“I still hate that I just want to be everyone else.”

Max Pechstein

Anyone else have a kinda weak sense of self?

There's very little that I know about myself. Not info things like where I'm from or bad things like my mental health stuff or minor things like my favorite color. But like things that truly matter.

Part of it is probably other issues, but part of it is definitely a gender thing. When I came out as not a girl, I went from feeling like a thing to feeling like a person, and that was the first time I truly asserted my identity at all. It's since continued getting better from there, and I've been chasing what makes me feel good because it makes me feel like I have a stronger sense of self. When I wear clothes I like, and have a haircut I like, and generally take steps to assert my gender, I feel more like someone. The biggest source of my dysphoria is my name (or lack of one), as I feel like I have no name, just things people call me, and I feel like I'd be someone if I had a name.

I feel like I just mirror everything around me and wear masks to be perceived how I want to be perceived, and a part of that is projecting onto characters I identify with. It took me a while to figure out that despite being allegedly NB, most of my "kin" list was male characters. I literally figured it out because I looked at Siffrin from In Stars And Time and his he/they swag and was like "I want your gender". Which was a fun discovery, but I still hate that I just want to be everyone else. Not even having my own cute mental image of myself in my head is enough to make me feel like someone -just makes me feel like a fictional character, because "me" as I imagine myself to be doesn't exist yet, and so it's just another selfsona.

Any other trans people have this problem? What can be done about it?

Like so many girls who come out as trans, she opens with a heartbreaking expression of what it’s like to struggle with feeling like a human subject, not a sexual or decorative object: “When I came out as not a girl, I went from feeling like a thing to feeling like a person.”

But what stands out most to me is her hunger after meaning. She has a weak sense of self because she is “chasing what makes me feel good” through clothes and haircuts and other attempts to change how the world perceives her. To be fair to her, she comes right out and says this—“I feel like I just mirror everything around me and wear masks to be perceived how I want to be perceived”—though she doesn’t quite connect the mirroring and masking to her (frustrated) attempts to find meaning and legibility through the medium of gender. “I still hate that I just want to be everyone else.”

These girls don’t just want to become someone else, they want to become somebody at all. They’re grasping for templates that don’t wound and offend them. They’re trying on masks, looking for the one that will create the right impression and secure the right kind of recognition. In other words, they’re engaged in the developmental process of identity formation—but only in the most superficial sense of the term, working from the outside in, cutting themselves off not just from the reality of their sex but from their actual interests and inclinations, which are reduced to props that either undermine or support the gender they want to project.

After “help me manage my doubts and cognitive dissonance,” “tell me how to enact my authentic self” is the second-most popular genre on trans Reddit.

Thus, a straight woman asks: How to sound gay?

Another poster asks: “How do I dress masculine?” She says she “really need[s] a bit of euphoria” and figures that if she “dress[ed] more masucline” that would “probably help.” But she doesn’t know how to dress masculine. So how can she dress masculine so that she can experience the euphoria that comes from… not following her own individual likes and dislikes? Redditors talk about the conflict between “wanting to be me vs. passing”—in which being seen as they wish (being read as either male or trans, not female) requires them to override their preferences:

I have a “girly” (i guess) sense of style and i have a girly way of talking. I wanna talk like myself but i also wanna sound masculine. I wanna dress like myself but i wanna be seen as a man. I guess I’m just looking for advice for how to be an alt man that still passes?

They wonder what it takes to be a boy. Or fret about not being “‘boy’ enough.” They wonder what boys talk about, so they can talk about the right things, rather than just saying the things they want to say. They speculate about what boys do when they hang out with each other, so they can fill their time with the right activities and hobbies, regardless of personal interest.

Unfortunately—by embracing gender as the source of identity, meaning, and belonging—they adopt a way of life that demands extensive and unrelenting self-falsification. No wonder so many report feeling like frauds, fakes, or imposters.