With the news about Noem breaking this week, I’ve seen a lot of different takes, some better than others. But one that bothered me almost immediately was when trans girls were quick to draw a distinction between who they are as trans women and cross-dressers. Noem was something else, not like them.

And now news breaks that they wish they could transition. In other words, they probably are a trans woman. I’m not going to assign them a gender but that’s the way it looks from here.

I’m not going to talk any more about Noem. Their story is theirs to tell if and when they’re ready. Nor am I going to why some in our community feel the need to separate themselves. I think the later is obvious. But I do want to talk a bit about what repression will do to a person and the kinds of things we do to cope.

When society has put you in a gender box that doesn’t fit, it fucks you up in ways you cannot understand. This goes double for anyone who’s spent time deep in conservative Christian circles and believed the rhetoric. When you’re in that world, they control truth. To be trans is to have an experience that doesn’t match the common gender narrative. But in that world, the cis/heteronormative narrative is TRUTH. To question it is tantamount to questioning the color of the sky. The sky is blue. You are a man. The infallibility of those two statements is the same. The only conclusion in that environment, then, is that your experience is wrong.

What’s wrong with it? There are dozens of possibilities and, if you’re anything like me, you cycle through them. Maybe it’s a sex thing? You’re just kinky. Maybe it’s some weird supercharged lust? You don’t just want to have sex with women, you want to take over a woman’s life. What kind of fucked up supermisogyny is that? Maybe God has just cursed you? Maybe this is your “thorn in the flesh” and you just have to accept this struggle? Or maybe you’re just sick in the head?

The one explanation you CANNOT accept in that environment is that you actually are a woman or that transition would make you free add even happy. You might want it. You might want it more than anything in this world. But that’s not something you can do. Your manness is an axiom of your existence.

And just to put a finer point on it… I don’t just mean that it’s not safe to transition in that environment or that embracing your femininity would result in massive social backlash and possibly worse suffering than the dysphoria. That’s true, of course, and that is how it’s enforced. But what a lot of external observers don’t realize is that, when you’ve bought the rhetoric, you don’t think about this in terms of choices you cold make and their consequences. It’s baked into your nervous system. You ARE who they say you are and they’re RIGHT to mock you if you ever try to change that.

Do you see the difference?

So what do you do when your experience and the cisgender narrative are at odds? You can’t deny your experience. But you also can’t question the narrative. The cognitive dissonance will kill you. Literally.

What you do is you find other outlets. You find ways to explore your femininity and excuses to cover for it. “LMAO, wouldn’t it be funny if we dressed up as girls and played video games? We could pretend to be gamer girls. Wouldn’t that be a riot?” Voila! Femboys. Once they’re good at their makeup and picking outfits, maybe they start doing sex work. It’s a whole thing. But again, it’s a gag. “LMAO, you thought you were into a chick. You’re really into a dude. You’re gay!” And as long as they’re doing it for a gag and mocking women, not actually embarrassing them, they’re still guys, right? Cognitive dissonance solved!

Or maybe you raid your wife’s closet and live vicariously through her. Maybe you love taking her shopping, knowing you’re shopping for yourself as well. Or maybe you’re not confident enough to actually wear the clothes and, instead, you just treat her as a full-sized Barbie doll that you never had as a kid. You can’t be a woman but you can be married to one and help pick her clothes and have a ringside seat to her life as a woman.

And even if you do have a trunk of clothes for yourself, you can write it off as a sex thing. You just really like to get all dressed up and go hang out with the guys. You’d never admit to anyone why you’re friends with that particular group of “men” or what happens when you go out. The CIA can’t keep secrets better than you and the “guys”. And as long as no one admits that there’s anything more to it than dressing up, it’s just a weird thing you and some of your friends are into that no one needs to know anything about.

But the key to both of these groups is to provide an outlet for their repressed femininity while keeping up the denial. Actually admitting their feelings and growing is NOT a goal. Or at least it often isn’t.

Does this mean that those communities are all just deeply closeted trans girls? No. I’m not going to presume anyone’s gender. But if you think it’s all cis guys who are just playing dress-up and they’re totally different from you or I, I’m afraid that’s not a valid assumption.

Now, before anyone gets all up in my business… Just because there are lots of trans people in those groups, that doesn’t mean that they’re healthy. Those are two totally different things. The femboy crowd is notorious for being full of channers, edgelords, and other alt-right types. Cross-dressing communities don’t necessarily have a better reputation. I can’t speak for all of them, of course, and I won’t try, but just because a group has a bunch of trans people in it doesn’t mean it’s trans-friendly. Again, many of these groups are built on denial and when denial is a core tenant is the group, phobia of the underlying reality is common.

