Art by Alexandra Haynak, on Pixabay
Welcome to #TransTuesday! Let’s talk about something that I think nearly every trans person who transitions as an adult wakes up to, and something many cis people probably never even realize happens. Let’s get into TRANS TRAUMA 2: SOCIETAL GASLIGHTING.
Let me start by saying that trans people are not the only marginalized population that this happens to. To different degrees, it happens to every community that isn’t non-disabled Christian cishet white men.
But as this is a trans Tuesday essay, I’m obviously gonna be talking about the ways it affects transgender people. I just don’t want anyone reading to think I’m implying this only happens to the trans population. Some of the specifics may be unique, but broadly this is something that every marginalized community probably deals with in some form or another.
And if you don’t understand how every marginalized community has more in common than not, how none of us are free until all of us are free, how if we’re not fighting for each other we’re not really fighting the problem and nothing will ever change, see the Trans Tuesday on TRANS INTERSECTIONALITY.
Allllllright, so what the heck am I talking about when I say “societal gaslighting?” You’re not gonna believe this, but it’s exactly what you think it is when you read those words.
It’s when all of society gaslights you. And just in case you’re not familiar, gaslighting is when someone (usually just a single person, or small group) acts like or pretends that what you know to be real is, in fact, not real. The goal is to make you question whether you know what is real and true.
The term comes from the 1938 play Gas Light (adapted into the film Gaslight in 1944), where a husband used, you guessed it, gaslights to do this very thing to his wife to try and convince her that she’s crazy so he could gain access to her inheritance. You can learn more about it here.
“How can something like that be done on a societal level, Tilly?!” I hear you scream.
Okay, listen. L I S T E N.
I’m not saying every cis person goes to their weekly Cis People Are The Best meeting and actively plans to lie to and deceive trans people as a whole (we all know those meetings are just to talk about cargo shorts and how great it is to feel like your mind and body are connected by default).
What I’m getting at is that society has trained us, both cis people AND trans people, to gaslight we trans people about the nature of our existence.
How in the hell is that possible? Well, my friends, it’s because implicit biases are in all of us. Yes, ALL of us. Even me, and even you. We didn’t want them, we didn’t ask for them, we didn’t put them there, or even know they’re there. But they are.
It’s the result of growing up and living in a system that reinforces compulsory cisgenderness at every single turn, often to the exclusion or even acknowledgement of transgender as a thing people can be.
For more on this, see the Trans Tuesday on IMPLICIT QUEERPHOBIA, and how even people who think they’re a good ally to trans and queer people, can hold biases against us because we are “outside the norm” of their expectations… expectations seeded by the compulsory cisgender heterosexuality of our society.
And when I said that most trans people, by virtue of being raised in this system and society, gaslight other trans people (and ourselves), it’s because we’ve also absorbed those implicit biases about ourselves. And we call that INTERNALIZED TRANSPHOBIA, so see that Trans Tuesday too.
And if you doubt the compulsory cisgender heterosexuality of our society, see the Trans Tuesday on GENDERED CHILDHOODS for all the deets on that lil’ poop nugget.
And if you need more on how society does this with basically everything, see the Trans Tuesday on THE FALSE DICHOTOMY.
I’ve mentioned time and Time and TIME again how for most of my life, I didn’t even know that trans was something someone could be. I can’t link you to a Trans Tuesday where I’ve talked about it, because it’s popped up so often I can’t even remember them all.
If you’re thinking that an entire society gaslighting you into thinking a fact of your existence is not real would really fuck you up, kudos to you because it certainly does.
You can see one of the ways it manifested for me in the Trans Tuesday on SEARCHING FOR MEANING (when you’re trans and don’t know it), and how I was always trying to find the inner truth about myself for my entire life, but not knowing where to look… or even being aware that that’s what I was doing.
And so it absolutely makes you question your reality, and what’s real. Because if I have these feelings that “I’d really like to be a girl” and “I feel way more like a girl than a boy” but your parents, your friends, your family, every stranger you meet and all the media and art you absorb says YOU ARE A BOY, well… how could all of them be wrong?
HOW COULD EVERYONE IN THE WORLD BE WRONG?
IMPOSSIBLE!
THEREFORE… SOMETHING MUST BE WRONG WITH *ME*.
But the feeling doesn’t go away. Even when we pretend it’s not there. Even when we try and try and try and try and try and try and try and try to make it go away.
You can see it in the Trans Tuesday on THE SIGNS WERE ALWAYS THERE, where once we realize we’re trans, we can often look back and spot countless examples of our transness from our lives, even though we didn’t know that’s what they were at the time.
You can also see it in the Trans Tuesday on HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU’RE TRANS, where we try to figure it out and maybe even recognize things that are clearly signs of transness to anyone looking, but will tell ourselves, “Still cis tho!”
Gaslighting ourselves, at the behest of our own internalized transphobia, telling ourselves that a fundamental reality of our existence cannot possibly be true, because that would mean literally everyone else was wrong.
IMPOSSIBLE!
This plays out in brilliant ways in media designed to talk about the trans experience, like THE MATRIX franchise (see my book on it), and in BARBIE, and in I SAW THE TV GLOW… all of which have people living in an alternate, fake reality, living a fake life, and not knowing what’s real!
And it’s also part of what makes a seemingly unintentional trans allegory like season one of SILO so very trans, too… because the characters don’t know what’s real and are being lied to about it by society.
I was obsessed with writing stories about “the nature of reality” pre-transition, and I didn’t know why. It was just part of trying to figure out why the entire world felt so broken and wrong. But the entire world can’t be broken and wrong, so maybe I am? That’s what our gaslighting society would have you believe, as you see playing out time and time again as all-cisgender politicians attempt to legislate trans people out of existence and deny our rights… as if they’re not true. As if we’re not human beings deserving of the care we need and the right to live our lives as our true selves. That’s all part of it.
