I sit in the GP’s office. He asks: “So, when did you know?” I say: “Always.” Because I’ve heard that simplicity gets results. It is one phrase that has spanned my lifetime. No matter what setting, country or occasion, it remains undefeatable. Like a cockroach that refuses to disappear, it doesn’t care which part of my life I am in; it will always emerge: “So, when did you know?”
People always ask me this, or, if I am not around, they will ask my mother, or a friend, or even a teacher I haven’t seen in years – “So, when did Travis … you know?” The “you” and “know” will come with verbalised italics. If an emoji could appear out of thin air, it would be the eyes darting to the side of the room accompanied by a vague hand gesture, as if to say: so, when was it clear Travis would become a cross-dressing deviant who is straying from God’s path?
Of course, humans are naturally curious, but I find British ways of communicating to be crowded with social pleasantries and forced “politeness” – an investment in never rocking the boat or being seen as out of line. Asking any form of direct question at a British dinner table can cause waves of disapproving murmurs for months. Yet, present that same dinner table with someone who is visibly gender nonconforming, wearing a dress, with a bit of a 5 o’clock shadow coming through, and all of those manners disappear. “So, when did you know?” becomes their version of weather talk or asking what you do for a living. People want to know, often within the first handshake or moment you sit down, whether you were always like this, what your parents think, the defining moment you knew, and when you first tried on the red lipstick and dress from your mother’s closet (even if, in fact, you never did). Perhaps what is even more terrifying is that for a long time I felt I owed every question an answer.
“So, when did you know, uh … ?” asks a donor to a very popular LGBTQ+ charity in the UK, at a private dinner celebrating volunteers. The “uh” is followed by a grand gesture of her hand, pointing up and down to my outfit and makeup.
I take a sharp breath to prepare my answer.
“Well, when I was around three years old my mother took me to the doctor because I had not spoken my first word yet. She was worried. I was her second child and my older brother couldn’t shut up, making full sentences by the age of three … ”
The rich, white donor lady leans in. She nods, as if to say, go on, don’t stop, tell me, how exactly you know.
Seeing that this story is working, I continue.
“So, my mother took me to the doctor. The doctor inspected me, and did hearing tests and more, to check if there was a problem with any of my senses. He realised I was not deaf, so then he started to look inside my throat, to check if it was anything to do with my vocal cords … ”
She is nodding ferociously at this point. I can tell she is waiting for the meat of this story to be served.
“And then, just as the doctor had given up on finding why I could not speak, as he was packing up his bag, I turned around and I opened my mouth and said my very first words. And do you know what they were?”
She shakes her head.
“I opened my mouth, aged three, and said: ‘Doctor, I am actually a cross-dressing, gender-nonconforming deviant.’ And that is how we all knew something was different about me.”
***
‘So Travis, when did you know?” I think of other people I have heard speak about their moment of knowing, how they say their parents recall them crying whenever they were in the wrong clothing. I think of an article I read by another trans person speaking of the indescribable pain of knowing innately they were not in the body they were supposed to be, how their childhood was plagued with the consistent reminder of being told they were a gender they were not. And I draw a blank. I cannot pin this reality on to mine.
I think about the house I grew up in and one of my earliest memories there. I was raised in a red-brick council house in a neglected suburb of Bristol, the kind of council estate that looks like every other photo of a council estate you have seen.
Although the house was cold, bare in its furniture and had cracks in its ceilings from subsidence, our family was the opposite of this. We were warm, loud and most definitely excessive: three very strong-minded people who made a home full of belly laughs, lots of singing, shouting and plenty of talking.
Our German lodger, Hangwolf, primarily there to pay our food bills, developed into a brief but important and loving figure in the house: a tall, statuesque man who fitted into the structure of our unit, almost as if there was a gap left by a father, still warm for Hangwolf to walk into.
“Introducing … Travis Alabanza!” Hangwolf said one day.
“Hangwolf, you have to introduce me with the name of the song I’m singing; you can’t just say my name!” I said offstage (which at this point in my life meant the living room).
“Singing his new song, All You Need Is a Shoe, introducing … Travis Alabanza!”
And the rest is history. That is how the 1999 record‑breaking hit All You Need Is a Shoe was born, smashing all previous chart records, and the royalties clearing every Alabanza out of generational cycles of poverty for ever more. Or, at least, that is the kind of energy I brought to my debut performance, my small feet shuffling in my mother’s heels, as I marched unknowingly into each gender-nonconforming child’s cliched memory.
The lyrics were simple: the only line to All You Need Is a Shoe was the title. If you want to sing it as you read this, you simply pick any tune you like and sing those words with extreme enthusiasm.
