#Trans impostor syndrome

[jiangshinigami]

anybody know the feeling from hearing the stories of a trans woman older than you, 20 years, 10 years, 5 years, however long, hearing the experience and struggles she had to go through

And feeling oddly jealous?

Why is that. What is this feeling.

I'll hear the struggles of growing up in a much less trans accepting society, or growing up not knowing being trans is a thing at all.

There's this odd feeling of envy that holds onto my soul, as if desiring to grow up like that, even if objectively worse.

Sort of like a lingering thought that my experience isn't equal to that.

There's almost a sort of nostalgia for a time I cannot experience, for an era that passed before I was here, for a place I never was.

I'll hear stories of abuse and horrible things, traumatic events no one deserves to go through.

I know logically that I shouldn't want that, but there's that creeping strangle hold on my soul that tells me that my mundane, straightforward existence is worth so much little compared to the suffering of others.

Its the sort of part that lies to me, discounting any form of struggle I may have gone through. It's not any better that I have lots of struggles with memory.

The fact that I began to take some form of action about my gender in 2022, expressing myself and finding groups, should be positive, working things out in my teenage years.

But that nagging part of me tells me that I'm invalid or haven't struggled enough because I figured it out "too quickly", even if I had spent the previous years in a quiet gender crisis.

Lots of mental health issues, that I'm still attempting to overcome, surely come into play. Depression, Self loathing, Anxieties and dysphoria all coming together in a mix that can most likely be labelled as imposter syndrome.

This feeling seems to crawl its way through up through my mind when I engage in trans stories, either real or fictional.

But I still love to consume these stories. Even when these terrible feelings invade my mind, more emotions seem to come along. There's an inherent beauty to this stories, someone putting themselves on display.

Hearing all of these bring new perspective. I can empathise with the parts that I find myself in, and gain more understanding from the parts that don't align with me.

And even if my own story is really "mundane", or if I haven't gone through nearly as much suffering as someone else, I'm still valid, I still have a story.

Even if someone had the easiest transition, perfect support, no judgement, no doubt, complete acceptance, they still have a story worth sharing.

Every trans story is worth sharing.

[thorne1435]

How did you all learn queer history??

I was raised by lesbians but they never talked about it. They didn't even acknowledge to me that they were lesbians, I had to piece that together on my own (which sounds way easier in retrospect than it was in reality when they've both been there for as long as you can remember).

I learned about Stonewall within the past two or three years, after I had switched political alignments and seen queer leftists talking about it like it was a thing I was supposed to know.

I learned about Leelah Alcorn today. Like, 10 minutes ago.

I need some kind of educational digital queer calendar that I can add to my phone's holiday calendar so I can start googling a significant queer event every morning.

[transenbyconfessions]

whenever I have a day where I’m in boy mode but I don’t feel miserable (transfem btw) i just feel like I’m faking it. and I worry my parents think that too. i need to dress like a girl more

Submitted June 4, 2023

[affirmations-for-everyone]

Hello tumblr! Made an affirmation blog, shoutout to the blogs who write theriotype affirmations for the inspiration <3

Asks are open, feel free to request any kind of affirmation! It doesn't necessarily have to be identity-related, this is for anyone dealing with impostor syndrome

[abalidoth]

Shave (a sonnet)

i hold to girlbeard, knuckles white as foam

my lilith’s apple marks the bounds of steel

a tapestry to make this skin my home

the softness of this estrogenic feel.

i close my ears to insecurity

the voices tell me i can’t feel this joy

“just look at real trans femininity.

deluded girl? or valor-stealing boy?”

i grit my teeth and clean up jawline strays

and think of those few sisters that I’m like

of women holding culture’s poisoned gaze

anomalies – the femme but fuzzy dyke.

a war within me as I wash my face

and tidy up this sacred, lonely space.

[nonbinary-vents]

yayyy I love being nonbinary I love having dysphoric breakdowns in the car over how my face will never look right while my mother just watches me isn’t being nonbinary just the besst I can’t believe anyone wouldn’t want to be like this wowwww

[jamiebluewind]

I had an odd thing happen yesterday.