They call us “unnatural” (a lie), “aberrations” (false), “anomalies” (nope, we’re not those either).
And that inflicts a trauma on you that you would not believe. It’s something I still struggle with, four and a half years into social and medical transition. I’ll probably always struggle with it, because that trauma’s built up over a lifetime.
If you want to see so many ways that’s messed up my life, see the Trans Tuesdays on THE PAST (and why it haunts us), THE PAST 2: THE NEW PAST (when a tv show somehow alleviated some trauma), and THE PAST 3: TRANS GRIEF 1 and THE PAST 4: TRANS GRIEF 2… when I had to confront the loss of the life that had been stolen from me, but maybe found an unexpected way to cope with it.
One thing I want to mention from those Trans Grief essays, and it’s something that you’ve probably seen pop up in a few other essays as well, is how my life was stolen from me. My childhood was stolen from me.
I didn’t get to be a little girl, or a teenage girl, or a young woman. I mean, I was always a woman, but I didn’t get to live as one, as me. I lived it pretending to be someone I’m not, and that too royally fucks you up. See the Trans Tuesday on GENDER DYSPHORIA.
And I’m still finding new ways that it’s impacting my life.
I grew up in the midwest, and lived there into my adulthood before we moved out to Los Angeles. LA feels like home in a way no other place ever has, and I love it here for so many reasons, and I thought that’s why the idea of going back to the midwest didn’t appeal to me.
But it’s more than that. There’s this stretch on the route I drive my son to school on, that… is bad.
It’s only a block long.
There’s just large apartment buildings on either side of the road.
There’s literally nothing remarkable about it.
And it… terrifies me? It makes my chest clench and my breathing ragged, and I feel like I’m being crushed. Like I’m drowning. HEY WAIT, that’s how I described my dysphoria.
And that’s also how I feel any time I so much as think about the possibility of going back to the midwest. What the heck?
What I discovered in searching and studying this block every time I drove through it was that it reminded me of the midwest. Of Chicago, where I grew up. It’s all tall buildings and right angles and deciduous and pine trees. And especially on gloomy days, when it all looks extra gray and flat and morose, it makes me want to run away and hide.
Because the association with extra gray skies, flat ground, only deciduous and pine trees, tall buildings and right angles… they remind me of my childhood. And that was nothing but a sea of dysphoria, and so it triggers those dysphoric feelings in me and makes me panic.
Like I’m going to lose everything I’ve gained. Like I’m going to be forced back into the false shell. Like I’m going to be forced back into living that lie. Like I’m going to be forced back into unending pain and despair with no way out.
Like I’m dying.
But this is the fastest route to take and my time is always at a premium, so I have to keep driving through that stretch. I can’t avoid it.
So I studied it further. And I realized there are a few palm trees scattered in there, but I’d been missing them. There are mountains waaaaaaay off, but I can see them (when it’s not too hazy). And I can remind myself you are not THERE. HERE is NOT there. You are in California. You are living as your true self. You made the impossible…
POSSIBLE!
But damn if it wasn’t tough to do that. And I have to remind myself to look for the palms, look for the mountains, to not panic through that innocuous stretch of one block of apartment buildings.
There are other ways this has impacted me too, that I haven’t really found a way through yet.
There’s music that, as a teen, I used to love. I was a known fanatic of a few singers.
When my wife and I got re-married earlier this year, to have a wedding with the real me, this actually came up. NO music from the artists I was a former fanatic of were on that playlist I kept getting complimented on.
And as I mentioned in the Trans Tuesday on A TRANS RE-WEDDING, the same old friend who was very surprised to see the “new” (true) me and how different I was, especially from our original wedding, said she was surprised there was no music played from these artists I was such a huge fan of.
And I had to tell her the sad truth of it is that I can’t really bear to listen to their stuff anymore, because it takes me right back to high school. And while a lot of music can do things like that for a lot of people, when the place it takes you back to is one of misery and pain and endless, hopeless despair… that’s not a place you want to go back to.
I’ve thought about maybe taking time to revisit those artists, to see if I could find a way through like I did with that one block of apartment buildings that nearly gave me a panic attack. But that’d mean taking hours to subject myself to terrible feelings to try and work through them.
And while that’d probably be a good and healthy thing for me to do, again my time is at a premium and I don’t have a day (or more) that I can potentially lose to the emotional fallout of whatever misery it might inflict.
So until I have the time and energy to confront that, I basically have to just avoid those artists entirely.
I guess where I’m going with this is that for so many of us who transition as adults, our past lives are filled with pain and trauma and it’s so hard to deal with. And that’s just from the transphobic gaslighting of society, never mind any other stuff in our lives that may have been painful on top of all that.
I want to say really quick that Trans Tuesdays will be off for the rest of the year for a planned break (these are just so much work), but will be back mid-January 2025!
I want to thank our sound editor Jillian Morgan for making the podcast version of Trans Tuesdays possible, without her I never could have brought Trans Tuesdays to that medium. I’m so glad she’s my partner in this.
I want to thank all our podcast guests this year, because I think we’ve had some really important, lovely, vital conversations.
And thanks to all of you for reading just so much of my writing for another year. I appreciate your time and your eyes more than you know, and I hope these have been some help to you.
As my final thought for the year, I want to say this:
To the cis folks reading, please try to understand some of what we might be dealing with. And go out of your way to assure us that you see us. That you support us. That you’re there for us. And remember that we need action, not just words. We NEED you.
And to the other trans, nonbinary, non-cis folks reading, let me say this:
You are not your trauma.
You are not wrong about reality.
And you are sure as hell not broken.
I see you. I’m in it with you.
And we can get through it together.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com