Transitioning Out of Time: Why Every Gender Transition Is Always Already Late

Abstract

While gender transitions are often discussed as a question of identity/body, this article examines them as a temporal issue. Gender transitions are not only chrononormatively located in youth as the life phase in which identity formation presumably takes place, but – regardless of an individual's chronological age – are often framed as a second puberty. The article argues that this is a specific use of time that works to contain gender/sex and regulate transitions. Drawing from a Germany-based ethnographic study, the article explores how gender transitions in youth and adulthood take place through arranging time. While timing seems integral to transitions, it appears to be impossible to transition at the right time: Every transition is always already late, foundationally rendered out of sync by the linear temporal organisation of identity. This is because trans is formed by marking it as change in gender/sex where chrononormative life course expects to be continuation.

Against this background, the article discusses gender transitions as time work entrenched in notions of youth and development. This time work imposes a teleology onto change and regulates and impedes transitions. The article shows that transitions are delineated by specific uses of time and theorises how time works to figure gender within modern linearity, suggesting that it is the assumption of linear time itself which makes it impossible for transitions to be on and in time and effectively displaces them from the present. Building on that, the article departs from common understandings of trans as incongruence of body/identity, venturing that the incongruence engendering transitions might be a temporal one. Concluding, the article considers whether for better trans politics, we need a different relation to time and move away from the linear segmentation of past/present/future, to make time for a trans presence that does not need to go anywhere.

‘I had this feeling of uncertainty for a long time, whether it's too late for me’, Alex says when we talk after a group session in a trans community centre, ‘I wonder if I’m too old’. ¹ At the time of our meeting, Alex is over 60 years old. ‘I wonder whether there's still something that can be done about it at my age, if anything can be changed hormonally’, he adds, ‘and you know, I’ve made it this far in life, I told myself that I’ll also get through the remaining years’. Such doubts about whether it is too late for a gender/sex transition ² because of one's age is a recurring topic of discussion in the trans self-help groups and community spaces I visited during my ethnographic research in Germany. For those who ponder the decision to transition, the conversations revolve around the question of whether it is possible or necessary to transition after a certain point of time, after which it might be too late, one might be too old. This point in time, however, is unclear and thus produces uncertainty. Often, this uncertainty does not lead to a feeling of urgency, for example, rushing to transition as quickly as possible. Instead, like in Alex’ case, a lasting feeling of hesitation halts the present. The fear of having waited too long complicates the establishment of a firm transition desire.

Such a firm desire is necessary because contemporary gender transitions do not happen unwittingly, but deliberately. The desire and its formation, however, are under scrutiny. Unlike other transitions such as entering school, parenthood or employment, no life phase suggests a gender transition per se (Boll, 2022), nor are there widespread social practices for considering and then potentially dismissing transitioning. People do not have to justify themselves if they do not transition. By contrast, the viability of a transition hinges on justification, which largely depends on timing (Adair, 2022; Israeli-Nevo, 2017; Spade, 2003).

Alex ponders whether it is ‘too late’ to transition because of his age. However, during my research I did not come across a transition marked as timely, regardless of whether someone started transitioning at the age of 5 or 60. Instead, proper timing as an issue surfaced in many ways. A sense of belatedness was often a topic in personal accounts, conversations in trans community spaces and self-help material that form part of my research. In medicolegal contexts, I encountered discussions about the difficulty to determine the right time, the danger of transitioning too early, as well as the advantages of transitioning as early as possible. Every transition seemed to carry the risk of being timed wrongly.

So, what produces untimeliness as a common feature? Much trans scholarship has pointed out that transitions are shaped by presumptions about when and how they should take place: Norms that assume a linear and teleological trajectory influence who can transition, at what time and pace, and especially in the medicolegal field produce long periods of anticipation and waiting (Pearce, 2018; Pitts-Taylor, 2020). And while linear and teleological trans self-narrations and their futural orientation may be enabling for some (Horak, 2014; Prosser, 1998), a teleological narrative ‘belies the complex temporalities of transition’ (Malatino, 2019: 646) as most trans lives do not adhere to the progressive timeline presented but may consist of forward, backward and sideway movements (Carter, 2013). Hence, Halberstam (2005), among many others, asserts that trans lives have an inherent potential for alternative relations to normative life stages (regarding older trans adults see Bailey, 2012; Baril and Silverman, 2022).

The regulatory function of temporality has been understood as a form of chrononormativity (Freeman, 2010), as ‘trans-chrono-normative’ (Garde, 2019; see also Amin, 2014), because ‘the broadening (but uneven) social, clinical, and legal recognition of trans subjects […] is often determined temporally’ (Pitts-Taylor, 2022: 480). Given the significance of timing for transitions, in this article I examine why it does not seem possible to transition at the right time. Following Freeman (2010) who argues that time works as a form of power, I attend to particular uses of time which compose gender transitions. To do so, I make use of the concept of time work (Flaherty, 2003) and explore the ways transitions in present-day Germany are chrononormatively entrenched in notions of youth and development. I show that while timing is prevalent in everyday life (Flaherty, 2003: 26–27), gender transitions entail specific kinds of time work. Not only do trans subjects influence their temporal experiences and rearrange past, present, and future to form new temporal relations, but, as I will demonstrate, timing is also integral to transitions in that the specific form of modern linear-progressive time itself is used to fix gender/sex and regulate transitions.

