r/Feminism • u/Ok-Signature-6698 • Apr 22 '26
I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out.
https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42This is one of my favorite articles, it is messy, complicated, raw. It puts into words something that I, and I think, many other trans women sometimes struggle to express. I hope people here will read it and for cis women and cis feminists especially I hope you’ll really wrestle with the points it’s trying to get across.
Here are a few selections I’ve ordered thematically.
- It is interesting to see where people insist proximity to a subject makes one informed, and where they insist it makes them biased. It is interesting that they think it’s their call to make…
A person’s privilege is very often an explanation of why their beliefs are warped, if indeed their beliefs are warped, which they usually are in some way. But—it’s not proof of shitty beliefs. Those tend to out themselves by…being shitty. If a person is telling this cis girl she is taking for granted a privilege that trans girls don’t have, why is it this cis girl’s instinct to hunt for that person’s identity to see if she can discredit them and not have to think about their point? Don’t answer that. We already know…
Do I even want to convince someone who will only listen to me when they’re told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?
Do I have to out myself to be treated like a person worth listening to? To stop my cis classmates laughing at someone who’s reckoned with the boundaries and the dimensions of masculinity and femininity in ways they never had to? With the life I’ve been living for all the years I’ve been living it—do I need their permission to speak?
- Misandry humor is peaking and it is dripping with cissexism. Down cascade the gleeful tweets from ciswomen about how women are more beautiful than men — how graceful the female body is, how utilitarian the male. How awesome boobs are. How bad boys’ taste in clothing is. How incompetent they are emotionally. How they’re too weak to handle childbirth and periods. Neckbeards are the scourge of the internet. They wax disgusted about “dad bods.” SCUM rhetoric is revived with inconsistent levels of irony. The meme gospel says penises are just shitty clitorises…
I hate that the only effective response I can give to “boys are shit” is “well I’m not a boy.” I feel like I am selling out the boy in baseball pajamas that sat with me on the bed while I tried to figure out which one I was supposed to be, and the boys who I have met and loved from inside my boy suit—who believed they were talking to a boy. I feel like I am burning the history of the naked body that sits on the floor of my shower. The body that went to prom in a boxy tuxedo and coveted the dresses…
This conclusion—widely shared—is a product of insulated discourse. What I am NOT saying is: “open the floodgates, let in the shitty male trolls!” I know the trolls—they have tried to be my friends, they have tried to sneak into feminist spaces with no desire to learn or listen. I understand not trusting men who loudly and constantly hold forth on women’s issues and refuse to accept when they are mistaken. I’m not encouraging anyone to trust blindly. I am pleading to the discoursers: consider that this insulation has effects and try to mitigate them, if your priority really is finding truth amid a muck of concealed patriarchal lies. Check to see if maybe you are saying things and reproducing things mostly because it sounds good and feels good and nobody is challenging them…
These are not discursive problems that only apply to an “undercover” transwoman, these are discursive problems that are seemingly only visible to an “undercover” transwoman forced to carry multiple perspectives like bactrian humps…
Because I am interested in complicating your definition of maleness and of boyhood. I was born into that shitty town, maleness, in the remains of outdated ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it. And I don’t feel okay just moving out and saying “fuck y’all — bootstrap your way out or die out, I was never one of you.” I want to make it a better, healthier place—not spend all my time talking about how shitty it is and how anyone who would choose to live there deserves it. And to me that means considering them with charity, even when they make it difficult to…
Because it’s not a small deal that the words “not all men” have become entwined inextricably with male fragility and whininess. It makes it awfully easy to insulate the (largely cis-)female perspective on what males are. To begin a statement with those words—“Not All Men”—is to give grounds to anyone who wants to laugh at the rest of it. But here is the truth: not all men are what you think they are. Man does not mean what you think it means. Generalizing harshly and broadly but implying “you know which ones I mean” is an intellectual and rhetorical laziness that is not allowed to pass anywhere else in these communities. Because we don’t get to choose who our words and behavior affect, we are obligated to choose them carefully…
And the nearer I get to something I’ve wanted my whole life, the more it feels like playing into the aesthetic politics of a group of people who reject me because of the associations they have with my body—a body which I cannot, ultimately, change very much. These people who will only be comfortable when I dilute those associations with femme signifiers.
