"It almost feels like armour in a way"

Apologies for the long gap between posts - teaching really got on top of me the second half of this year, but I have still been thinking and writing about smell as well as chewing the ear off anyone who will listen about it, and now it’s your turn. Lucky!! Today I want to talk about the second piece of work which has come out of the project I’m working on about trans identity and smell. This project continues to be such a joy and pleasure to work on, and the things people shared with me in interviews were so exciting and so rich. This post is a touch longer than usual, but hopefully you’ll agree it’s worth it.

In 2022 and 2023 I spoke with 26 trans and nonbinary people living in Aotearoa and Australia and asked them to talk to me about their relationship to smell. I wanted to know if people’s feelings about and preferences around smell changed during their transition; how did they select and use fragranced items, and did they have anything they wanted to share about connections between smell and being trans? I got the idea for this project when I was trying to find a new fragrance in early 2022. I mentioned to a few friends that I was seeing a lot more fragrance being marketed as unisex, and that when I was a teenager and first figuring out that I was trans, one of the first things I did was buy men’s deodorant and a men’s fragrance. A few trans friends - I want to say three or four? - told me that they did the same thing. It seemed like for a few of us at least, smell was one of the first ways that we affirmed or explored our gender identity.

I found this compelling enough to design a project to figure out if there was something interesting that could be said about the relationship between transness and smell. The article I’m discussing today looks at just one part of the project, thinking about identity, and draws out four key themes:

• Smell as an early experience of gender affirmation

• Smell inducing feelings of affirmation

• Smell to convey identity

• Smell as a way to manage misgendering

The first of these was similar to what I had experienced - people who recalled smell-centric experiences from their younger years which they saw as reflective of their gender identity. For some people, an experience with smell that felt ‘right’ or made them feel more confident or calm pre-dated a conscious knowledge of their identity, a kind of embodied knowledge that emerged before they had the words to describe what they were experiencing. Multiple people told me that later on, when they started to think more about their gender identity, remembering these experiences with smell helped things fall into place.

Flynn (they/them) talked about the kind of scents they were drawn to prior to their own realisation about their gender and said “I think it was unconscious for me before coming out, and then after I came out… you know, when you sort of retroactively look back to apply what you know about yourself now to how you were, you were like, gosh, yes, that’s very obvious, isn’t it.”

Dylan (they/them) explained they wore men’s deodorant as a teenager. They were “not really sure of what that meant. But I knew it meant something” and although at the time they lacked the language for their identity, “I knew that I could put on this men’s deodorant and... feel more confident, or something changed in me”.

Quite a few people explained that smell and scent was part of how they consciously affirmed their own identity, too. H (he/they) changed fragrances when they started transitioning, switching from what they identified as “a very traditionally femme perfume” to a woody, smoky cologne. H talked about the cologne as something he wore “to feel quite composed and put together… it almost feels like armour in a way”, and a few people used similar language, describing smell as having a kind of protective quality.

I asked the people I spoke with to bring along a smell they particularly liked or felt strongly about to start the interview, and Nate (he/they) brought along a bottle of Armani Eros, gifted to him by his partner after he came out, which he described as “the scent that I associate with my masculinity”. Finlay (he/him) also nominated a cologne that a friend had helped him choose, which he explained represented a “pivotal moment” in his transition. Some people explained that what they wanted or needed from a scent shifted over time, particularly as they got further into their transition. Hamish (he/him), discussing a cologne he had been gifted after he came out explained “I was just excited to have something that was masculine. And now I think I don’t use it as much, because I think I’m at a point where I’m more comfortable in my identity.” Dylan explained they were at a place of “accepting all possible aspects of myself” and that “I might wear my men’s deodorant, which I’ve worn for the past 10 years, and then also have a sweet little scent on too, you know? And feel comfortable being in those two spaces in one body.” I thought this was such a fantastic summary of how smell can be a tool, but can also be one of the ways that shifts in identity can be reflected and tracked.

As well as using smell to manage how they felt about their identity and felt in their body, people also used it to communicate about their identity to other people, to help influence and direct how they were perceived. This encompassed gender as part of the identity they wanted to convey, but smell communicated much more specific and fine grained information too. Ruby/Sebastian (she/her/he/him) changed the fragranced items he wore based on how his gender felt on that specific day. Ruby/Sebastian said once she’d decided on a scent she hoped “if someone were to smell me, they would… get a sense of my personality and identity”. Responding to a question about how putting on her usual perfume made her feel, April (she/her) mused “Maybe makes me feel normal to put on? If I leave the house and I realise I haven’t put on perfume, I get pissed, you know?” Robin (he/him) explained that when he put on his cologne that morning “I sprayed it on, I was like, ah, yes, smells right.”

Alex (they/them) told me that the kind of identity they wanted people to perceive had shifted before and after they got top surgery. Alex explained “up until now I had dressed really heavily in black and had been like, I want to dress like a void. I don’t want anyone to observe my body” and this “severity” was reflected in the fragrance they used. But post-surgery, they became interested in scents where “there’s something about the warmth or the lushness of them that kind of… invites someone to perceive me”.

Finally, and linked to being conscious of how smell communicates identity to people around us, some trans people use smell as part of a suite of tools to avoid being misgendered. It feels a bit obvious to say, but the marketing of most fragrances is strongly gendered. Multiple people I spoke with expressed that while they often found this arbitrary gendering of smells tedious and might not especially like the smell of some of these fragrances (Lynx often got a mention here...) they did recognise that the unmistakeably gendered nature of some smells helped to communicate their gender identity more clearly.

People explained that they thought about who they would be interacting with when deciding how they wanted to smell, and could sometimes feel acutely conscious or wary about using any scented products which didn’t align with their gender identity, particularly early in transition, in case any mis-match might be used to question the legitimacy of their identity. AJ (he/him) told me that “…in a more hostile environment… there was quite a bit of pressure to conform to the sort of hegemonic standards of masculinity, in terms of how to present because otherwise, people would just doubt you in a way that is like, ‘so you’re not really trans’, which is frustrating.” Sometimes though, smell permitted them a degree of autonomy in unfriendly environments. As Sidney (they/them) put it: “I don’t know if I’m going to be perceived in negative ways by strangers, but at least my scent is something that I have full control over.” Sione (they/them) told me that smell was part of how they managed the “moments of contact” with new people, who they didn’t yet know and trust, hoping it could open up an opportunity “where… I can actually say that this is who I am, and this is how I am addressed”.

This has been an interesting time to be working on this project. I think smell could seem like a frivolous thing to be concerned about when it feels like every week brings some new cruelty being visited on trans people. But one of the things I have found most compelling about this work is the way it reveals us as being embedded in networks of care, and of finding ways to express our identity and make sense of it for ourselves and for other people. People told me about a smell helping something fall into place, of it lighting up their brain, or of it giving them a glimpse into being content, calmer and more confident - enough to be curious about if that state could be a little more permanent. I think smell is important because it helps to make up the large and small parts of our lives, and I believe ultimately in the value of teasing out the everydayness of being trans.

I am still very much immersed in this project - right now I’m roughly halfway through a first draft of a book on the topic, drawing on the interviews with trans and nonbinary people and also with a couple of perfumers and olfactive artists who were generous enough to speak with me. The road from manuscript to published book can be a bit of a winding one, but I’m very keen to get more of this work out into the world, and I’ll certainly be letting you know here when I’ve got updates on it! Thank you as always for reading, and if you’d like to read the longer version of this work, it’s available (no paywall) here.