From Grey to Light: Trans as Origin and Destination

Exploring Identity Beyond the Binary Gaze in a World of Algorithms and Erasure

Today was a bad day. One of those days at school when everything feels heavier than it should—when every interaction is jagged, every noise too loud, every demand pulling at frayed edges already stretched too thin. It’s the aftermath of the fires and the loss of whole communities. My school was in the bottom end of the Eaton fire evacuation zone, but was spared from destruction. We were shut down for three days by the thick toxic smoke. So, by the time I reached for my phone, I was more than ready to disconnect, to sink into the numbing rhythm of doom scrolling, where the endless churn of content offers a strange kind of solace.

And then I saw it—a meme that caught me off guard. It wasn’t anything overly dramatic, just a handful of words, but they stuck like barbs in my mind. They began to unravel something within me, tugging at threads I hadn’t realised were so tightly wound. Anxiety began creeping in, slow and insistent. I read the words again, trying to process their meaning, trying to fit them into the shape of my understanding.

And then it hit—like a surge of electricity flooding my verbal centres. Words began spilling over, fast and relentless, ideas forming and dissolving in an instant. It felt as though my brain couldn’t contain it all, couldn’t slow the rush long enough to make sense of it. The panic set in—not from the words themselves, but from the overwhelming urgency to do something with them.

I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, grounding myself in the rhythm of inhale, exhale, repeat. The panic began to subside, leaving behind a sense of something unlocked, something raw and urgent, demanding to be translated into language. That’s when I felt the overflow begin to shift—not as chaos, but as clarity. The words stopped tumbling and began to take form, weaving themselves into lines and phrases, fragments of something whole.

By the time I reached my keyboard, the poem was already forming in my mind. It was born out of that cascade of emotion, that strange alchemy of anxiety, reflection, and release. What came out was not just a poem, but a map of my mind in that moment—how the words moved through me, how they demanded to be spoken, to be seen.

Trans as the origin and the destination

The meme itself was striking in its simplicity—so much so that it took me a moment to unpack why it felt so deeply jarring. At first glance, it seemed clever, perhaps even insightful, but the longer I sat with it, the more its underlying assumptions began to surface. It wasn’t really about us—trans people—but about how the cishetero world perceives us. The meme reduced our lives to a simplistic journey between two fixed points, as though transitioning were no more than a linear trajectory from one binary to another. It centred entirely on the cis gaze, reinforcing the binaries that have long been used to erase the complexity and richness of our existence. In doing so, it failed to capture the nuance of what it means to live as a trans person. For me, it felt more like a caricature than a reflection, a framework that didn’t just fail to represent me—it erased me entirely.

I couldn’t see myself in what the meme was trying to convey, and that absence struck me with a painful clarity. I’m trans. I’ve always been trans. My awareness of that truth has grown and deepened over time, but it was never a matter of moving from one predefined box to another. My transness was not born the moment I began transitioning; it has always been part of me, an intrinsic aspect of my identity. For many of us, this is true, though we’ve been gaslit—by society, by the media, by the structures that shape our lives—into thinking otherwise. The idea that we are “becoming” something new often ignores that we are, in fact, reclaiming what we’ve always been. For some of us, trans is not just the destination but the origin, or a return to self, the foundation of who we are. To ignore that is to miss the essence of our experience.

The meme’s failure lay in its simplicity, its inability to hold space for the complexities of trans identity. It flattened our lives into something digestible for a cis audience, a tidy narrative they could categorise and consume. But transness isn’t a bridge, a detour, or a stopover; it’s not a journey from one binary to another. For me, trans is both the beginning and the end, the ongoing process of becoming myself, free from the constraints of societal binaries. It’s a destination in the sense of finding alignment, yes, but it’s also the origin, the unchanging truth I’ve always carried.

What I couldn’t find in the meme was the development of my essential transness—the unfolding of self-understanding, the moments of quiet revelation, the joy of stepping into my truth. It wasn’t there because the meme wasn’t about us; it was about how cis people see us, and that perspective will always prioritise the binary, the neat categories that make them comfortable. It betrayed the depth and complexity of our existence, reducing it to a story of becoming “other” rather than becoming ourselves. That absence, that refusal to see us as we are, only magnified the ache of the day. It was another reminder of living in a world that so often misrepresents us, erases us, or forces us into frames that don’t fit. And yet, it was this very erasure, this flattening of my existence, that sparked the flood of words and the creation of the poem that followed.

The Cis Gaze

It’s impossible to ignore how much the algorithms shape what we see, think, and feel. They’re designed to prioritise engagement, which in today’s world often means amplifying what provokes anger, frustration, or outrage. The systems driving our favourite apps are not neutral; they’re engineered to serve the cishetero majority and the neuro-majority, reinforcing norms and binaries that keep people yelling at each other rather than connecting. For a trans, autistic person like me, it’s like living in a minefield—every scroll is a gamble, every post a potential trigger waiting to detonate. The content served to us is not tailored to our experiences; it’s tailored to maximise clicks, likes, and shares, even at the expense of our mental well-being.