I contacted a building supply text line with a question about woodworking. No big deal right? They asked my name. Since I never give my real/full name for these things, I usually just put J. But yesterday I was anxious. I got scared that the company would think I was fake and not answer my weird question (yay anxiety!), so in a split second decision, I wrote down Jay instead.

It felt... good. Surprisingly so. And it kept feeling good when they called me Jay too.

Just to be clear, this isn't exactly an egg cracking moment. I know I'm nonbinary. My first name never really caused me dysphoria (it's fairly gender neutral), so the only time I thought about a different one was as a teen before I knew trans existed (I wished it was Danny/Danni). However, between me being older and all the impostor syndrome, it's hard to navigate these thoughts. My brain keeps screaming that I just want to inconvenience everyone around me to feel special (and a million other things my family has told me before), but something about being called Jay felt good. I didn't make that up. Didn't plan it. It was just... nice. I don't know what it means, but I felt like I should write it down somewhere.

[khalixvitae]

I feel like unironically, unabashedly enjoying cute things is so healing. Like as a kid I always so vehemently rejected all things cute and stereotypically feminine because I wanted to be “taken seriously” (and I should have been in the first place!!! Kids are autonomous beings too!!!) and then realizing I was trans and non-binary made me even more inclined to push away the cutesy and soft “feminine” aesthetic (once again, so I would be “taken more seriously”). But like now as an adult, I’m a lot more comfortable in my agency as a person. I expect others to take me seriously, and if they don’t then they fucking suck lmao. I realized it’s not my job to make others validate my autonomy, my intelligence, etc. I don’t have to change ANYTHING about myself to be worthy of personhood - to be worthy of taking up space - because it is my right by way of existing. Allowing myself to love cute and soft things has been a huge part of accepting my whole self. I am trans, I am non-binary, and I’m also hyper femme! I love cute things and sweet smelling perfumes and sparkly phone charms! And furthermore, None of these things should be gendered in the first place, and all of these things are valid interests that should not inhibit someone’s ability to be perceived as an intelligent and autonomous being! Stereotypically “feminine” interests and products are not innately vapid and shallow, but also it’s fine to enjoy things purely for the aesthetic pleasure they bring!

[autistic-ben-tennyson]

Does anyone struggle with identity issues?

I am a Korean adoptee (20) and I often feel like I am a fraud. Everyone loves the fake, quiet and compliant person that I pretend to be. I was always the polite, responsible one who barely rebelled or talked back and always tried to get the class to shut up. It was always out of fear, never real principles. Dad would yell at me for things like making a grumpy face at my brother or getting mad when my brother’s friends would gang up on me in their “games”. He’d yell at my brother a lot too over stuff like chores or homework and it would always escalate to screaming matches as both have a really hard time admitting that they were in the wrong. And now he’s trying to be all buddy-buddy with me and is always pushing me to talk about my “feelings”. Dad’s always praising me, comparing me to my brother and telling me stuff like “god made you perfect” which doesn’t help my psyche. I am starting to wonder if I am experiencing perfect child syndrome. I always feel like I have to please people and what I want is always going to be dumped on or told is unrealistic, regardless of what they claim about being supportive.

It feels like everyone just wants me to be their perfect little boy who always helps out and stays around forever. Sometimes, I feel like a deeply fucked up person. I have acted like a jerk several times and questioned if I had ASPD or NPD at certain points for not feeling bad about it. I only came out to mom about it but I am trans and just feel disgust whenever people share pictures of the person they perceive. I’m not their perfect little son who can do no wrong. There are times I feel like I don’t belong in the family or wished I had a different life but then felt guilty about it. I am going to therapy about this but I only have a certain amount of meetings available which cost money so I use Reddit and tumblr to blow off steam. I am worried about how I will do as a parent as well with teaching the kids about their heritage. I don’t know much about my culture at all, don’t really like kimichi or bulgoggi and am worried I will screw up as I do have a short fuse and can be impatient. I want to do better but I worry that the only advice I’ll get is “toughen up” or some platitude.

[transgenderpolls]

note from OP (they/he, nonbinary genderfluid transmasc): sometimes I really think that I'm just an impostor and a "woman lite" :<

[hallows-personal-hell]

so uh. I been doing some research for the past couple months and a lot of Thinking and think I might be agender.

