Transfag Comphet
I feel an obligation to serve as an older brother, if you will, in trans spaces. I’m nowhere near old enough to be thought of as a trans elder but I have enough experience and knowledge that I would feel guilty if I didn’t guide the “baby transes.” As such, I regularly check in with a number of online spaces where questioning, newly-identified, and pre-transition trans people ask for advice and support.
Over the years, I have seen one particular genre of post repeatedly. Generally, it goes like this: the person posting it was assigned female at birth and is attracted to men. Sometimes they identify as nonbinary, sometimes as a trans man, sometimes as both. They are currently in a relationship with a cis man; most often, this cis man identifies as straight. According to the poster, the relationship is great. They love their partner. But they’re worried about what might happen if they transition. While this can include social transition, more often than not, they have socially transitioned and are worried about medically transitioning, specifically.
The concerns spiral from there. What if he doesn’t love me anymore if I transition? Or, he told me he won’t be attracted to me anymore if I medically transition, what do I do? Or, he uses my name and pronouns but won’t stop identifying as straight -- why? Or even, it’s not that bad presenting feminine/as a woman and my partner likes it that way, so how do I cope with everyone deadnaming and misgendering me and the dysphoria I get from that?
There are other common posts I see that are not exactly the same as this but related. For instance, people asking how to medically transition without becoming hairy, going bald, having too deep of a voice, and so on (“Micro-dose T!” is the most popular response); a fixation on identifying as either gender nonconforming and/or a trans femboy and valorizing femininity over masculinity; and iterating the similarities between themselves and women and the differences between themselves and men, just to name a few.
These are the posts that compel me to respond and push back. Not because I am judging these concerns, not because I think I am better than the posters, but because I relate. Deeply. Everything I mentioned are preoccupations that I have battled before and, admittedly, still battle at times. They are reflections of transfags trying to navigate a landscape that is already harmful and is becoming even more hostile to our existence.
Fortunately for us, we already have a term to describe the forces causing these anxieties: compulsory heterosexuality. Unfortunately, nobody from my knowledge has yet to articulate how compulsory heterosexuality impacts trans men, much less gay/bi trans men specifically. I hope to initiate this conversation with this essay.
A Brief Overview of Compulsory Heterosexuality
As with many buzzwords, compulsory heterosexuality (or “comphet” for short) is often used and used incorrectly. The term was popularized by the 1980 essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence by lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich. In the essay, Rich argues that heterosexuality must be understood as a political and economic system in which all women (not just lesbians) are coerced into maintaining and prioritizing sexual relationships with men. As a classic example, throughout history, women have relied on marriage as a way to secure economic security. We can still see this reality reflected in the modern-day US through statistics like single mothers having a poverty rate that’s twice as high as single fathers and 6 times higher than married parents and married lesbian couples having a poverty rate that’s 1.2 times higher than married straight couples and twice as high as married gay couples.
Because of this demonstrable link between relationship with men and economic wellbeing, and because of a variety of other tactics used to threaten, bully, and force women into relationships with men, Rich presents a thought-provoking question: in a world where patriarchy didn’t exist and women faced no repercussions for rejecting relationships with men, how many would choose those relationships to begin with?
Rich concludes that it is essential for feminists to interrogate the reasons and motivations for why they engage in relationships with men and to stop assuming that the desire for these relationships are a default, basic instinct. Such an interrogation isn’t to prove that women should never engage in relationships with men but rather to encourage a more thoughtful analysis of the ways in which patriarchy obfuscates female oppression and conditions women to accept this oppression. Ultimately, this interrogation will secure much more satisfying and equal relationships for women with whomever they choose. As Rich explains,
Within the institution [of heterosexuality] exist, of course, qualitative differences of experiences; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent upon the chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives.
