What can it possibly feel like to be transgender?
It's difficult to imagine what it must feel like to be transgender if you are not. And if you are not transgender then your mind and your body match. One way to try to understand what it's like to be transgendered would be as this example...
Let us for instance imagine that you are a genetically born woman who is attractive and feminine. Now imagine that you wake up one day and find that you are suddenly a man. You can no longer wear your earrings or jewelry, your hair will be cut and you can wear no makeup or any of the colourful and expressive feminine clothes you wore. You find that you now have muscles and are covered with hair on your body. You will be treated as a man by your fellow women and must now try to act as a man in order to integrate with them.
You are now required to do this for the rest of your life.
Every time you get dressed, every time you gaze into the mirror, every time you come in contact with another person; who you know yourself to be and who you appear to be are in complete contrast. Stress will build as you are forced to be who you are not. Welcome to being transgender.
Yes, we are born with a sense of self identity and yes, we are born with sexual characteristic of either a male or a female. But the sense of identity does not always match the equipment we are given. Most who are transgender know they are different from the earliest of ages, some as far back as age 4 or earlier if they can remember so far back.
For most, the issue occurs as a result of hormonal imbalances in the developing fetus and results in a brain which develops outside of the norm of the physical sex. the incongruity never goes away and it can never be "cured" to match the way the brain perceives one's to the body it has been dealt.
It is very very fundamentally important to state that gender and sexual preference are two separate things entirely. The first thoughts by many may be that one who presents as a woman must be interested in sex with men. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Sexual identification is who we wish to be intimate with while gender identification is who we see ourselves as within the inner reflection of the mirror of our mind.
To learn a little more about some of the other scientific research going on surrounding this condition, please see:
I probably didn't mention the stress which is involved with having to hide a whole piece of oneself from the world. Each day becomes a struggle as one plays the facade of who we physically are born as and hides who we are inside from the rest of the world to avoid potential ridicule. It eats at a person by day and in dreams at night. It never goes away and unless steps are taken to materialize who we are inside, it can cause a complete nervous breakdown - I should know - I hit that wall - 40 years of holding it inside....
This is what it is like to be transgender.
Now the question I propose is this.... Just as thought, if you woke up and suddenly found yourself one morning in the body of the opposite sex and would have to live and socialize in that body as that gender, what would you do? For a person born transgender, they generally have felt like this from a very early age. It is something they deal with often for the rest of their life....
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Just some of the questions asked when this topic comes up:
Morally wrong? No, obviously not! Just as in any other sentence of the pattern "Is it bad to be a _____ who wears makeup?" Whether you put man, woman, stockbroker, housecleaner, opera singer, welder, or catsitter in that gap, it's still not wrong.
Inappropriate in an office situation? Possibly, depending on your workplace and the exact nature of the makeup you like to wear.
Unsafe, because bigots will object violently in public? Possibly. This is also true for cis men who like makeup. And, for that matter, some cis women, because there are bigots who assume anyone with certain kinds of makeup on is a prostitute and therefore subhuman trash to be abused.
Likely to make it harder for you to pass? Depends on your underlying facial structure and a million other things. For this one, start with asking yourself if passing (being reflexively taken for a cisgender man) is particularly important to you. If people, instead of saying "sir" and "he" as a matter of course, eye you sidelong and look confused, or say ".... ma'am?", does that bother you? If so, how much? More or less than the lift and happiness you get from the eyeliner? Just something to consider in your pros/cons analysis.
Does it mean you're not "really" a man? Binary gender-policing is a big snarling bitch. There are even trans women who react angrily towards other trans women who feel most comfortable wearing, say, jeans with a girl-cut t-shirt and a hoodie with no makeup and ballet flats. I have heard "If you weren't going to make an effort, why did you even want to be a woman?" said with a straight face from one trans woman to another. It made me want to punch her, though I know it comes from a place of pain, and a lifetime of habits learned from transitioning back when doctors wouldn't let you transition unless you were girly enough and said all the right things.
Likely to cause pushback from your nearest and dearest about your transition? Possibly. I know there are members of my family that have a real problem with even the concept that "I am a man now" doesn't mean I'm going to give up on wearing sparkly purple when I feel like it, or stop knitting, or think that now I'll magically develop a deep and abiding interest in football, cars, spitting on the floor, and acting like a pig to women. I'm the same person now than I was then, only with fewer self-destructive coping strategies.
But thankfully we live in a more enlightened time, and as long as you keep an eye on your own personal levels of safety and comfort, and whether the makeup is doing more to make you feel good than it is causing people to misgender you and make you feel bad, then by all means -- have fun. Just don't get fired over it, if you can help it.
