Your Identity Is Non-negotiable

I came out as a transgender woman in August, 2022 — six weeks after I had begun gender-affirming hormone therapy. It took several days to complete the process. I called my closest friends and family to explain personally and to answer basic questions. Afterward, I sent an email to a distribution list of almost 50 people with My Official Coming Out to the World and details on the process.

Many of my friends and family rejoiced at my “new-found” femininity. Some people — including all three of my sisters — responded with a variant of “Well, yeah…” Some people seemed unfazed by the information, and some people were unsure why I bothered them with trivialities.

As I wrote previously, my name changed legally to Amethysta Selina Herrick in November, 2022. It has been final for more than two months at the time of writing. Yet some people in my close circle of friends and family will not use my name or pronouns.

In some cases, this snub has been performed subtly, using turns of phrase carefully worded to prevent having to use names or pronouns. In some cases, it has been less subtle, such as emails or notes that avoid greetings altogether or use what appear to be terms of endearment as a greeting.

But make no mistake — there is nothing endearing about being rejected.

The right to ignore identity

I am fortunate that very few in my close circle of family and friends have chosen not to use my new name and pronouns. In the Western world, there are many who believe they have the right to ignore other people’s identities. These people ignore our chosen names and pronouns; they disapprove of the way in which we choose to present ourselves; they may even lobby the government to regulate our identities when social pressure fails.

I sympathize with the people whose worlds changed when I came out as transgender.

I understand that by declaring I had never been a man, regardless of how I presented myself, I broke the image some of them may have had of me. I believe I may have hurt people, that they perceive I rejected the name and gender they would choose for me. I recognize that being transgender may violate the expectations people had of me, that I defied being placed in a neatly labeled box, and that this makes life difficult for some people.

Finally, I agree that taking 52 years to work up the courage to accept who I am — to hide my transgender and never to let slip that I am Amethysta — appears as a betrayal of trust. I sympathize with the hurt of not being confided in, especially by those close to me.

I also assert that I am a person in this situation and my feelings demand consideration. To anybody who feels I rejected a false concept of who I was, I state unequivocally that choosing not to use my name rejects all of me.

How people get away with it

It took 52 years for me to come out as transgender. The delay was not due to lack of introspection. By my teenage years, I knew I would transition someday. As an undergraduate, I struggled with girlfriends as I built my identity around femininity. By graduate school, I emerged full-blown as my feminine self.

Then I got married. I buried my feminine self.

Why?

As part of therapy last year in exploring my gender, my psychologist recommended a book by Lindsay Gibson titled Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. The hypothesis is that children who are forced into a caretaker role early in life — that is, to care for their parents physically or psychologically at the cost of their own development—struggle to exit the role and learn to care for themselves as adults.

I was trained to be a caretaker. I do not want to offend people or remind them to consider how they treat me. As a result, I falter when people choose not to use my name or pronouns. I feel guilty for wanting to be called by the name I chose, the name by which I am legally recognized.

I empower people not to respect me, my name, my identity — everything. I do that. Nobody owns my identity except me.

I cannot speak for all members of the LGBTQ community. I suspect many of us have difficulty asserting our right to exist because we were trained not to do it. As a result, the people who believe they have the right to ignore our existence get away with it.

Do not accept violence

When I first began transitioning gender, I was given a maxim to remember: as I transition, everyone around me is forced to transition as well. Wiser Sisters of mine, such as Kitty Whitemore and Saoirse, have expressed the maxim more eloquently, focusing on our partners — who require more support during our transition than we do.

Identity is not static. Identity evolves as we learn about ourselves and interact with our social environment. People who want to be in our lives must evolve along with us.

However, many people choose not to investigate their thoughts or feelings. Instead, they prefer to rebel against evolution, to seek to write one definition of reality and cling desperately to it, to the detriment of the rest of us. One calcification of their reality is choosing to ignore other people’s identity.

When people refuse to use the name I chose for myself, they commit an act of emotional violence — made worse by dint of being unspoken. It is violence by omission, an active form of abuse dressed up as passive non-use of a pronoun.

None of us should accept violence as a method of communication. None of us needs to justify or explain our identities to a person who chooses not to hear.

Some contend there are people incapable of understanding others or changing their ways, which should allow them greater leeway in our relationships. Granting leniency to recalcitrant people excuses their poor behavior. It may even condone it.

The time has come to care for yourself

The people in your life will choose whether or not to accept you. It is not your responsibility to seduce them to change. They must agree to loosen their grip on your reality; you cannot affect the decision they make.

My response has been to cut those people out of my life. To be clear, correcting people who choose not to respect my identity is painful. I battle my upbringing with every interaction. I must coerce myself not to cave in, not to allow myself to be steamrolled, not to accept the violence being to done to me as only what I deserve.

It is painful to change my behavior and demand that others change theirs. But it is nowhere near as painful as living the lie that I did for 52 years.