Five More Things To Be a Better Trans Ally
I'm continuing my series of five things. Last year for Pride month, I published Five things to be a better trans ally. In that article, I had a lot to say about deadnaming, pronouns, and medical status. Well, I have a lot more to say with another year of lived experience under my belt, so it’s time for Five More Things To Be a Better Trans Ally.
1) Here’s a situation. You go into a room and you meet someone. You introduce yourself and your pronouns. The response you get is "Hi, I'm Ronnie. My pronouns are they/them." Cool, so you just met a person using they/them pronouns, that's great. It's likely that Ronnie falls outside the gender binary. So far so good. Do you accept Ronnie as they are, or do you start wondering what sex Ronnie was assigned at birth? For some reason, wondering what sex someone was assigned at birth seems to be a question that a lot of cis people think about.
Let me state that unequivocally, under no circumstances, should you ask a question about someone’s sex assigned at birth. If you even find yourself thinking about this question, you should actively try to break this thought pattern. There is no time, place, or purpose for wondering about Ronnie’s sex assigned at birth. They fall outside the gender binary, and maybe they will use a label for that (nonbinary, agender, transgender, bigender, multigender, genderfluid, genderqueer, or others). You should know Ronnie's pronouns, know the labels that they share with you, but there's no reason you need to know what they were assigned at birth unless Ronnie chooses to volunteer this information. Because all that matters is who Ronnie is, not who society thought they used to be.
If you find yourself thinking about someone’s sex assigned at birth, I have a question for you. Do you think it's healthy to be thinking about someone's genitals when they were a baby? Wondering what sex someone was assigned at birth IS thinking about someone's genitals when they were a baby. Once you realize this and recognize who frame trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people as a threat, you'll realize what the groomer slurs against the trans and larger LGBTQIA+ community actually are. They are the accusers telling on themselves that they are thinking about baby genitals. Is it any wonder that these same people pass bathroom bans for trans folks when they are the kinds of people who think about other people’s genitals when they were an infant? They seem to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about other people’s private parts.
If instead, you want to validate a trans person’s identity, what should you do? I take steps to intentionally avoid learning a nonbinary person's assigned sex at birth if at all possible. Knowing someone’s sex assigned at birth is a common cause of misgendering, so there’s no reason to try to learn it, just as there is no reason to learn someone’s deadname. Of course, if you’re already friends with a gender nonconforming person and they bring up information on who they used to be, hopefully they are already anchored in your brain on who they are today. Nonbinary people deserve to be seen as they are, not through a societal binary that does not fit them.
2) Sometimes it can be difficult to keep up with how language changes. Language for transgender people is evolving quickly. Let me give you a rule of thumb when talking about transgender people. Never use a term for a transgender person that equates them to a different gender than the gender they tell you they are. That the terms sex assigned at birth, assigned female at birth, and assigned male at birth became popularized in the 2010's is problematic. Older terms that were used and are also considered problematic today include female to male (sometimes written as FTM or F2M) and male to female (sometimes written as MTF or M2F). I'm sure that there are other terms that incorporate this structure and you should not use any of these terms that imbed an incorrect gender for someone. There are multiple reasons that these terms are problematic. No, I was never male, so I am not MTF. Additionally, mentioning someone's sex assigned at birth is, as I stated in the first thing, showing that you are thinking about baby genitals.
So then what should you say? I'm a transgender woman, someone else is a transgender man and nonbinary people are just that, outside the binary. You can also use the more generalized terms transmasculine and transfeminine, which include some nonbinary people in addition to trans men and trans women. When someone is a trans woman, you have all the information you need. Same for a trans man or people that are transfeminine or transmasculine. For nonbinary people, the structured terms like F2M are incredibly problematic because they erase nonbinary and gender nonconforming identities. There are more than two genders. Never refer to a nonbinary or gender nonconforming person around their sex assigned at birth.
3) Lots of people call themselves allies to the trans community. But a self-appointed label does not make it true. I'll tell you what I think the most important thing someone can do to be viewed as an ally by me. An ally must accept criticism gracefully. This is one of the few things that is non-negotiable to me, and it's for very important reasons. Often if a trans person is stopping to explain to you why something you've said or an action you've taken is problematic, it's likely that the trans person thinks you are worth that time. The trans person is giving you a view into their lived experience and it's important to honor that. You do not always need to understand the nuances of what the transgender person is saying the first time by the way. Often you might need to hear something multiple times to fully get it because their experience is different than yours. Hear the correction and commit to truly processing it and thinking it through before you push back against the criticism please.
