Pictures of ourselves
how it feels to look at pre-transition photos of myself
This is the first time I’m incorporating video into a post. I highly encourage you to watch it even though it’s a long read (11 minutes total). Some content in the video is not in the text.
The back wall of our kitchen used to host half a dozen really gorgeous photos of our family. We hung them there shortly after moving in, staking out the dinner table space as a family zone, a place where we focused on spending time together instead of being on our phones and computers and tablets.
The photos didn’t just have us in them, they had extended family, too. Most of them were from the wedding celebration my wife and I had in 2014. We officially got married the year before, just three days after the fall of DOMA, and so we opted to celebrate on our one-year anniversary with all of my wife’s family and almost every friend in our lives. That was one of the best days of my life, and keeping those photos up kept the memories of it alive and tangible.
Early in my transition I felt so close to the memories of that wedding, of the way we loved each other, of my happiness then, that I thought it would be easy to keep those photos up forever. I even told my wife I intended to do so, that it didn’t bother me to see myself in a white wedding dress. It was true for a while.
And then it wasn’t.
As the months went on and I changed more and more, those pictures on the wall began to haunt me. My own eyes followed me around the dining room and kitchen. I stared at that smile on my face and wondered who that person was, because it didn’t feel like me anymore. I wasn’t her.
Had I ever been her?
Sometimes it was disorienting, confusing. My eyes refused to look at those images of myself, and instead of blooming and growing I began shrinking. I sat in a specific place at the table so that the photos were outside my field of view. If I thought about removing them, I recoiled at my selfishness. I just needed to get over those feelings, right?
We had canvases of the kids printed and hanging in another room, really lovely images of them at the beach in the summertime playing in the sand and the waves. Our youngest still had long hair in those pictures. Both of our kids had long hair when they were little, and then they wanted short hair as they got older. At least, that’s how I justified keeping those canvases up on the wall.
When my oldest kid had a friend over, and the kid asked, “Who’s that with you on the beach?” my son replied, “Oh, it’s my cousin.”
He lied. It was his little brother in those pictures. I think his friend probably knew that just by seeing their faces.
Once the friend was gone, I talked with both of my kids about the incident. My oldest hadn’t known how to respond, and he was afraid of saying something that would out his little brother. We had previously discussed privacy and created rules about not outing someone in any circumstance, but we hadn’t explained what to do about old photos of them on our own walls, and here we were, caught out, unprepared.
My youngest son asked us to take the pictures down a few days later. And we did. It wasn’t long after that that I did the same thing to those photos in the dining room of me in a white wedding dress having the time of my life. I removed them from the wall, packed them away in a box, and placed the box where I couldn’t see it.
Seeing old images of myself is fun and perplexing and fine and disorienting all at the same time. It changes the more I change, and I never know quite what to expect. Sometimes it makes me feel nauseated. Sometimes I feel joy over the memory of a great moment. Sometimes I just don’t recognize my face at all. Sometimes it makes me feel like a fake, like an illusion, like I’m not a real thing.
I spent years glancing at my reflection and not recognizing who I saw there. When the image started to split as I transitioned, I hadn’t yet strayed so far from the start point that it caused any big problems. But the more I physically and mentally changed, the harder it was to hold both selves in focus. Stubbornness kept me from taking those photos down for a long time, and when I finally did it, we all breathed in relief.
But what do you do when you had a wall full of photos that’s suddenly blank? I, for one, still don’t feel confident about photos of myself. I’m just not ready to put that kind of thing up on a wall to stare at every day. Maybe I’ll feel differently in time.
For now, we’ve painted that wall with chalkboard paint, and the kids create their own designs whenever they feel inspired. We replaced our other photos with collections of their artwork, things they crafted on the weekends, or bigger projects that came from art class or wilderness school.
A question about this topic came through my AMA not long ago, and that inspired me to write about my experiences here. To preserve the author’s anonymity, I’ve reworded their question, and I’ve included a portion of my response to them below.
How do you feel about people who love you holding onto photos of you from before your transition, especially ones from your childhood? I’m not sure I can bear getting rid of photos of my child, because they hold such sentimental significance for me.
I've seen and heard a lot of mixed feelings in groups of trans people about this topic. Some of us are super triggered by past photos, some love them, others are ambivalent. I flex between all of those feelings depending on a lot of internal and external factors. I wonder if the cis people in my life have those feelings at times. I also have the perspective of being trans and raising a trans child, so I've looked through those old photos of my kid and had feelings like what you're expressing.
There is no simple answer to any of this.
The child I was in past photos does not deserve to be erased. For anyone who has those photos, I don’t want them destroyed, and I don’t really mind them looking at those images and remembering the past they shared with me. Those moments happened. They were very much real. And I don’t mind looking at them myself—I see something very different in the eyes of the kid in those pictures, and I care deeply about all the things I felt at those stages of my life.
But it’s also difficult for me to witness others looking at those photos. What are they thinking when they see me as a 9-year-old? Or as a teen? Does it create some kind of cognitive dissonance for them? When they glance back at my face now, will they see the man staring back at them? Or will they be locked in a memory of what they think I was?
More importantly, will looking at old photos of me make it harder for people I love to get my pronouns right or treat me as the man I am today? Some of us can stretch our brains into the right shapes to make this happen, but it’s not a guarantee. As a trans person, I often feel as though what I look like now will never be different enough from what I looked like then, and those photos might give someone permission to see more “her” and less “him,” which is painful for me.
As a parent, I love the pictures of my kids from when they were tiny. But we still had to take some of them off the walls for my son to be comfortable in his home. Do I occasionally cruise through my photo collection of him as a baby, him in a princess dress for Halloween, him with longer or shorter hair, him on the beach as a toddler, the two of us taking selfies eating ice cream? Of course I do. And you, as your child’s parent, will always have those memories. Photos just help us tap into them, and sometimes we want and need to feel those things. I think it’s fair to ask your child how they feel about all of that, but maybe consider doing so in a way that affirms who they are now and who they’ve always been. Go out of your way to see them in each photograph. They’re there, I promise you.
Your trans friend,
Robin
Robin, thank you. I wish this country were moving toward making your lives easier instead of where we are. And where the shitbirds want to take us.
For what it’s worth, I’ll be standing with and for you and your child and every other trans human forever.
Thank you again. Your honesty and vulnerability are seen and held in my heart. 🤍
I really enjoyed listening to the video and reading along. I took down pictures of my trans family member at their request and I have some photos pre transition in a hidden file on my phone. I don’t look at them often but when I do I find it stranger to see the pre photos than the way I see them now in person. I’ve grown accustomed to that face and it feels more real than before.