Then, as I doom scrolled through my app, I was already on edge. The algorithms seemed particularly sharp, pushing content that catered to cisheteronormative views of the world, reinforcing binaries that felt suffocatingly narrow. I saw posts that weren’t just ignorant but actively harmful, reducing the rich, layered lives of trans people to something simplistic, something others could easily dismiss. And then came the meme—the one that sent me spiralling. It wasn’t hateful, not explicitly, but it carried the same cisnormative undertone: the idea that trans lives can be neatly packaged into a story that makes sense to them, not to us.

I realise now that part of my reaction was tied to the algorithms themselves. Even the app I consider my favourite—my space for connection and expression—was contributing to the problem. It wasn’t just showing me a distorted view of trans experiences; it was pushing content designed to provoke an emotional response, knowing that outrage drives engagement. And it worked. My brain lit up with anxiety and frustration, not just at the meme but at the entire structure of how this content is served. It wasn’t designed to foster understanding or build community; it was designed to trap me in a loop of emotional reaction.

For someone who already processes the world differently, being autistic only heightened the intensity of that moment. It felt like the app wasn’t just showing me a meme—it was taking aim at my identity, weaponising it to keep me scrolling. The anger, the confusion, the deep-seated sense of not being seen—it all came flooding in at once. What should have been a moment of detachment, a break from the day’s stress, instead became a spark that lit a firestorm in my mind. And while that firestorm eventually led to clarity and creativity, it left me with an uneasy awareness of how even my favourite platforms can work against me, reinforcing the very dynamics I’m trying to resist.

Crossing Borders

There is a moment
when the light comes on—
a sudden brilliance,
not a dimmer turning slowly,
but a switch,
flipped in the bones of my being.

What once was shadowed
is sharp-edged now,
vivid and alive,
colours spilling out like streams of molten glass,
pouring into a world
I did not know
I had been living without.

Before, I lived in the grey,
a landscape of outlines
that hinted at life
but never spoke its name aloud.
Each step forward was measured,
hesitant,
a body as function,
not as home.

Now, HRT has carved paths
where there were once walls,
bridged gaps I thought eternal.
My mind—
a garden waking to spring.
My body—
an instrument tuning itself,
finding its voice
in the hum of life.

I remember the train,
rolling between Vienna and Budapest,
how the Austrian countryside sang
in impossibly vivid tones,
gold-green fields alive
in their own illumination.
And then,
the border—
no announcement, no fanfare.
Only the colour fading
to a memory
of what it meant to see.

This is how I lived,
moving between worlds,
knowing always
where I belonged
but finding myself caught
on the edge of exile.

But now, the colour stays.
HRT paints everything with light,
not as a gift,
but as a reclamation.
Trans is the destination.
Not the barren borderlands
of “almost”
or “in between,”
but the place where the light settles,
vivid and unrelenting.

My body is no longer
an awkward conveyance,
but a home
whose doors have opened,
whose walls
welcome the sunlight.

The world outside
still clings to its greyscale,
its binaries and lines.
But I,
an expat of those rigid lands,
have found my colours again.
I wear them on my skin,
in my voice,
in the air I draw into lungs
that now breathe with ease.

Here, the light stays on.
Here, there is no border
to cross back.
The destination was never elsewhere—
it was always within me,
waiting for the switch to flip.

Final thoughts …

Being so far removed from the statistical “mean”—as a trans, autistic person navigating platforms designed for the neurotypical, cishetero majority—creates an online experience that can feel isolating and exhausting. The algorithms, geared toward the largest, loudest groups, rarely prioritise content that resonates with me or acknowledges my existence beyond stereotypes or erasure. It’s a constant search for connection amidst a sea of noise, one that often leaves me feeling unseen. And yet, I’ve managed to find a few meaningful connections, friends who make the online experience worthwhile. These relationships are what keep me coming back, even when the broader platform feels fundamentally unwelcoming.

The looming threat of TikTok’s demise feels like another blow to those of us who’ve worked hard to carve out spaces where we can belong. For many, TikTok has been a platform that disrupted the usual dynamics, offering a place where marginalised voices could flourish and narratives beyond the binary could thrive. Its possible collapse feels less like the loss of an app and more like the loss of a rare refuge, a space where people like me could connect, share, and find some semblance of community.

Meanwhile, the shifts on Meta’s platforms in response to political pressure / desires—removing content moderation and fostering environments rife with harm—have only amplified the toxic dynamics that drive so many of us away. The active targeting of marginalised communities, paired with a lack of accountability, has made those platforms unbearable for many. I’ve seen friends and advocates urging us to leave, to abandon spaces that don’t care for us and find new homes elsewhere. But the thought of starting over is terrifying. The labour of building a friend group from scratch, of learning a new platform’s quirks and algorithms, feels overwhelming. It’s not just the mechanics of moving; it’s the fear of losing what little connection I’ve fought to maintain.

The challenge for those of us so far from the mean is that every new platform means starting again, hoping to find enough people who share our wavelength to make the experience meaningful. The emotional toll of repeatedly rebuilding is immense, especially when each step feels precarious, as though the rug might be pulled out from under us again. It’s not just about finding a platform that works—it’s about finding a place that sees us, values us, and allows us to connect without erasure or harm.