Does Misgendering Feel Worse Over Time?
Context matters, but context can be a layered thing
CW: misgendering, trauma, assault
We are all a product of our collective experiences.
I wasn’t particularly upset the first time I got misgendered after coming out as gender questioning in February of 2020. In fact, I was so insecure about my pronouns, I originally told people they could use whatever pronouns they thought were appropriate for me. This was useful because it taught me both how people read my gender expression and also the degree to which they believed me that I wasn’t exactly cis-gender.
When the news finally caught fire at work that I was transgender, long after I had changed my email signature, sometimes the fear of misgendering was harder to swallow than the misgendering itself. It made me feel like a problem. I overheard a conversation that I should not have heard:
“We need to be really careful about Logan’s pronouns. We could get into serious trouble, if we get them wrong.”
“We need to be really careful about Logan’s pronouns. We could get into serious trouble, if we get them wrong.”
If that had been true, a lot of people would have gotten in trouble.
I was misgendered about 50 times a day on average over that next year. This was a major factor in my decision to medically transition. I believed that getting gendered correctly wasn’t likely to happen often, until my body was unrecognizably different.
Though I’m glad I went on Testosterone for a wide variety of benefits I received to my mental health, I still feel resentment towards my society as a whole for the social reasons that dominated my decision. I wasn’t unhappy with my body before being misgendered. I shouldn’t have had to make such a drastic change to my body to feel like there was a chance that I would eventually be seen as myself. I definitely shouldn’t have had to make this decision because I read somewhere that I was less likely statistically to get assaulted again once I was on Testosterone.
Getting on Testosterone through an “informed consent” doctor required me to sign a form listing a wide variety of things that I have since learned to be untrue.
My doctor at the time was trying to scare me into deciding not to make this “irreversible” change. It was indicative of my growing social dysphoria from being misgendered, along with my fear of assault in the wake of things that had happened since coming out, that I accepted all of the potential consequences and signed that paper. I felt sufficiently invisible and simultaneously visible enough to have had some bad enough things happen that I was willing to die early, accept what I believed to be immediate sterilization, and take the risk of having organs suddenly removed due to a doctor’s negligence.
How did I get from the point where I didn’t care about pronouns to the point where they meant so much to me that I was willing to pay such a price to hear someone call me “dude”?
How did I get from the point where I didn’t care about pronouns to the point where they meant so much to me that I was willing to pay such a price to hear someone call me “dude”?
Somewhere along the way, thoughtless words from well-meaning coworkers blended with the experience of strangers shouting lesbian slurs at me.
It blended with the clenched jaw of the man staring at me as I put on my first suit jacket and masculine hat in the clothing section of a store. It blended with the fear that I couldn’t protect my wife or my then-girlfriend if the shouting of another stranger escalated. Misgendering became linked to the feeling of helplessness and fear. The psychological effect of it evolved from the shrug of the shoulders to a willingness to give up the ability to have biological children, to potentially die earlier, and to dive into a scary unknown with very little concrete information even after doing more research than my own first doctor bothered to do to inform myself about the potential effects of Testosterone.
Though some of the same resources Kitty Whitemore pointed out in her writing here helped to soothe my nerves a lot, medically transitioning was still a massive scary leap of faith. I wish I had done this for myself, rather than because I gave into outside pressures, hoping to experience basic validation and safety that shouldn’t have required a medical transition.
After beginning Testosterone, misgendering words carried some new weight.
It meant that the risks I took to start medically transitioning for all the wrong reasons weren’t enough. The 6 months of still experiencing misgendering 50 times a day after beginning to shoot myself in the leg with a needle once a week evolved from feeling invisible to feeling like I had made changes to my body to accommodate people who weren’t going to respect me no matter what I did.
The 6 months of still experiencing misgendering 50 times a day after beginning to shoot myself in the leg with a needle once a week evolved from feeling invisible to feeling like I had made changes to my body to accommodate people who weren’t going to respect me no matter what I did.
Then, there were the hours of elevator music playing while I tried to get my health insurance sorted out, only to be told that I was a drug addict who couldn’t be helped by my health insurance because Testosterone is a controlled substance only covered for cis people. This information was sandwiched between deadnaming and misgendering words.
I was only a couple of months on Testosterone, when I had a bad experience.
I didn’t know it was traumatic at the time. It was just misgendering through a kind of touch that I had specifically said I didn’t want to experience, alongside some misgendering words. When I tried to describe part of what happened to a coworker in a general context, without admitting that I was describing my own assault, hoping to explain the weight that misgendering could carry for a transgender person, she said, “wait a minute, that shouldn’t matter! Touch is about consent. If a trans person didn’t consent, that’s assault, regardless of whether it felt like misgendering.” It’s true that experiencing a touch you asked not to experience is assault, but it does matter that the touch felt misgendering. It changes how misgendering feels going forward.
After that experience, a misgendering word used frequently by a coworker carried the weight of an assault I had experienced. It carried the weight of all of the misgendering words that were uttered during the assault. After the assault, I began to disassociate completely every time I heard a misgendering word. I hadn’t named the assault, but it had begun to effect my everyday life quite significantly. For 4 more months of getting misgendered 50 times a day, I was floating outside of my body for most of each day. I was back to losing hours of time.
Several months later, I find myself in a much better position, comparatively speaking.
I only have to see my deadname twice a day. I’m rarely misgendered at work. When I was misgendered once, I received a very long, uncomfortable apology letter for it, followed by a message from my supervisor assuring me they had handled it, all despite me never having said a word. Somehow, these rare occurrences leave me in a non-functional fog now, despite having once handled 50 misgendering incidents a day decently well.
It seems that each word carries more weight now. The words have become caked with muddy layers of history. I’ve lost my old talent for shaking them off gracefully, even when I silently accept each new invalidation of my existence.
There is always a cost for misgendering me now, even if you don’t see it.
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