Simply put: while some women may have genuinely beneficial and nurturing relationships with men, women’s ability to choose whether or not to engage in these relationships, both helpful or harmful, is hampered by external factors that punish women for rejecting them. If women are unable to say no to a relationship without a detrimental outcome, then this is a coerced decision that enables the exploitation and abuse of women by men. The erasure and minimization of lesbians and other kinds of meaningful relationships between women is a way to further reduce the self-determination of women.
It likely goes without saying that Rich was writing from a cis perspective. The usage of “women” here refers to anyone assigned female at birth. Rich was not particularly trans-inclusive; Janice Raymond explicitly thanks Rich for her support in the foreword of The Transsexual Empire. However, as trans women are, indeed, women, nearly everything described in Rich’s essay on compulsory heterosexuality is true of trans women’s experiences as well.
But if trans men would technically be covered under Rich’s definition of “women,” it’s far less obvious how we are impacted by comphet, especially queer trans men. This lack of acknowledgement is unsurprising; the rare academic or political conversation about trans men tends to either lump us in with lesbians or, more recently, characterize us as confused, clueless children. When the subject of sexual relationships between trans men and other men appears, we are generally farmed as traumatized victims (for instance, I’ve been told multiple times that I “became” trans as a way to cope with being sexually abused by my father) or sexual predators (like the other dozens of times I’ve been accused of being a rapist targeting cis gay men for simply identifying as a gay trans man). In both cases, the relationship between trans men and other men (always assumed to be cis) is framed as inherently violent, abusive, and deeply traumatizing to one party involved. It also implicitly asserts that our male identity is some sort of ruse devised to trick ourselves and/or an innocent other.
With this alone in mind, is it any wonder that the trans groups are filled with baby trans mascs expressing nonstop anxiety about their relationships with men? We are essentially gaslit on a regular basis about ourselves and our experiences. It’s easy to feel unmoored when everyone else seems to understand your existence as some sort of inherently problematic issue, especially when being trans is the one thing that has finally made sense to you.
Perhaps someone like Adrienne Rich would argue that this anxiety is actually reflective of comphet’s profound impact on women, that our internal sense of purpose and identity is so intertwined with men that we’re rejecting our identity as women and still agonizing over men’s role in our lives. And maybe she wouldn’t. I won’t put words I heard from online TERFs in Rich’s mouth.
But regardless of whether Rich or some other rando might argue that point, I’d like to offer: what if this framing of trans men as traumatized victims or sexual predators and the impact it has on us is actually comphet in action?
Compulsory Cissexuality
I would like to make my position clear now: I do not believe trans men are women. As a trans man who started my medical transition nearly five years ago now, I move through the world as a man. I am rarely misgendered. To argue that I am a woman would be completely ridiculous.
With that said, it is also true that trans men have a different gendered experience than cis men. No matter how well you pass, there is always the threat of being outed and mistreated. My home state, Kansas, just passed a law that reverted all of our gender marker changes back to the original marker and banned trans people from using the bathroom that best aligns with our gender. Additionally, the push around the country to ban trans healthcare for minors (which Kansas also did last year) is turning into a push to ban trans healthcare for adults. These are tactics meant to forcibly detransition us.
To return to Rich, I agree strongly with her suggestion that heterosexuality is a political and economic system that coerces women into relationships with men. What she misses is that heterosexuality is also innately cissexist -- that is, trans people are also explicitly erased and punished for refusing to adhere to socially prescribed categories. The most obvious example of this is gender clinics in the US refusing to operate on gay trans people until 1986. The Benjamin scale, which gender clinics followed to make these medical decisions, required the “true transsexual” to desire the life of a heterosexual person. After all, if the purpose of sexuality is primarily reproduction, and if reproduction can only be done between a man and a woman, then why would a doctor ever operate on a gay trans man who could be a wife and mother, or a lesbian trans woman who could be a husband and father?
