I have a force-fem/sissy kink, so isn't this just a fetish? A tran without a man, to borrow a phrase, is like a fish without a bicycle. Gender identity and sexuality may inform one another to an extent, but they exist independently you don't even have to feel sexual attraction at all for your gender to be real. Cis perceptions of drag culture have partly fed into this the exaggerated femininity that has been expected of gay men in the media, particularly on popular shows like Drag Race and the original Queer Eye, lends cultural credence to old theories like Richard Green's “Sissy Boy Syndrome,” which pathologized feminine behavior in assigned-male youth as a predictor of homosexuality.Īllow your resident transfem dyke to set your mind at ease: you can be trans and like other women and/or femmes. One of the most pernicious myths about transfeminine people is that we're some strange breed of “ultra-gays” - men so egregiously homosexual that we've looped around the Great Donut of Gender and become women. Whether you knew who you wanted to be or not, and regardless if anyone saw any clues, your childhood doesn't have to determine who you are as an adult.
That doesn't mean I'm not trans it just means I subconsciously understood, even as a five-year-old, that being myself was to invite hostility and ridicule. I even joined Boy Scouts, one of the most stereotypically masculine youth clubs on the planet. When I was young, I was so scared of the possible consequences for telling anyone I liked how wearing a dress made me feel that I repressed all such expressions for nearly a decade. TransYouth Project founder Kristina Olson reports that on average, "trans kids follow different trajectories than children who simply prefer toys and clothes associated with the opposite gender" and even show more gender nonconformity, on average, than their cis peers. It's been part of the diagnostic criteria for decades: did you want to play with dolls instead of toy cars? Did you vocally insist on wearing dresses instead of pants and shorts? In the past, many therapists have even denied diagnoses to people who failed to show such signs of cross-gender expression.īut childhood behavior, I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear, is way more complicated than that.
When diagnosing trans people with gender dysphoria, it's common practice for mental health professionals to look at someone's childhood for indicators.