The article is organised in four parts, which together are intended to demonstrate how every transition is simultaneously both late and early. First, I explore the relation between identity development and adolescence which positions transitions in late adulthood as delayed and belated. Second, I show how transitions at any age are constituted as out of sync, making lateness and belatedness both constitutive and constraining for transitions. The third part deals with transitions in youth. Fourth, I take up the disenfranchisement of transitioning adults and bring together the previous parts in demonstrating that the constitutive belatedness of transitions, coupled with developmental norms, sets the stage for impeding transitions at all ages. To do so, I rely on research that attends to how gender/sex and the temporality of transitions relate to and reify modern/colonial concepts of progress and development (Draz, 2017; Garde, 2019, 2021; Gill-Peterson, 2014, 2018; McClintock, 1995; Snorton, 2017), together with historicisations of the modern notions of adolescence and childhood (Castañeda, 2014; Lesko, 2012; Owen, 2020). These works provide me with the background to demonstrate that the gender/sex relations in focus here are a matter of timing bodies so that their dimorphic organisation is maintained, with linear developmental time acting as a mechanism of power. I conclude by considering whether the incongruence posited in trans may not be about body/identity but a temporal one, and whether for better trans politics, we need a different relation to time.

Methodology and data

This article forms part of a larger ethnographic study I conducted in 2020–2022 and explores one aspect of this research – timing – which emerges from the analysis of the material as a whole. The ethnography takes Germany-based gender/sex transitions as its object of inquiry. By transitions I mean ways of changing gender/sex that do not adhere to the medically assigned and legally enforced static male/female dichotomy. Different gender/sex positions and material situations make for different forms of, reasons and desires for, and capacities to transition; and the lives, joys, values, and views on gender/sex of those transitioning are as complex and varied as those of others. ³ Thus, the ethnography does not assume similarities based on a shared identity or extant distinctions such as cis/trans. Instead, the ways in which transitions are differentiated are at the centre of the investigation.

It employs a new materialist methodological framework and research process (Schadler, 2019), drawing on Agential Realism (Barad, 2007) and the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblage. The guiding question is: ‘Given a specific situation, what kind of assemblage would be required to produce it?’ (Buchanan, 2021: 22), that is: What are the different discursive and material components that combine in the actualisation of contemporary gender/sex transitions? And how does the assemblage regulate and arrange their relations? (Barad, 2007: 316, 335, 451Fn22; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 334–336, 347).

To ascertain what comprises the assemblage, the study used a variety of data sources and took interviews with people who transition(ed) as the vantage points for further data collection. Ten interviewees were recruited through leaflets and postings distributed in 65 community centres, and online and offline social groups, forums and mailing lists with a focus on queer, trans and/or LGBTQIA issues, across all states in Germany. The interviews took place in interviewees’ homes, workplaces, public spaces such as parks and cafés, and online, and often led to further exchanges, for example through encounters in the context of ethnographic observations in community spaces.

In the interviews, interviewees mentioned other people, spaces, regulations, concepts, documents, books and other things which played a role in their respective transition process. Tracing and including these components in the analysis was a key aspect of the study (Schadler, 2019: 222). It led to a set of data including observation notes from visits of online and offline social spaces such as counselling centres and internet platforms, further interviews, photos and drawings made by interviewees, personal medicolegal documents such as psychiatric reports and health insurance communication, media representations, medical diagnosis manuals and clinical practice guidelines, legal regulations as well as secondary sources such as survey data and historisations of specific practices or concepts.

The analysis focusses on referencing ‘processes that could have been the basis of a current situation’ and ‘rebuilding’ them (ibid.: 224), to make ‘specific boundaries and relationships comprehensible’ (ibid.: 228). It seeks to understand how gender transitions become evident as transitions, that is, bounded and propertied, and how their boundaries are defined. Specific uses of time present one component of these boundary-drawing-processes which recurred throughout the data, rendering timing integral in the assemblage that actualises transitions. Thus, this article zooms in on how time works in the delineation of transitions, and what gets excluded in those boundary-drawing-processes.

Too late

During the group meeting, Alex talks about feeling ‘a bit isolated and alone’ with starting exogenous hormones in his sixties. ‘I see all these young trans guys; they still have their life ahead of them. That makes me sad sometimes, about the time I’ve lost’, he says when he shares his doubts about transitioning after the meeting. In comparing his situation to younger trans men, he produces an idea of what would have been possible for himself at an earlier point in time. The feeling of belatedness grows from considering lost alternative life trajectories in conjunction with (imagined) transition trajectories of others. Shared timings, following Freeman (2010: 18) synchronise individual bodies with one another and larger temporal schemas, bind bodies into the social, and produce ‘a sense of being and belonging that feels natural’. Conversely, asynchrony, moving at a different speed or time to others, doing things earlier or later, unhinges the self and complicates the feeling of connectedness, community and naturalness.