...

what do I do with this information 🧍‍♂️

[aroaceconfessions]

Hello!

I just wanted to ask the asexual community as a asexual myself,

I concider myself to be attracted to anyone and I find myself feeling agender. But I don't want to have sex at all.

I realised that I do get horny when it comes to seeing sexual things. I was wondering,

What type of sexual things am I allowed to see or get horny to from my description?

Because a lot of people say I'm not allowed to get horny to anything queer and only straight.

Apogies if this is disgusting to read. I'll delete it immediately if disrespectful.

Submitted March 2, 2023

[transenbyconfessions]

yknow the imposter syndrome wants to tell me im not trans but i've already submitted to this blog like 5 times already in the course of like a little less than a month i dont think that's very cis of me /silly

Submitted July 9, 2023

[lifeofafrogblog]

Sometimes I doubt myself for being trans, then I remember...

Sometimes I question myself, "am I really transgender?" Then I remember cis people don't spend three hours straight watching trans ftm tiktok compilations on YouTube (yes, that did just happen). Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually trans then remember how I force my boobs against the bones of my chest because of how dysphoric I am. Sometimes I question if I'm trans and then watch hours of "coming out as trans" and "what I didn't expect to happen when starting T."

Impostor syndrome is really getting to me lately even though I know I am trans..

[junebugwriter]

Imposter Syndrome and the Transgender Experience

A personal account of a common occurrence

“Look to your left. Now look to your right. You see all these people?” asked my university dean at orientation. “Each one of you that is in this room right now has earned it. This isn’t a prank, yes, you actually are qualified to be here. We didn’t make a mistake. You are NOT impostors.”

This was the first thing that I heard upon entry into the Ph.D. program at my university. I thought at the time that this was a very kind thing to hear, for a class of people (academics) who in general often feel that they are out of their depth. I know I certainly needed to hear it. I thought I had blundered my way into the program, fooling everyone with my academic knowledge. Sure, I had wanted to be a Ph.D. for years, felt called to teaching, felt that I knew that I would be well equipped for academic life—but how are THEY sure about it? How do I know they aren’t just lying to me? How do I know they aren’t just humoring me, the class joke whom they trained wrong on purpose, as a prank?

I, of course, should have listened. I should have internalized it. I should have grown enough self-worth in my core that could withstand such anxiety. Yet still, 5 years on, and I still wonder how the hell I managed to fool everyone. Sure, I aced my classes, aced my comprehensive exams, and am in the revision phase of my dissertation, but none of that means that I actually am qualified to earn that Ph.D., right?

You see how silly this is. How narcissistic it is in practice. I am not the star of the Truman Show. I am not the center of the universe, the fool upon which the whole of humanity is arrayed against in mockery and jest.

Nobody cares enough to do that to a person. Nobody at all.

You are not an imposter. People aren’t fooled. Your identity is valid.

I have been thinking about this recently and decided that I needed to put some of these thoughts on paper, partly as a therapeutic measure, but also because I think I’m not alone. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like an impostor, thinking that everyone else has it all figured out and I’m the lone monkey that’s going to gum up the works with my incompetence and buffoonery. This isn’t just about professional impostor syndrome, either. No, that was simply an entry point into the thing that has got me wound up: my feeling like an impostor, and my gender identity.

Chief Clown at the Gender Circus, I Am Not

I am very new to all this, to be honest.

Allow me to begin this by saying that I am not an expert in gender, gender studies, or anything like that. My academic focus is on the field of theology and ethics, with a smattering of disability advocacy mixed in there; diving headfirst into the gender pool is an enterprise that frankly terrifies me. I am quite new to discussing gender and gender identity. For a matter of fact, I am new to the idea that I even have a gender with which to discuss! It is woven into the fabric of our society and relationships that, in all honesty, most people don’t even consider gender expression a thing worth dwelling on for any longer than it takes to look at oneself in the mirror and say “Yeah, that’s about right. I’m okay with this whole thing that I have going on.” Most people do not experience gender disparity or gender variance within themselves.

