An Anxious Freedom

"A Separation" Edvard Munch 1894

To be a trans person in a cisgender world is to be the midwife for other people’s anxieties. Often unwillingly, we challenge core assumptions carved into the walls of every room we enter and defile order that structures most people’s perceptions about the world, the people in it, and their own place among them. Our freedom, like all freedom, leaves risk and panic in its wake not because it yields actual danger but because it yields uncertainty, doubt, second-guessing of oneself and the people around you. After all, if we are free to challenge the gendered norms and embodiment so often portrayed as inevitable and universal, then so are you. All freedom breeds anxiety, but nobody’s freedom creates more than your own.

Transsexualism is far from the only category capable of this destabilization—fragile and brittle are the foundations of most people’s sleepwalking path through their daily life—and yet our fluidity and transgressions run against some of the oldest hierarchies our culture has to offer and the first social categories we learn as children. When the Reagan administration deregulated advertising to allow toy companies and food companies to target their products at children, marketing researchers quickly learned gender was the most stable and widespread identity most children had integrated into their new and delicate self-concept—hence the thick and impassible binary of My Little Pony and GI Joe, hot pink and militant greens of 80s toy advertising. It then becomes the wallpaper of our lives, structuring how we present ourselves and, more importantly, how the world presents itself to us, assigning gender to us not only at birth but across our daily lives.

Many people who are not trans challenge this assignment not only for themselves but all people simply because that’s how identities work—they are social constructs because they are constructed socially. You are constantly shaped and reshaped by the people around you. So one person’s ability to exert their own freedom and autonomy is an invitation to you to do the same—whether that’s a change in how you navigate the gendered assumptions of your own life or simply a shift in perspective of what it means to be a man, woman, or human. This is greeted not with delight and amazement at the diversity of the human experience but, as trans people’s current political trajectory shows, with paranoia, panic, and anxiety.

The philosopher Samir Chopra writes in his recent book Anxiety: A Philosophical Inquiry, that freedom is always “characterized by anxiety…we flee by acting, skillfully and convincingly, to satisfy others’ established expectations and normative standards.” We assume titles that don’t align with our own self-concept, speak words that feel like betrayal, and allow the people in our lives to plod through our dissociated selves like wanderers in a fog. When we are made conscious of the fact so many of these standards restraining us are entirely subjective and enforced by little more than fiat, our freedom to transgress them becomes a terrifying thing. Much easier is the path of being “who the world wants me to be,” writes Chopra:

“This grants me a stable self, a recognizable identity, a refuge in a zone of made up comfort; it gives me an acting script I can crib from for my daily performances in this world. But this acceptance of conformity is an act of ‘bad faith,’ of inauthenticity, for by seeking safe, sheltered, and circumscribed stations, we find not freedom but constriction and restraint. These social arrangements have assuaged someone else’s anxiety, forcing us into preexisting containers of action and thought, there to wallow in our distinctive misery and anxiety as we find ourselves ‘outsiders’ or ‘strangers’ in a world we have not made or chosen.”

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This misery and anxiety—this lifelessness and listlessness—is nonetheless a more familiar comfort than the possibility our lives hold, the endless shapes our bodies can take and our voices can sing. Even the mere awareness of these other possibilities is terror-inducing, so much so the mind will work for years burying awareness of it or drawing the body towards numbing illusions, enticements, and addictions—the blaring static of chemicals, the frenetic quest for distraction, the desperate attempts at a love we cannot feel because are not being true to ourselves or others. “This tensions between the unrealized future and the possible,” writes Chopra, “and the actual present with its acquisitions, its goods to lose, is human anxiety.”