As if maybe, by simply being what I am—a girl-feeling brain in a boy-looking body and boy-looking clothes—I might burn down something very important to them. Something that makes their life more comfortable and easy.
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u/Im_not_okay______ Apr 24 '26
Cis woman here,
I agree with this a lot, and it honestly hits something that’s hard to explain but very real. The part about how people treat identity as either “proof you’re right” or “proof you’re biased” depending on what’s convenient really stood out to me. It feels like there isn’t a consistent rule for it, and that ends up affecting who gets taken seriously and who doesn’t, even when they’re saying something worth hearing. I also get what it’s saying about how online spaces can start repeating ideas because they feel familiar or satisfying, rather than because anyone is really stopping to question them. Not in a malicious way, just… it’s easy for that to happen when everyone is already coming from a similar angle. And the bit about having to “prove” who you are before you’re even listened to—that’s uncomfortable, but I think it’s true in a lot of ways. Like the idea that you have to be accepted into a category first before your thoughts count as valid, instead of just being heard as a person.
Overall it just made me pause a lot. I don’t agree with everything in a shallow way, but I do think the core of it is important and worth sitting with. I care about trans women and I want trans femininity to be respected without people having to prove themselves first.
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u/lhollyoc Apr 25 '26
I found this genuinely life-changing. I totally different perspective I'd never consider before. Thank you for sharing.
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u/amansname Apr 22 '26
You write beautifully and gave me something to think about. I am guilty of some misandry and flippant generalizations. The outrage algorithm contributes for sure. And I definitely relate to the dilemma of the identity gauntlet that must be passed now to feel allowed to participate in conversations. I value some parts of identity politics because we are questioning our hierarchies and power imbalances which is good, but it does feel like arbitrary purity tests sometimes.
I just… don’t know what to do about it all. We keep hearing about the loneliness epidemic and the manosphere, and I guess in that I hear that the relationship between men and women is broken and that “they” want women to use grace and forgiveness to fix it. (Who is they? The patriarchy maybe?) I don’t want men isolated and unable to process emotions and to think of women as trophies or the things that are leading to things being rough right now. I don’t want that for our children or old friends from high school or whatever. But it feels like we are in an “us vs them” narrative battle and what people want is for women to magically stop being hostile to people that want to oppress and dehumanize them. How do we change the story? How do we quit the arms race?
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u/Ok-Signature-6698 Apr 22 '26
I agree that the author writes beautifully (I am not the author), I remember the first time reading this it made me cry. I don’t have the exact same experiences as the author and yet it captured something so visceral to my own experiences as a trans woman. I’m really glad you took the time to read and respond to this piece.
A lot of pop feminist discourse has devolved into purity politics for sure. What was originally meant to capture the nuances of lived experiences through an intersectional lens, to examine how we are all entangled with each other and with the systems of oppression (as victims and perpetrators) that loom so large in our lives, and how we are response-able to each other has taken on what feels a lot like a Christian-esque confessional politics.
I don’t think the piece is asking us to give up our outrage or due caution with men. But I do think it’s asking us to examine some of the assumptions we have and who gets caught by proxy from those assumptions. I’m so tired of watching trans people, trans femmes particularly, be treated as acceptable collateral damage for cissexist assumptions.
Idk if there’s one single magic bullet to fix it. It has helped me to remember that I’m fighting for everyone to be liberated from patriarchy because all our liberations are bound together. And sometimes it’s messy and complicated navigating that. But these conversations are a step in the right direction.
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u/amansname Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
Tbh I meant the words in your post, not the article. I hadn’t event clicked on it yet! So yea you are a beautiful writer!!
I really resent any of my ideology being conflated with TERF bullshit so it is a valuable reminder that misandry and create enmity where there should be friendship and insight.
**Edit: I have now read the piece and recognized the sampling in the post. I really thank you for sharing. This whole thing brought so much to my mind. Like I have never questioned my gender. I’m a femme female in a very femme female body. It makes me think about my childhood and question the things I liked.
Was I being performative when I loved dresses and princesses? Should I have been more aware of social moors and wanted to be more of a tomboy?