So how do you go about seriously discussing gender with most people? And how do you express the concept, for most of your life, you feel like there is something wrong with your identity in a way that doesn’t make you sound crazy? That you’ve been playing along to a game that has been going on far longer than you’ve been alive, assigned a role that you might be ill-fitted for, and expected to live up to that role whether you enjoy it or not?

If you can imagine how that feels, you are doing better than most people. From birth, you are given a role based on whatever biological arrangement your body appears to be, and if it doesn’t clearly do so (like for our intersex siblings) sometimes, a doctor performs surgery so that it does more neatly align with the binary.1 For most people, this is an unspoken social contract. Humans love binaries and categories, and putting things in boxes for handy storage. The problem is that life in its infinite complexity rarely conforms to boxes and neat categories. Ask any biologist, they will tell you that taxonomic systems rarely obey the dictates of scientists. Humanity is no different, and being human, we exist in endless and varied gradients of being.

But enough waxing poetic. The problem for me, and for many who are trans, is that the role we were assigned at birth doesn’t fit right. Either our “biology”2 is at odds with our identity, or we simply don’t align with either end if the binary. Some go as far as to say they are agender, or even inhabit multiple genders! Presentation, identity, and gender are not necessarily bound by a biological component, and once you get to the point that you can accept that truth, you get to be in for another surprise:

That was just the beginning.

The Deeper End of the Gender Pool

What I have said thus far is but a taste of the kind of reality that I and my trans cohort inhabit. Additionally, not every trans person is an expert. I’m certainly not an expert. All we have is our minds, the words that might help us express our identities, and the common understanding of the experience of gender variance. (I haven’t even read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble yet, but I promise it’s on my reading list.) Yet, no matter how long you live out and proudly as your true self, one question still lingers in the mind of just about every 3trans person:

Am I trans enough? Am I really trans? Or am I just fooling myself, and everyone around me is playing along to be nice?

It’s a question that haunts me. It’s the fear of being found out, a fear that has existed in the back of our minds since birth. Why? Because all our lives, we HAVE been impostors, just the other way around. I was an impostor of a “man,” fooled into thinking I HAD to be one, and then got conned into trying to live up to that role. I’ve been fooling everyone ever since! Oh, you think I’m a guy? Even though I don’t really think like a guy? Or act like a guy? Just because I had a beard and a deep voice, and because my genes got washed in testosterone during adolescence, that does not make me a man.

Manhood is a strange thing to me, because it never seems to have a clear definition. There are stereotypes of manliness and manhood, and those tropes and stereotypes are rigidly enforced by society, but at the same time it felt like the rules kept changing, kept moving out of the way each time I tried to connect with it. Manhood was a concept that felt like mercury to me: liquid, elusive, and potentially toxic.

Yet womanhood? Femininity? Well. That’s something else entirely.

Femininity was the threat, and the punishment. The label that was foisted upon those who could not sufficiently perform “manliness.” It was the constant taunt by both child and adult alike in my youth. “Come on, boys don’t cry!” “Stop being such a girl!” And so forth. I don’t care to reproduce all the slurs that usually followed after such taunts and jeers. They inevitably came anyway.

Transphobia and homophobia might as well have been in the very air I breathed growing up in Texas. Internalizing that transphobia was the natural result of that, along with heaping amounts of shame and guilt. Shame for not being able to inhabit my gender correctly. Guilt for letting down my peers, as well as the adults in my life. I internalized the shame and guilt to such an extent that at times I feel like nothing but a shame factory, unable to process the joy that life can offer.

After I began this process of coming out, since my “gender epiphany,” I’ve slowly begun to find joy and euphoria. A lot of it was buried underneath decades of shame. Yet despite the still-extant mountains of guilt in my psyche, coming out has allowed me the agency and ability to start digging my way out of it. Tiny pinpricks of light have burst into the darkness that was my life, and I owe that to me figuring out that my gender and my sex were at odds. The things that gave me joy were not allowed for me when I was under the impression that I was a man.

I simply wasn’t a man, and no amount of insisting I was one would ever change that interior variance of being.

But could I ever really be a woman?

Now that’s a very different prospect.

