The Egg Prime Directive is Bullshit

We transsexuals have an obligation to help each other.  Transition is hard, and there are certain things about it that only other trans people are able to help with.  That’s why community is so important.

That being said, we often don't know what to do with future transsexuals.  There are plenty of people out there who will be like us if they get the right information about what is possible.  

I am of course talking about eggs; people who are trans but don’t know it yet.  It is standard wisdom to treat these people delicately.  Their emotions around gender tend to be volatile, so asking them to confront their gender may make them panic or get defensive.  

This is why the standard advice about them is that we have to wait until they themselves learn that they are trans, and that we cannot intervene.  This is called the “Egg Prime Directive”.

I think the Egg Prime Directive is bullshit.

These eggs are not just people we can abandon; they are our future siblings.  We cannot let them stew in their own ignorance when it is in our power to help them understand themselves.  We have just as much of an obligation to future transsexuals as we do to current transsexuals.

Emptiness

It is easy to be ignorant about your own gender.  Society avoids talking about it whenever possible.  Most people that an egg will encounter are cis, and therefore, don't think about their gender any more than they have to.  In other words, eggs usually don't have anyone to talk about their feelings who would understand them, be sympathetic to them, and be able to give effective advice/support.

This makes it so that gender is often a site of deep schism or even a void for eggs. Many trans people will or have described their pre-transition existence as effectively a pantomime- not quite living, just hollowly performing half-considered expectations. 

This is why so many eggs come to believe that they are the only people in the world who feel what they are feeling.  Their dysphoria is- in a way- an emptiness as much as it is a site of pain and caused by ignorance. 

Unless they happen to find the few spaces where similar people happen to congregate, they are unlikely to come across people like them.  They instead remain ignorant of why they feel the way they do, how many other people there are who feel the same way, and what can be done to address these feelings.

We transsexuals know this feeling all too well.  Most of us were, at one point in our lives, deeply ignorant eggs, and this made us miserable at best.  However we dragged ourselves out of that (or were dragged out by others), we all agree that being left ignorant was awful, and that we never want to go back there.  

We all know that at any time, there are people steeped in that same ignorance, just as we were.  We also can’t agree on how to address it.

The way we imagine people coming to terms with their own gender is incomplete.  Most people will never crack if they don’t confront the fact that living as trans is a viable option.  In this way, transition is as much a social process as it is an individual one.  As a social species, we look to our peers for examples of how to live.  This is why trans communities are so crucial to eggs and the freshly cracked; they demonstrate what is possible.  

But, again, transsexuals can’t seem to agree how to address eggs. It’s a recurring problem and site of community debate, discourse, and crossfire.  The most common solution to this problem is the Egg Prime Directive.  It acknowledges that these eggs are trapped by their own ignorance.  However, proponents argue that the ignorance of eggs is self-reinforcing, meaning that addressing the root cause directly will cause the ignorance to grow rather than be addressed.  

Therefore, proponents of the Egg Prime Directive argue that we cannot help eggs directly.  Rather, they demand that we must wait until they realize that they are trans themselves.

There are several problems with this.  Most importantly, it misunderstands how people go from being eggs to living out as trans.  It makes the assumption that if eggs are given enough time, they will realize that they are trans, and will not require outside help to make that change.  

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This is false, at least for the vast majority of people.  In my experience, most people won’t realize they are trans by first principles.  Hardly anyone knows they are trans from a young age, and is then able to act upon that.  Most of us need to be shown in detail that it is possible to live as a different gender and/or sex from that which we are assigned at birth, since society at large has no interest in making that clear to us.  

The large wave of trans people who came out from the early 2010s to the early 2020s was made possible because, more so than at any time in history, people were shown examples of trans people living dignified lives.  Eggs seeing this had living proof that they were not alone, and were given examples of what could be done to alleviate their suffering.  Their ignorance was not broken by internal deliberation on the nature of their identity, it was broken by outside examples of what is possible.

Were it not for that wave of positive profiles of trans people, it is possible, likely even, that most readers of this website would not have realized they were trans.  Hell, I had my egg cracked by a profile of Jazz Jennings, a trans teenager, written in The Guardian of all places.

These positive depictions for the general audience are rarer today because there is more ambient bigotry against us.  This doesn't just affect current trans people, it also affects eggs.  By giving them less positive examples to draw from (and giving more negative examples), they have less knowledge about themselves to work from.  This reduces the chances that their eggs will crack, and therefore, the chances that they will live out as trans.

It is for this reason that the main justification for the Egg Prime Directive falls flat.  

I will get to the other common justification later.

Obligations to Future Transsexuals

If someone cannot find out that they are trans on their own, they will have to be assisted by some outside influence, whether that is indirect or direct.  We as a community have a responsibility to provide this.

Our obligations to our fellow transsexuals do not just apply to people in the present; we also have social obligations to future transsexuals.  Since an egg with proper knowledge, self-understanding, and willpower will develop into a transsexual, that means that current transsexuals have some obligation to provide these things.

Those who might argue otherwise are likely fixed in the tension of the anti-trans wave- worried about optics and moral panic narratives seeming true.  To that I say that transness is not a social contagion. It is a type of human experience, and humans are a social species, so it is a social experience.  Also, moral panics don’t need to be true to be effective, but that’s another story altogether.