This doesn’t mean denial has to be inherently toxic. r/Egg_IRL is playful in its denial. Everyone knows the sub is trans-adjacent and people regularly “graduate” and post a meme about how they’ve finally finally accepted that they’re trans. Then it’s off to r/traaaa. Of course, there are fully aware trans people who hang around there, too. It’s a good vibe. And everyone knows the denial is a bit tongue in cheek. But it provides a relatively safe space for trans eggs to explore their feelings without being pressured to act on them just yet.

But when talking about anyone who’s deep in the closet, especially when they’re closeted from themselves… Yeah, things can get toxic.

Now don’t get me wrong, I get as frustrated as any other girl with the way that trans girls, cross-dressers, and drag queens get conflated. Even if a bunch of cross-dressers are closeted trans women, trans women aren’t guys playing dress-up. We’re women. Full stop. Just because we both buy gaffs and have shop at the same shoe stores, doesn’t mean that we’re the same. There is a difference.

But the difference isn’t necessarily a difference of who we are at a core level. It may not be a difference in our stories. For many, it’s a difference in whether or not we’re living authentically or in denial. For many, especially those without a healthy and accepting support structure, admitting they like to dress up may be a whole lot easier and safer than admitting they’re trans. Safer physically than coming out or safer psychologically than admitting it to yourself.

For myself, and for many other late-blooming trans people, finding emotional safety and independence was a prerequisite to coming out, even to yourself. Read that again. PREREQUISITE to coming out to YOURSELF.

For myself, this meant that I had to get out of my parents house, out of close-knit conservative Christian groups, and be isolated from that world by a global pandemic before I could go from being a guy who laid awake fantasizing about a totally different life to admitting there might be something different going on. I also spent nearly 2 years doing what I didn’t realize was trauma work before I even had access to the memories that I needed to understand who I was. Three decades of my dad’s misogyny stood between me and that understanding. I first had to dismantle a lot of that.

But before I could even do that, I had to come to terms with the fact that my childhood was abusive and that my parents weren’t actually acting in my best interests. That required me to come to terms with my ADHD and autism first because those were something I actually believed in, unlike being trans. Even though my autism has nothing to do with me being trans (that’s a whole other discussion), it was a necessary entry point. I need to see something about myself, something that wasn’t my fault but that I got punished for. I needed to admit that I was traumatized before I could really do the trauma work. I wasn’t ready to admit that I might have gender stuff going on. I needed to do a whole lot of trauma work first and understand that the transphobia, including my own, wasn’t coming from a good place.

It also helped that I had a job where I had access real, live, out and proud trans people. I had to see that my discomfort around them, and with myself, wasn’t justified.

There were a lot of steps along my journey but the point is that it’s a journey. It’s not as simple as “I want to be a woman, therefore I am.” I mean, it is that simple, but that doesn’t mean the realization comes quickly.

And part of the reason why these questionable spaces exist is because people have something going on but they’re not ready to face it yet. Will those spaces help them? Maybe not. But the group therapy thing I went to early on run by a gender therapist didn’t exactly help me, either. We all have a story and it’s often long and complicated and contains chapters we’d rather forget. I’ve had the few trans friends I made along the way (sometimes without knowing it) since reassure me that I was never a proper ass but I still have chapters I’d rewrite if I could.

Does this mean we should rush to embrace shitty people the moment the news leaks that they might be trans? No. Shitty people are still shitty. Brianna Wu and Katlyn Jenner are both toxic as hell and there’s a damn good reason why Brianna is one of the most blocked people on BlueSky. They’re both white women who lean hard into whatever privilege they have left and try to be the one trans person toxic conservatives will accept. Fuck ‘em!

It also doesn’t mean we should assume someone is trans just because they dress up. We of all people should understand that presentation does not equal gender. Maybe they really are comfortable in their masculinity and just like to have fun with it? Maybe it turns them on? It doesn’t matter. Neither you nor I know who someone is on the inside just because they like to dress up.

Nor should we assume that a space with a lot of closeted trans people is safe. Trans people can be transphobic as hell, especially when they’re trying to hold down their own feelings. Some girls are total bitches.

But we should also not look at those groups and be too quick to say, “They’re nothing like me.” Many of them are just like me. Given where I came from, I could have easily ended up there, had my path taken a few different turns.

Instead, we need to work on our own shit and build community so that, when they’re ready, new girls have a safe space to land.