Everybody else in the group meeting is under 30, and in the trans online forum Alex is active in he also rarely meets people his age. He would like to see pictures or videos from others transitioning at his age, to anticipate bodily changes. He misses having examples of ‘what that looks like, when you start so late, to have an idea of what I can expect’. The lack of such transition examples made available by others in trans online spaces and on YouTube further complicates Alex’ consolidation of a transition desire.

Looking at data for when people in Germany transition, Alex’ trajectory does indeed stand out. A recent participatory study on sexual health of trans and non-binary persons in Germany (RKI and DAH, 2023) shows that becoming aware of one's gender identity begins at a median age of 15 ⁴ and ends at a median age of 19. ⁵ At the age of 21, more than 90% of the respondents ⁶ had told someone about their identity. The hospital statistics (RDC, 2023, reporting year 2022) show that more than a third of all operations for genital transformation are performed on people aged 18–25 and a quarter on people between 25 and 30. These statistics have their limits ⁷ and transitions are far from uniform; for example less than a 10th consider genital surgery ⁸ (RKI and DAH, 2023). That said, these figures show at what age people experience or take certain steps that can be part of transitions and thus help us to infer their timing and duration.

The points in time at which transitions regularly take place are tied to temporal norms; a norm being that which ‘makes regular’ (Butler, 2004: 55) and produces seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines. In common popular and scholarly understandings, adolescence is conceived of as ‘the moment that gendered becoming occurs’ (Owen, 2020: 25): while gender/sex is assigned before or at birth through genitalia shapes, chromosomes, and gonads, a young person ‘must also become fully gendered as an (adult) man or woman through development’ (Castañeda, 2014: 59; see also Boll, 2022: 177). Since Western transness has always been medicalised, sexological and medico-scientific concepts are particularly formative for what is understood and materialises as transitions. They not only inform taxonomic and diagnostic tools and medical practice but also influence prevailing notions of trans(itions) in public discourse, legal regulations, ⁹ and form points of reference for individual experience. Acting ‘within social practices as the implicit standard of normalisation’ (Butler, 2004: 41), they define what appears as ‘legible, acceptable embodiment’ (Freeman, 2010: 4) and are thus involved in materialising what constitutes normal gender well beyond their jurisdiction.

The clinical practice guidelines analysed for this ethnography understand gender in developmental terms. Whilst they do not contain a single, shared definition of gender or identity, a teleological ¹⁰ development is assumed that leads from open, volatile and unstable to an increasing consolidation and stabilisation on the path to adulthood. Temporally divergent development is indicated with formulations such as ‘already in childhood’, ‘even before puberty’, or ‘only in adulthood’, and often differentiated into late and early onset. The time in-between would then be neither early nor late, and thus rightly timed: Adolescence is considered a crucial period, drawing on psychologist Erikson (1968) or researchers who adopted Erikson's psychoanalytically oriented model, such as Seiffge-Krenke (2021).

In the second half of the 20th century, Erikson's developmental theory advanced identity as a normative requirement for healthy adulthood. Expanding Freud's focus on the psychosexual, it defines normative steps that include physical, cognitive and psychosocial dimensions. In adolescence and young adulthood, Erikson (1968: 87–91) argues, an individual develops the necessary physical and mental maturity for identity formation and social responsibility. Not feeling ‘clearly to be a member of one sex or the other’ (Erikson, 1968: 186) can be a transient state, a period of doubt and confusion, a prolonged immaturity as part of an identity crisis. The confusion must eventually give way to a clear identification with and integration into one's gender/sex role in society, for ‘only a firm sense of inner identity marks the end of the adolescent process and is a condition for further and truly individual maturation’ (Erikson, 1968: 88–89).

Erikson's model is from the same period in which gender identity was conceptualised in Euro-American sexology: In the 1960s, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Stoller (1968), with his colleague Greenson, established the notion of gender identity – a sense of masculinity/femininity – as an independent entity not necessarily bound to sex, within a culture/nature-dichotomy. While there do not seem to be any indications of direct collaboration between Erikson and Stoller, their models converge in subsequent research in sexology and psychology, particularly on trans youth, and both were pivotal for instituting identity as an organising principle of human development and fundamental condition for social being.

In both conceptions, identity forms as part of a teleological development, and is ideally marked by firmness, clarity, and stability, as well as endangered by disorderly confusion, disturbance and distortion (Erikson, 168, 88, 186; Stoller, 1968: 36, 92, 109, 240). The threat is best averted by finding one's individual place within social norms, by forming an identity congruent with sex and its attached roles in society (Erikson, 1968: 128, 161; Stoller, 1968: 97, 140, 156–157). This makes the embodiment of social norms ‘synonymous with the arrival at adulthood’ (Owen, 2020: 103). Preoccupied with the inherent risk of failure of normal development, those models are arguably concerned with regulating and disciplining body and personality formation, particularly in those who stray from the prescribed path and might endanger procreation and reproduction of society, based on white and middle-class standards for gender and healthy identity (Gill-Peterson, 2018: 99; Repo, 2016: 49–74). Trans deviations from the path then signal an individual problem at the level of identity which constitutes a risk to social integration and heterosexual family life (Erikson, 1968: 71–72; Stoller, 1968: 192, 259), rather than the inadequacy of binary gender/sex and a desirable (and desired) life that exceeds the identity framework. The specific benchmarks and the timings in Erikson's and Stoller's models differ, but in both identity becomes gradually fixed in childhood until the end of adolescence (Erikson 1968: 161; Stoller 1968: 30). Adolescence, then, is decisive for gender transitions ‘as it leads to the definitive consolidation of gender identity’ (Seiffge-Krenke, 2021: 123, my translation).