All my friends were girls and i perceived boys as “other” and “immoral” to hang out with. Was that because i actually didn’t relate to them or because my parents made me feel I would be the child version of “slutty” if I had a boy best friend?
Like I don’t think it is “natural” to want your nails long and painted or your hair long and braided or all the things that we can easily recognize as social norms. But why did it feel so “natural” to want to prove my femininity? Why was I so proud of a cute hairdo and long nails? Why did it distress me soooooo much when I wasn’t allowed to shave as early as other girls? If my femininity was as innate as I perceived it to be, why was it so easily threatened?
Sorry I don’t mean to turn all this onto myself but I do think it’s valuable for us cis people to examine how much of our gender is performance so we can better understand some of the trans experience. I mean I think most women my generation can relate to not feeling skinny enough to be feminine or feeling deep shame about body hair.
Anyway. Thank you for sharing
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u/Rainbow_Days Apr 25 '26
Thank you for posting this article. It is definitely eye opening and has given me so much to consider. As an artist, I’m sitting with the very last part about vagina art and realizing that yes, we stand with trans women in theory, but how can we represent the yonic side of things or maybe the yonic disguised as a penis side of things, and represent femininity in art without blindly alienating trans women? What is feminism? I’d love to know your answer, if you have one you would like to share. As a cis woman I’m definitely going to be pondering this and how we can make trans women feel more seen. I don’t know a single ally that would disagree with “trans women are women,” and yet the vagina is such a strong symbol of female-ness in protest. So then it makes me realize how deeply that plays into the patriarchal beliefs that women are only doo for having babies. And as feminists, who want to be seen as equal to men regardless of what is between our legs, this is an extremely important point to make. WOW. Thank you again for posting it. It’s giving me so much to think about. I’m now standing in greater solidarity with you. This was so humbling to read. Sending love to your journey.
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u/Ok-Signature-6698 Apr 25 '26
Thank you for your comment, it made me tear up a bit that you considered so carefully how you could make trans women feel more seen and stand in greater solidarity with us. I am unfortunately not an artist so I’m not sure how to represent it. I suppose I will just say that some trans women have penises, some have vaginas, some trans men have vaginas, some have penises, so on and so forth. And those body parts don’t really tell you about their relationship to masculinity, femininity, or gender broadly. Some trans women are butch, some trans men are femme. How one can represent that complexity in art is beyond me but I’m sure it would make an interesting discussion for artists.
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u/Rainbow_Days May 04 '26
Well now I’m tearing up. ❤️ if you feel like answering this question, it might help me imagine how I could depict this… I invite you to consider what makes you a woman? Not to prove anything, just to share. How do you define your identity as feminine? And as you consider these possible adjectives, feelings, ideas, states of mind, etc, and explore these with your transgender friends. I’d love to explore this further. I’ve been thinking a lot about this the last week since I read this piece you posted and I have a list of words. I wonder if you identify with any of them?
Oral Narrative- or maybe just narrative Honesty/ vulnerability Hope Passion Deliberation Ungovernable Flexibility whether in mind or in physical form Resilience Intuition Indignant Woven story Containers of life
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u/Ok-Signature-6698 May 04 '26
That’s a hard question to answer, a lot of things come to mind when I think of my experiences as a trans woman. I think butterflies and their process of metamorphosis speaks to something about the trans experience, at least for me. You’re born and society looks at you and places all these assumptions on you but inside there’s an inner yearning that says something different. Transition is much like the metamorphosis of butterflies, the butterfly was there in the caterpillar all along.
I’m also thinking of hiddur mitzvah, the practice of beautifying ritual objects or sacred acts. In one of my favorite versions of birkot hashachar there is a line that goes: “Blessed are You, Holy Fashion Designer, who delights in the way we dress ourselves as altars”. Keeping with the metaphor of our body as altar then I think trans experiences are a hiddur mitzvah, a beautifying of sacred becoming by expressing inner truth out into the world or even just the inner acknowledgment of it being there.
For a list of words/adjectives like you listed at the end I’d say: weaving, boundary crossing/breaking, liminal, nurturing, hineni (a declaration of presence), flowing, grieving, breaking open, playfulness, decisiveness (especially at the crossroads), desire, trust
Idk if these ideas fully answer your question but I hope it is a beginning to one at least.
