Being Transage is Valid

Content warning for suicide and sexual abuse

You may have heard of transage people: people who feel that they are internally a different age than their physical, chronological age. When I first heard that some people were calling themselves transage, I was skeptical, to say the least. The entire concept seemed to be brimming with transphobia. How could anyone compare the multifaceted experience of being transgender to simply feeling like they were a different age?

However, I knew that it was valid that some people could feel like they were a different age than they were physically – after all, it had happened to me.

I went through an almost unbelievable amount of trauma when I turned 21. To begin with, I’d transferred colleges, lost most of my friends, and started failing classes because I didn’t have the energy to show up to them. I’d suddenly developed debilitating depression so bad that I could barely get out of bed, as well as chronic pain so severe that I began thinking about killing myself. Then I started dating a man who began to regularly sexually abuse me.

Due to how overwhelming my life had become, I had a string of attempted suicides, not as a cry for help but because I was deadly serious.

After all this, it felt like I just stopped aging. My friends went on to graduate college, get married, and have children, but I stayed floundering at the internal age of 21. I couldn’t age past the trauma. Even now that I’ve finally started to heal and make peace with being chronologically in my 30s, my inner age hasn’t budged.

So when I met people who called themselves transage, I was understanding. But at first, I felt like the entire concept needed to have a different name: something that wouldn’t invoke the idea that being transage was on par with being transgender.

Eventually, I realized that being transgender shouldn’t be put on a pedestal above other forms of dysphoria. The fact that some people are age dysphoric doesn’t invalidate the fact that others are dysphoric about their gender (or are transgender without experiencing dysphoria). And as I began to age regress down to my teens and preteens at times, I started seriously contemplating that I was transage myself.

Given the fact that I firmly identify as being 21 even when my body is a decade older, I didn’t have to think for long before deciding that the label applies to me. There are a lot of reasons why someone might feel like a different age than they are chronologically, trauma being just one of them. The entire concept of being transage is real, is valid, and deserves to be taken seriously.

And no, maps aren’t the only people who are transage, and being transage isn’t the same thing as “clovergender.” Clovergender is an identity that was made up by anti-maps to slander maps as supposedly identifying as children for the sole purpose of being able to date and have sex with children. Transage people who identify as being children recognize that they are different than chronological children and understand that children cannot consent to them.

Personally, I think that the reason there are so many transage people in the map community is because these people have already come to terms with having an identity that is largely hated – being maps – and thus have no qualms with picking up the misunderstood label of being transage. Non-maps are understandably more worried about being judged for labeling themselves as something that seems so controversial. But I think that there are probably equal numbers of maps and non-maps who are transage; the non-maps just don’t want to admit to themselves that they’re age dysphoric.

I think that as being transage becomes more understood, more people will come out as being transage. But for now, it’s mainly only maps who are brave enough to take on this hated label. I hope that things change for transage people in the future, and that more non-maps begin to understand how necessary the label of “transage” is.