Elin McCready

If you look at news reports, they might say: “Elin — an edge case for Japan’s bureaucratic system.” I changed my gender marker in the US, but in Japan the whole process was more complicated, in fact: impossible. That impossible status is the subject of a court battle now. But isn’t Identity so much more than a fixed status or marks in a document?

“Being myself” ... when did we come to think that there was such a thing? “Me” as an individual, shaped over time through setting myself apart from others, just as much as by identifying with something, a group, a set of values.

Like many people I often felt different from the people around me. But finding a frame to enter into as “myself” in a positive way — that was harder to come by as a child in 1980s Texas.

The norm was set by White cishet people as everywhere else. But for me there was something wrong, something hard to process about the body I was in. Eventually, I figured out that there were ways to feel better, ways to change my body. But there wasn’t much information out there pre-internet. A hard thing to go into without knowing anything much.

For the person I was back then, choosing to transition felt like not choosing everything else. Would her life be just about gender and body? In that era, that place, maybe it would have been. Transition, or everything else. That “me” in the past chose to put the possibility of transition away, wrapped up as too scary to touch. Instead, I began building an identity elsewhere, in other spheres: studies, travelling, eventually moving to Japan, getting married, starting a family there.

Making the choice of transitioning invisible to myself created an ersatz-fearlessness. I felt I could do anything, was ready to do anything, anything but just that one thing, that thing put aside. Maybe genuine fearlessness requires being ready to risk failure and pain. But that came later.

At first, life in Japan facilitated these compartmentalised identities. Now, finally, there were other reasons to feel like an alien: being a foreigner, being tall, being White. People didn’t expect an alien to live by local Japanese norms. Everything was looser as a foreigner, including expectations around gender. But after years, the downside clarified itself: being a foreigner brought freedom and privilege, but also meant being outside the community in some ways.

What community is our own? How do we answer this question? It is hard — maybe impossible — to answer, if we choose to look away from parts of ourselves. Positioning yourself requires seeing yourself. I chose to open up to that part of myself that needed to transition. That in turn meant finding a new community to be fully a part of.

Is transition the end of the journey? Did I reach a final goal, did I complete my identity? But what is a “complete identity” anyway? Everything changes: ageing bodies, widening awareness, the world around us. New categories spring up daily, and with them we learn to see ourselves and others differently too.

Changing the body is far from the end of change — identities are fluid. Having an Identity is an activity. Completely identifying yourself with something is limiting and often damaging. Nothing is fixed because all depends on both the self and the society it moves in. For me, I don’t know where the future will lead. All I know is that this flux has led me to a body and a life that makes me happier than I have been before.


Words by
Elin McCready

Photograph by
Mengyu Zhou