How to explain being trans better to a cisgendered person?

[LexiToPeter?]

Alright, so I'm pretty sure my brother thinks I'm full of crap when it comes to me being transgender. I came out to him at a not so great time and it's still semi-unresolved. And I'm sure my parents also think that as well,so I need help on how to explain it to them differently?

I basically told me that my body feels wrong, it has for forever, that kind of thing, and that while I knew I was a girl as a kid, I never hung out with the girls, and that I think that I'd do better socializing with boys now. In summary, that I'd be happier as a male, and that I feel like one.

Is this a good way to go about it, or is there another way to explain it to someone who doesn't know what it's like? Cause I'm not really the best at explaining some of the more abstract thoughts I have to other people...

[caseyyy]

I think that's the best way to put it really, short and sweet. I do find it helps a lot to tell them that you're still the same person, you're not trying to change who you are, you're just changing your body to match how you've always felt.

[rosetyler]

I've heard it described as "your outside doesn't match your inside"...dunno if that helps.

[Andris]

I suppose being short and straight is the best way.* And make that person feel that asking is possible and is definitely a good thing - and holding something back is silly, he/she may ask you anything if necessary.
But it depends how old is the "insider" and is she/he totally new to the topic or have some strong ideas about the whole stuff. 
(For instance I didn't come out to my sister yet but because she saw a drag queen couple of years ago and sometimes on TV she finds "men in women's clothes". She doesn't have prejudices or bad words for this - however my mother would have some.)

Like you said... (I tried to explain like this, to my 15-years-old sister and she got it. We were talking about a not-really-passed** MTF girl she saw on the bus. )

~ There is a nude body. It's male or female. And there is a brain that contains your emotions, self-image and how see the world. It's male or female. And mostly male body is together a male brain and female body is together with female brain. But sometimes they are not the same, and then the individual feels bad. Becuase the brain can't have the body that it can control. So there are TS people who may want to change their body to fit on well with their brain. And after all - when they can wear clothes, have the body their brains wanted - they live happily. Because it's really painful for the brain to live forever in a wrong body. ~

IDK, maybe for a grown-up it's easier to tell. But the frame, what you wanna say, is exactly the same. You just change the "toddler-words" a bit.

*I admit it can be real hard. (I hope it'll work when I date someone or whatever... between friends it's better.   Anyway, after one or two coming out's it gets better and even better to come out again, explaining being TG.
** this sounds badly, sorry. No offense, to anyone. 

[JohnAlex]

I like to tell people, "I'm a guy.  It's just my body developed wrong in the womb and now is a girl's body instead. So I'm a guy with a girl's body."
Sometimes with friends I add, "Can you imagine if that happened to you?  It sucks."  In my experience, people seem to be pretty empathetic when I say it like that.

Also, this is a good idea.  It worked really with coming out to my sister.

You could have them watch a trans video with you (if they would do that), one of those floating around that interviews trans folks and talks about what it is and how it's like.  It might help them with the idea that this is not your half-baked idea, that it's a real thing that really happens just like this.  They might see parallels between the interviewees and you.

[Felix]

I've had people who were kinda like uh huh okay, sure, I respect that, and who then continued to not use the right pronouns, and to get annoyed with me for inconveniencing them in one way or another with my gender. The thing that seemed to bring them around best, as far as I could tell, was how little attention I paid to them because I was quietly putting myself through hell with binding, haircuts, trying to hide my tampons, trying to find male shoes that fit, etc.

More than once I had someone kind of carefully and astonishedly say something along the lines of "you really mean this, don't you?," and then any further questions are straight up. They start wanting to know what it's like, and they point out to me how horrible it must be (which lol I just respond in my head, shut up shut up shut up), and they start to really get it.

This is just my experience.

[Mahsa Tezani]

Just say you can't explain it.

Like why gay boys don't marry girls.

[InstantRamen]

I like to tell people, "I'm a guy.  It's just my body developed wrong in the womb and now is a girl's body instead. So I'm a guy with a girl's body."
Sometimes with friends I add, "Can you imagine if that happened to you?  It sucks."  In my experience, people seem to be pretty empathetic when I say it like that.

Also, this is a good idea.  It worked really with coming out to my sister.

sounds like a really good idea actually
-takes into consideration xD-

[justmeinoz]

I have tried explaining that the area of the brain that determines gender identity is constructed differently in men and women, and doesn't run at all well on the hormones of the opposite sex.  Sometimes that area of the brain develops on the wrong track in the womb, and you end up trying to run it on the wrong operating system.  Like a computer it will keep crashing until you upgrade it and change the OS. After that it runs fine.

[King Malachite]

In my personal experience I tried to relate it to something.

I call it forcing a puzzle piece of space into a puzzle that resembles the beach. If you have a 100 piece puzzle that is supposed to represent the beach but one of the pieces is actually a piece of a space puzzle and you force that space piece into the beach puzzle the whole thing will eventually split and everything around changes because of that one piece and thats how I explain it.  Since the mind is diffrent from the body your whole life changes and is revolved around that.

[MaxAloysius]

I usually tell people I have male brain chemistry, but the body of a female. I talk about how a baby progresses in the womb from female to male, and that my mind kept changing but my body was left behind. It's a very simplified version of the truth, but most people understand it a lot better than anything else I could tell them.

[Twin Hammer Tommy]

I will often explain about how I always felt like it was someone else in the mirror until I starting trying to look different.

Also I find most people are thoughtful if you ask them how they would feel if every day they had to deal with people using the wrong pronouns for them.   And it wasn't out of malice, or anything, just that they had to move through the world with every single person relating to them as if they were someone else.  And how jarring and horrible that is.

