This morning I woke up to the news that Graham Linehan, the writer behind Black Books, The IT Crowd, and Father Ted, was arrested at Heathrow Airport for advocating violence against trans people — specifically, saying that trans women who use women’s public restrooms should be “kicked in the balls.”

It’s kind of weird going through his X feed. It’s full of stuff I’ve seen before: pictures of trans women captioned “they’re men, i can’t believe more people can’t see that” and other random anti-trans invective.

And I get it, I really do. I had a lot of trouble coming to terms with the rise of trans-openness in the last couple of decades. I wasn’t at all ready for transness to go mainstream.

Of course, I had a reason not to be ready.

One of the ideas that transphobes have the most problems with is the idea that gender is a performative thing, something you do, and learn to do, rather than something you are. You learn to perform your gender in much the same way that you learn to perform your social class.

Now, a lot of trans people also have issue with that, because part of the idea behind being trans is that you are another gender than the one you were assigned-at-birth, and that by transitioning you’re just becoming who you really are.

I’m not sure that there’s a ton of conflict between these two ideas, but they are very different ways of looking at gender; one is essentialist, the other is fluid.

Like a lot of people who grew up inhabiting the “smart boy” stereotype in a working-class milieu, I got a lot of shit for being smart, for having glasses, for being different. I moved a lot, and moved schools even more, so there were more years where I was the new kid than years where I returned to the same school, and every single time you’re the new kid, the other kids in your new class give you a once-over, looking for things to mess with you about.

Often, this takes the form of just throwing a lot of stuff at you, and then doubling down on the bits that seem to land. On your first day, you might get teased for being too short, too tall, too smart, too stupid, too rich, too poor, too… anything and everything. The second day, you’re going to get teased for being whatever made you cry (or even flinch) the first day.

This creates an interesting feedback loop, because it’s a really effective way of probing someone’s insecurities, getting at the things that are not obvious on the surface. If someone calls you stupid, nerdy, dumb jock, faggot, poor, rich boy, ugly, effeminate, et cetera, and you get angry about getting called a faggot… well, guess what you’re getting called the rest of the year?

The interesting thing is, I didn’t figure this out when I was a kid. I didn’t really figure it out until I watched my own kids interacting on the playground.

The first time I remember wishing i was a girl, I was four years old. There was a girl next door that I played with; we were part of a group of kids on that block, and she was the only girl, and she got treated different, and different in a way that made me feel like I wanted to be like her. My memories of it are really hazy, and obviously I never talked to anybody else about feeling like that, so I can’t get any feedback from people whose memories of that time would be better (I remember getting chased across a field by a turkey when I was three, but that memory has been reinforced by its retelling by adults).

I didn’t have words for ‘trans’ or anything like that; I wouldn’t encounter those ideas until a lot later, and then very unflatteringly. I did get the idea, very, very early, that being a girly boy was super bad.

The thing is, in a lot of the ways that count, I never was a girly boy. I read a lot as a kid — a lot a lot — and on the kind of vast array of topics that come with being undiagnosed ADHD; but also, i was the kid that climbed things and fell off them; i was the kid that got in fistfights; i was the kid who figured out where the loose board was that got you through to the interesting space between the fences. My favorite spot to read a book was sprawled on a branch way up in a tree.

When you’re discerning your transness, one of the thought experiments that gets tossed around is this: If you found an old lamp, and rubbed it, and a genie came out and granted you three wishes, would one of your wishes be to be the opposite gender?

If the answer is yes… well, you might be a trans person.

I had this idea that *real* trans people were, you know, recognizable. There was a kid at my tiny, backwards, redneck high school who was exactly what I thought of a trans woman as being: an effeminate boy who hung out with the girls at lunch and was really, really well groomed. There’s this idea in the culture that the *real* you will shine through, that you will be *recognized* as your true self, somehow.

I kept getting teased about being too effeminate, even though I was not at all effeminate, because I kept flinching when it happened. I always responded with an internal inventory: What can I do to be more manly-seeming? How do I get more buff? How do I keep people from seeing the girl in me?

And, honestly, I got really good at it. I played football in high school; I learned martial arts; I habitually let my fists do the talking when someone got too close to my gender issues.

As an adult, I’ve moved firmly out of the lower-middle/working-class spaces I grew up in and into spaces where everyone’s college educated, everybody has trauma from having gotten called a nerd when they were a kid, all of us flinch when someone yells.

It’s easy for me to be the most manly person in the room here. All I have to do is loom a little, show a bit of the rage I was trained to keep like a pitbull on a leash, let my accent slip a bit.

Anyway, when the whole trans thing started to get mainstream, 2008 or so maybe, it made me uncomfortable. I couldn’t have told you why it did, exactly; I had the whole “inner girl” thing firmly compartmentalized, pushed into little boxes that only got opened for sexual fantasies or very well-partitioned online alternate identities.

When I was 18, I was invited to a Halloween party, and in typical fashion I hadn’t put any thought whatsoever into a costume, so me and my friend dropped in at my girlfriend’s apartment and basically raided her wardrobe, going full dress-up. My friend looked amazing; he was built like Bowie and could move just the right ways and even with short hair, he looked sexy as fuck.

I, on the other hand, looked… well, I looked like an offensive lineman in a dress.

Part of it was that my friend was putting on a fun, camp role, whereas I was probing for an underlying truth that didn’t match my outward self, so I ended up accidentally emphasizing the exact things I should have been downplaying, if you see what I’m saying.

