Are You Transgender? Here is The Key Question to Ask Yourself!
Questioning your gender identity and especially if you are transgender, is overwhelming and if you are curious to see where you may land, you can take my “Am I transgender quiz” a free and confidential online quiz to find out.
You mind may be shifting between feeling certain you are trans to deep uncertainty about who you are!
All of these feelings are very common to go through. And sometimes, figuring out just where you land on the gender spectrum feels like an impossible task.
As a gender therapist, people ask me all the time if they are transgender. While it is impossible to know without considering your overall history and having a chance to sit down with you, there is a KEY question that I found helpful.
This KEY question can be especially helpful to you if you have history of experiencing gender dysphoria.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi everyone. I'm Dr. Z and you're watching Dr. Z PhD, the place to be for expert info on gender. Many of you ask me, how do you know if you're transgender? Even those of you who have feelings of really knowing your trans still ask this question. So in this episode, I'll talk about various ways you can affirm your gender identity and a secret key question you can ask yourself that can clarify your gender.
And if you're really eager just to hear the secret, key question, feel free to fast forward towards the end of the video. And remember, if you want more videos like this this from me every Friday, make sure you subscribe to my channel. Now let's discuss transgender and how do you know if you're trans? Before we begin, let me say that today the term transgender is used differently by different people.
When I say transgender, at least just in this video alone, what I mean is any person who experience or experiencing gender disorder in relation to their gender assigned to birth. So when I trans I don't only mean individuals who wish to go from one binary to another, for example, to transition from male to female, or vice versa, from female to male.
I'm also referring to non-binary as well as other gender identities in the middle of a spectrum. Keep in mind that I'm talking about gender identity, which is your sense of who you are in relation to your gender, not your gender expression. So let's talk trans identity and how do you know if you're trans . For starters
I want you to take a note that we're talking about subjective, sense of self, meaning we're discussing an interpersonal felt sense of how you see yourself and how you feel about yourself in relationship to your gender. The subjective sense of reality, the sense of how you feel about yourself is equated to your own truths and subjectivity is very important here because only you and only you can tell me who you are.
Now, of course, I can ask you all the right questions to help you explore your gender as a gender specialist, but in the end, only, you know, you may not have the words to describe it, but you have a feeling. The reason why I emphasize subjectivity is because I want you to know that deep down a part of you already knows what your gender is.
And pretty much every trans person I talk to and I have talked to thousands of trans people, tell me that they may, they have always known or felt ever since they were little. In fact, all of you who participated on my Facebook post about how and when did you know, by the way, thank you so much. I love hearing what you have to say.
Pretty much all you said, you always had this deep feeling of knowing. Even if you didn't have the right words to describe, you knew. Just the fact that you're watching this video or wondering at all whether you may be trans is a big indicator that some part of you is not fully comfortable with your birth gender.
So it's theoretically speaking, all of you knew or felt as early as age four that you didn't feel comfortable with your birth gender. Now, if you're wondering why age four or not two or three, well that just simply because by age four is when the kids become really fully aware of their gender identity and can verbalize it, and majority of you said that that's around the age when you felt something was going on.
Some of you say that you knew something was off early on, but didn't really fully become aware or cognizant about it until puberty hit. While other states they knew but didn't really have the right vocabulary to describe their experience until much older, maybe in their twenties, forties, or even fifties.
But one way or another everyone seemed to have this deeper knowing or a deep feeling of knowing maybe you couldn't name it or describe it, but you felt there was something different about you and your gender. So the very first step for you to do is to recognize you have this feelings to recognize that you're not comfortable with your birth gender.
So what else you can do to clarify your gender idenity once you recognize you have those feelings. Professionally, what I have seen work best to begin is to, is to explore your own relationship to your gender. This way you can safely figure out for yourself how much of your confusion has to do with gender dysphoria and therefore your gender identity, or how much of it has to do with simply with gender expression or even sexuality because believe it or not sexuality is strongly tied to our relationship to gender and can add additional confusion to the mix.
