On the first Saturday of 2020, I attended Hamburger Mary’s monthly transgender-themed nightclub in Long Beach, California, run by the fabulous Jamie Jamieson. For me, this queer venue has been a safe haven for decades. It is a valuable incubator for queer people at all stages of their journeys to experiment and find their authenticity.

Upon entry, men and women were handed a ticket — either blue or pink, respectively. At midnight, Jamie was scheduled to randomly draw one ticket of each color, and the two winners would both walk home with $50. It was also standard protocol for her to take pictures with the lucky patrons, and the photos would often wind up on Jamie’s website, “T-Girl Nights in Los Angeles”.

As I looked around for my friend, a gentleman approached me. He wasted no time progressing from “You're the sexiest girl here”, to touching my body. I urged him to slow down and share a bit about himself, emphasizing how important emotional connection was in conjunction with physical heat. He kept saying things like “I want to know what you do for work”, “I want to know what foods you like so I can cook for you”, “I want to make you my girlfriend”, and “I want to go on road trips with you." For all his forwardness, he did seem to make a real effort to connect, and by the time the music stopped and the dance floor lit up for Jamie’s midnight raffle drawing, I found my defenses dissolved, his arms around my waist and our lips entwined.

The winning ticket for the girls’ raffle was called first. Sadly, it wasn’t mine, so I tossed my ticket aside. Next up were blue tickets. Jamie called out numbers, and when the last digit was read, the man whose arms were around me bulged his eyes. He swung the ticket in my direction. He had won.

“Congrats!” I said enthusiastically. “Go up there and get your fifty dollars!”

But he hesitated, did an Elvis shuffle, made like he was going, and then froze. It was then I knew he didn’t want to be outed as someone who dated women born with penises.

In my needier days, I would have overlooked his act of self-revelation. He was handsome, a good kisser, smelled good, and talked a smooth game. But I knew I could no longer consider him a potential partner because he wouldn't confront the shame he felt surrounding his romantic attraction towards a transgender woman. And as the poet Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

* * * *

Queer people are all too familiar with hiding identities. We understand the costs and tradeoffs of claiming ourselves in ways that defy social norms. But one of the hardest things about being queer is the conflict between claim and substantiation. The prevailing attitude currently seems to be that whatever people claim as their authentic identity must be respected. Yet many often hesitate to substantiate their claims. Instead, they choose to express their inner self only intermittently, presumably because they don’t like the costs associated with being visibly queer.

The intricacies surrounding transgender identities are especially instructive. Most people are now well aware that gender is a social construct, which is layered onto sex much like race is layered onto class. In both cases, complexities emerge when we try to associate someone’s claimed identity to their history or biology: our biology may shape our physical body, but our history shapes how we come to understand ourselves.

For example, are transgender women who are born male but have a feminine heart and later claim womanhood in their adult years less authentic because they had a childhood and adolescence spent socialized as a boy prior to finding their true identity? Is there any good reason for pushback against claims of a person’s gender identity without valid substantiation of those claims?

Gender is a social construct that has been passed down and modified through millennia of tribal and familial history. What made one an attractive woman in 1720 is not exactly the same in 2020. But since sex is not the same as gender (we can tell which giraffe is biologically male or female, but not which giraffe cares about symbolic representations of gender because they don’t wear clothing or accessories, use language, or make other such recognizable choices), it becomes clear that gendered symbols help construct the language we use to describe where we feel our hearts and spirits fall within the spectrum of human identities — a spectrum that invokes different methods to communicate who we are on the inside using the choices we enact on the outside.

Claiming a distinction between gender and reproductive sex evokes a common knee-jerk reaction for many. The instant transgender people claim to be an identity seen as contrary to what society associates with their history and biology, it is immediately assumed that one of those claims must be a lie. For people who only know about the sex of a trans person, this assigned “truth” holds more weight than their life choices. This attitude is often reflected in the beliefs of some radical feminists, for example, who erroneously claim that only a woman born female can be an authentic woman.