A curious thing happens to many trans people as they awaken to the falsehoods they’ve been living by in the closet. The anxiety of our “unrealized future” (often described by clinicians as gender dysphoria) grows worse as we begin to challenge it. Like an open wound being cleaned with peroxide, our distress sparks and inflames as we prepare to bandage and stitch it close. Physical features we had never thought twice about may become sudden obsessions. Affects hammered into our muscular memory are suddenly realized for the artificial and uncontrollable twitches they are, and our motions, gestures, and habits are suddenly revealed to be compulsions taught and enforced on us by others’ fears. Suddenly, one is aware of how much of your public and private self is a betrayal of one's desires and will and one’s own power to challenge it—a power that terrifies at first and enlightens as it grows. “We are not just creatures who are free to act,” writes Chopra. “We are creatures who are aware that we are free to act.”

This surge of anxiety stems from the initial realization of our own freedom. But it’s not just we as trans people who endure this—it is the people around us and those who had invested their own self-concept in us in particular. The parent who “mourns” the child they were promised because they have been replaced by their actual child’s will isn’t “grieving” a person but a false sense of certainty about their own self-concept as a parent. Their child has changed and, thus, so have they. This fear scales up to a society as a whole, particularly one built to enforce a rigid social order and exclude those who defy it. Such rules might be openly derided and even mocked, but are ultimately grieved when they are gone. An awareness of freedom invites anxiety about ourselves and, perhaps, animus towards that awareness and the people who brought it to our attention.

But a person who accepts and conforms to their gender assignment is not a neutral agent. They are not a leaf being carried along by the surface of a stream—they are the stream. We are all asked to enforce and respect a massive laundry list of norms, rules, manners, and ethics and ignore many others and each one we do or do not abide is a choice we are making. In countless moments throughout the day, we decide to conform to those standards to relieve the anxiety we would otherwise feel from the awareness of our own freedom. When someone cannot or will not choose to do the same, it challenges us, too.

The porous nature of all identities is revealed by trans femininity in particular because it flaunts the norms that govern expectations of entitlement, labor, care, and love. Femininity is the uniform of a job, the marker of reproductive labor and potential submission. So many feel owed the certainty of who can and cannot be feminine that any betrayal of that myth is regarded as a rupture, a victimization that justifies in turn any level of repression. It is a violence that destroys the freedom of its target and its perpetrator alike, fueled as it is by a misplaced faith in a false god. Our repression is a public ritual, a vital part of how the boundaries of identity are enforced.

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Hence—panic, exclusion, political and interpersonal violence. Hence Kate Manne’s definition of misogyny as the “law enforcement arm” of the patriarchy, Jules Gill-Peterson’s point that the trans misogynist “enjoys the rare privilege of being at once the victim and the judge, jury, and executioner.” Hence this system’s utility to authoritarians big and small, from the totalitarian lover to the domineering patriarch to the aspiring autocrat. So fearful are we of other people’s freedom, they hope we’ll gladly and swiftly extinguish our own (and they’re often right).

To put freedom forward as a shared interest in its own right is thus a dangerous bet. For trans people, loudly and repeatedly demanding freedom for ourselves is so dangerous we are often tempted to run for the comfort of other people’s categorization and permission, to reduce the experiences of other marginalized categories to simplified metaphors, to defensively crouch and note we can’t help but be this way. The harder but more necessary route is defending our freedom on its own terms as a beautiful necessity, an inevitable choice. We can promise that nothing will change—and most things won’t—but we cannot be virtually normal. A trans person is a stitch in the social fabric irreducible to the private sphere. We are a challenge to the soothing and violent faith in social reproduction, the cruelty that upholds the boundaries of identity that comfort others and immiserate ourselves.

“Anxiety is the realization that this abode is put together,” writes Chopra, “a house of cards depending for its stability on the mutual agreement and the sympathetic coordination of the utter strangers who are our fellow travelers.” There is no unringing of the bell that comes with the awareness that trans people exist and, in particular, one may even be a trans person themselves. Coming to terms with our freedom is the end of a longstanding pain, the ceasing of an addiction to our repression. Society and culture may whither from the withdrawal as surely as trans people ourselves become terrified upon the realization of our own freedom and divergence. But it doesn’t make the embrace of that freedom any less necessary. It simply means having faith that we will always, in beauty and sorrow, be changed.