I sighed. This was not a conversation I was ready for just yet, but here it was, and I couldn’t escape it or take some time to prepare for it. I had to deal with this now and I had no other option. I started to explain, trying to be gentle but maybe coming across more impatient, that it was actually the other way around. I had tried very hard all my life to be a girl because I knew that me being a boy would devastate my parents. I had heard the kind of things they said about trans people. I had heard the words they use to describe us. I knew “transgender” was the most disappointing thing I could possibly be.

“But there were no signs” he bemoaned. “Yes, I worked very hard at hiding this from you. I did not want you to disown me.” While it is true that I hadn’t known I was trans until I was 20, it is also true that I had worked very hard to hide how much I hated myself. How much I hated life. How much I wanted to be an entirely different person. I had struggled with my identity something fierce since the age of 11 and had hidden the whole struggle from them because being anything other than the perfect daughter was not an option if I wanted my parents’ approval.

This is just my experience. Trans people around the world have experienced this phenomenon where cis people will frantically look around for something to blame, anything, as if our gender is a viral illness that can be fixed if the virus is eradicated. I made a post about this on an anonymous online forum once, and the comments were full of other trans people chiming in with their experiences where the cis people in their life tried to find something to blame for them being trans.

A trans man shared that he had been seeing this therapist for years when one day, he offhandedly mentioned how his mom had wanted a son but got a “daughter” instead. The therapist got visibly excited and told him how this must be the reason he’s trans and he needed to unpack that trauma before going through any medical transition. If she had listened for one more sentence, she would have heard him say that his mother was happy to have a daughter regardless. Besides, she did not need to tell him that. That was a thought that had occurred to him independently. He had spent years unpacking that trauma and now that he was done with it, he had realized that he was still trans. Yet the therapist thought this was going to be some huge revelation to him. He said, “cis people don’t understand that if there is something about our life that they think made us trans, we were the first person to think of that possibility and deal with everything related to that because we are terrified of making the wrong decision. If there was any way I could be cis, believe me, I would be”

There were many trans men in the comments who said a lot of cis people in their life blamed their sexual trauma for them being trans, and no matter how many times these men said that they had had gender dysphoria since long before they experienced sexual trauma, nobody would listen. They just wanted something to blame.

This is a problem. I am who I am, even in the absence of all external factors. The disconnect between my brain and my body would still exist even if I was all alone on an island and completely free of societal expectations. There is nothing to “blame” for my identity, because my identity is not an illness. Most trans people have done extensive work on healing past traumas, with or without professional help. Most of us came to the conclusion that we are trans after considering all the other possibilities. Most of us have a deep desire to be cis. If we could be cis we would. None of us are trans by choice. If there was a way we could deal with past traumas and become cis, we would. We are not choosing to escape misogyny. We are not choosing to look different because we got assaulted in our female form. This is who we are and who we are does not have a cause that needs to be eradicated.

Some people like to point to the statistics of how trans people are disproportionately people who went through childhood abuse. That abuse is not what makes us trans, in fact it is the opposite. Being trans means being different. Being different means being ostracized. Being ostracized means being more vulnerable to abuse. People who are ostracized are likely to have low self-esteem, they are likely to look for approval from authority figures in their life, they are more willing to accept mistreatment and abuse just to gain some small scraps of approval. This mindset makes us prime targets for abusers. When we already have been ostracized by our peers, it’s easy for an abuser to swoop in and say “I love you. Nobody else loves you. Nobody else will ever love you. If you want my love you need to keep letting me treat you this way.” The people who have always felt unloved and ostracized are more likely to believe those lies and to quietly accept any treatment, including abuse. So, in a roundabout way, being trans makes us more vulnerable to abuse. Being abused does not make us develop gender dysphoria.

It is not a bad thing to be trans. This is not a sickness that needs to be cured. This is not something that will resolve if our trauma is healed. This is innate. This is part of us. We exist as ourselves because we are trans. If we were not trans, we would just be a different person. My gender is not something that happened to me: it is who I am. My gender is not a tragic story: it is just another facet of my life.