Expanding the Possibilities of Being: Transness and the Practice of Freedom by Mark Gardett

Imagine a tree.

This tree lives in a park, surrounded by other trees. There’s a lake in the distance, and the tree has plenty of space to spread its leaves to the sun. In the summer, its leaves are lush and green, and in the winter, its bare branches shake in the wind.

Now imagine this tree saying to itself, when its leaves turn brown in the fall, “I am so ugly—the other trees won’t like me.” Imagine the tree next to it thinking, “I am the smart tree,” or “I am mom’s favorite tree,” or “I’m a failure–I will never be a good enough tree” or “I’m going to be the richest and most successful tree.”

It doesn’t seem likely. Yet as humans, we have these kinds of thoughts all the time. They’re called identifications, and every practice of yoga, despite all the incredible diversity of lineages and traditions, is designed to teach us how to let them go. No matter what school of yoga you study, this is the goal: liberation from our identification with the impermanent, changing, and ultimately unsatisfying temporary self, so that we can reunite with the true Self beneath.

Central to this practice is the concept of nonattachment. Nonattachment is often misunderstood as giving up on the world, renouncing everything, or “transcending” our problems. In fact, nonattachment is better described as a loosening of the grip—and specifically a loosening of our grip on our identifications. Any time we think, “I am that,” we’re in identification. It happens when we say, “I am smart,” or “I am not as good” or define ourselves through statements like, “I am a lawyer” or “I am a mother.” All of these things may be true, but the lesson of yoga, and of nonattachment, is that they are always only temporarily true.

Gripping tightly to identifications is the ultimate source of our suffering. Loosening that grip is the solution.

It is no simple task. According to most traditions, it’s work that will take not months or years but lifetimes. The good news is that relief from suffering comes not from achieving the goal, but from practice toward it. Although I had practiced yoga for nearly 20 years, it was only when I came out as transgender and began to transition that I began to truly understand them.

Transness and Freedom

Since I began transitioning, my clothes have changed. My name has changed. My body shape, my smell, and the way people see me and respond to me in the world have changed. One by one, every signifier that I was taught to believe defines a person dropped away and was either replaced or simply left behind.

When I first began this journey, I thought that I was simply moving along a line, from “female” to “male.” I thought, “Aha, who I really am is a boy, so I will just change all these markers from girl to boy, and we’ll be good.” That is not what happened.

When you let go of an identifier that has defined you for your entire life, it’s much harder to pick up a new one and attach to it in the same way. The realization that there is something else underneath—something that is not defined by a name, a gender, a body, or a role in the world—cannot be unseen. I love being Mark and moving in the world in my new shape and role, but I will never be able to identify as completely or as unthinkingly with Mark as I did with my previous self-concept. The door has been cracked, and the space beyond has become visible.

I haven’t given up the old person and replaced them with a new set of markers and identifiers. I’ve had a glimpse of the truth beyond both the old self and the new, or rather inclusive of both and more than both. What we identify with is real, and important, and vital, but there is also something else, beneath all of that. That is the true self.

If the real “me,” whatever I really am, cannot be lost—if it remains even when I change my job, my name, my gender, my relationships, how other people see me, how I look in the mirror, everything that I thought was myself—then I am not beholden to any of them. I am free.

That is the difference between being transgender and practicing transness. Transgender is a descriptive word for people who experience a mismatch between their self-perceived gender and the gender or sex they were assigned at birth. Transness as a practice is the intentional, conscious act of letting go of the deepest, most apparently unchangeable identifiers we have available, and watching what happens. What opens up? How does our sense of ourselves expand? What can we hold with a lighter touch or even leave behind completely? What do we no longer need to identify ourselves with?

Transitioning showed me that I had been understanding nonattachment all wrong. I had thought of it as a switch: giving up something to get something else. But what if this practice is asking us not to contract, but to expand? What if loosening our grip on our attachments will not make us less, but more? What if this one act, the letting go of our clinging to our identifications, could open up infinite new ways of being, thinking, and knowing—not just for ourselves, but for our families, our culture, and the world?

Always, Eventually, Now

People often ask me whether the desire to change my physical body is at odds with yoga, or with the practice of nonattachment. Isn’t transition just another form of identification?

Yes—and no.

Yes, eventually, yoga promises that we will leave behind our limited selves. That is moksha, “complete freedom from all conditioning” (a deeply feminist concept in itself, but I digress). One day, if we continue our practice, we will find ourselves in the liberated state permanently. But even then, we may continue to take actions in the world, to live in bodies, and to make choices. We’ll simply do so from a point of view we can’t comprehend right now.

More importantly, though, that’s not where most of us are now. We are right smack in the middle of the world of impermanent things, living our lives in the midst of change and relationships and capitalism and all the rest of it. Eventually, my transitioned and transitioning body, like everything else I do in this temporary world, will fall away. But in the meantime, I can suffer less. That’s the purpose of practice.

Being transgender is a characteristic, but transness is a conscious activity that can be undertaken by anyone, whether transgender or not. It is a movement toward the final end goal, one way of understanding the work of loosening our grip.

The more I practice transness, the more options I have for living in the world. Having moved out of my fear-driven identification with one kind of self, I can see my entire self-concept from a slightly less attached vantage point. As the cycle of my practice continues, that vantage point will expand even more, and my attachments loosen again. In that way, transness becomes a practice toward the liberation that is, according to yoga, not only the purpose of life, but the highest aim of our being.

BIO: Mark Gardett (they/them) is a transgender author, yoga teacher, and transformation coach focusing on issues of identity and self-concept. Mark holds a PhD in English, and their current work centers around identity injury and identity threat, the work of yoga in expanding self-concept (especially after injury or trauma, or in times of transition), and transness as a spiritual practice. Mark’s book A Necessary Joy: Yoga and the Quest for Transformation is now available at https://tinyurl.com/4jpc7j2a, and you can find them at thepracticeoffreedom.com.