than having gender affirming surgery.
A lot of care is taken to ensure that trans people seeking gender affirming medical treatments are well informed of the risks involved. Reminding patients that they can always slow down can go a long way to easing their minds. Some people receive huge joy with social transitioning, but prefer not to use medical treatments. It’s all very individual and doesn’t make you any more or less valid.
Gender Fluid to gender free: fad or future?
Fluidity in gender and sexuality seemed to be a hot topic in the mid-2010s queer media. However, with the need to defend trans rights so heavily between then and now, some of that evolution seems to have evaporated from the public discourse. In order to justify gender-affirming care, the establishment wanted sacrificial blood. They wanted proof that one’s gender identity as a trans person was a permanent feature of one’s self. That was the threshold demanded by people who didn’t really *get* transness.
Obviously, there are many trans people whose identities are stable throughout life. However, as with any time we put people into boxes, the ones who don’t fit in the box are left unseen and unacknowledged. One way that people started fighting back against these boxes was to start raising gender-free kids.
Allowing kids to simply be who they are without heavy expectations attached seems obvious, but it hasn’t been for a long time. When you hear millennials and older generations talk about their early gender experiences, there’s a lot of angst regardless of how cis they are. We defy categorisation and it’s time we leaned into that.
Be Free!
You don’t know what anything is like until you try it. Once you try it, you learn how you feel about it, and only from there can you really make an informed decision about it.
No, we shouldn’t all rush to grab hormones and surgery just to test the waters of the “other side”, but if there’s a curiosity within you to try something, let yourself. If someone decides that after they’ve tried something, they actually want to move on to something else: let them. The less resistance, the more clarity.
Heavy judgement is in the air these days and we could all benefit from being held a little more gently.