A transition desire forming later deviates from this norm. Hence, for those study participants who transitioned in middle or late adulthood, the question looms large as to why it had not happened earlier. ‘I’m just a late bloomer’, Miro says in our interview, ‘others start much earlier, I’m relatively late, I’d say. But I was just so afraid of everything, that my parents would kick me out, that I won’t find an apprenticeship, might lose my friends’. Miro started transitioning in their late 20s. Living in a conservative rural area in Germany, they fear discrimination and stigmatisation and associate transitioning with the risk of losing stability and prospects in life. ‘And I just didn’t want to risk that. But I think I knew what was going on with me, not super consciously, but it was there, hidden somewhere deep inside me’. For Alex, the formation of his transition desire mid-adulthood caused self-questioning: ‘It's the main reason I’m struggling with transition, why I didn’t realise all this 20, 30, 40 years earlier’, he says. ‘But I should keep in mind that I didn’t grow up with the internet, with all the information. It was in the back of my mind before, that there's something like trans, but only when I saw more reports from trans men or women, I started, slowly, wondering if it applies to me’.

These accounts place the process of the formation of the transition desire or gender identity in the past – it was already there, in the back of one's mind – and provide explanations for why it only surfaced significantly later. In medicolegal contexts too, the timing requires explanation, as illustrated in psycho-medical reports study participants received as part of diagnosis and assessment processes. The reports examine eligibility for somato-medical treatment, health insurance cost coverage and/or changing first names or the legal gender/sex marker. They do so by assessing and predicting the individual's gender development as to whether it meets the medicolegal criteria in Germany at the time. The documents are imbued with reasons for why the person only presents with a desire to transition now, at the time of assessment. For the reports I had access to, these reasons include the lack of ability to understand and/or share one's gender identity, caused by insufficient knowledge or misinformation about trans, social environments hostile to and unsafe for transitioning, or self-alienation, for example through drug addiction complicating self-connection and -knowledge.

The legibility and viability of an untimely formed trans identity and respective transitions depend on making sense of the anachronism and asynchronism within the temporal norm. These reasons explain what slowed down or blocked the allegedly normal process of gender development in childhood or adolescence. By explaining why the developmental task of consolidating a gender identity was not fulfilled in due time they validate and make intelligible the transition desire. The explanations extricate the desire from its precarious position by reaching into the past and providing reasons for the present delay. This implies an understanding of time in which the past serves primarily as a developmental cause for the present.

Crucially, in these temporal arrangements, the reasons for the lateness, whether framed as sociocultural, material or biographical, are external to gender identity. That is, external reasons do not cause the identity or transition desire, but only delay its manifestation. This move allows for the temporal norm of gender identity development to remain intact, and, as set out in the following section, makes it impossible for transitions to be on and in time, regardless of when they take place.

Never early enough

Children and youth carving out a desire to transition appear not only to be the majority of those transitioning but also to be chrononormatively in sync with social and psycho-medical ideas about the timing of identity formation. However, it seems that forming a transition desire can never happen early enough. Lily told her parents that she wanted to become a girl at the age of six, in the mid-90s. In our first interview, right after my prompt to share about herself and transition, she voices a sense of having been late: ‘I don’t really belong to that group, in the typical way, to the trans people who noticed it at the very beginning, early in their development. I only noticed that I didn’t quite fit into the whole man-woman-thing when I was already in primary school. I discovered it quite late I guess’.

A discovery requires a specific temporality: What is discovered needs to be there already. Much of the consulted trans-self-help literature provides ‘a guide to discovery’ on the ‘journey of self-discovery’, and in the same vein, the sexual health study cited above (RKI and DAH, 2023) asked respondents when they became aware or conscious ¹¹ of their gender identity. Within the underlying temporal mode, gaining knowledge about one's gender identity happens retrospectively (Draz, 2017: 377; McClintock, 1995: 28). And the discovery ideally happens, as Lily said, ‘at the very beginning’. The very beginning, I venture based on Butler’s (1999: 180) account of gender as performative, marks a point in time beyond one's own lifetime because of ‘the postulation of a true gender identity’: an identity that verifies its trueness by having always existed. Gender is grounded on a ‘corporealisation of time’ in which repeated performative acts congeal over time to produce the effect of a primary and interior gendered self (ibid.: 179). These repetitions in gender practice, as Freeman (2010: 4) writes, conceal its genesis and ‘accrete to “freeze” masculinity and femininity into timeless truths of being’, linking trueness and time. The legitimacy of modern/colonial gender is grounded in duration, whether conceived of as trans or not (Adair, 2022: 485). It not only conceals the fact that ‘gender cannot behave the same way across time and space’ and is ‘historically grounded and culturally bound’ (Oyěwùmí, 1997: 10). ¹² It also means that, unlike other bodily characteristics, feelings of belonging, desires, or self-understandings, gender/sex may not change over the course of a lifetime. Gender does not appear as something to create or choose. Gender is always already there, and trans marks the retrospective discovery.

