“Maybe you should never transition”: On the four cisnormative corridors of denial trans people face when readiness to transition is voiced.

|||| Patience Newbury

The great revelation of 2011: not every child is cisgender, and not every child has a cissexual body.

Stop the presses. Or something.

It should be qualified somewhat: this was the biggest revelation of 2011 to a cisnormative audience and to cis people individually. For trans people who have (with gruelling patience) watched all of this cis fascination over trans children suddenly entering the cisnormative consciousness, one superlative of all superlatives emerged: this was the biggest non-story of our trans lives.

As trans people, we’ve been shrewdly aware of this knowledge for generations. For many, that knowledge is pretty clear throughout our entire conscious lives. For others, it lingers, nudges, and prods in the background until something — a particular event or an epiphany — forces us to confront and affirm it.