Encountering trans people can help other trans people who aren’t yet transitioning (or even aware of themselves) by helping them find themselves. 

Now, there is much debate as to how this fact ought to be applied to eggs themselves. That same debate also covers how direct we should be about talking about gender with eggs.  Some people believe that we ought to be direct when confronting someone who we believe to be an egg.  Others believe that due to the risk of backsliding, we can only give indirect hints and ask leading questions.  Still others believe that all we can do is respond to those who are openly questioning their own gender, but cannot be proactive.

I will save this debate for another time.  HERE is a link to a good article on that topic.  I agree with the analysis, but not the conclusion.

What all these positions presuppose is that we have some amount of obligation to these eggs, and that we have the capacity to help them, even if we cannot agree to what extent.  None of these follow the strictest interpretation of the Egg Prime Directive.

Unless you believe that transsexuals only have obligations to people who currently call themselves trans, and have no obligations to eggs, then we agree that we ought to do something for them, even if we can't agree on the specifics.

If we agree that 1) transsexuals in community with one another have obligations to preserve our wellbeing (whether in the form of sharing money or sharing advice), 2) we have an obligation to help those who cannot help us in the near term, and 3) it is reasonable to expect eggs to become transsexuals in the future, then it follows that we have an obligation to help eggs.

Who Specifically Has This Obligation?

While we generally agree that someone has an obligation to help crack the eggs, where we differ is who specifically has this obligation.  Some people are less equipped to handle the process of cracking an egg than others, as well as the process of guiding someone through the emotional turbulence of early transition.  If this is done particularly poorly, there is a chance to stunt the person’s development.

This is the motivation for the other primary justification for the Egg Prime Directive: that it is irresponsible to crack someone’s egg when you are unable to help them through the transition process.  This reasoning is far more justifiable than the last, but it is still incomplete.  

To understand how this justification came about, we should understand how and where the Egg Prime Directive became popular; Tumblr in the early-to-2010s.  The term wasn’t used at the time (the earliest documented use I could find was in 2021), but the logic behind it was widely practiced.  

The typical trans user of Tumblr at this time was young (teen to early 20s) newly out, and probably mentally unstable, owing to the previous two factors, and combined with the trauma of being trans in a world hostile to trans existence.  These are people who had their hands full understanding and taking care of themselves.  They didn't have the energy to help others like them.  For this reason, they discouraged each other from cracking eggs, as they were not in a position to give the new trans people the camaraderie that they would need.

This behavior is understandable.  We cannot expect people to take on more than they feel they can handle if they truly can't handle it.  This is especially true if those involved are teenagers.  

However, I don't think that non-intervention is a good policy in general.  We as a community still have an obligation to future transsexuals.  However, fulfilling that obligation should be the responsibility of those in the community who have the emotional capacity to take on that responsibility.  That is generally not children.

So how do we address this?  I think we ought to view this obligation as a collective responsibility on behalf of the community, but which is best addressed by the more capable members of the community.

That sounds abstract, but there is already a field in which we practice this: mutual aid.  We generally accept that someone ought to make sure that no one among us is going hungry or homeless.  To ensure this, we pass around ways to help the person in need, often in the form of a Gofundme page.  There is an understanding that someone ought to ensure that these needs are met, but there is also an understanding that some people cannot provide this for lack of resources.  Those who cannot help are not shirking their duty, they are simply unable to perform it.  So long as someone is eventually able to help, the community is able to do its part.  

Addressing eggs ought to be treated in a similar way.  Even if you can’t do it, that doesn't change the fact that someone has to do it.  The community as a whole has the responsibility, but this task should be delegated to those who have the capacity for it.

This will usually mean someone who is late into their transition, who has had enough life experience to grow wise, and who has the emotional capacity to handle someone who is recently cracked.  That is to say that cracking eggs is a skill that some people will be better at than others.  We ought to find people who would be good at it, train them in the skill, and delegate the responsibility to them.

Like many community roles, cracking eggs and then setting them on the right path ought to be celebrated.  To show a prominent example, the most prominent trans account on Bluesky, Katie Tightpussy, keeps a running tally of how many people she has turned trans.  As of writing, it stands at 246.  

I for one am proud that I have cracked 6 eggs, 2 of whom are among my best friends in the whole world.  Since I have the experience and emotional capacity to help, I feel that I should use it.  I think it is an honorable act to help my people where I can, and I think that I am reasonably good at doing it.  To not try and crack an egg would be to deny help to those who need it.  I have a skill and an obligation to use it, therefore it is immoral to not use it.

If this isn’t you, that’s fine.  We shouldn't be expected to carry the world on our shoulders (and transsexuals are already prone to messiah complexes).  We should be expected to do what we can.

Still, eventually, someone has to do it.

Conclusion

To let eggs suffer in ignorance is an injustice.  If we as a community can help and refuse, we are a part of that injustice.  We cannot be bystanders in the suffering of our future transsexual siblings.  

For this reason, the Egg Prime Directive is actively harmful, and should be forgotten.

In the words of my colleague and co-founder of The Needle, 

“The prime directive is bullshit in Star Trek and it’s bullshit in gender. If you have the power to minimize suffering you have a moral obligation to exercise it.” - Artemis T. Douglas

At some point, I will make a followup on how to crack eggs effectively.  It is a delicate process, and it deserves more space than I have here.