Rating: 5/5, amazing
I started following Mia Violet on Twitter (@OhMiaGod) once I started being more active on Twitter a year or two ago and she consistently posts good stuff, mostly on trans topics but also on mental health and other subjects.
This book is a memoir of Mia’s life from her childhood in a brutal British boarding school to her life as an out trans person working in a white-collar job. It explains her experience of being trans: what it feels like to be trans, how she knew she was trans, how dysphoria feels, and what it feels like to come out and start transitioning.
Mia had an intuition she was a girl from a young age, though she didn’t play with dolls or do typically girly things. When the teacher split the class into boys and girls, she felt that she should be grouped with the girls, but she didn’t know what those feelings meant. Her elementary schoolmates saw her feminine-coded kindness as a positive trait, but her mom and later schoolmates saw it as a sign of weakness because it clashed with gender expectations for boys.
She writes:
“If you don’t know that being trans is even a concept, you’re unlikely to realize there’s a valid reason why you don’t fit in—you just assume the problem is you. All you know is there’s a standard and you’re failing to hit it.”
When I was growing up, we did question gender norms for girls but not for boys. It was okay for girls to be tomboys (as long as they became more feminine after puberty) but in 90s American culture being a feminine boy was always seen as a joke, as okay to ridicule. We didn’t get taught to tolerate differing gender expressions the way we were taught to respect people of other races and cultures. I think and hope this is changing now so kids today don’t have to go through what Mia and many others did back then. We really need to teach kids that it’s okay to not 100% conform to their assigned gender and it’s not okay to bully others for not conforming.
Mia actually realized she was trans when she was 14 and found the trans community on Gaia Online, but her mother’s response to her coming out caused her to go back into the closet until adulthood. Her mother’s idea of trans people was informed by sensationalized depictions in media, so she didn’t accept Mia’s coming out as trans because she didn’t have enough feminine behaviors and interests as a child. One of Mia’s main points in this book is that trans doesn’t have to look a particular way, that there aren’t certain criteria you have to meet to be trans, it’s just something you know intuitively.
She describes how dysphoria made everything feel dull and how giving up on transition sapped her motivation and made even her successes feel hollow. It’s like no matter what you do, if you’re not being authentic to yourself it’s like you’re living someone else’s life and it’s hard to get invested in it.
It took Mia a couple years to come around to the conclusion that she was transgender because her dysphoria was more mild than the media usually portrays:
“I repeatedly told myself that I wasn’t a girl and that everything I was feeling was just a silly personality quirk. I couldn’t be a girl because I simply wasn’t trans enough. In my mind, only stereotypically feminine trans girls chose to transition, ones who grew up with dolls and wept at the sight of their own body. I believed my ambivalence and numb disinterest in myself was proof I didn’t have gender dysphoria.”
She also writes about getting overwhelmed with internet discourse, giving too much emotional support to others that it drains her mental resources, her struggles getting her family to accept her, and her difficulty getting transition care from the British healthcare system.
I don’t want to spoil too much, so I’ll leave it at that, but I highly recommend this book! Mia Violet has such a warm and approachable tone that I think people that aren’t familiar with trans issues will be able to learn a lot and people who are familiar with trans issues will find her perspective interesting.
Here’s the Amazon link if you want to purchase it (it’s totally worth it): https://www.amazon.com/Yes-You-Are-Trans-Enough/dp/1785923153
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