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At almost every step of their transition, Rae McDaniel’s inner monologue haunted them: Were they putting it on? Were they being “extra”? And though they were always met with the same answer – no! – the nagging doubt didn’t disappear. Eventually, Rae would learn to accept this uncertainty as a part of the journey and simply measure whether their decisions brought them closer to a life of true authenticity.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:06
Hi, my name is Rae McDaniel. I’m from Chicago, Illinois.
00:10
I was in a place in my life about four or five years ago where I was really questioning
00:16
a lot about my gender identity and expression. I stood in front of the mirror one day and
00:21
I put a binder on and I immediately panicked. What if everybody thought that I was a fake?
00:29
I was a therapist. I worked with a ton of trans clients and I was terrified that all
00:36
of my clients, all of my colleagues, everybody in my community was going to think that I
00:42
was putting on and appropriating a trans persona because I thought that it would get me more
00:48
clout at work.
00:49
I didn’t know whether or not I identified as non-binary at that point. I just knew that
00:56
I really liked the look of a flat chest. So I took the binder off. I put the binder back
01:02
on. And this entire cycle probably repeated two or three times every time that I wanted
01:08
to wear a binder for about six months. And eventually I got more comfortable with it.
01:14
I got more comfortable choosing day-to-day if wearing a binder was something that I wanted
01:20
to do. And as I got more comfortable with that, other things about my gender identity
01:26
and expression kept coming up.
01:29
I was sitting on the couch with my girlfriend at the time. My head was laying on her chest.
01:35
And I very shyly said that I had been thinking about being called Rae instead of Rena, which
01:42
was the… my given name. And a few minutes later, she just casually ended a sentence
01:49
using Rae. And I just remember that feeling in my gut, that feeling in my stomach of butterflies.
01:58
So I started to tell a few of my close friends about it and slowly started inching my way
02:05
into telling more and more people that I was just trying out the name Rae to see if I liked
02:12
it better. As other people started calling me Rae, specifically my close friends, it
02:18
got really awkward. Their voice would go up about an octave because it was new to them.
02:23
It was new to me. I think they were probably nervous about it. I realized that that discomfort
02:29
that I was feeling was probably a little bit of both mine and theirs, but over time it
02:36
dissipated.
02:37
And over time, it started to feel more and more right. So one day I just kind of said
02:43
Fuck it out of the blue and I posted on Facebook that I wanted to be called Rae. I changed
02:49
my name on Facebook. Nothing bad happened in my business. It was totally fine. Everybody
02:55
was very chill about it. And Rae now just feels like my name.
03:01
Around the time that I got comfortable with my name, I started realizing that I was fantasizing
03:07
more about starting low-dose T. I just wanted to see if taking T would make me feel just
03:14
a little bit more comfortable in my own body. So my brain, of course, kicked up thinking,
03:21
you know, Is that enough? Is it enough to take T as someone who’s non-binary without
03:28
a clear transition plan? Was I being extra? Was I hopping on some trend of identifying
03:35
as non-binary so about?
03:38
A year and a half ago, I just had another “Fuck it” moment. I went to the local
03:44
LGBTQ health center and got a prescription for testosterone gel. I didn’t really see
03:51
any results with the gel because it was pretty low-dose, but I did notice that I liked the
03:57
process of it. So eventually I got on testosterone auto-injectors instead, and really started
04:04
to see a really tangible change in my body. I started noticing that I could feel my voice
04:10
in my chest, and I really loved that.
04:13
Now I remember the first time that somebody mentioned that my voice had shifted. It was
04:20
one of my closest friends and we hopped on the phone after not having talked on the phone
04:24
for a couple of months. And the first thing that they said was, Oh my God, your voice!
04:30
Over time though, people have stopped commenting on my voice first thing. They’ve gotten used
04:35
to hearing it a little bit more. And it feels just a little bit more me.
04:41
I’ve also waffled for about four or five years about whether or not I wanted to get top surgery.
04:49
I got a genetics test to see if I had the BRCA gene, which is the gene that causes breast
04:54
cancer. And the reason I got it was a little bit of hope, which sounds strange, but hope
05:03
that I had it so that I would have a legitimate medical reason for getting top surgery. And
05:10
I didn’t have it and I remember feeling a little bit disappointed about that.
05:16
Also about three and a half, four years ago, I decided that I wanted to get a tattoo chest
05:23
piece, like a pretty big one that covers my entire chest. I remember saying to the person
05:28
that I was seeing at the time that this made that decision for me. I was definitely not
05:34
getting top surgery because I couldn’t even bear the thought of my tattoo getting messed
05:40
up.
05:41
I had for years kept this pro and con list in my head of, you know, here are the cons
05:49
for why I don’t want top surgery, here are the pros for why I might want top surgery.
05:56
And over time I realized that the cons for why I might not get top surgery started getting
06:05
less and less. Sometime over quarantine, I decided that life is too short. I only get
06:13
one body. I only get one life. It might as well be the life and the body that I want.
06:21
So I sat in this doctor’s office, it was meticulous and beautiful, which is exactly what you want
06:27
in a plastic surgeon. He says that my chest is favorable for top surgery, whatever that
06:33
means. And I decide in that moment that I’m going to do it. And now that surgery is just
06:40
a few weeks away. It’s actually happening on my birthday this year at the end of December.
06:47
I’m incredibly excited.
06:50
There’s also still those little kernels of uncertainty… of doubt. But what I’ve realized
06:57
over this entire experience is that any time that I have made a significant decision about
07:04
how I wanted to identify or present my gender, simply because I wanted to, I’ve never regretted
07:12
that. And I’ve realized that having doubt and uncertainty in this process doesn’t make
07:19
me a fraud. It just makes me human.
07:24
I just ask myself, will this make my life bigger? Will it make my life better? And will
07:31
this get me one step closer to being the most authentic version of myself and the world?
07:37
And if the answer is “yes,” or even if the answer is “eh… I’m pretty sure it
07:43
will,” then I do it because that’s enough.
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