A Trans Tipping Point

In what follows, I want to consider gender transitions and cultural transitions, how these interlock, and how they also seem to defeat one another. As an English literature PhD candidate examining transgender storytelling, I spend a lot of time examining transgender representation in film, television, novels, and news media. Most of my work right now focuses on certain tropes we use to express transgender identity—think of those metaphors and analogies like being born in the wrong body or going on a gender journey. A major tendency recently is that more people, both inside and outside of the trans community, are using the language of gender transition more than gender transformation.

Let me explain further. The 1950s was when North America really became aware of transgender identity, mostly through a figure like Christine Jorgensen suddenly appearing on the front of a newspaper after a trip overseas to have her final surgery. Trans identity in this context was a sudden and overwhelming change; it was, to use an actual quotation from a medical document from this time period, to "go abroad […] and come back a broad" (Benjamin 43). The distance between the points of man and woman, woman and man, was sudden, stark, and noticeable. This sudden overnight change was then replicated in media that covered the story. Think of the before/after photograph so common in trans storytelling, even nowadays. The distance between the before and after photo is small, but it represents an overwhelming change. Similarly, think of the analogies often used to represent transgender people: the cocoon and blooming butterfly, the phoenix being reborn from the ashes. All sudden, all stark, all overwhelming.

And mostly fictional. The space between the before and after photograph is supposed to stand in for surgery; it's supposed to be the magical transformation which suddenly changes a man into a woman. But changing genders is something that happens over years, sometimes decades, by sheer necessity. Hormones take a long time to manifest secondary sex characteristics and must be closely monitored. Even surgery, which can seem like a quick overnight change, actually happens over weeks and sometimes even years—especially if financial saving, recovery time, and the multiple surgeries some people choose to have are taken into consideration. Nothing here is a sudden transformation.

Transgender narratives are often presented as a one-way trip; a teleological progress narrative constructed around certain steps and with a designated closure. It's pristine, it's perfect—and it's a myth. Most transgender people, if they experience gender as binary, don't see it as a sudden move from one to the next but as a gradual transition. For many others, gender is nonlinear. It can't happen teleologically because they must go backward and forward; they may stop transition halfway through and resume it later. Even their own memories, which now present a fragmented life full of so many different selves, are split and ruptured.

The split self is what doctors try to solve when they perform surgery; it's the trauma that therapists and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual label "gender dysphoria." But the more time I spend in transgender communities, the more I realize that the split self isn't something to fix. It is oftentimes the goal of transition itself. Gender transformation, like that of Jorgensen, is all but forgotten; it's the gradual transition which can be a-linear and non-teleological which often presents a better option. The split self doesn't provide trauma but is an inspiration to keep moving and keep figuring something out. By denying an ultimate ending to the gender narrative—surgery—transition as a methodology but also an ideology and narratology stays around, and so do the experiences that go along with it. Transition, rather than transformation, seems to be the key to understanding transgender identity.

But then someone uses a metaphor of transformation on the news or in a recently released film like The Danish Girl, and I realize that we're still thinking in older terms. In 2014, Time Magazine said there was a "transgender tipping point," meaning that...