Nicola Sian Frater and Lin Gould are participants in the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, the leading global resource empowering lesbians and queer women to date wisely and love well, and Ruth Schwartz is the Academy director.

This conversation emerged from a written conversation sparked by the trailer for the new movie Every Body, in which intersex people share their experience.

Ruth: I wonder whether the movie also makes space to talk about the experience of being genderqueer, gender expansive, non-binary, or transgender, even when there is not a physically documentable “intersex” medical reality, or at least not one that we can currently identify?

Nicola: When I first began my exploration of my trans identity, the way I wanted to describe how I felt was that I was “intersex inside.” I still feel a bit like that retain the “them” in my “she/them” pronouns to own my non-binary-ness along with identifying as a woman

Lin: I have always felt clearly female and secure in my body. And for a long time I thought, “Didn’t lots of us work so that genders could be expanded? Why can’t someone be happy being a kind of sensitive cool man, what is this big deal with GENDER?”

It’s still an interesting question for me but I come at this never having had any question about my gender. But I have taught people who were formerly young men, and were incredibly unhappy. We were all terrified that they were suicidal, and it turns out that they actually were suicidal every day. Now it has been staggering to me to meet them again as absolutely female, happy adults.

My initial feeling about trans women was, Well, right, they grow up white cis straight guys with all this privilege and move into/invade MY world of lesbians??? But in fact, nothing could be further than the truth. Both of these kids were utterly miserable as boys, and did their best to stand up for those who were bullied around them. And it is amazing to know them now as shining lights.

Not that their lives are easy! Both of them had their entire families disown them. The reason I know them now is that they’ve chosen to live back in this community, where I taught them, which is rural and not easy. There are plenty of open-minded people too – it helps that this is a gorgeous resort area and cool people do move here and are willing to be under employed in order to live here. But, there are significant local redneck holdouts. And now these trans young women are LIVING their lives, not blindly/barely/day to day questionably enduring them.

Nicola: Lin, the question you asked when you were struggling to accept people like me was the same question that kept me from accepting myself as a woman for so long. I studied gender at university. I joined the “men’s movement” that worked so hard to help men leave toxic masculinity behind and create new masculinities.

And then when I first began to think I might be trans I read Jungian books on masculinity and femininity which speak of every man having a feminine soul and every woman having a masculine soul. In fact, Jung himself identified, I think, around five feminine structures in the male psyche.

All this did was confuse me and delay my acceptance of the truth, that this was somehow different from all of that. That until I accepted I was a woman embodied in this male form, my body itself – the body that I had separated from as a child — would not let me back in. It is a strange thing, but many of my trans friends identify with it – my sense of my core embodied self, locked safely away in the deepest core part of my body, somewhere near that center line where one’s chakras are located. My body kept out my mind self, the only self I knew for 60 years, until I was ready to accept I was a woman.

This is why, for me, the tidy distinctions between “sex” (the male intersex female spectrum) and “gender” (the socials roles we construct for those assigned a particular sex at birth) do not work. They do not make sense of my experience.

I experience my womanhood in my body which is male in form. I feel female. I even feel female in that part of my body that led the midwife to call out, “You have another bonny boy, Mrs. Frater.” Being transgender is an embodied experience.

And then, just to mess with my head further, I open my mouth and speak from my mind and heart in this male voice and, sometimes, I feel like a man! Sometimes I misgender myself. I’ll do something silly and say, “Oh you silly boy.” So, nothing about this is tidy. It is messy and paradoxical and confusing. Yet at core, when I came out publicly as a trans woman, that was the beginning of experiencing what it feels like to be truly happy in my own being. That is the core reality for me. The rest is detail.

Lin: Yes. I could not believe the difference in both my students. They truly are, now, who they are. They shine. I’ll never know this experience from the inside but I do know what it looks like.

Ruth: I love this conversation! I think it’s so valuable to have a conversation between a cis and trans lesbian in which both of you are acknowledging complexity and in which you, Lin, are describing your movement of learning and acceptance – and you, Nicola, your challenge of self-acceptance. I think more people need to hear this!

FYI, my ex, who is now named Max but was formerly Michelle, who transitioned female to male, would agree with a lot of what both of you said. He worked hard for decades to accept himself as female – he followed feminist protocol of trying to love and accept his body just the way it was, but even through years of that, he couldn’t do it. Then when he transitioned, he experienced enormous relief. But I think he would also relate to your description, Nicola, of being “intersex inside.” He says he is still both genders but it feels more right to wear the male on the outside rather than vice versa.

My current girlfriend grew up feeling like a boy, dressing in boy’s clothes, doing boy’s activities whenever possible. She was heartbroken to be shut out of Cub Scouts. She found an old Cub Scouts uniform at a thrift store and would wear it every day after school. She was devastated to be told she couldn’t play baseball, because girls weren’t allowed. And, little girls who thought she was a boy were always falling in love with her. Once, she tried to tell one of them that she was a girl, and the girl honestly didn’t believe her.

So her experience living between genders was very difficult, and she says if she were a kid today, she is sure she would transition to male. But that wasn’t an option when she was young. She didn’t know anyone trans until she was in her thirties. At the time, she seriously entertained the possibility of transitioning. She bound her breasts and used “he/him” pronouns for a while. It was easy for her to pass. But then she found she didn’t like being a man among men. She wanted to get to be a woman among women.

She went to the Michigan Women’s Music Festival for many years, and there she found role models, cool butch women who were doing butch things with their shirts off and their breasts showing. They embodied female masculinity and gave her a sense that there were people like her. There was someone she could become. So then she decided not to become a man. She realized she didn’t have body dysphoria, she had social role dysphoria, and she didn’t want to change her body because of it.

She admits that then for a while she thought if transitioning wasn’t right for her, it couldn’t be right for anyone. But then she realized that some people did feel terrible dysphoria within their bodies, and felt “right” as men in a way that she didn’t. She now says that she’s very grateful to trans men for the sense of freedom and acceptance she feels within her butch female body. She wouldn’t have gotten here without them.

So it’s really true: there is no one answer for everyone. Gender really is complex. Many of us are more than just one thing or the other. But some of us can find a sense of home in the gender we got assigned, and others can’t.

Personally I feel agender, beyond an experience of gender. I don’t have dysphoria about my female body, and I’m fine with women’s clothes. I present like a very cis woman. Yet if someone came to me and said “Tomorrow we’re making you a man, and you’ll get to live out the rest of your life that way,” I’d say, “Cool! That sounds like fun!” (Well, except that my girlfriend might not like it.) I have no sense that I “am” a woman, or am not a woman. It feels like I’m fine with wearing the female “costume” that I was assigned, and I’d be fine with a costume change, because my soul is really agender, beyond gender.

I deeply appreciate that the Conscious Girlfriend Academy is a place where lesbians and queer women get to have conversations like this!