Your Silly Questions Answered: My Trans Identity

Hello, and welcome to Your Silly Questions Answered. I’m Carolyn Petit, and boy oh boy, do people ask me some silly questions sometimes. Today, I want to answer one such question, but before I do, a quick message for those of you kind, supportive readers who may feel inclined to respond to this with something like “Don’t feed the trolls” or “Don’t let them get to you.” Your concern is certainly appreciated, but please refrain from making such responses. The trolls don’t get to me, and while I certainly don’t think that they deserve responses, I also don’t think that ignoring them is always the way to go. Sometimes behavior needs to be called out. Sometimes we need to work toward fostering online cultures in which certain types of behavior are seen by the community as unacceptable. And sometimes I respond to trolls, or share their attempts to needle me, simply because I find them so lazy or inept in their attempts to insult me that it’s downright amusing. 

But this question, I’m just answering because, even though it was clearly asked not in a spirit of genuine curiosity but simply to bother me, I think may result in an interesting answer. 

image

The question is so far from being rooted in reality as to be absurd. It takes only a cursory glance at my work for GameSpot, or my Twitter, or my Tumblr, to see that I hardly feel as if being trans defines the entirety of who I am. But one might reasonably ask how I feel that being trans fits into my identity. I’m not sure I’d have a good answer for this question, but I’m thinking about it and am going to answer it as best I can in this moment. 

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question for trans people. For some, being trans is something they identify with very strongly. For others, it’s not. Typically, I don’t think of being trans as a particularly interesting or revealing fact about myself. It’s a reality, a characteristic that I was born with. What does knowing that I’m trans tell you about me? That I was born with an X chromosome and a Y chromosome. There you go. Does that give you a better understanding of who I am as a person? To me, it seems about as revealing about who I am as the color of my eyes. It simply is. You’ll get a much better sense of who I am, of what I think and feel, by reading anything I’ve written about music or movies or the culture surrounding games than you will by learning that I am trans. I also don’t feel that being trans modifies my status as a woman any more than being cis does for cis women. I am a woman, full stop. Also, I am trans. Also, I have blue eyes. 

Of course, the fact that I am trans has impacted my life in much more noticeable ways than has the color of my eyes. But that impact is so tremendous, so unknowable, that I don’t think it can reveal much. How has being cisgender (for all you cisgender folks out there) impacted your life? You can’t know. I feel like I might as well ask, “What if I were born a Japanese peasant during the Edo period?” as ask, “What if I were cisgender?” Of course my heart has gotten snagged on the question before, but it is pointless. There can never be an answer that means anything.

While I don’t think of being trans as a particularly revealing part of my identity, it’s also absolutely not something that I or any trans person should feel any need to downplay or hide, and because so many in this world seem to think that trans people should live in shame and fear, I’m proud to declare my trans-ness in the face of such ignorance. That’s what I was I doing in the photo the person above included in his tweet. I’m very serious about the idea that games, and spaces, both real and online, devoted to the celebration of games, should be for everyone, not just for the particular kind of straight man who seems to feel threatened by the idea that the domain is not his and his alone, that he might have to share it with women and queer folks.  I also often share my experiences as a trans person, in the hopes that some people might benefit from them in some way. 

I hope this answers your silly question. Thank you for playing!