The structure of 20th century gender clinics resulted in an absence of choice, as Rich would say, for trans people. Either you adhered to heterosexual expectations of your gender or you simply were not allowed to transition. Yet refusing to adhere to the standards of the gender clinics and broader heterosexual social norms meant continued struggling with dysphoria, social rejection for gender nonconforming behaviors, lack of employment or underemployment, assault, homelessness, poverty, and/or any mental health conditions resulting from the stress of all of that combined.
In 2012, the 7th edition of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care officially endorsed the informed consent model for accessing hormones. In place of requiring trans people to prove our identities to multiple providers over years to access healthcare, providers could start giving us hormones as long as we demonstrated that we understood the effects of taking them. In the US, I suspect that this shift, in addition to Obama-era policy changes that extended insurance coverage to trans healthcare, has much to do with the apparent explosion of the trans population recently. Nearly fifteen years later, we are embroiled in a reactionary backlash to revoke our access to healthcare and our right to even identify ourselves as we please.
While all of this seems far removed from the posts I described at the beginning of the essay, it is necessary context to consider how transfags are impacted by comphet and why comphet manifests the way it does for us. Additionally, we must keep in mind the recent fixation on trans men by the anti-trans movement, such as the FDA and Texas Attorney General suing binder companies (with Ken Paxton accusing them explicitly of child abuse) or President Trump signing an executive order lamenting “the horrifying tragedy that [trans boys] will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.”
Rich is clear that she wrote Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence due to her frustration with feminists for simply assuming that their desire for relationships with men is apolitical despite broader structures at play that force women into those relationships whether they like them or not. Similarly, it is of utmost importance to consider the intensifying attack on trans rights when a trans masc seeks validation for their hesitation about medically transitioning and their romantic/sexual relationships with (mostly straight, always cis) men.
The Dreaded Personal Essay Portion
As I shared before, the reason for my interest in this subject is because it is, ultimately, a personal one. I’ve been with my partner, a cis bisexual man, since 2019. When we began dating, I was still mostly closeted; only friends knew that I was trans. Fortunately for me, my partner has known since the moment we met that I am a trans man; my transness was never an issue.
Exactly 15 days before our second anniversary, I started testosterone. He continues to be incredibly supportive of my decision to transition. He regularly reminds me to take my T; he was the one who took care of me in the weeks after I got top surgery. And yet despite constant reassurance from him since the beginning that no, me being a trans man doesn’t bother him and actually, he likes that I’m a trans man, I spent those first two years of our relationship fretting about what would happen if I transitioned.
I bring up my partner because I had the absolute best-case scenario for a pre-transition, mostly closeted trans person. I’m from a deeply evangelical background and have no contact with essentially every relative except for my sister and my mother, the latter of which doesn’t approve of me being trans and tries to convert me back to Christianity on a regular basis. I didn’t come out to my mother until 2020; by that point, I had spent seven years agonizing over what would happen when I came out. I waited that long because I wanted to make sure I had a bachelor’s degree, a place to live, a job, and a car in the event that I was disowned.
My partner was really a light in the dark. I was an absolute wreck those first two years. The abuse and emotional fatigue sustained from spending a life being denied who you are and shoved in the closet doesn’t make you a particularly pleasant person to be around. I was much more emotionally dysregulated. My partner, on the other hand, was steady. It took me those two years to fully digest that I could actually trust him, that he wouldn’t abandon me at any moment.
So, now, imagine that you’re in my position. You’ve just graduated college and moved out on your own. You have no friends you can reliably go to for help. Your grandfather, a retired evangelical pastor, is a co-signer on your lease because you’re not financially stable enough on your own. You struggle significantly with your mental health and these symptoms are exacerbated considerably by gender dysphoria. But coming out to your family poses a genuine risk of rejection, homelessness, loss of insurance, and even violence. You also live in an area that doesn’t have any anti-discrimination protections for trans people and hardly any sort of public assistance.
And then you have a partner. He’s your out, quite literally the one and only thing that can protect you from being on the streets if the worst scenario happens.
