Feeling like an Imposter Before, During and After Transition

Because my research focuses in part on experiences of feeling like an imposter, the subject of “passing” as a member of the opposite sex comes up a lot. There’s the constant self-monitoring, the agony of not passing, the mingled thrill and terror of succeeding.

But the other day, I ran into an interesting use of the term on the r/actual_detrans subreddit by a young woman who identified first as transmasc, then nonbinary, and had taken testosterone. She wrote:

I am worried I am not pretty enough to be feminine: I’ve always been chubby and I think a lot of my dysphoria and desire to be masc has been just because I didn’t think I could pass as a pretty feminine person because of being chubby.

Here we find the language of “passing” applied not just to “passing” as the opposite sex but passing as an “acceptable” member of your own sex. The implied equivalence between these two sorts of “passing” is interesting and gets at the way femininity feels like a performance or affectation for many girls.

For many girls, “passing” as an acceptable member of your own sex class still means being thin enough, pretty enough, and feminine enough. The band of “acceptable” femininity is perilously narrow, and the equation of femininity with being female is pushing girls toward transition.

I still remember the girls who could never do anything right, whose effort and lack of effort were equally persecuted by our peers. Attempts to beautify yourself, if you were not considered beautiful, were laughable pretensions (“Why bother?”). There was no opting out, either (“Wow, so-and-so really gave up”). There was no way to insist on other terms. You either “passed” or you failed by some mysterious, ever-shifting standard. 

This was pre-social media, pre-filters, pre-fillers. And there was no escape via trans identification. So the pressure has gone up and a valve has opened to vent that pressure. Girls who struggle with the impossible and often contradictory expectations girls and women face—and the peer pressure and bullying that comes down on girls who cannot or will not conform to these expectations—can opt out now.

In response to that post about not feeling “pretty enough to be feminine” a detransitioned woman wrote:

I am not in exactly the same situation (I regret every part of my transition) but I think I feel similarly? I certainly relate to not feeling feminine or pretty because of my body, and (not to project this on you, but for me personally) I hid behind ‘masc’ presentation for a long time because it was a type of judgment I had control over, as opposed to the judgment of not meeting expectations of my bio sex.

Transition is a way of saying: Don’t look at me like that. Don’t think about me that way. Don’t judge me against that standard. If I am going to be judged, let me choose what I will be judged on. If I am going to be rejected, let me choose the form it takes.

Ultimately, transition is a form of self-rejection, but it is most obviously a way of rejecting the demands of the outside world, a way of saying no.

It turns out there are a lot of ways to feel like an imposter—before, during, and after transition and detransition.

There are women who report feeling like an imposter as women pre-transition and/or post-detransition, and others who report feeling like imposters as trans people (worrying they’re “not trans enough” or that they might be “faking it”) or imposters as men (“I’m not a real man”).

One FTM-identified poster wrote:

But I also always felt horribly out of place and just wrong being around girls, being counted as one. I was shunned, because those girls sensed I wasn’t performing femininity well enough.

In therapy, going back and describing my former self as a little boy and not a girl has been a huge part of my healing, and a big explanation for why I felt so shitty and out of place. Calling him a boy was a big step for me.

I had a long phase where I tried to be a good woman. Dresses, long hair, tried makeup. It was a lie. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror and I wasn’t even sure why, but I hated that person because it was fake. It was never me.

“I don’t feel like a girl I never did, I just over compensated to fit the roll [role] in looks, but I don’t feel like a boy either, just a fake,” another wrote.

Here’s another:

Despite trying really hard to integrate the gender identity of ‘woman’ I felt like an imposter. It made relationships with people especially hard because I felt like I couldn’t authentically connect. Now, I feel like I am a fake man, I see a woman that forces others to call her ‘he/him’, I feel this female body that just functions and looks a certain way. Man, in my head, still is synonymous with ‘male, very different ‘opposite’ body, AMAB’. Intellectually, I am unlearning that and I met many trans people that have a vibe that I can sense they are so obviously their gender. But not for female looking me. I hate that I cannot consistently validate my own gender identity. It was way easier to live like a woman, but think in my head ‘I am not a real woman, I am in disguise’.

The feeling of being an imposter can stay with you all the way through.

For many girls growing up steeped in a Tumblrized version of queer theory, being a “boy” and being a “girl” are seen as equally performative and self-falsifying. So why not pick whichever aesthetic appeals to you? Why not make an inventory of all your features and personality traits and see where you land?

The body takes a walk. What does the body have to do with any of this? It’s a canvas to be painted, clay to be sculpted, software to be updated, an avatar to be customized, not a set of hard facts to be accommodated. “I find it weird how a huge argument against transitioning is, ‘what if you regret it in the future?'” another trans-identified young woman wrote:

Because think about what that means for a second. It would mean that your body developed secondary sex characteristics you were unhappy with, causing distress and thousands of dollars trying to reverse it. Oh no what a horrible fate! It’s not like NOT transitioning can cause the exact same thing to happen. It just feels like this argument uses how awful dysphoria can feel as a reason why you SHOULDN’T transition???? Like bruh that’s what I’m trying to avoid.

There’s a deep unseriousness to the way members of online trans communities talk about transition. I’ve drawn this comparison before but I haven’t been able to think of a better one: transition is conceptualized as a minor home-remodeling project, as something that can be done and undone at will, given enough time, money, and energy. There is little to no recognition that a human body doesn’t work that way: that our endocrine systems are exquisitely sensitive. That puberty does not have a “pause button” and that we don’t know what exactly it is we’re doing when we say we’re putting a stage of human development “on hold”. That surgeries cannot be “reversed,” only revised and each revision slices human flesh just like the first. That embodiment is not a choice. 

But—online—it feels like one.