Mattie Schraeder

I hate the term deadname. I hate the images it brings up. I hate the connotations that it has. I hate everything about it. That isn’t to say there’s not a place for it in transgender discourse, or that other transgender people can’t find solace in that same term, images, and connotations. In fact, I still use the term a lot, more so now than when I first came out. It does the job that it’s set out to do, which is to define very succinctly what calling someone who is transgender by their non-preferred name feels like, and why it shouldn’t ever be done. The very term sounds grave, because it is.

Imposter syndrome, according to Wikipedia, is the “concept describing individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud.”” Usually it is a term used in professional contexts, but I can guarantee most, if not all, transgender people experience their own symptoms of imposter syndrome.

The feeling of not truly being the gender they identify with is a struggle that every transgender person must deal with. It begins from the very first moments of questioning one’s gender, and I’m not convinced that it will ever fully go away. I feel like I will always have moments where I question whether I truly count as a woman.

For those of you who don’t know, Code4Lib is a community for information technology in the library industry. The community hosts a yearly conference, this year in Washington, D.C. For the past decade, since I first started working on my open source project C# MARC Editor, I had been eyeing the conference as an experience I would love to participate in but unfortunately would likely never get the opportunity to do so.

I came out to my girlfriend of 3 months, at the time, as questioning my gender. Her reaction was an immediate “what does this mean for me?” and “what does this mean for our relationship?” It was the first time I had spoken my issues out loud, let alone to another human being. I immediately retreated into my closet full of “I could never actually transition” and “I have a career/life/family I can’t possibly be transition” and “I’m too old to transition” and a side dose of “I like girls I obviously can’t be a girl myself because I’m not gay”, reassured her that everything was fine, and we didn’t speak of it again.

I could go on and on about how gender is a social construct, gender identity can be fluid, that gender is a spectrum, and that societal expectations of gender are toxic, but that has all already been written about by far more intelligent and eloquent people than myself. Instead, I’m going to tell my story, and hope that doing so sheds some light on what lead to my not coming out as transgender until I was 32, and why it took me so long to come to the realization of, as well as to terms with, being transgender.