Despite how much my partner reassured me that he was okay with me being trans, I still frequently considered not transitioning for him. Sure, I thought, he says he’s okay with it, but what if I transitioned and he stopped being attracted to me? I would lose the only support I have. It would be proof that I am undesirable not just to him, but likely to every other man, too, because no one but him has ever expressed interest in me. I won’t be able to survive on my own.
So I started reconsidering. I thought: it’s not that bad being read as a woman, I guess. Maybe it makes me feel kind of dead inside but it could be worse. And there are more straight men than queer men, and plenty of queer men are vocally against dating trans men, so it probably makes more sense in the long run to just get misgendered as an androgynous woman than to limit the pool of potential men that could support me. I can use whatever name and pronouns I want and maybe people won’t respect them but you take what you can get.
This kind of thinking sent me down a genuinely dangerous path. My desperation to make sure there would always be men who could financially support me led me to bioessentialist, TERF-like beliefs, like that I am innately a female no matter what I say or do and that my capacity to physically reproduce is a marker of this femaleness and essential to my identity. My self-worth was tied to whether or not men would desire me enough to want to marry me and have kids, regardless of if I wanted that. I became so consumed by this anxiety that it ruptured friendships and negatively impacted my relationship with my partner, too.
Now I ask you: is this not a perfect representation of compulsory heterosexuality? I was psychologically held captive by a societal standard forced upon me through the very real threat of destitution. And even though my partner has always supported me and my decisions, has always respected my autonomy and personhood, I was still unable to fully appreciate and enjoy the relationship for what it was because I was so terrified of losing everything if he stopped being attracted to me because I transitioned. The most rational conclusion to me was to simply try my best to be a woman even though I loathed the concept so much that it made me suicidal. And despite the fact that my partner and I are queer polyamorous communists, I still had an idea in my head that not achieving the stereotypical American Dream was indicative of some kind of moral failing on my part and therefore also indicated how much I would deserve losing everything.
The absence of choice Rich described in her essay is what I experienced as a transfag. Was I able to fully consent to my relationship because I actively wanted it, or was it hampered by the fear I felt about what would happen if I didn’t have a partner? What about people who are in the same boat I was but with a partner who is far less supportive, far less accepting, maybe even abusive? Are we allowed to say no? Are we allowed to walk away without repercussions?
Transfag Comphet
There is nothing wrong with being a gender nonconforming trans man. I wear women’s clothes all the time. I’m not particularly interested in being masculine. But I do have to wonder if the rise in things like the trans femboy and the continued popularity of validity politics (e.g. “trans people who don’t transition are valid!”) are comphet masquerading as self-determination. The difference largely comes down to a matter of confidence. The feminine trans men and the trans people who don’t transition and who are confident in that decision do not go around seeking validation for it.
It’s not a crime to need validation every so often. Part of being human is feeling insecure from time to time. But when a certain topic comes up again and again, when you need to be continually reminded and reaffirmed that something is “valid” or whatever word you’d like to use, then it’s not a bad idea to interrogate why you need that reassurance.
For instance, sure, it’s completely acceptable for a trans person to determine that medically transitioning is not for them. But why was that decision made? Because they’re scared of facing unemployment, harassment, and homelessness? Because of government persecution? Because they don’t want to lose their relationships? Because healthcare is inaccessible? If any of those are the case, then that is really an absence of choice, and the choice to not transition is a coerced one. An uncoerced choice would not have such drastic outcomes for refusing the “standard” decision. After all, no person I’m aware of has faced any of what I mentioned for refusing to medically transition.
Similarly, why do some trans mascs feel the need to so readily defend being feminine? Is it because they genuinely like being feminine or because they’re scared of what might happen if they present more masculine? Why are some transfags so frightened of using testosterone and developing physical features and traits associated with maleness, like body hair, alopecia, and deep voices? Is it because most men are straight, and straight men aren’t attracted to men? Is it because we have been taught our whole lives that our value as human beings is defined by our romantic/sexual relationships with men?
