Transness or Trans-not: The Expectation Paradox. Author: Emmett Dawson-Smith

Four months ago, I was walking along the beach, angry at myself and the world. I’d just broken up with my partner because he couldn’t bring himself to accept my transness. It had been a year and a half of pretending to be a woman and be deadnamed in front of his friends to make him feel more comfortable whilst I was indescribably uncomfortable. I was also struggling at work, because I didn’t look trans enough to be accepted as a man. Ten-hour shifts being misgendered no matter what I did to myself. On that beach, I realised there was no way to exist in this non-negotiable expectation paradox. I felt persecuted for my transness and my trans-nots, hung within a liminal space, with no way out.

This is also not an isolated experience for just me; many trans people find it hard to navigate these relationships. It’s hard to function in an expectation paradox where you can’t win. How can we be too much, but also not enough?

When I say expectation paradox, I refer to the idea that trans people can either adhere too much to the gender binaries that society follows, or not enough. For example, a trans man may not look masculine enough to be accepted despite trying to adhere to gender binaries but also would not have stereotypical ‘female’ characteristics and behaviours. In this case, he would be shunned by both male and female communities, for being too much like one binary but also not enough for the other. As he belongs to neither category, the expectation paradox is created as he strives for acceptance from other social actors. Berger and Luckmann’s theory of typification aids understanding of this, as it outlines how dialectical processes underpin social reality’s construction and experiences for identity ‘types’. It is essentially the historical process in which social norms change and are then legitimated. This is useful in terms of structuring the expectation paradox, as the term ‘trans’ became mainstream debate around the 2010’s, making it a modern ‘phenomena’ (Faye, 2021,pp68). As Berger and Luckmann note, identity types are observed in everyday life and the acceptance of these ‘can be verified-or refuted- by ordinary men’ (1966, pp194). Although trans people have always existed, their mainstream emergence has meant that legitimisation instructed by social structures has not yet been attained. Due to a lack of legitimisation, the expectation paradox has created a liminal space, as ‘identity remains unintelligible unless it is located in a world’ (Berger and Luckmann (pp195). Therefore, it is currently possible to be ‘too’ trans or not trans ‘enough’.

The expectation paradox is easily situated in the public sphere and its implications on relationships, as trans ‘issues’ have been circulating media and political spheres for a significant period, and have opened to attacks from the far-right and some feminists. Faye notes that although for the most part feminism is open to trans inclusion, there is a small sub-section of feminists that are supportive of trans exclusion (e.g. TERFs) (pp228). Anxieties voiced by these feminists largely attack trans women, as they are seen as assailing the feminist movement (Turner, 2024, pp313). This ‘assailment’ on the feminist movement derives from the idea that trans women were not born ‘women’, thus their socialisation invalidates their claim to womanhood, as they have not undergone a lack of privilege or oppression in the same way a cis woman would, as they are biologically ‘men’ (Turner, pp313). The expectation from this narrative is that to be deemed woman ‘enough’, you must have some arduous experience of the patriarchy that is only afforded to biological ‘women’. Turner notes that to be accepted into social relationships, there is the need for an ‘effort bargain’, where trans people need a story worth telling that involves self-sacrifice to show that they are authentic members of various communities (pp315). This implies a need for medical transitioning as form of self-sacrifice but also as a show of worthiness to internalize gender binaries. This adds a new dimension to the expectation paradox, as not only do trans people have to look trans ‘enough’ to not be recognised in public to be discriminated against, but they also must have undergone discrimination to be accepted, and must be public about this fact. How can one be trans enough to be accepted through hardships whilst also not look too trans to undergo such discrimination?

The expectation paradox makes navigating personal relationships a difficult process, particularly intimate ones. Pfeffer’s research into relationships between trans and cis partners is a useful analysis for this. In the study, cis partners were accepting of the other partners transness, but often felt conflict towards a new socially perceived dynamic. Most participants had lived most of their lives under the label ‘lesbian’, which had laid foundations of social relationships. With a transitioning partner, there is a ‘consideration of the complex management processes…negotiating both individual identity and group-based membership’ (pp3, 2014). Both partners became vulnerable as their social status and acceptance from established social relationships changed. For cis partners, the notion of being perceived as heterosexual with heteronormative expectations was problematic, as it went against how they identified themselves (Pfeffer, pp21). This causes conflict within cis-trans relationships, as the refusal to adopt heteronormative presentations and membership may invalidate the trans partner regarding their transness and attached expectations. This shows the need for critical engagement in the ‘paradox of social recognition with regard to queer identities’ (Pfeffer, pp23). As we have discussed already, the relationship to public spheres for trans individuals is difficult, thus having a cis partner that refuses to adopt affirming expectations created a new difficulty to the trans expectation paradox, where they are ‘too’ trans for their partner and their refusal to adopt this makes them not trans ‘enough’ in expected relationship patterns.

From the widest scale to the most intimate settings, we’re fucked for as long as the expectation paradox exists. Stop erasing us from Queer theory, we are worth the research. But we aren’t guinea pigs to be prodded for personal explanations of what we are, we aren’t a public story of bravery and arduous experiences we necessarily want to share, only to be persecuted for doing so. It is only this way because sociological and cultural thought has remained stagnant and overlooked our rights to our personal lives, as our bodies have become public interest subjected to political attacks. We aren’t a pre-paradigm, we are here already, so the narrative must change. Transness or trans-nots, we are allowed to exist, however that may look or sound.

 

References

Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. (1966). The sociology construction of reality : a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Faye, S. (2021). The Transgender Issue: an Argument for Justice. Bristol: Allen Lane.

Pfeffer, C.A. (2014). ‘I Don’t Like Passing as a Straight Woman’: Queer Negotiations of Identity and Social Group Membership. American Journal of Sociology, 120(1), pp.1–44. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/677197.

Turner, C. (2024). Social Theory and Transgender: Beyond Polarization. Society. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-024-00981-x.

 

Appendix

The poem I wrote during that coastal storm on the beach, as the only way to articulate how I felt because I had no tangible words to describe the hell I was going through:

Dust from dust,

Did the dust that made you,

Not make you beautiful?

 

Did you not see your fight for survival,

Was borrowed from the rage of the waves?

The scream building up inside,

Is that not like the cry of the gulls?

The way your eyes glisten,

Bestowed from the rain glistening on a roaring sea.

Your wrinkles and scars,

Does that not mimic the bark of driftwood?

You are killing yourself like we are Mother Nature,

You aren’t yourself in this world,

She cries at how beautiful you already are,

As she dies for you to ignore it.

 

Why do we love nature only in its beauty?

Can we not see beauty in its destruction and towering fury?

In her perfect imperfection?

That’s us darling,

We are beautiful in both love and in anger,

Storms are not to be kept within,

Mother Nature lets herself scream and makes us cower,

And yet,

You break a storms heart, because it resides in you building and waiting,

Waiting to let all the thunder and waves crash over others,

Not to crush you down until you’re nothing but a shell,

That is yet to be swallowed into the waves and be forgotten

 

Your knuckles are white,

Like the lightning that thrashes the ground,

Staring into the mirror,

Wishing for something more,

The reflection warped beyond natures control

 

You ask a divine entity to save you,

And the irony is,

They’ve given you one,

Mother Nature made it for you,

You are your own guardian angel,

Because she gave you everything you need,

Borrowed from her own self,

And Mother Nature is screaming for you to save yourself,

She’s drowning in your sorrow and her own,

Because,

Dust from dust,

And the way you’re going my love,

Momento mori

 

Dust from dust,

Nature did not choose for you to be ugly,

She created you to be beautiful