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

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.