To be sure, this temporal arrangement as such is not a unique feature of transitions but of gender formation in general. For ‘gender is for and from another before it becomes my own’ (Butler, 2004: 16), not least because it is fixed by others before/at birth, and the gendered relations we live in precede the individual life. However, if what is brought to you rather seamlessly becomes your own, then supposedly no decisive juncture in the process stands out, no specific point in time marks the incorporation. If what you discover is what others have told you is there, the discovery is none. Then, gender can maintain its ostensible primacy and timelessness, for it has indeed always been there. Transness, by contrast, only comes after, and in this sense, is inevitably late and marked by a constitutive lag. In other words, transness implies something before: It is stipulated as derivative and explained through reference to timeless binary gender/sex.

This constitutive lag renders different forms of time work necessary for transitions to be viable. Transitions may involve various practices that manoeuvre this time lag and make ‘time fold and pleat’ (Carter, 2013: 140) to bring a future self into being. But since it is impossible to catch up with timelessness, pressure is folded into the pleat, and may cause transitions to be time-pressed and unfold with a sense of urgency. This can be seen in Alina's account, who shares with me in one of our interviews that ‘when you come out and say “ok, I'm a woman”, but you have all this hair and a penis, then the pressure is very high to get there as quickly as possible’. The pressure can come from different sites, trans and non-trans, as Israeli-Nevo (2017: 38–39, 44–45) shows, and likely in gendered, classist and racially differentiated forms.

When Alina began her transition at the age of 23 ‘it was like this for me: all or nothing. When I understood that, when I knew, I am a woman now, this is me now, there was no turning back. But then I realised, oh shit, I’m still in this body. And I still look like a man with a cheap wig, shit!’ This discrepancy is a temporal one, a longing towards a body and self that is not there yet. Communicating and using a different name and pronoun and telling others about the gender repositioning was a way of dealing with the discrepancy, a temporal pleat bringing present and future together. However, to live in the fold, ‘to feel this discrepancy, during that time, that was hard. Not as hard as living in the wrong identity before, it was … it has its own pain, its own challenges’. Alina continues to recount numerous events where she was harassed in public and her personal life, denied access to facilities and, even when ‘people left me alone’ felt exposed when out and about in her hometown. Gender temporalises the body in that time works as a ‘as a mechanism of differentiation’ (Draz, 2017: 373): Insofar as gender is borne on the body, transitions plasticise gender and mark change where ‘the body's supposed truth’ is situated ‘in static existence outside of historical movement’ (Freeman, 2010: 4). Properly temporalised bodies are deemed real. In contrast, Alina's transing body exposes gender in its necessary temporality. This does not tend to deprive the temporal verification mechanism of its power and lead to situations in which femininity and masculinity thaw and fuse. Rather, failures to embody timeless gender appear as asynchrony. The very trueness of Alina's body is called into question, devalued as not genuine, and exposed to violence.

Too early

While every transition is always already late given the atemporal constitution of modern/colonial gender/sex, transitions of young people are simultaneously considered too early. At the age of nine, in the early 2000s, Lily was seeing a psychologist to attain an indication letter necessary for starting somato-medical treatment. ‘It's like being in front of a tribunal, that's how I felt. It was all down to this person’, she remembers the feeling of being at the mercy of the practitioner, ‘I just really wanted to have this letter, so badly’. After each consultation, her parents received a letter from the practitioner which outlined his assessment and the need for further sessions, ultimately stretching over a period of three years. ‘I never knew what was going to happen, how he was going to decide. Of course, he also made some comments during the meetings, but the final decision came with the letters’. Lily is not trusted to make the decision to take hormones herself. As a child and as an adolescent, she lacks this decision-making power over her own body.

Adolescents are construed as distinct from adults based on a universalised timeline in which ‘the interiority of selfhood’ is linked ‘with the biological growth and aging of the body’ (Owen, 2020: 44). Adolescence as an identifiable developmental stage emerged at the turn of the 20th century, together with the conception of time as linear-progressive and objectifiable (Lesko, 2012: 91; Owen, 2020: 62–62). The idea of progressive development is imbricated with the conceptualisation of abstract time that exists independently of things: It makes possible the idea of a self as growing and progressing on an individual, if universalised, timeline, and to evaluate life against time as a parameter external to it. Youth became defined as a ‘psychological development time’ (Lesko, 2012: 102), in-between the naturally dependent, immature child and adulthood, a transient stage and a time of rapid changes. In it, adolescents’ self-knowledge figures as unstable and uncertain, making paternalism towards young people seem inevitable (Lesko, 2012: 165; Owen, 2020: 126, 104). Still today the alleged instability and lack of maturity limit their capacity to make decisions about their lives and bodies, also institutionalised in the legal status as a minor (Sauer and Meyer, 2019: 145–146, 159).

