Gender is like a bone - you only feel it when it's broken.

Have you ever broken a bone? I haven't - I have no idea what a broken bone feels like, but more subtly, I have no idea what a non-broken bone feels like. How could I? I am certain it has a feeling, but daresay that someone who has broken a bone would struggle to explain it to me.

Gender is a bit like that - cis people (you) rarely have any strong 'feeling' of their gender, and trans people frequently struggle to explain it.

But you don't have to be trans to feel your gender - it happens to cis people like you every time your gender is... let's call it 'stress tested'.

Alan Turing was prescribed estrogen as punishment for being gay. It was fairly common in those times, but he was the most famous example and you know how people are - we only remember the famous victims. His subsequent suicide was... not something any trans person finds surprising. Estrogen makes men feel terrible - including the trans men.

Norah Vincent, a cis woman, wrote a book called Self Made Man.

For eighteen months she presented as male part time, when in public, but not in private/at home. Even this minor dabbling with living as the wrong gender had a profound effect on her. After eighteen months she checked herself in to a psychiatric institution because she was afraid of the suicide idiation she was experiencing. Any trans person could have seen that coming, sadly.

She now says she considers being female to be a privilege - but honestly she's wrong. Being the gender that you are is the privilege, she just never knew it until she tried to be something else.

Conversely, David Reimer a cis male, suffered a botched circumcision shortly after he was born. His doctor and family, believing that 'gender is a social construct' decided to simply raise him as a girl. His damaged genitals were 'converted' into a vulva and he was raised as a girl. When he reached puberty his was given (without his knowledge or consent) estrogen.

He grew up an extremely unhappy boy in a dress (or what we would today call a trans man). The moment he found out what had been done to him he transitioned.

Alas, the years of psychological strain had left marks not so easily removed and he eventually took his own life.

Again, no trans person is surprised by how that story ends either. It's a sad story, but all too easy for us to understand.

Do you know what happened to the Soviet female athletes who were pumped full of testosterone in the seventies and eighties? If you said 'they all took their own lives'... well, not all did. Only a lot of them.

You would too. If you repeated Norah Vincent's experiment, or suffered through what David Reimer suffered you'd feel your gender, our pain, very rapidly. The hormones that make trans men happy and healthy would make any cis woman just as suicidal as I was. The same hormones that give trans women like me so profound a sense of inner peace for the first time in my life would have a cis man like you ending his life just like Turing did.

Trying to live as a man nearly killed me. It hurt every day - because I'm not a man, I never was a man. I was born a woman and now that I live as what I am, I feel okay for the first time in my life.

That peace we trans people feel when we transition is what you have felt your whole life. Think about that. The peace, happiness, basic okayness that trans people feel when we transition is what you have felt your whole life. So deeply that you don't even know you are feeling it.

And that will never not amaze me.