Politeness norms seem to keep a lot of folks from discussing or asking their trans friends questions they have, I figured at the very least I could help try to fill the gap. Lemmy has a decent trans population who might be able to provide their perspectives, as well.
Mostly I’m interested in what people are holding back.
The questions I’ve been asked IRL:
- why / how did you pick your name?
- how long have you known?
- how long before you are done transitioning?
- how long do you have to be on HRT?
- is transgender like being transracial?
- what do the surgeries involve?
For the most part, though, I get silence - people don’t want to talk about it, or are afraid to. A lot of times the anxiety is in not knowing how to behave or what would be offensive or not. Some people have been relieved when they learned all they needed to do is see me as my gender, since that became very simple and easy for them.
If there are trans people you know IRL, do you feel you can talk to them about it? Not everyone is as open about it as I am, and questions can be feel rude, so I understand why people would feel hesitant to talk to me, but even when I open the door, people rarely take the opportunity.
I have exactly one question which I’ve never found the right venue to ask, and because it’s about the internal experience, I would need to ask several trans people to get a picture:
When you meet someone who has your deadname, do you experience an initial reaction like you would meeting someone who has your ex’s name?
I just started working at a new place, and my closest coworker has my deadname. Threw me for like half a second, but hasn’t been an issue at all otherwise.
No one has my birth name. My parents made it up by combining their names!
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone with my deadname, it is quite a rare name :)
For me it’s somewhere between that and hearing the name of a dead family member that I had a complicated relationship with.
Neat side note, not all trans people have a dead name. One of my friends had a gender neutral birth name and he just kept it. Some people get all the luck 😂
hm, no - I don’t think it works that way for me, anyway.
My deadname felt very much like “me” and I lived as the wrong gender for decades, so one of the ways I adapted to that was to implicitly think about my deadname as not a man’s name, so when I met other guys with the name I had this horrible feeling like they shouldn’t have my name, and that’s not what I’m like, and so on.
When I transitioned and took a different name, the deadname within a few months started to lose its gender-neutral sense for me, and it’s like the name went back to being a male name without that dissonant feeling - which led me to mostly feel repulsed that I ever went by that name. It feels so wrong that I was ever called that, and so when I see or meet people with my deadname it’s mostly just a reminder of those feelings - that I went through this awful experience, but also that I’m so relieved I’m not that anymore (a kind of affirmation, in a way).
Is that what it’s like to meet someone with your ex’s name?
I met two people with my dead name and a third who used the nickname I used to (think Christina/Tina) all in the same job. I thought it would be weird, but I realized that I never identified with those names, I just used them because it was expected.
I imagine it’s different for other people, but that’s how it has been for me
Yes, but that name is so distant to me that it no longer feels like it ever belonged to me. At best, it was borrowed.
I knew a woman who gets very anxious if she meets someone with her deadname. She couldn’t be friend with and tries to not speak with the deadnamed person, etc. I hope it’s better know.
I often meet people with my born name, I don’t really care. I mean, I met people with this name before changing mine so it’s ok, it’s a very common name. I have a friend named like that. The hard thing is to not react to the name.
Yes.
That wasn’t as much my experience but I never really distinctly disliked the name I used before transitioning, it just wasn’t what I needed at the time
That being said, my relationship with gender has ended up being very messy, and I now go by a different spelling of the name I used as a kid, so whether I fit into the umbrella of “trans” is complicated