The second most common reason I'll stop someone is because what they just said or did was really jarring. I need to tell them about this right away as it could be traumatic for trans people to hear this. I jump in and coach people all the time in my daily life. There aren't a lot of trans people that I work with, so there is an educational element of what I sign up for working as a leader in corporate America. So many people genuinely want to do better but just don't know. So, if a trans person pulls you aside to explain why something is or could be problematic, the worst thing you can do is get defensive and dig in. Please don’t say why you said it, as I’m telling you how you can do better. Please don’t say that you know someone else that is trans and they don't have an issue, when I’m telling you about an issue that I have. Accepting criticism gracefully is a key component to being an ally.
I want to give some examples of allies doing things correctly here to help cement this. There is an older couple that I’ve known for 15+ years and I supported them as evangelical Christian missionaries for close to a decade. My funding was reallocated to other places in the spring of 2024, but they wanted to treat me to lunch as a thank you for the years of support. It also was not lost on me that a big part of this lunch was that they wanted to show me that they respected me after they learned of my transition. We’re talking and they are describing how when they are meeting younger folks, they ask about their pronouns. Friends, for evangelical missionaries to know to be asking folks about their pronouns is wonderful to see and absolutely shows respect for different identities. However, there is a better thing to do in that situation. Rather than asking their pronouns, the best thing to do is to introduce yourself with your pronouns. This opens things up for the person they are meeting so that if they are comfortable, the person they are talking to will state their pronouns because stating your pronouns will be welcome. If someone is closeted or exploring their gender, they may not want to make an outright declaration of their pronouns. When I said this to the couple, no only did they not push back on what they had been doing, they wrote down what I said so they could try to incorporate that into how they interacted next time. Do you know how much of a better world we would live in if evangelical Christian missionaries stated their pronouns when meeting someone for the first time? It would do wonders to stop people from shouting at each other and actually understand their experience.
4) I know that old photos can bring you wonderful memories, but please don't share pictures of trans before they were living authentically without their express permission. I understand that when you are looking at a photo, especially if you were in the picture with a trans person or remember when it was taken, their living inauthentically might not be the first thing that you see. For so many trans people, it's going to jog memories of that day and the pain they felt in living inauthentically. Don't share them, unless you have express permission from the trans person with how the photo will be shared. If you have permission for having a picture in one context, don’t assume that permission is universal either please.
Here is one way I’ve seen this play out. After transitioning, I had a friend that kept sharing old photos where I was tagged on Facebook. Initially I just removed the tag and I asked him to stop sharing old photos. He would acknowledge the request, but a month later, he’d share another old photo again. Every time it got more painful for me as each month I had put more space between my transitioned self and the inauthentic me. Finally, he shared an old photo including me with the caption "I miss my friends". Well, that version of me is never coming back and I had had enough. I blocked the friend on Facebook so they could never share those images again. Then I began the arduous process of removing fourteen years of Facebook photos. This was a long process, but it ensured that a photo of me tagged should never pop up unless it's of the real me. It is very weird how my Facebook photo gallery doesn't have any pictures of me for the first fourteen years, but it's worth it to not have those photos available for public consumption and so that I don’t have an old memory picture of myself shown to me when I haven’t put my armor on to look at old photos. I’ll state that I unblocked the friend about a month later, once pictures of me were off the platform and I refriended him. He realized that he should be doing better, which is good and we are still friends today.
I’ll also tell you that we still have a picture of my wife and I up in our bedroom. It’s from 1997, before we were married. This is probably the time that I was happiest in the before times, a few months before my wife and I got engaged. There are also a few snapshots of us up in our kitchen. These are private, printed pictures in our house. I’m fine with those pictures being up because we’ve been together for over a quarter of a century. Outside of those limited locations, we’re not putting those pictures out there though.
5) I started writing the final thing in this article, and I just kept writing and turned the final thing into its own article in and of itself. This is one of the reasons I love the five things format, because occasionally I’ll start writing a thing and I’ll have a lot more to say than I realized. So, look for “My Forthcoming Gender Affirmation Surgery (and the number one thing people get wrong about it)” coming soon. So instead, I'll leave you with a tangible step that you can put into action today. The Trevor Project recently released the results of their 2024 survey on LGBTQ+ youth's mental health. My friend Ev wrote a fantastic summary of the results in her article earlier this year on her Substack, Queer Science Lab. In that survey, LGBTQ+ youth was asked how people can show that they support them. The top answer, with 88% of participants saying this, was "trusting that I know who I am". LGBTQ+ youth are not confused and are not in a phase. They know who they are and they need adults in their life to affirm this. Sometimes, how you can change the world is to just do something simple. In this case, that’s believing trans youth when they tell you who they are. Believe them the first time, and every time.
Happy Pride Month!