Welcome to #TransTuesday! This week we’re talking about something that permeates ALL of our society in all kinds of ways you probably never realized. It’s also part of what took me far too long to untangle in figuring out I was transgender, and that’s: THE FALSE DICHOTOMY.
So what is a false dichotomy? Well a dichotomy is any two things presented as opposites (left and right, up and down). A FALSE dichotomy is a situation where those two options are presented as the ONLY options, or as being mutually exclusive, when that’s not remotely the truth.
It’s like going to your favorite Mexican restaurant and your friend telling you they only have tacos and burritos, maybe because that’s all they like or all they’ve ever tried. But the actual menu has enchiladas and quesadillas and tamales and tostadas and more.
That is, of course, a pretty benign (if culinarily cruel!) example. And this may seem obvious to a lot of you, and it is to me now, but our society LOVES false dichotomies.
Because it’s shorthand, it provides for quick reference, and everything is much easier for you to think about if there’s only two options. But also because our entire society is predicated on the notion of the false cis binary matrix. There is A or Z and nothing in between.
You can see in my thread on TERFs that even biological sex isn’t remotely confined to only two options. Not by a long shot. There’s a lot of great science linked in that thread, so definitely have a look if you missed it.
But today’s post isn’t about sex or gender, at least not on the surface. I’m a woman, so some might see that as part of a binary choice, but I’m a TRANS woman which is certainly not the same as a cis woman. Thus I am outside the cisgender binary matrix of society.
The earliest I can remember society’s preference for false dichotomies happened pretty young, when I was in grade school. And if any place is about trying to put every kid into some neat little box, that’s sadly a lot of our public schools.
So let’s just get it out there: I’m a nerd. I am a giant, shining, sparkling, unrepentant nerd (you may have noticed!). From the first time I understood what science fiction was, I was in IN. LOVE.
I spent my time wrapped in Star Trek and Star Wars and every bit of sci-fi I could find. Fantasy, too. I was DEEP into Dungeons & Dragons and a lot of other tabletop role-playing games (and still am!) and even as a KID, invented my own ttrgps on multiple occasions.
I went to two different high schools, and at the first I was on the competitive chess team and I was pretty damned good. I even have Unbelievable Chess Tournament Stories (I told you I was a nerd). At my second high school, I was on the Academic Team.
THE ACADEMIC TEAM. The very name reeks of nerdiness, damn. If you’re unfamiliar with that, it’s basically schools playing Jeopardy against each other. I was never good enough to make it to the main team rotation, my memory wasn’t good or fast enough, but I loved it anyway.
I love video games and comic books (long before they reached the mainstream cultural saturation they have today) and board games, and if there was anything kids thought of as nerdy, I was probably a big fan.
Now that I’ve painted you a stunning picture of the depth of my geekitude, I’m gonna throw a whole bucket of paint all over it, because: I also loved sports. A LOT. Especially baseball.
Not just in the nerdy aspect, either, which baseball admittedly lends itself to with all of its entirely ludicrous and deep statistical tracking… which is maybe the only part of baseball that hardly interests me. Beyond batting average and ERA, sorry, I just. Don’t. Care.
But the sport itself I LOVED. I played it every summer as a kid in little league and couldn’t wait for it to start up every year. I honestly can’t remember if I was very good or not. I remember a couple amazing plays I made, those stuck with me, but that doesn’t tell you much.
I also played soccer, and this one I know I was pretty good at. I played tennis and volleyball (I LOVED volleyball, maybe the sport I was the best at) and I was on the track and cross country teams.
I was SO DISMAYED to find out my first high school, which was HUGE… did not have a volleyball team. Or rather, they did. FOR GIRLS. But not for boys. That definitely didn’t help my pining to be a girl, by the way! 👀
My second high school had a boy’s volleyball team, I think? I can’t remember now. Because by then I was already giving up on sports, and I’ll tell you why.
I was never, EVER a jock. The jocks never thought I was, and they were all basically jerks so I never wanted to be one anyway. They knew I was into nerdy stuff, because I never hid it, and they made me suffer for it.
So in my first high school, freshman year, I went to baseball tryouts! I was SO EXCITED. I was number 66, we had to have it on our shirts somehow, and I ruined a perfectly good shirt by drawing the number on it in sharpie all fancy-like.
I’d never really been attached to any numbers like a lot of other athletes were, but now maybe I would be! This was MY number! The one that got me into high school baseball and then maybe college baseball and who knows maybe I’d be good enough to go pro someday!
The day of the tryouts came… and it rained. No big deal, they’d just shift it to another day, right? No. Again, the school was HUGE. I don’t know if it was logistical or the baseball program was just run by dickheads, but they went ahead with it… INDOOR.
