The Lived Experience

I have personally and academically struggled to find an approachable and cogent way to address the "reality" of being transgender in a predominantly cisgender society. I struggle not because I am unable to summon the words, but rather because the words seem to consistently fail to connect with audiences that do not live this peculiar existence. I recently gave a lecture to a group the graduate students in clinical social work at Arizona State University about the experiential nature of being transgender/transsexual in society today. Through the course of that conversation the question of privilege came up.

It’s inevitable that privilege should come up in this discussion because this class full of accomplished scholars struggled, from amidst their vantage point of cisgender privilege, to wrap their minds around how I could feel so profoundly alienated from and within my own body and wish to repair that fundamental mismatch between consciousness and physical embodiment. From that evolved, a thoughtful and nuanced discussion building toward a more complete understanding of cisgender assumption and cisgender privilege:

To wit, cisgender assumption (vis-à-vis the transgender experience) can be defined as:

The assumption that other people experience their intrinsic and subconscious sense of gender identity in the same way you experience yours . . .

From that erroneous assumption, you experience no impediment to projecting your cisgenderism upon others . . .

Finally, assuming that, because you do not experience gender dissonance that it doesn’t exist. However, if you concede that it does, from your point of view the only reasonable explanation for it must be psychopathology.

Once they stepped out of their old paradigm, they were better able to incorporate (some more empathically than others) a clearer understanding of the "workings" of cisgender privilege.


The notion that cisgender attributes are generally and uncritically assumed to be “natural” and thus “normal.”

Further, that if an individual’s lived experience is not appropriately defined by “gender normative” models, then that experience is deemed invalid, “unnatural” and “abnormal.”

Assuming that the male/female gender binary provides an accurate and comprehensive model of gender identity.


It was a productive discussion that I hope left a few future clinical social workers with a better understanding than they arrived with that evening. To conclude I shared with them my intrinsic truth and the lived experience of having transitioned gender. The sublime reality of being “whole” is an experience that transcends and indeed frustrates labels like “male or female-identified.” If I were to speculate, it may be that the elusive feeling of wholeness and completeness is what, standing in the hallway between male and female, eludes many in seeking to understand our motivations as transpeople for undertaking gender transition in the first place.

I described it to the students this way:

Perhaps my brain now finally “sees” clearly, what it has always expected to see, a congruently “female” form complete and connected to a complex sensory system that perceives the world, and is in turn perceived by the world, in fundamental harmony with an innately “female” consciousness. Are various aspects of my physical embodiment essentially prosthetics? Certainly, yet in the primitive, ancient places of the brain where innateness and idenity resides – it is sufficient and there is a measure of peace . . . at last.

To conclude, I left them with this thought:

Respect the expressed identities and lived experiences of other individuals – resist the temptation to overlay your assumptions upon them.

Check your own privilege and challenge the notion that there is some terrible hidden cost to you for failing to uphold a raft of socially and morally suspect assumptions about other human beings.

In short – get used to asking yourself the honest question – What’s it to me?


Renee Thomas ©2009 All Rights Reserved