Tell Us As You Write Your Story: What You Don’t Know and Might Learn

Leave room for growth

We often think of not-knowing as an opportunity, and it is, but often it’s presented rigidly: We’re in a classroom or workplace, and we’re supposed to learn a fact or skill that someone else already knows and wants to teach us to do exactly whatever they’ve decided we should do.

The state of unknowing can also be a state of wonder, creativity, and openness. The hope of there being something to learn is the hope that we can grow, stay connected and engaged, and do something important. It doesn’t need to imply there’s a predefined fact or skill to be acquired.

Our unknowing is wise when we know that we don’t know.

Our unknowing is electric when it’s an openness to grow in any direction and we let ourselves be changed by it.

Gender Unknowing

How does someone know their gender? Is gender transition like hopping from one stereotyped category to another, in the hope that the grass is greener elsewhere?

Well, “gender” does literally mean “category,” so gender unavoidably deals with stereotypes. But gender is bigger and more flexible than that. Gender is based in part in ideas and feelings, and we already know those will change. Your gender can be like a home for the parts of you that change. This can involve one big transition between categories, shifting between categories frequently, challenging the categories in a way that seems trans to ourselves or others, or abandoning categories altogether.

Trans people often talk about feeling most at home in a gender category where we feel we have more room for growth. We know we’re going to change. We designate a space in which we can do it.

We can make lists of ways in which we fit one gender stereotype more than another, and there’s nothing wrong with that exercise, but there’s a limited amount we can learn from those lists, and those lists may not take us into our futures.

Gender transition is like other big commitments to ourselves — what we’ll study, what we’ll do for work, where we’ll live, who we’ll spend time with — insofar as we begin with our knowings but also leave room for the unknowing in which we’ll grow. Every human being changes. We grow in the ways that most draw our interest.

Unknowing What Happens to Us

Why does a fire come to one doorstep but not another? Depending on how we approach the question, we might say that a fire is random so there’s not much to be learned from the way the wind was blowing. But we can find reasons why the climate is changing and reasons why a person lives in one neighborhood and not another.

I can say that something happens or doesn’t happen to me because of how I’m perceived as a man. This answer might be incorrect or incomplete. Another possibility is that I’ve been treated certain ways and had certain outcomes because of how I’m perceived as white. Electric unknowing generates as I sit with that possibility. As long as I don’t completely know something, I have room to stay responsible for learning more about it. What I allow to draw my interest will change how I show up in this world.

Don’t Weaponize the Unknowing

Transphobia often manifests as a resistance to the idea that trans people have special self-knowledge. It devotes itself to proving that we (trans people) do not have this knowledge of our own genders and that our feelings, beliefs, and opinions are incorrect.

For example, because I’m not a sports authority nor a correctional officer in a prison, it isn’t my job to decide how to group certain individuals in those settings. I know that I don’t know those things. This is a wise unknowing, I suppose. It’s not really an electric unknowing for me, since I’m not trying to know anything on those topics nor am I excited about my lack of knowledge. I simply feel content that it isn’t my role to make those decisions for anyone at all.

Unfortunately, in what tries to pass itself off as “debate” today, a common transphobic ploy is for a “questioner” to approach a random trans person and try to back us into a corner on a topic like “sports” or “prisons”—which, for the questioner, is really the topic of trans people. Ah ha—they declare victory — if this random trans person can’t assure me that all people on the planet should always be grouped a particular way with no exceptions, they’ve essentially admitted that trans people aren’t fundamentally entitled to their gender! Therefore, trans people don’t really belong to their gender!

But clearly the questioner is not a sports authority or correctional officer either; if they were, they wouldn’t be coming to a random trans person for advice on how to do their job. They are just looking for an excuse to cast skepticism on trans people and reject how we identify our own genders.

This person probably doesn’t know what they don’t know. If they do, they’re intentionally maintaining their ignorance.

As I said, my personal unknowing about sports and prisons isn’t electric in the directions of sports and prisons per se because I don’t aspire to become more knowledgeable in those areas.

But when I sit with transphobic arguments, I learn a lot about transphobia. For me, that’s electric—learning more about how transphobia surfaces and what it thinks it’s doing. It’s an electric unknowing for me to sit with an argument, familiar or new, at first not knowing what someone’s motivation is for complaining about trans people at all, and finally to see why they’re doing what they’re doing, how they’re going about it, and why indeed they could just stop.

The non-knowledge of transphobia teaches us about itself. It doesn’t tell us anything about trans people. This, to me, is a fascinating (if dangerous) electric tension.

Writing Prompts: What You Don’t Know and Might Learn

Grab the structure of everything you know—and unstructure it with what you don’t know. Tell us:

• Is there room for growth here?
• What can you possess, and what could you lose?
• Do you sense the direction of motion?
• Who’s at the center of this situation?
• Is anything here useful?
• Is there a physical sensation?
• Why did you come here in the first place?
• Where would you begin looking for the answer?

Sign Up to Hear More

On Saturday, August 12, 2023, at 3:30 p.m. ET, I’ll be giving a short talk on “Electric Unknowing: Gender Transition, 25 Years Later.” Please register at mediumday.com. It’s free. On the registration page, scroll down and take a look at the all-day schedule. Many people will generously share their wisdom. What we will hear at Medium Day for now remains electrically unknown. — Tucker Lieberman