[GentlemanRDP]

Well, for me, explaining trans wasn't easy. Especially because my father for one has always been pretty Republican. I grew up with him telling me that gays and the like belong in the closet and should never come out for the good of everyone around them. Seriously, I was like eight and he was telling me this kind of stuff. But that's beside the point. Anyway, when it came to me telling him, I just told him that I was a man and that I intended on getting a sex-change one way or another. He already knew what trans was, because of the Chaz Bono stuff all over the TV, thank goodness for that.

But even now that I've been out and openly transitioning for over eight months now, I still get asked, "Wait...what's trans? Does that mean that you have both parts?" Seriously, I get that question a lot, and after I laugh my ass off, I simply reply, "No. What I mean is that I was born into the wrong skin, and since I was, I'm fixing it so that my skin matches the rest of me," I don't know if that kind of description would help you though.

Honestly, I think the description depends on the kind of person. You could have twenty people, explain to all of them at the same time, and have two thirds of them staring at you like, "Was that in English?" Think about the way that different people learn. I don't mean, draw a picture, but say...maybe the people you're dealing with are more logical and statistical, you could talk about it from a biological standpoint. Whereas more creative or non-linear people might connect better if you give them examples of your feelings and the way that it makes you feel to be perceived as a man. I don't know if any of this helps or if I'm just over-analyzing, but regardless, good luck!

[Anon]

Personally, I use a medical matter-of-fact sort of approach, which works well for me.
I start out explaining how the brain has an internal map of your body that it knows what you have and how to control it (this is why people who lose a limb often get that phantom limb feeling), and how my brain literally has a male body map.
If they want to know anything more, I go on to explain how transsexualism is an intersex birth condition, and that 'transition' is simply correcting this so I can live my life normally.

[caseyyy]

This got me thinking about how I actually explain it to people when they ask 'what's trans?' without wanting my whole lecture on sex and gender. I remember at one point I just said to my boss point blank "I'm getting a sex change. I've legally changed my name from X to Y." Lol. And you know, it was honestly the best thing - he had a great response and asked me what, if anything, I would need from him.

[mixie]

As a cisgender who is passionate about transgender issues,  I have actually gotten a few people to completely change their mind and lose their judgements  based on the following example.

Say you had a hermaphrodite baby that was born with both a vagina and a penis and so in the hospital you as the parent made the decision to choose the baby to be a boy or a girl.  So you had a surgery and elected to raise the baby as a girl.  You also gave the child mild hormones that you expected to escalate when the child hit their teens.    After a few years your daughter started telling you  "Mommy (or Daddy) I know I'm a boy.....I feel like a boy"  what would you do?

How would you feel?  Would you feel like "Oh my god I made a huge mistake!"  or would you feel that the child was wrong and insist on raising the child as a girl.

Most people will freak out at the idea that you had both genitals and elected to remove the "wrong one" and it seriously does get a cisgendered person to understand how drastic of an "off" it is, when the outside doesn't match the inside.

That's been one of my most successful examples.   Most people I talk to will then say that it makes sense to stop the hormones and switch to the opposite gender to correct the mistake.


It's important to show the many different examples of ways the body comes out different or wrong rather than diving into solely transgender issues. That makes people realize that it's not so cut and dry when it comes to body matching the mind.

AIS is also a good example.

[Felix]

I once watched a small child and an adult argue in front of me whether I was a he or a she. The little boy kept refusing the lady's correction, and kept insisting that he wanted to know HIS name (while pointing at me) not her name. The woman seemed so nervous and apologetic and tried finally convince the boy by appealing to my daughter ("isn't this your mom?"). My daughter stood silent. I decided to answer the boy, since it was his question anyway. I knelt down and told him that yes I am Leah's mom, but I'm a boy and my name is Felix.

The kid wasn't surprised or confused, and he didn't even play I Told You So with the lady. He just said "Hi Felix, look at this!" and showed me a drawing he'd just done.

I wish I could get that kid to explain things for me.

[wheat thins are delicious]

Say you had a hermaphrodite baby that was born with both a vagina and a penis and so in the hospital you as the parent made the decision to choose the baby to be a boy or a girl.  So you had a surgery and elected to raise the baby as a girl.  You also gave the child mild hormones that you expected to escalate when the child hit their teens.    After a few years your daughter started telling you  "Mommy (or Daddy) I know I'm a boy.....I feel like a boy"  what would you do?

No.

Hermaphodite is not an appropriate term for people, it's a word surrounded with stigma and usually is a source of ridicule.  No intersex people are born with both a vagina and penis, that is just not how intersex conditions work and no one should perpetuate that myth.   

[mixie]

No.

Hermaphodite is not an appropriate term for people, it's a word surrounded with stigma and usually is a source of ridicule.  No intersex people are born with both a vagina and penis, that is just not how intersex conditions work and no one should perpetuate that myth.

I know.  The point of the story is not to discuss hermaphrodite issues.  It's to create a situation that would explain the sort of situation that occurs, the moment of choice.  Generally this argument has been successful for me when discussing the idea of giving hormone blockers to young children.  Some people are morally opposed to that.

So the example gives them a situation where the question was simply  "I made a mistake, the child identifies their gender in a way that doesn't match the outside, what should I do."

I would then go on to explain that the mistake really is the "assignment at birth"  not necessarily anything to do with the child or the physical appearance of the body.


This is also a helpful allegory because many people consider SRS  a genital mutilation.   IOW the body is perfectly healthy there is no reason to change it.  So it's necessary to create a situation where you would have to do a SRS.

I suppose then, if you don't understand how I'm using the allegory,  it would be better to avoid it completely.

[wheat thins are delicious]

But not every trans person has SRS or even feels it necessary for them.  It's not helpful to make cis people, who don't have experience with the trans community, think that it is.  I think there are better ways to explain it to a cis person than the method you are using.