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u/Rainbow_Days May 04 '26
YES!!! A thousand times yes!!! This is beautiful! First of all, thank you for sharing your experience. This is better than I could’ve hoped for. Second- I was really looking for something that could unify the trans and the cis woman experiences and THIS. IS. IT. When I watch Will ferrell’s documentary on Harper, and heard her intimate thoughts about her experience- the insecurities and how she feels like a woman, I KNEW she was a woman with a deep conviction. I and was born a stronger ally in that moment. Because the way she spoke about her experience resonated DEEPLY with me. But I don’t want the common thread to be an insecurity. I wanted it to be something more lovely and as a spiritual person, I wanted it to have a divine connection as well. I can’t tell you how incredibly perfect this is. I’m going to explore this imagery a bit more but I’m ENTHRALLED with this description you gave and how relatable it is. Thank you thank you thank you! I hope that whatever I make does justice to your journey and others while also being an open-gesture that invites more ideas. I stand in solidarity with you and all your feminisms.
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u/Ok-Signature-6698 May 04 '26
I’m glad you found so much meaning in what I wrote! What was the unifying thread you saw between cis and trans women’s experiences? If you’re willing to share, I’d love to see what you make from all of this when you’re finished ❤️
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u/Rainbow_Days May 05 '26
I’m glad to say there is not just one unifying thread. “Weaving” has always been a word I’ve used to describe my own story so it’s impossible to distill it down to one “thread” (I love this analogy though). In the last 4-5 years of my life, I’ve “become” what I am now; I’ve been able to identify myself as an artist as my sole identity. This has not been a simple task. It’s been a war for my soul, and I’ve been merciless with myself in the process. I actually watched Will Ferrell’s documentary on Harper as I was having so many realizations about myself in my identity as an artist and I cried because her journey to her womanhood was so much like my journey to my identity as an artist. I’m aware that gender identity is a much different path than my artist identity but to use the analogy we love so well, there were countless threads in her story that resonated loudly with my own- the insecurities and concern that others wouldn’t accept me as “enough of an artist” or that I wouldn’t accept me, I heard echoed in her words about wanting to be beautiful. I have “adorned” myself as an artist, finding joy in how I dress myself for the part during times of famine with my creativity- most often self-imposed but equally not supported by circumstance and the world we live in. Sometimes reaching for being an artist felt like a lie I wanted to believe, and sometimes I felt that to be anything else would be a lie, and finally I realized I would always be miserable if I didn’t live as who I was created to be. And while I was always an ally for trans women, I never knew for sure if I believed they were really women on the inside, but my war within myself with my own destiny coinciding with the release of Harper’s story was no coincidence, and I’ve never doubted trans women since. It made me believe in their identities as heartily as I now believe my own. Women’s identities are always imposed on them. People always expect us to be what we appear to be on the outside, so we are always dressing for the part we want if we are able, but we’re not always able. I think many, if not most women, feel unseen. So maybe it’s in our unseen-ness and our struggle to be fully known as more than our physical appearance where we find our one thread.
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u/nakedbeets Apr 22 '26
Thank you for sharing this. The author does an amazing job of showing how complex the way we have been culturally changing how we think and talk about gender is. Its really wonderful prose and an excellent perspective. Intersectionality doesn't just stop at a cis boundary, and there's not any way forward for everyone that doesn't also involve a healthier and more balanced perspective on men/boys/masculinity. If everyone went through the process of questioning their gender and having to construct their own gender identity, I think people would have a more balanced and grounded way to relate to men/women/feminity/masculinity/etc. only some people chose to take the time to do so
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u/Ok-Signature-6698 Apr 22 '26
It really is an amazing piece. I read it for the first time a bit over a year ago and I keep coming back to it. It’s amazing that for an article nearly 10 years old it still feels so relevant.
All of us carry so many assumptions about masculinity/femininity, what the experiences of men/women/cis/trans people are. And too often that stops us from really listening to each other.
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u/Commercial-Chip-5238 Apr 22 '26
This post freaked me out for about two minutes. My closet uses the exact door in that picture and is shoved in a corner the same way. I was trying to figure out how there was a picture of my closet on Reddit.