I have been thinking about that a lot lately, the idea that every trans adult was once a trans child. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. But when you sit with what it actually means for real people, for the adults who have come to me over many years carrying decades of something they were never allowed to name, it stops being obvious and starts being a reckoning.
Let me tell you about someone I will call Margaret. She found me in her late fifties, recently retired, recently widowed, and, as she put it, with nothing left to hide behind. She had known, in some wordless, bone-level way, since she was about five years old. Not known in the way she might have articulated it if there had been language available to her, but known in the way a child knows when something is wrong with the map they have been given. Her body did not feel like hers. The clothes she was made to wear felt like a costume. The name she answered to felt like something that belonged to someone else.
She did not have the word transgender. In the late 1960s in a small market town, nobody around her had it either. What she had instead was shame, absorbed so early and so thoroughly that she stopped noticing it was there. She learned to suppress the feeling before she had language to describe what the feeling was. By the time she was a teenager, she had become very good at performing the life that was expected of her. She married. She had children she loved deeply. She built a whole world, and she lived in it as honestly as she could, which was not honestly at all, not about this.
What she described to me was not a lie, exactly. It was more like learning to speak a language that was not your mother tongue, so fluently and for so long that you almost forget there was ever another one. Almost.
The suppression does not disappear. It goes quiet, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. But it waits. For Margaret it surfaced in small ways throughout her life: a persistent sadness she could never quite explain to her doctor, a sense of standing slightly outside herself in photographs, an odd grief when she watched her daughter get dressed for her school prom. She cried that evening and told herself she was just emotional. She was, of course, but not about the prom.
When she came to me, what she needed more than anything was not a diagnosis or a protocol. She needed someone to tell her that she had always been real, that the child who knew had been right, and that it was not too late. I could tell her all three of those things because all three of them are true.
The knowledge that trans children exist, that they have always existed, that they grow into trans adults whether or not anyone around them helps them along the way, is not a modern idea. It is simply a modern visibility. The children who knew in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s did not grow up to stop being trans. They grew up to be trans adults who had spent thirty, forty, fifty years finding ways to survive without support, without language, without anyone reflecting back to them that what they felt was real and not shameful.
Margaret told me that the hardest part was not the transition itself, which she began at sixty-one. The hormones, the slow softening of her face, the new name, the new clothes that finally felt like hers: all of that, she said, felt like coming up for air after a very long time underwater. The hardest part was the grief. Not regret, she was clear about that. Grief for the girl who never got to be, for the decades lived behind a screen, for the conversations she could not have with her mother who had died years before, for the version of herself her children never knew when they were small.
That grief is real and it deserves to be named. But it is not a reason not to start. Margaret would say, and has said to me more than once, that the years she has lived as herself have been the most fully alive she has ever felt. She is in her mid-sixties now. She laughs a lot. She has made new friends who know her only as who she is. Her adult children, after a difficult year, are finding their way towards her.
What I want people to take from Margaret's story, and from the dozens of others like it I have heard over the years, is this: the child who knew was not confused, was not going through a phase, was not influenced by anyone or anything. That child was simply trans, in a world that did not yet have room for them. The adult who finally steps forward, at thirty or fifty or sixty or seventy, is not starting something new. They are finishing something very old.
It is never too late to be yourself. That is not a comforting slogan. It is a clinical fact and a human truth, borne out by the lives of real people who found their way here late and have never, not once, told me they wished they had waited longer.
If there is a topic that you would like me to cover, just let Sammy know.
Dr Helen Webberley, Gender Specialist and Medical Educator.
helenwebberley.com
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