Was I Ever a Woman?

A nonbinary person’s experience of privilege and social ambiguity.

A child in a dress, leaning against an aquarium wall. Their reflection is visible in the aquarium. Photo by Bekah Russom on Unsplash

“Gender Socialization” is one of the most hotly-contested, oft-misunderstood concepts that touches trans life. And considering how often cis people misunderstand us and fight about us, that’s saying a lot.

A lot of cis people struggle to understand how a trans person could ever truly and fully be the gender that they identify as. These cis people will point, with varying degrees of sincerity, to the huge swathe of gendered experiences a trans person experiences in childhood. That was when each of us was “gender socialized”, the logic goes — and thus, that was the time when a lot of behaviors and norms for us got really deeply ingrained.

In a lot of people’s minds, it seems that gender socialization is a very categorical thing: either you were forced to wear dresses, perform emotional labor, do chores, and wear makeup, or you were forced to be tough, taught to take up a ton of space, and never permitted to cry, until you turned into a totally boorish monster.

That kind of thinking justifies a lot of transphobia, particular transmisogyny. If you truly believe that anyone “raised as” a boy has an inflated sense of privilege and entitlement, you can justify excluding some of society’s most vulnerable members (trans women) from…