Yes, you can transition medically without transitioning socially

One of the most difficult stumbling blocks for trans people who are still coming to terms with their gender and struggling to envision their life as a trans person is the idea that transitioning is a fixed, one-size-fits-all process. The notion that being a trans woman or a trans man entails progressing through a rigid and specific set of steps, regardless of whether those steps are necessarily right for you, can make the prospect of transition seem intimidating, overwhelming, and even offputting. If a trans person doesn’t want vaginoplasty or top surgery, for instance, a model that yokes surgery to being trans will demarcate transness as being off-limits to them; if a trans person wants to begin medically transitioning but is not yet comfortable publicly presenting as their gender, and has been told that the latter is a prerequisite for the former, taking even the first steps toward embodying their gender can seem impossible.

These are not hypothetical issues – these expectations of what shape the unique experience of gender must take for all trans people, many of which had been shamefully promoted by clinicians in decades past and persist to this day, can needlessly amplify the doubts that are already a nearly universal feature of questioning one’s gender. The reality is that each trans person has their own unique relationship to their body, their gender, and how they wish to live both in their private life and in society. Transition is not meant to be a singular process that all trans people are fed through; it is an ensemble of tools meant for each person to utilize as needed to get to where they truly want to be.

While rigid models of “the” process of transition may have held sway in the past, gender clinicians and professional organizations today recognize that individual trans people have individual needs – what’s right for one of us may not be what’s right for another. ■