We went to the party — my girlfriend had to work that night, so she didn’t come along, just watched bemused while we ransacked her closet — and everybody thought our costumes were hilarious, and for all the reasons you’d think. A woman friend of ours snapped a photo of us together, and said, “Oh my God, you’re so masculine that putting a dress on you makes dresses look more manly.”

The girlfriend whose dress I was wearing didn’t last, but the girl who’d taken that picture… well, several years later, I married her. And that picture ended up framed in my living room for a lot of the time we were married.

Twenty-five years later, toward the end of that marriage, we were at another party, and a friend of ours came out as trans, and everybody gathered around and showered her with positive affirmation and all the women pulled her into the women’s room and gave her an impromptu makeover, and she looked, honestly, amazing. My then-wife was one of the women who led that.

And all I could feel was rage. I was so angry about it. Angry at the woman who had come out, angry at my wife, angry at everything, and I couldn’t, at the time, have told you why I was so angry about it.

The thing about strong emotions — at least, my strong emotions — I tend to feel them first, and then figure out what they mean later. Sometimes there’s an intuitive, immediate sense of what the connection is, and sometimes that sense is right, but a lot of therapy has taught me that that immediate knowledge of what is making me angry, what is making me said, what is making me happy, that’s a guess on the part of my subconscious, and it’s not always right. The sequence is like:

See something -> connect the thing with an idea -> make an emotional connection to the idea -> feel the feeling caused by that emotional connection -> decide what the feeling means -> act

And that’s if I’m lucky; sometimes there’s no “decide” in there at all, and it goes right from “feel the feeling” to “act” without ever passing through any sort of conscious review process.

That party wasn’t the first time I’d felt helplessly angry about the growing mainsteam-ness of trans people and trans identities, but it was the first time I saw a direct throughline between that party when I was 18 and that party when I was 40-mumble and how my wife had seen me versus how my wife saw our newly-out friend, and it made me really, really uncomfortable, that throughline, because it was really the first time I thought, in a conscious way, about the fact that I might be a trans woman.

I’m the right age that when the “Alt Right” started to be a thing, it was not just that it was conservative ideas wrapped in hip language. It was my dad’s voice, saying the words that might have convinced me of the rightness of his ideas, as though someone had evesdropped on our conversations during long drives in his pickup and somehow translated what he had to say — all the rush limbaugh inspired libertarian nonsense you’d expect from a man who’d never felt as though he’d come anywhere near to living up to his potential while simultaneously being angrily downwardly mobile to get back at a father who’d been dead since before I was born — it was like someone had translated all that into words and phrases that resonated with me the way 90s punk rock had resonated with me.

A bunch of things in my life conspired to save me from falling into that rabbit hole. Good friends to talk things out with, a lefty city that provided a constant counterpoint refrain, kids who my ex-wife managed to send to a woke school, they all combined to keep me from being that guy.

But I can see that guy from where I was in those days. I can see where I might’ve ended up if I hadn’t managed to pull up on the wheel when I did. As it was, there were people I alienated enough that we don’t talk anymore, even though I’ve fully come around and they were some of the reason why.

So when someone like Graham Linehan turns out to be a transphobe — I get it, really I do.

It’s a cliche, the whole “x-phobic person who turns out to be x” thing. And there’s a reason that cliches are cliches. I’m not at all saying that Graham Linehan or JK Rowling or Ilan Musk are secretly trans and that’s why they’re so awful about it.

It is easy to feel like my secret transness was exactly that kind of contributing factor; on the other hand, the fact that I eventually was able to surface all that stuff, to realize that how I felt was to do with stuff that’d been hurting for so long I’d forgotten it was pain and just experienced it as “how things are” — some of that is why I didn’t end up being Graham Linehan.

I mean, that and the incredible writing talent and the fame and fortune.

When you’re a weird kid, it’s hard to avoid internalizing the stuff that gets said about you. I think that even if I hadn’t been secretly trans, I might have still flinched at being called faggot, girly, soft, because it was stuff my dad focused so hard on beating out of me. I am pretty sure that he was concerned that I was too sensitive, too book-ish, too prone to living in my own little fantasy universe, and he was sure right about that, and he wanted to make sure that I wasn’t beaten up for being a nerd.

He needn’t have worried, not really. Like 75% of fantasy novels turns out to be about the necessity of being able to kick the shit out of your enemies, even the girly ones.

But nerdy young men who aren’t secretly trans are still going to get called faggot because they read a novel on the playground. They’re still going to flinch, because that’s something their dad ragged them about. And then when they grow up and become middle aged men with rage issues, they’re not going to have that little hidden corner that forces a little bit of reflection onto them.

They’re going to find some success, and they’re going to feel like, hey, fuck those guys that picked on me, I’m better than them anyhow, because I found my own way, my college educated, socially valuable way, and people think I’m more successful than those muscleheads anyhow. And they’re going to find their way to feeling normal and part of that normal is to construct an ideal of how the world should be and to see your place in it, and it is very, very easy to see someone else doing it wrong as being threatening to your precarious sense of having found your way to not feel like that little bookish kid who got called a faggot.

I’m going to wrap up here, and probably go play with makeup while I watch something girly, because it turns out that there’s a lot of girly stuff I was very careful not to show interest in while I was trying to make sure everybody knew I wasn’t a faggot like that kid in third grade said I was.

I hope this finds you well and helps you along.