True, there are crossdressers who only dress up a couple of times a year, insisting it is just a weekend hobby that has nothing to do with their gender identity, but on those occasions demand for the entire evening to be recognized as a woman and addressed with feminine pronouns. Personally, I find such queer identity claims (when there is little effort made to substantiate them) difficult to honor. When a person who was born male, who lives in the world as a man, insists they are a woman and that they know what it’s like to live as one because they’re in town as a crossdresser for the weekend, I find it far-fetched. Even so, I do see and respect their trans heart and the possibility of their eventual transition. But I find their assertions of temporary womanhood dubious because, at that particular junction, they are still not making the full-time choices of a woman and don’t understand the sacrifices that come with such an identity.

Then there are those individuals who have just recently transitioned and assert their newfound identities by proclaiming they are “finally themselves”. This, too, disturbs me because the statement implies that who they were prior to their transition is not a part of their identity. Regardless of one’s choices to embrace a new presentation, no transgender person can ever claim their past is not a part of the actual life they lived. Stepping away from our old identity does not mean it never existed. As author Madeline L’Engle said, “We are always all the ages we ever were”, to which fellow writer Kate Bornstein immediately added, “And all the genders!” We can never erase our history or cut out our past, even if we feel the need to conceal it in an effort to be perceived as a person who went through the normative gendering experiences of our current presentation.

Then there are some nonbinary people who hide behind normativity or fluctuate between gender expressions and identities, yet berate those who fail to use “they/them” pronouns with political policing. What troubles me about such practices is the notion of claiming through rejection. Can we really opt out of gender and not identify, or do we, at some point, have to be clear about who we are and what we will commit to? Is identity, or more specifically, transgender identity, just based on rejection, or does it involve some demand to know who we are rather than just who we are not? Is a person who is born male and presents as a man truly a woman just because they claim to be? Or do they have to make choices that are socially considered womanly? Every choice in this finite world has a cost, even the choice to try and duck the cost itself.

To me, our biology is less of a deterministic indicator of our identity than who we are on the inside. When someone talks to my biology rather than my heart — by choosing to see me, for example, as a guy in a dress rather than a transgender woman — I know it reveals more about their limitations than it does about me. But that concept doesn’t excuse us from having to claim something. It doesn’t allow us to identify with all the categories of gender while sacrificing nothing. We can’t, as a queer community, hold others to proper pronoun usage and political correctness while simultaneously shifting our fleeting identities to our advantage based on our circumstances.

Although all claims of identity require a process of emergence — from a teenager claiming they are no longer part of their family but now an individual, to people claiming their queerness — no emergent process is ever absolute. We can have transcendent identities yet still understand that we are always rooted in the various truths of our past and immutable traits.

I will always be a transgender woman who has a male body, who went through male puberty, with certain male-boned features that dominate my physical appearance. I have no delusions that I will ever be female biologically, because I am not. I also understand that I don’t always pass 100% of the time, and since I was socialized with boys at a young age, I know the monumental work it took to recondition and shift the way I take power in the world, where I learned to make the choices of a woman rather than those of a man. I know from experience that trying to flirt with men while passing as a born female is not only dangerous at times but inauthentic; that trying to pass all the time limits my ability to share all of my history, and that my feminine heart has more to do with my gender than how I choose to sculpt or reshape my body.

* * * *

On that first Saturday of 2020, as my night at Hamburger Mary’s began winding down, even though I knew the gentleman I connected with earlier that night was no longer interested in me, I stuck around to meet up with my friend. This friend had demonstrated an incredible act of courage when she came out and transitioned at our old place of work. Despite not having the typical Hollywood-esque body one would see on the cover of Vogue, she substantiated her claim every day at work despite the awkwardness and struggles of being a newly-out transgender woman. Since getting laid off, she had been struggling financially, to the point where she confided in me that she had considered venturing into selling sex on the streets.

“Go up there and get the fifty dollars”, I said to the gentleman next to me.

He insisted he didn’t care about the money.

“Well, then go up there and get it for the sake of my friend”, I whispered to him. Still, he remained frozen. And that is why I did not buy into his promises of pampering me as his girlfriend. Irrespective of his claims, his true identity had shown itself. He was not ready to substantiate his statements or overcome his shame surrounding his romantic attraction to a transgender woman. Someday, I hope he does. I hope he finds the courage to embrace himself and live an authentically queer life.

Published May 1, 2020
Updated Dec 30, 2022