How this developmental paradigm manifests itself in the present is exemplified by a statement from the German Ethics Council (Deutscher Ethikrat, 2020: 3), a relevant actor in shaping social and medical approaches to transitions in Germany. In 2020, the council stated that ‘the ability to reflect and make decisions is still developing in adolescents’ and argued that this is why the adults involved (parents and medical professionals) face the challenge of taking the young person's ideas and wishes into account while protecting the young person's well-being. In other words, young people are not trusted to know what they want and understand the consequences of their desires and decisions.

Of course, the disenfranchisement affects young people in general because of the place allocated to them on the developmental timeline. However, when young people desire to settle within the established boundaries of their assigned gender, this is not fundamentally questioned based on a lack of maturity. Hence, it appears that it is only in certain cases that young people's supposed lack of ability to reflect and make decisions is mobilised, namely when the positionally superior adult decides for the young person that their will constitutes a risk for their well-being. The well-being at risk not only lies in the future, overriding the present child/adolescent (Kokko, 2024), the young person's will is considered to conflict with their well-being because it constitutes a deviation from their assigned path within specific gender/sex boundaries. While the German act against conversion therapy prohibits changing a person's gender identity, characterising adolescents as still-developing allows for a ‘reconciliation with the body’ – in other words, no transition – to be discussed as a desirable developmental outcome worth protecting in the context of developing the new guideline on gender incongruence and dysphoria in childhood and adolescence (Wüsthof et al., 2024: 7, 20–21). Masquerading as individual care, young people's capacity to make decisions about their bodies is reduced when their choices are socially unwanted. Owen (2020) and Lesko (2012) show that such a differential treatment is a general feature of adolescence-as-development: a mechanism of power put into service for regulating what adulthood should be, that is in that those who ‘occupy normative categories and roles […] are often imagined to be on their way to maturity and thus on their way to social recognition of their personhood and right to civic participation’ (Owen, 2020: 87). ¹³

Often the status of youth means having to wait until adulthood to make socially undesirable decisions. But transitions of young people are simultaneously also treated as a matter of urgency. Treatment guidelines point out the advantage of therapeutic intervention in adolescence to minimise later mental health problems and set the beginning of puberty as the time for somato-medical interventions. This resonates with the medicalisation of puberty in the 1970s, which connected plasticity to puberty – with the idea of adolescence as a temporal threshold (Gill-Peterson, 2018: 182). Adolescence is seen as a ‘process of increasing differentiation’ (Erikson, 1968: 23) into a more stable form, and increasing differentiation means decreasing malleability. It is not only the adolescent's identity which is considered to change rapidly and be more malleable before puberty than later in adolescence and in adulthood, but also the body.

This leads the young person into a temporal impasse: adolescents’ characterisation as still developing, including the ascribed malleability, means that they are too young to decide independently to diverge from socially prescribed paths. It is too early for them to know what they want. At the same time, malleability, and especially the idea of waning bodily plasticity, makes adolescents apt for interventions, for which it might soon be too late.

The mastery of time is supposed to lead out of the impasse: After the three-year diagnostic process and with the beginning of puberty, Lily received endocrine treatment with gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogues, often called puberty delaying treatment or blockers. They suppress endogenous sex hormones and are supposed to prolong the malleability of the body, imagining the pausing of puberty. In the drawing Lily makes of her transition in one of our meetings, she draws only one long line for this time: ‘Nothing really happened, it was just to give me more time, to know who I am, who I want to be, also for society, in the future’, she remembers.

GnRH analogues are invested in the future, they serve to gain time for shaping the future. It is time work attempting to have ‘control over time in an effort to realise a specific version of self’ and ‘“future possibilities” in current or anticipated circumstances’ (Flaherty, 2003: 30). As Castañeda (2015) and Gill-Peterson (2014, 2018), among others, have shown, this future, though, is not open. The ‘physical development happening in puberty creates time pressure’ (Deutscher Ethikrat, 2020: 3) because the body has an agency of its own and what is at risk is a normatively gendered future, an eventual conformity in adulthood. The body pre-adulthood is seen as uniquely transformable and therefore able to ‘achieve legitimately gendered adulthood by accommodating to developmentally normalised medical treatment’ (Castañeda, 2015: 8). The source of urgency is a temporal constraint from the future.

So, while all transitioning bodies are temporalised improperly, puberty blockers help fix the body who transitions early enough and is deemed to have the potential to ‘be put back on course when it deviates from the norm’ (Castañeda, 2014: 60). ¹⁴ The transition in youth is timelier than the transition in adulthood because of its potential of an adulthood that is, at least not visibly, trans. Gender's timelessness puts the transitioning body out of step, and the young developing body might get back in step, ‘recuperated and naturalised through a narrative of growing up into adulthood’ (Gill-Peterson, 2014: 416Fn5). The relative timeliness of transitions in adolescence is thus based, at least in part, on the intention to redress young people towards an adulthood that does not reveal any transness, ‘to promise a future that erases trans visibility itself’ (Gill-Peterson, 2018: 198).