20,000 Leagues into the Closet

We live in an era now of unprecedented and violent transphobia, and I picked a hell of a time to figure out that I am trans. Trans people used to mostly be a curiosity, a quirky subset of the queer community. Now, though? As more people learn what trans people are—or THINK they learn what trans people are as filtered through the transphobia lens—the more danger we are in. And it’s hard not to internalize this transphobia all the more.

“Why am I doing this to myself? Why do I think that I would ever be able to call myself a woman? What makes me think I can change myself enough to reflect who I am inside? For people to see me as I really am?” The questions dig deeper and deeper, that voice of shame and guilt grows louder and louder. “Who do you think you are? What makes you so special that you can put on makeup and a dress, take hormones, and grow your hair out—do you think any of that gives you the right to be a woman? You’re just a fake. An impostor. A freak in a dress, who is doing it just for the attention and amusement of yourself.”

“You will NEVER be a woman.”

And there it is. The most potent weapon in the transphobe’s arsenal. The thing they parrot constantly at any kind of gender variant person, specifically transfeminine people like me. You will never be the thing that you are inside. You have a sickness, a delusion, and you are a danger to yourself and others. You are insane, and we shouldn’t humor this kind of behavior.

The thing I have to say to this winding, twisted rhetoric that burrows into my skull is this:

Who are you to say what I am?

Who are you to say that I cannot be the person I am on the inside? It’s not like you were humoring me much when I was pretending to be a man for 35 years. All I got for the bulk of that time was “man up!” I was always more comfortable around women than men, I was never “one of the guys” and everyone kind of knew it already! Hell, I was an Eagle Scout; I got an awarded rank for being the best boy! Yet still, masculinity eluded me. So why try so hard to be something I clearly am not, when femininity is something that comes so much more naturally to me?

It does, too! This year, each new thing I’ve tried that is more feminine—makeup, nail polish, fashion—it all seems to fit like a glove, like I have a natural aptitude for it that was lying beneath the surface all this time. All of the trappings of female-ness that I have attempted are just more... me.

Femininity is not defined by outward appearance or secondary characteristics, however. The truth of it is that being a woman comes naturally to me because I am one. And even when I’m presenting to the world a more masculine face, that does not take one iota away from my womanhood. A woman is still a woman without makeup and a dress. A woman simply is what she is, and that’s so much deeper than even the hormones can affect. That’s a level of identity that cannot be taken away.

Impostor syndrome is an insidious cancer within a trans person, borne of internalized transphobia and a lifetime of shame. It affects all of us in the trans community, because we all have lived as impostors for so long, becoming our authentic selves feels alien to an extent. But it is in our authentic selves that we find our true joy, our true happiness.

To any trans people reading this, I implore you to internalize this message, if nothing else: You are enough. You are not fooling anyone. You are who you are, and nobody gets to determine that but you. And they can hurl all the insults they want at you, they can shut you in a closet so deep you can’t see the light, but they cannot take away your identity. That is your own, your truth. Truth cannot be erased so easily. You are trans enough, if you know yourself to be trans.

For anyone else who has journeyed this far with me through this account, thank you for your patience and willingness to listen. I hope that, if any of this has resonated within you, that you ponder this and learn more about what it means to be transgender, at least so that you can be better informed about the lives of us queer, wonderful, beautiful people. Most of us are an open book, and would love to tell you about our journeys. But most of all, believe us when we show you are true selves. Such is an act of supreme trust and vulnerability. Listen to us, our fears, and our joys.

Because the truth is the same for you as it is for my trans siblings: you are enough. Don’t allow the world to tell you otherwise. You are you, and that is the most important truth in this whole world.

You are enough.

1

There are articles too numerous to count about the injustices done to intersex children, but this article gives you an idea of the situation. Link

2

People much more informed about the biological component of gender have a great deal to say about the subject, and I will let them speak for themselves. Suffice it to say, the biology is far from clear, what you learned about in 6th grade health is not exactly the best science available, and we are always learning more each day about the biological reality of sex and gender. Harvard is a good place to start: Here

3

Impostor syndrome is so prevalent in the transgender community, it even has an entry in the dang Gender Dysphoria Bible! I don’t want to cover the same territory, a more detached analysis of it can be found there. This is simply a personal take on the topic. Link: Here