traaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnns

Sorta kinda. I live in a country that still has medical gatekeeping around gender affirming care, so to get approved for bottom surgery i had to - among a bunch of other utterly and completely useless and degrading shit - come up with a trans CV. Like, an actual CV were you explain your career of being very gender. "Having always known" isn't a requirement, and hasn't necessarily been one in the past, but a history of repressing your transness was definitely something that was held against people in the past. So in my case, just to make sure and to fill space with stuff these eggheads actually understand, i threw a bunch of stuff about how i acted GNC from age 5 at the doctors, listing off instances of me putting on makeup or wearing women's clothes or being bullied for acting too girly and so on. I had plenty of that. It was easy to fill a couple pages with that crap. It had nothing to do with what being trans means to me, but it was something that helped some dork who gets to decide if they want to completely crush the hopes and dreams of trans people greenlight me getting a vag.

The thing is, i made none of that stuff in the CV up. That all happened. It's largely irrelevant to who i am now, it does not define me, but i'm absolutely in team "i never was a man." I just didn't know that for most of my life. And that's a fairly common thing among trans people, to have a long history of phases where you're being confused, or completely repressing, or being in denial, interspersed with moments where things just come bubbling up. That's highly common. There is a kind of consistency there, almost nobody i've known for a long time was particularly surprised when i came out. It made sense. I just wasn't ever one of these kids that walk up to their mom at age 5 and tell them that there must be a mistake because they have a peepee, but they're actually a girl. There definitely are people who act like that from a very young age, tho, we see that with trans kids nowadays. It's rare, it has no bearing on if somebody is actually trans (basically everybody who says so is) and that kind of early childhood dead certainty is indeed falsely made out to be the norm, but it actually happens.

I get that "born this way", both for being gay and for being trans, is something that a lot of postmodernists see as constructed. To quote Foucault, "the Sodomite had been a temporary aberration. The homosexual was now a species." Queerness as something you are and not as something you do is a rather recent concept in Western societies. It's just that, as usual, that simply means Western societies have been full of shit for ages. From my own lived experience and that of basically every queer person i know personally, the "born this way" hypothesis mostly works, albeit not in the way it is typically portrayed as. Queer identities are more messy, blurred and fluid than something that comfortably fits in a one-paragraph explanation, but that doesn't mean people aren't on to something when talking about sexual orientation and gender identity.

I wear various jewelry or other apparel that says 'they/them' but otherwise am pretty AFAB presenting and no one says shit in my backwards cow town, not even my mechanic.

no no, you're thinking of a "gander," commonly used in formal wear to hold socks up