They moved it into the huge gymnasium. We did stretches and got warmed up, and then… what? What the hell were they going to do? We were in a gym! You can’t play baseball in a high school gym, even a pretty big one.
Well, they lined us up and… hit us some ground balls, and judged us on how well we fielded them.
Now I don’t know about you, but I played baseball on dirt and grass. I was… a kid. I’d never played on an artificial surface before, much less A HARD WOODEN FLOOR THAT NOBODY IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD EVER PLAY BASEBALL ON (yes, I’m still sensitive about it. apparently.)
So the coach hit the ball, and… I missed it. Entirely. Wasn’t even close. Because I had NO IDEA how a baseball would bounce off a polished wooden floor, and it went a way I didn’t expect.
That was it! Failed that test, off you went. Done. That was my ENTIRE tryout for the team. There were probably hundreds of kids there, I know they had to cut the field down somehow, but COME ON.
To say I was heartbroken is an understatement. The jocks all laughed. They somehow did fine! How? What dark magic did they use to get their ground balls to bounce right toward them while mine skewed left at a 75 degree angle?
Maybe I wasn’t actually good enough to make the team, and that’d be fine, but I never even got to find out. Everyone said it was because I was a nerd and just not cut out for sports… despite my love for them and having played baseball all my life.
And the awful sickening thing is I BELIEVED THEM. Because it wasn’t just the jocks telling me that, was it? SOCIETY says you’re a jock or a nerd (or maybe just someone who’s neither), but nobody is BOTH. That’s not how it works.
I was WELL into adulthood before I got fed up and re-embraced my love of sports right alongside my nerdiness. That happened long before I figured out I was trans, yet it feels like it was a big part of it.
Because I had to get to a point where I believed society was wrong and could go screw itself, and I was going to like whatever I liked. Relatedly, there’s no such thing as a “guilty pleasure.” Don’t believe that crap. Like what you like. Who cares what anyone else thinks!
Unless your guilty pleasure is, like… bigotry or murder. In that case, no, maybe don’t embrace those.
But once you notice false dichotomies, you begin seeing them everywhere. Men are muscular, women are soft! Except no, men can be soft and women can be muscular. I’M a muscular woman! I’ve always dug ladies with muscles, but society isn’t often kind to them, is it?
For more on that, see the Trans Tuesday on BODY HACKING and all the ways every human does it, and how for me a big part of that was using exercise to reshape my body.
So I bucked the trend there, too. I do the same with my taste in music! Well wait, you can like “real” rock or you can like “fluffy” pop, not both right? Nah, screw that.
I like Journey, The Rolling Stones, Guns ‘n Roses, Fall Out Boy, All Time Low. I LOVE Muse and The Pretty Reckless and AC/DC. But I also like Taylor Swift, Lizzo, Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Carly Rae Jepsen. I LOVE Ariana Grande and The Chicks…
In thinking about it, I’ve wondered if this is also why my favorite artists are P!nk and Queen… because both can ROCK THE HELL OUT, and both can go light and poppy, and both often experiment with all kinds of styles in between.
They defy convention. They won’t be put into neat little boxes. That speaks to me a lot. P!nk specifically, as a woman, has had to deal with a music industry that tried to change her, that didn’t understand her.
She had an extended moment in her recent Beautiful Trauma tour, a video package during an extensive costume change, that covered her talking to her young daughter about this and it hit me like a ton of bricks.
The first time I saw that bit, in 2018, it was like a jolt that shook me awake. I think it was that concert, and possibly that exact moment, where I first truly felt everything would be okay if I transitioned. There’s a Trans Tuesday all about that coming up.
P!nk’s and Queen’s songs and voices speak to me most, but I don’t think I can discount how important it is to see part of myself reflected in the ways they value their own creative expression, and the way they will be whoever the hell they want to be.
All of this is to say you can like sports AND sci-fi. You can like rock AND pop. You can like buff ladies and soft bois and every type of human in between. You can like leather AND lace. Hot AND cold. Indoors AND outdoors. The sky AND the sea.
Don’t buy into the false dichotomy, it’s all bullshit. Don’t let society tell you who you are or what you can or cannot like.
Be YOU, whoever that might be. Even if that means casting off every single label society has saddled you with, INCLUDING THE GENDER YOU WERE ASSIGNED AT BIRTH.
Rock on, friends. 🤘
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com
me with long curly brown hair and curly bangs, with a pink bow in my hair, in dark eyeliner and light pink lipstick, wearing pink-framed cat-eye glasses and a blue off-the-shoulder top… and I’m throwin’ up the horns!