It didn’t matter how four-year-old me performed the song, the applause was rapturous each time: Mum cheering for an encore, Hangwolf humming the song to himself in the shower, even my stoic brother releasing a smile.
Surely this was how I knew? If I were telling this story at a dinner party, in response to another person asking me the question yet again, I would receive full marks for this one. There are the clear signifiers that link this story to the mainstream perception of trans identity, particularly those of us assigned male at birth: the high-heeled shoe and the performative nature of the song effortlessly blends with the public imagination of how all transfeminine people discover our gender. Blended with the quirkiness of a hunky German lodger, this story, when told right, often results in a sea of smiles, unthreatened nods and a calmness washing over the room. A calmness that is specific to liberal cisgender people feeling comfortable again because they have you all figured out.
Yet when I look closer at this memory, none of that feels certain to me. I can see the joy so vividly on my face. The kind of joy I recognise now as that which comes from the perfect symphony of being yourself, of others celebrating that, and of being in a place of safety. I know that the joy I found in thinking about that high‑heeled shoe was real, but none of that led to a knowing. In fact, knowing feels like the exact opposite of what encompassed that memory, because I was too busy doing.
Despite how many times I have had to withstand questioning about when exactly I knew, I still wish I could pinpoint an answer that felt honest, even if just for the rare time it is asked from a place of safety and comfort; even if it is just so I know myself.
I once replied to a casting director: “When I played a witch in a school play; I was 13.” He nodded, as if that was an answer that made sense to him, so he could move on. He looked at the figure in front of him, saw the shadow poking through my jaw, and could draw the lines of where a witch once was, or could be.
I think about that school play now, remembering how I felt when I asked my drama teacher if I could play the witch. How quick she was to say yes; how everyone else paused, wondering if I was serious. How the moment I put on the dress, heels and tights for the role I felt a sense of confidence I had not before. How the moment I went out on to the stage, I experienced instantly the comfort and celebration we have with gender nonconformity when it is placed in the realms of performance. The football boys, who were there to watch the popular girls in my drama class, came ready to laugh and point at me, but instead laughed involuntarily at how well I fulfilled the role. Maybe this was it. Maybe becoming the witch was how I knew I was trans, as if witch and transfeminine were synonyms I was already acutely aware of.
But as I write this, nothing about the memory feels like a knowing. “Knowing” should feel like the remaining jigsaw piece, found after months and months of searching for it, slotting into place. No moment I can pinpoint reveals an innate knowing of my transness; rather, each is just another example of how I am responded to by the outside world.
OK, OK, but when did you know?
Well, maybe I never did know.
I do not think I am innately trans. I do not think I was born this way. I am not convinced that I have known inside of me since the moment of conception that I was destined to change anything specifically about me. I am not sure I was destined to feel repulsed at the thought of calling myself a man, or to wear dresses, red heels and Mac red lipstick (I still don’t think red lipstick looks that good on me).
Before the sceptics aim to use this as proof for any theory they may have about us: this is not to say I do not think I am trans. I am sure of it. If trans means to be something other than the gender you were forcibly assigned at birth, then deck the halls and give me the ghastly coloured trans flag: I am surely trans. I am so trans that when someone refers to me as a “he” in passing I have to remind myself that they could possibly be talking about me. I am so trans that I thought about having my pronouns tattooed on my wrists – yet am trans enough to know that is a distasteful idea.
I believe my transness is a reactionary fact, not an innate one. I am trans because the world made me so, not because I was born different. I am trans because the systems the world operates through force me to be so, not because of genetics. I am trans because of you, not because of me. I did not always know, because I once imagined a world where I would not have to know. More than this, I believe that others may only be so very cis because the world is forcing the same reaction from them.
So much of the narrative around LGBTQ+ identities, especially those more marginalised, such as transness, relies on us to state that we were born this way in order for us to be accepted. We “cannot help who we are”, so therefore deserve to be protected. Safety is conditional on our innate difference. We need a discovery moment that is as clear as day, that highlights the unchangeable reality that we exist. It works as a way to make us more understandable – and, therefore, respectable.
If I was born this way, then you do not need to change.
If I was born this way, then it has nothing to do with you.
If I was born this way, then transness can continue to be distanced.
***
My friend and I are two pints into a conversation that present-day me would not even last a sip of beer in. It’s a confessional kind of conversation where my friend, the cis person, tells me how hard it is for her to understand transness because she has never been around trans people. I remind her that I am trans, in order to fight against the urge she has to abstract us; to ground us as people like me, who walk among the definitely real cisgender. She nods in that specific way that is dismissive in outcome but positive in intention, and begins to clarify what she said: “But I mean proper trans.”
She pauses, I suspect to check how I feel about that sentence, and then says: “Obviously I get that you say you are trans, but I mean trans in the way that is more traditionally trans.”
