• Any pronouns

See you on Bluesky or Discord.


I'm going to ramble about my experience with gender for a bit.

I'll avoid getting too dark. 5 mins reading.


So...

I'm a trans woman. It's something I questioned since I was 14, and something I've known with a fair amount of certainty since I was 18, but it's only now at 35 that I'm making steps to transition. It's not something I've talked about publicly before, but I don't mind sharing it on Cohost, small and wholesome community that it is.

I'll probably tweet about it when I'm good and ready, assuming Twitter doesn't die between now and then.

First, how did I survive being closeted for half my life? That's easy. Repression. I told myself that transitioning would let everyone down, cause a lifetime of ostracization and confrontation, and will only lead to unhappiness. The fact that my repression was already causing a deep sense of unhappiness went unaddressed.

(It's no coincidence that the protagonists of Aviary Attorney and Small Saga are both bitter, repressed, very masculine creatures who despise themselves. At least Small Saga's writing has a bit more self-awareness about it.)

I used to tell myself that it was "too late". I beat myself up for not transitioning at 18 — "damn, I could be passing by now!" — but I'm over that. I can't blame past-me for acting on the thoughts and feelings I had at the time. And when I add up all the parts of my childhood, it's kind of a miracle that I worked it out at all.

  • My father is the Iranian son of a Mullah.
  • My mother reads the Daily Mail and Robert Galbraith.
  • My brother is a Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate fan.
  • My step-father-like-figure was a violent homophobe. (Don't worry. He's in jail now.)
  • I went to an all-boys Catholic school until I was 18.
  • It was during "section 28", which was the government-imposed school ban on the mentioning of anything queer.
  • Without any queer role models or friends, my teenaged understanding of LGBT+ people came entirely from porn sites accessed through AOL on the family computer.

Framed like this, it makes my childhood sound horrid, but that's not accurate. It was just blandly conservative. I didn't have queerness and femininity beaten out of me, so much that I was in an environment where queerness and femininity didn't even exist. 16 year-old me barely knew what a woman was, let alone a trans woman.

Despite their rocky political views and some questionable upbringing choices, my immediate family genuinely care about my wellbeing. When I come out to them, I expect for there to be some initial tears, but for them to be understanding and supportive once the dust settles. Although my brother's conversation will be... interesting...

In a way, my family's genuine love is a double-edged sword. If I hated my parents, if I thought they were irredeemable bigots, then it would have been easy to cut them off and transition freely whenever I wanted. Instead, not wanting to let them down, I played into a role of a "normal" cis man, and fought off transitioning as long as possible.

Not that I'm complaining about having two loving parents. I just find it ironic.

There wasn't any one event that stopped this pattern of repression and kicked-off my decision to transition. It was more of a slow-burn of going to talk therapy for two years, encountering and befriending more LGBT+ people, and meeting a supportive and open-minded partner.

Weirdly, the current wave of anti-trans hysteria didn't really factor into my decision making. Like, what are transphobes going to do? Make my life miserable? Good luck, buddy, I'm an expert on that subject. Their bigotry cemented my decision if anything, because it's satisfying to defy ignorant authoritarians.

Anyway. Hopefully I'll start HRT later this year.

Thanks for reading. Happy Pride, y'all!

~ Sabrina Noghani

Edit: I've tried out different names since this post, so apologies if the sign-off no longer matches my name.


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