Forever young

When Alex applied for funding for his mastectomy, the surgical removal of breasts, the health insurance medical service (MDK) denied his application. In his application, he justified the need for the procedure by stating that, despite his beard growth, he is often not treated as a man in everyday life due to his large breasts, and is also subjected to violence because of his appearance, making a mastectomy imperative for him to be able to live as a man. After several months, he received the negative response. The MDK replied that, as he is still often treated as a woman because of his breasts, he is not yet able to live his everyday life as a man and therefore cannot yet be sure whether this is really what he wants.

This is informed by guidelines for the MDK which require at least 12 months of so-called full-time real-life experience to test if the desired role is liveable and gender identity is coherent. The coherence is thus always also a temporal one, grounded in persistence over time. Alex is presented with a temporal conundrum: he must already live as a man to be able to live as a man, to be what he wants to become, while being denied what he needs to succeed in that. The MDK argued, he should take more time to try to live his life as a man and, with the rejection, they want to ‘give him more time for his personal development’. The letter suggested to wait another year, to experience further physical changes induced by exogenous testosterone before undergoing surgery. Alex’ second application for funding a hysterectomy (uterus removal) was denied a few weeks later. The MDK explained that a hysterectomy was irreversible, which would make it impossible to bear children himself should he want to do so at a later point, and thus prioritised the preservation of reproductive capacity for him over his desire for surgery, despite his bodily reality of the beginning menopause at the time of application.

Like young people with a transition desire, Alex is not yet trusted to make such decisions about his body and anticipate their consequences. His experience provides a vivid example of how transitioning adults are demoted on the developmental timeline and ‘required to regress developmentally, returning to a state of immaturity so that they may become the gendered subjects they desire to be’ (Castañeda, 2015: 7). Following Boll (2022: 177) who says that ‘[p]art of doing gender “correctly” is doing age transitions “correctly”’, part of doing age transitions correctly is doing gender correctly; and the transitioning adult fails at both in their interconnectedness. If identity ‘fixed at the end of adolescence’ (Erikson, 1968: 161) is deemed a necessary developmental milestone for achieving adulthood, the transitioning adult does not fulfil normative adulthood. Changing gender – be it transitions into a stabilised social category or continuous movement – then marks a temporary phase and (as of yet) incomplete development on the path to real, stable gender. From this vantage point, transitions in adulthood indicate an unfinished maturation process and developmental problem – an idea that even found its way into the first cardinal symptoms of adult transsexuality in Germany a few decades ago (see Sigusch et al., 1979, 263–268, 270). Transitioning adults are incapacitated based on how they do gender at their age. Today's clinical practice guidelines and public discussions highlight the responsibility treatment providers have towards those seeking transition-related treatment. Concerns of doctors and psychotherapists are described as inevitably in tension with the right to self-determination, based on which adults who want to transition are granted shared decision-making.

Under the pretext of care, Alex is told that he needs more time for development. His desire and self-knowledge are construed as fleeting, and since their continued existence can only be determined retrospectively, he must wait. The legitimacy and viability of Alex transition are tied to duration over time. In this sense, also Alex is positioned as too early, which justifies the institutionalisation of delay: Those who are early have to wait. Ostensibly, the concern is about Alex's future. Yet it is even more obvious here than with adolescents how linear developmental time is ‘shifted in the present embodiment of a person to achieve particular ends’ (Owen, 2020: 171): Alex’ ability to know what he wants, now and in the future, is questioned because he challenges existing gender/sex relations. This illustrates that adolescence ‘persists as the embodiment of regressive, deviant, or pathological forms of developmental arrival in adulthood’ and thus is not necessarily ‘over when the body reaches physical maturity’ (Owen, 2020: 65).

Gender transitions are firmly linked to youth as a life phase to the extent that they get recast as ‘a second adolescence’ (Pearce, 2018: 124) or ‘a second puberty’ (Bailey, 2012: 56) for and by those transitioning in adulthood. This is grounded in comparing emotional, social, and physical changes associated to the period considered first adolescence with those that may take place in gender/sex transitions, such as changes in gendered comportment, appearance, body shape, hair, voice, or libido, and the exploration of new clothing styles, social spaces, or sexual desires. Transitions in adulthood are framed as the time when individuals ‘come to terms with moving through the world in their preferred gender role(s)’ (Pearce, 2018: 124) and may be ‘experimenting with their gender expression like a teenager’ (Baril and Silverman, 2022: 126).

In our interview, Alex shares that he is ‘very happy and grateful to be going through this puberty, with testosterone, basically the second one, now that I’m not so young anymore’. He feels that having lived six decades provides him with ‘a certain maturity to deal with life and this emotional chaos, my sex drive has also changed, to deal with it better than boys who don’t have so much maturity yet’.