The 20-year-old me nods, consciously agreeing with what she is saying, yet a subconscious part of me knows that something does not feel right. The 26-year‑old me both cringes and thrills at the word “traditionally” appearing next to “trans”. As if anything feels traditional about a journey into gender deviance, unless of course my friend was referring to the longstanding examples of transness within previous historical periods – yet something tells me she was not.
There’s a part of me that looks back at this moment and wishes that I had turned the table over. That I had thrown my drink in anger and hurt as I shouted the word “traditionally” on repeat, interspersed with the names of Amanda Lepore, or Marsha P Johnson or Nina Arsenault – none of whom strike me as anything that the word “traditionally” would fall next to. There was no fight, however.
Six years on, I still do understand what my friend meant. Her “traditional” means a gender recognisable by the state (ie male or female), and the untraditional are those of us who are non-binary. Her word “proper” is actually doing some heavy lifting, where “proper” means going from one distinguishable gender to the other (or at least looking like you are trying to do that in their eyes). A part of me wonders if here, for my friend, the “proper” also meant commitment.
The “proper” could mean the trans people who have had to save, or fundraise, or wait to afford the costly and arduous medical procedures to make changes to their bodies.
I’m not sure if my friend would even remember this moment.
Her honesty felt refreshing: at least I did not need to decipher what she may have meant, or how she truly felt. Sometimes I wish for the more out and out, retro bigotry – at least then I know where I stand.
In my friend’s directness, I gain a clarity about experiences that were dealt me with greater sleight of hand. My friend’s “But I mean proper trans” in the middle of a south London pub becomes the moment a hairstylist on a job told me, unprompted, that my wig “would suit my face more if I shaved”. Now when I hear “But I mean proper trans”, I think of the countless men who have told me, unprompted, that if I “made more effort to be convincing” then they would sleep with me.
Intentional gender nonconformity is seen as OK, if it sticks within your assigned gender at birth. We are OK with the pantomime dame, or RuPaul’s Drag Race, or even pop culture figures like Harry Styles in a skirt – as long as that person does not claim the change to be anything other than visual. As long as it stays within the realms of clear performance.
Or if it is a phase someone will eventually move on from, then we can sometimes afford it grace, too. Yet if there is a permanence to it – a declaration that the gender nonconformity is intentional and refuses to go away – then there is a problem. If it is not used as the gag, punchline or reveal, but is in fact here to stay, then the facade of acceptability ruptures. The younger me playing the witch in the school panto was applauded while on stage, yet I know that if I had worn that outfit on the streets I would have been punished.
The notion of proper and improper trans also does not take into account the lack of access someone may have to medicalisation for myriad reasons. Medical access is already heavily dependent on location, funds and varying degrees of safety and support. So many girls, theys and boys are having to go through relentless fundraising to access private medical treatments because our public attitude to understanding the need for trans healthcare is so deeply lacking. Not everyone who wants to access hormones, surgeries or other gender-affirming procedures can get to them: does this mean they are not trans until they do? Or is the desire to have these things enough to legitimise them?
What if I have been hovering over the same Google search about starting hormones for four years: does this mean I am not seen as “proper” until I commit? When so much of my experience of being trans is of feeling like an impostor in my own body, how can I differentiate between that feeling and that of being an impostor in my own transness? Ultimately, the question I am struck by every time I look in the mirror is this: do I want to change because of them – the myriad people who delegitimise a gender-nonconforming person – or because of me? And does it even matter any more?
***
When in that south London pub, my friend said “But I mean proper trans”, I ended up saying nothing. But if I could turn back the clock, I wish the conversation had gone something like this: We both pause. She wishes she hadn’t said that. Not because she doesn’t still think it, but because neither of us can be bothered to figure out what we really mean.
I look at the half-drunk pint. I put it down. I decide instead that today I will try to say what I think, even if I have not fully figured it out. I remind myself that there are so many types of people who are allowed to say things even when they are not fully sure.
“I wish you would not say ‘proper’ as a qualifier before trying to split up me and my other sisters and siblings. You may think it is a natural thing to split people up, that it is already embedded within the thing itself, but that shit is done to us externally. Eventually that stuff seeps into us. It affects how we think, how we treat other people, how we treat ourselves.
“Your pressure on us to make ourselves ‘proper’, whether you mean to or not, builds into a culture that further separates us. It makes us think that these divides are real.
“We don’t have to all be the same to still be real. You understanding something does not make it proper. Understanding is not a prerequisite for us existing … I’ll explain what I mean, but only if you get the next round in.”
• This is an edited extract from None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary by Travis Alabanza (Canongate, £16.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
