the Trans-Queer Fear of Appearing Heteronormative

Hey trans and queer people—

Raise your hand if you ever found yourself performing heteronormative gender roles for the sake of cis or straight passing and then felt really weird about it because you were enforcing a binary which has been personally destructive and invalidating! * sheepishly raises hand *

When trans people first come out, there’s a societal expectation that our gender expression will be traditionally masculine/feminine in line with our newly-declared gender identity (never mind that they might be non-binary, that’s a complexity society doesn’t seem ready to grapple with). Social norms, even in the trans community, place a heavy emphasis on “passing”. Trans gender expressions are judged by how well they “pass” for cis, and there’s pressure to “prove” that your gender identity is valid—if you’re really a girl, you’ll be more feminine than a 1950s housewife in the American suburbs.

As anyone with an even minimal understanding of the gender binary knows, this is bullshit. But for people who have had their gender identities continually invalidated, the desire to be gender-normative and to avoid being misgendered is strong. Then there's the issue of safety and survival: trans people experience disproportionate violence and discrimination, potentially avoided by performing normative gender roles and going “stealth”. Passing is also used as a metric for progress in changing our bodies to better reflect our gender.

There were so many parts of masculinity that I felt I didn’t have access to when I was female-identified, and when I came out as a trans guy, it was all so exciting. I could wear masculine clothing and look like a femme guy! Better yet, I had social permission to be ugly! This excited me more than I could possibly express—now I’m allowed to age instead of trying to be an eternally pretty nymph-girl. I don’t need to be Sky Ferreria, or even George Clooney, I can be Nicolas Cage!

Performing masculinity was exhilarating, but some of it was forced. I was granted permission to take up space—not too much but you know, more than the typical female allowance of “none”—so I awkwardly tried to sit with my knees a few inches apart and my hands confidently in my lap instead of crossing my legs and gently hugging myself. I changed the way I walked from a shoulders-first head-down rapid march through the masses to a slower, hips-first (dick-first) stride. I also thought masculine meant waddling like John Wayne imitating a duck so I angled my feet out in a manner which was painful and hilarious and painful.

Another example: the volume at which I was required to speak in order to heard nose-dived. Where before I needed to be aggressively loud if I wanted anyone to listen, people now paid attention to me and a hush fell around the room if I so much as cleared my throat. I adjusted and learned to be quieter in a (perhaps misguided?) attempt to push back against my newfound male privilege. Or maybe I talk less because the less I speak, the less likely it is I’ll be misgendered: my voice isn’t especially high, but my vocal mannerisms are still feminine enough that people clock me as DFAB (Designated female at birth—not, as fuckboys on the internet insist, “Down For A Blunt”).

I’ve also toned down my fashion to be less eye-catching. As a self-identified girl I wore bright lipstick and short skirts and black stockings but as a boy I have adopted a norm-core uniform of jeans and a tucked-in collared shirt because it helps me pass.

Sometimes, it feels fucking weird. I’m not only performing a normative gender expression which I find irremediably dull; I’m complicit in a binary system of gender, quietly letting people assign me an M instead of an F without kicking up a fuss that they’re ticking arbitrary, mutually-exclusive boxes based on transphobic assumptions of what wo/men look like. Worse than being complicit, I fear I’m ossifying the gender binary when I correct people on my pronouns: they might mistake my exhaustion from being misgendered for affronted masculinity and offense at the idea of being feminine, and by then I’m usually too worn down to explain.

But honestly, it was really fun to perform traditional masculinity when I first came out—that was something I never felt I was allowed to do before. I played with it, tried it on, insisting to my friends and family that I was a man’s man’s man who liked the manliest man things you ever did man—like, I don’t know, beer and pussy?—but it turns out I mostly prefer androgyny (tea and pussy).

Heteronormative doesn’t just mean straight; it’s the idea that straight is default, along with conformity of gender expression and roles, long-term monogamy, and vanilla sex with the aim of reproducing a stable, two-parent nuclear family unit. Heteronormativity is fucking gross, not because those things—the monogamy and vanilla sex and the rest—are necessarily bad, but because they’re assumed to be “normal”, default, and anyone who falls outside of that norm is socially punished. The mainstream gay marriage and gay adoption movements have tapped into this too with campaign images of white, middle-class cis gay couples on a suburban lawn: homonormativity. Obviously we should be evaluating whether assimilation into an institution of effectively owning other people is what we want as queers, but whatever, now we too can spend all the money on a boozy wedding party? Happy long-term partnerships are great and gay people should have access to the same legal contracts as straight people, but why are things like healthcare and the benefits of citizenship only then given to hetero/homonormative couples? They should be available to everyone. Is my anarchy showing?

I want to destroy the gender binary, to smash it absolutely to pieces—but I also want my gender identity to be respected and for (cis) people to accurately read the signals I’m trying to emit with my gender expression, so sometimes I exaggerate hegemonic masculinity to help them out. Having my gender identity validated by strangers is so rejuvenating that it’s worth it to be a bland most of the time—and I suspect this will change over time when I start hormone replacement therapy and get those physiological signifiers that I’m lacking: the deep voice, the masculinely-distributed fat, the facial hair. Then I can wear a dress and still be a “sir”—you have no idea how badly I want this.

It’s ok to play into heteronormativity to feel comfortable, to survive. Not everyone has the ability to access "passing privilege", but if you do and you benefit from it—that’s ok. It’s also ok to feel more comfortable in traditional gender expressions/roles than in queered ones, like how women can be stay at home moms without threatening feminism, so long as they could also be CEOs or cosmonauts if they wanted.

What does is mean to be “queer enough” anyway? Are you only queer if you’re an androgynous petite white girl wearing tailored menswear, having poly threesomes with another pretty girl and a tattooed hunky dude with a flower-beard? Or do you need to be a genderf*cked pansexual transactivist running a queer/sober dance party? (Go to those events, they’re great). It’s not a competition; abandon the drive to be queerer-than-thou. Celebrate difference instead of internally policing queer identities. You are queer enough. I promise.

Originally published on the now-defunct The Most Cake. Lightly edited in 2025.