Alex walks the line between youth and adulthood and revalorises what should be contained and left behind in adolescence, allowing it to become part of his adult life, differently. Such a valorisation makes possible a perspective different from Halberstam’s (2005: 174–175) refusal of adulthood for its association with reproduction and the family, and from Carter’s (2013: 143) critique of Halberstam who argues that to embrace arrested development rejects futurity and ‘shuts down the space for becoming-trans’ (ibid.: 142) and thus marginalises those who need to move on because they cannot remain who, how or where they are. Alex experiences what he describes as a second puberty neither as setback nor celebratory achievement, but navigates normative temporal schema by evading an idealisation of failure and of development. The notion and experience of a second puberty later in life interlocks different strata of time, cuts across teleological notions of growing up, and collapses the assumed linearity of externalised time. Past, present, and future coexist and include each other in non-chronological, manifold time (Deleuze, 1988: 59–60, 1994). What seems to have been lost by waiting too long becomes that which enables Alex transition to take form. Thus, I suggest that valorising temporal lag is not about celebrating failure nor foreclosing change but a way of sidestepping the aporias produced by positing linear time and its force to synchronise bodies and produce belonging. Throwing the parameters for success and failure into confusion and resisting to impose a teleology on experience and change becomes the condition for ‘return[ing] with a difference’ (Carter, 2013: 139), a return which ‘dismantle[s] the inevitability and mutually exclusive construction of youth/maturity’ (Halberstam, 2005: 174), because the ‘only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 277).

Coda: Transitioning out of time

Transitions are formed by marking a change where chrononormative life course prescribes continuation. Despite – and because – of the specific temporality of presumed gender development, they have no time and place in the timeline. It appears that the only way to be in time with gender is to confirm its timelessness by endowing one's medically, legally and socially assigned category with meaning over time. This indicates that all genders fundamentally cannot be assumed to already cohere in time, which deexceptionalises transitions. Yet, while the temporal continuity imposed on gender/sex regulates all bodies, it exceptionalises those transitioning and renders them out of sync. Therefore, this article seeks to reorient aetiological debates towards time as one major force producing transitions in their present form. Time does exist in bodies and not external to them, and through specific uses of time, some gender/sex incorporations come to seem like somatic facts while others are temporalised as derived and construed as less natural or real. Gender/sex takes place through arranging time and the power of timing to effect true gender/sex construes transitions as a belated actualisation. From this impaired position, transitions are drawn up as improvements over time. Those who want to transition are conceptualised in terms of a past from which they will soon develop, towards a projected time of future durable gender. In contrast with congealed gender/sex, transition is associated with motion. Like youth, transitioning subjects are figured as and mainly exist in the future, that is, they exist as developing or becoming. As Stone (1992: 61) argued, this transient character manifests in self-erasure being the ‘highest purpose of the transsexual’.

Relegating transitional phenomena to pre-adulthood renders them as on the way to something, but never the real thing. The developmental paradigm creeps its gender/sex norms in through congealing time: While gender/sex transitions from young people are under scrutiny due to their category of age, a transition desire forming in later adulthood is under scrutiny because of its deviation from the chrononormative placement in childhood and adolescence. In youth, that which is depicted as indeterminate or ambiguous within current gender/sex relations can be dismissed as temporary. In adulthood, it can be dismissed as immature and in need of development.

It may seem tempting to tackle this devaluation by removing transition desires from their precarious position in developmental temporality, by asserting that those who desire to transition can act as independent, autonomous individuals; that they are wrongly deemed incapable of making decisions about their bodies and lives, when in fact they are perfectly capable – which, of course, they are. The key issue, though, runs deeper: Placing identity as the reason for transitions and for individuals to be trans effectively temporalises and tempers gender/sex. ¹⁵ Not only does identity's timeless character introduce coherence and continuity as prerequisites for identity formation and problematise discontinuities. Such a knowable identity which needs to be discovered also precludes the possibility of wanting to become trans, prompting doubts and invalidations of transition desires in self-interrogations and institutionalised scrutiny as to whether one is truly and innately trans. Gender only changes in such a way that the change will not have taken place.

By contrast, refraining from a singular yet universalised notion of gender-as-identity frees those who transition from ‘the fate of representing something essential about time’ (Adair, 2022: 477). It unbinds gender from time which burrows both backward and forward to ensure permanence and decide who is deserving of care. The making of time reconfigures which ways of living gender/sex come to matter, and challenging the notion of linear-progressive time allows reconfiguring transitions beyond any developmental sense. Moving away from transition-as-developing delinks changes in the present from the knowability of the future, and thus reduces the need of a future-oriented outlook on the parts of those transitioning and medicolegal management. Putting the postulated externalised time into disarray also opens new ways of thinking about external causality and challenges the assumption that transitions are the result of particular identifications. Gender is always ‘a manifestation of something else’ (Saketopoulou and Pellegrini, 2023: 161), causality implies no direction to time and causes are non-separable from their effects. This means transitions can be legitimately engendered by that which is placed outside of identity. The incongruence that characterises trans(itions) then is not one of body/identity but one produced by time work. Incongruence remains at the core of gender/sex transitions, but as a temporal one, which defies being displaced into the interiority of an individual.