If that is the case, and we’re trapped in a political landscape that is robbing us of our right to transition and even criminalizing our existence, it would make sense that being understood as or mistaken for a woman feels safer than being readily read as men. After all, if we’re all going to be forced back into womanhood, doesn’t detransitioning after years of hormones and surgeries make us damaged goods? That’s what all the anti-trans fearmongers say about trans men. We don’t want to be destitute social rejects.
Determining what is and isn’t comphet might seem challenging, but transfag comphet can really be boiled down to one question: are you able to refuse things associated with (straight) womanhood without facing repercussions?
Yes, your (cis) male partner is included in “things associated with (straight) womanhood,” even the best, most supportive, queer partners like my own. It’s worth asking yourself whether you actually benefit from that relationship or if you’re scared about what might happen if he wasn’t there. Or maybe if you’re trying your best to conform to heterosexual expectations and he’s your best way of accomplishing that. Or even if you would be able to live as a queer male couple or if he would be resistant to that.
I do not believe I know better than anybody on how to live their life. It could very well be the case that any of the people posting their concerns are in a situation that makes sense for them for the most part. But I want to make sure people are actually thriving in that situation, not just tolerating it. I could tolerate being seen as a straight woman, but I thrived when I started transitioning finally, when I was understood as a man by others, when I looked into the mirror and saw a male looking back at me. My relationship with my partner improved significantly because I improved. And when I improved, I gained more confidence to say no.
This isn’t to say that you’ll never have moments of uncertainty or anxiety about being single. That’s all part of life. This is why I agree with Rich when she stresses the importance of questioning your feelings and desires instead of just accepting them as they are or seeking validation for them. Sometimes anxieties are the consequence of growing pains, other times they reflect a more fundamental conflict between who you are and how others understand and treat you. But you won’t know unless you really look at them and be honest with yourself.
There is no need to moralize; moralizing often makes things worse, in my experience. So just follow the questions that Rich posed and my more condensed version:
- Are you able to refuse?
- If you could refuse without any issues, would you still make this choice?
If your answer to both is “no,” then you might be experiencing comphet.
The Bottom Line for Transfags
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again as many times as I need to: the world does not want you to be a transfag. If that weren’t the case, then we wouldn’t be experiencing such an unprecedented attack on trans rights currently. When anti-trans figures moan about you losing your capacity for reproduction, what they’re quite directly telling you is they want you to marry a man and be a mother, that your only value can be found in your ability to reproduce. The same rhetoric isn’t used for trans women because comphet has dictated that your worth is only found in birthing children for cis men.
It’s not a coincidence that anti-trans attacks are co-occurring with rolling back abortion access, an obsession with “parent rights,” and a general return of fascist thinking. The ruling class is attempting to restore an older patriarchal order and you becoming the transfag of your dreams is a direct threat to that. Even if you do get married and have kids, it’s still not satisfactory if you’re a transfag while you’re doing it. Why else would they be tearing away our identification documents? Making it illegal to use the men’s restroom? Barring our access to gender-affirming care?
When we’re painted as traumatized victims or sexual predators, the goal is the same. We are broodmares who have escaped our stall and need to be wrangled back inside. And once we’re back in our cramped stall, we get scared. We think, maybe it’s not so bad in here. Maybe my body isn’t that bad. Maybe I shouldn’t change it for my partner because he’s the only person who loves me and takes care of me, even if that love and care is ultimately contingent upon his approval of my body. Maybe people are wrong when they say I don’t have to live like this. Maybe those people are the real enemy; it’s valid to be a broodmare in a stall, after all. Broodmares don’t belong in the fields. Broodmares are too different from stallions.
The truth of the matter is that taking the jump to transfaggotry is a deeply terrifying experience. It is also a deeply rewarding experience despite everything. I wouldn’t ever take back my decision to transition. The absence of choice is designed to kill you, spiritually or literally. Don’t let heterosexuality take the victory so easily.