So the first step is to begin looking at your current gender and to ask yourself some questions. For example, how do you feel about being a man or being a woman? What about being seen and treated as a man or a woman? Do you enjoy the gender role of male or female? How do you feel when someone uses male or female pronouns?
What about your body? Do you like it? And be careful here not to confuse body dysmorphia which gender dysphoria. To clarify, mostly everyone feels some form of body dysmorphia. Just think of times when you didn't feel good about how you looked. But there is a big difference. So let me explain. There's a difference of not being happy about how your body looks, but still being comfortable with your gender versus not liking how your body is because of the gender it denotes. So let me give you a bigger example. A woman might not like how her hips look, but still be very comfortable with being a woman versus a woman who hates her hips because it communicates to the world, she's a woman and she feels strong dysphioria about her gender. So asking questions on how you feel about your body in relation to your gender is crucial.
Ask yourself, how do you feel about your chest or breasts? What about your genitals? Are you comfortable with your genitals? As you question your relationship to your gender? Many things you can come up to the surface that you never thought of before, that will help you further explore. It's also very important not to confuse gender dysphoria with a need to fully transition.
What I mean is that some people assume gender or transgender means male to female or female to male, and that means full transition. But in reality, many identities, such as non-binary falls in the middle of the gender spectrum. And if you're not sure and you want to go from one binary into another, figuring out what your gender identity is is very important because it can save you from some parts of medical and surgical transition that is irreversible.
I have worked with many people who just wanted partial surgical transition because they identified non-binary mastectomy or removal of breast, for example, and thats totally legit. The key is to figuring out what your identity is, but sometimes it's not as easy as it sounds. I would even venture to say that knowing you're trans male or trans female is easier than knowing you don't identify with your birth gender and have no clue where you land on gender spectrum because at least you know that another gender binary is your goal.
But if you don't even know where you land on gender spectrum, it can be very difficult to know what part of transition to undertake. As you can see, asking yourself questions about your relationship to gender is very important. Let me share with you now a key question. Remember I mentioned key question in the beginning of the video that you can ask yourself.
Now I have people who really confused about gender ask this key question. So here's the key question and let's assume the person is wondering is there trans female? So key question is. Do you want to feel like a woman or do you want to be a woman? Notice emphasis on feel versus be. Let me repeat it with trans male identity in question.
Do you want to feel like a man or do you want to be a man? I encourage you to have someone ask you this question and emphasize the words feel, and be. So why is it so important to make distinction, betwen feel and be? Think about this for a moment. Our feelings, how we feel are always in motion and rarely constant, therefor we may feel happiness
one second, and sadness another. In this way, feelings are transient. There might be times when you feel like gender other than the one assigned at birth, but do you feel this way all the time? If the answer is no, it could be that you need to explore your gender expression and how you feel about yourself.
Most importantly, explore why you feel certain way about your gender and at what times. Now, that's a feeling. Now let's talk about being. Being on the other hand is more about a constant state of presence, right? To be a woman or to be a man is more than just about feeling that way. Being goes deeper into our sense of who we are and how we see oursevles.
It strikes at a core of our identity. Here's the same question, regarding my career. For example, I want to feel like a psychologist versus I want to be a a psycholgoist? Do you see how being is driven from an inner sense of who I am? So if you answer this, if you answer is be like a man or a woman, or non-binary or any other gender identity, the chances are you are trans.
This is analogeous to a miracle question trans people tend to ask themselves, If I could wake up tomorrow and be any gender, I'd be a man, or I'd be a woman. If you find yourself feeling and being a desired gender both feel and be, then chances are, again, you're probably trans. So asking yourself if you want to feel or be certain gender helps you clarify your gender identity.
But the bottom line and the most important thing for you is to trust your feelings and your inner knowing. Now, personally, I'd love to hear you comments on how helpful this has been. How has it been for you, and how do you know for sure that you are trans? And please don't forget to like this video.
And also if you're new to the channel consider subscribing and I'll see you all next Friday. Bye.
