Wrapped up in my queer and transgender identity, I find a self-reinforcing feedback loop of not fitting in and wanting to not fit in.
For me, being transgender was never a result of strong dysphoria or intense feeling of being in the wrong gender role. It was a much more subtle sense of wrongness in my life that built over time. I really tried a lot of things to address this (though maybe not always intentionally): cutting my hair and growing it out, many sports and academic pursuits, doubling down on health and manliness and waking up at 5am every day to go to the gym, joining a college fraternity. While many of these things were good, they didn’t fit the hole.
The things that have helped include growing out my hair, lasering off my beard, injecting hormones every week (and feeling their effects over time), changing my wardrobe, using a new name and pronouns – all the things I do as a trans woman. I could only start these things when I knew they were even a possibility.
But what if being trans fem is not the path, simply a path. One that I started down based on my place in life when the feelings of wrongness grew enough to be unavoidable. The equation needs something to satisfy the rebellion, the weird, the “make the machine try to chew me up and spit me out” – the Queer as in Fuck You.
The not fitting in is trans; the not wanting to fit in is queer.
Evidence of trans coming first, and queer coming out of that: I have felt an increasing desire to be visibly and actively queer since starting to transition.
Evidence of queer coming first, and trans building out of that: being trans started as a solution to the wrongness, and I can now name that feeling as queer.
Anyways, I’m not going to answer the title of this post. To me, there is no trans without queer, and there is no queer without trans.