Cracking The History of The Trans “Egg”

Chances are if you’re trans and online — or just looking at trans content for some reason — you may have encountered the term “egg.” No, not the one that refers to the boiled or scrambled variety. Within trans and gender nonconforming circles, egg refers to a trans person who has yet to realize their own identity.

All across TikTok, trans folks are sharing pictures from before and after their “egg” cracked, set to music from I Saw The TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun’s critically-acclaimed 2024 film about teen dysphoria and coming into your transness. While its jump in popularity across TikTok has reinvigorated conversations about the term, the trans use of “egg” isn’t new.

Popping up around the mid-2010s, “egg” became shorthand online lingo to refer to a trans person who has yet to realize or accept they are trans, or “crack their shell,” so to speak. The metaphor is simple: like an egg, a trans person has to break through their exterior wall with a journey of self-discovery and acceptance before they come into their transness. From The Matrix to Midsommar, trans people have quickly taken to the term to describe eggs in television, films, and beyond.

The trouble is, like many queer intracommunal terms that came about during the digital age with histories scattered across the internet, historians have had trouble tracing its exact origins. Even Susan Stryker, one of the foremost scholars of transgender history who appeared in the seminal documentary Disclosure, tells Them that she couldn’t quite recall when she first heard the term. That’s why we did some digging into what we could find out about the term’s history, meaning, and significance to trans people now.

What is an “egg,” in trans terms?

The Gender and Sexuality Campus Center at Michigan State University defines the term “egg” as a “slang term for someone who is trans but doesn’t know it yet. Someone who is an ‘embryo’ of the trans person they will eventually ‘hatch’ into.” At other times this self-discovery is called “cracking.” This verbiage is more often used as an action: to crack someone’s egg is to help them discover that they are trans.

“Egg” is often a designation given to someone else, like if one of your cisgender friends shows frequent signs of questioning their gender, or if you find someone who you think is on the brink of questioning their gender, you might describe them as an egg. It’s often somewhat used in a humorous manner: I’ve had friends who described their exes as a long string of eggs, for instance.

But the term is also often used as an ironic self-descriptor. People who are trans but don’t feel comfortable considering themselves as such might refer to themselves as eggs. There’s a whole subReddit (r/egg_irl) devoted to “memes about trans people in denial.” Or, essentially, trans people who aren’t ready to be out.

Where did “egg” originate?

As with many slang words, the origin of “egg” is hard to place. The earliest document of the term Them tracked down was an Urban Dictionary definition for “egg mode,” written by user bitplane7 on August 23, 2016: “someone who is trans but doesn’t know it yet.” The subReddit (r/egg_irl) was created on July 26, 2017, and the first non-deleted post on the subReddit was posted the following day. So, while the exact first time “egg” was used to indicate a closeted trans person might be lost to time, the term appears to have entered the internet zeitgeist in the mid-2010s.

Susan Stryker tells Them that she doesn’t have a clear idea of when she first heard the term “egg,” however, she does remember publishing a piece in Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ) by Grace Lavery in 2020 called “Egg Theory's Early Style,” “about how queer theory in the 1980s and 90s didn't know it was already trans.” The piece would have been written in 2019, and Stryker is pretty sure she heard Lavery use the term at the 2019 National Women’s Studies Annual Conference, where the two sat on a panel together. Though there’s a chance she’s “inventing that memory retroactively” because they were already working on the piece that would later be published in TSQ.

“I do remember at that time that ‘egg’ seemed intuitively obvious as a term to me, something whose meaning I understood and felt familiar with even if it wasn't a term that I used myself, like it was already in the ether, part of the zeitgeist,” Stryker says. “Anecdotally, based on my own social media usage, I noted a big uptick in prevalence during the COVID lockdown among the pandemic transitioners.”

And hey, that makes sense — online activity increased across the board, which means a greater number of people came into contact with niche online terminology and the communities that come with them. Take a look at the statistics for the previously mentioned subReddit (r/egg_irl) for a glance into this increase. There were many trans people who also cracked their eggs and transitioned during the early days of the pandemic, so it also makes sense that the term would grow exponentially from 2020 onward.

Is it okay to call someone an “egg?”

By calling someone an egg, it might imply that you’re waiting for them to either understand or accept their own latent trans identity. This can be done in positive and negative ways. To name fictional characters or inanimate objects as “eggs” can be merely playful and facetious intracommunal banter. To talk about an actual person as an “egg” is more precarious. In some cases, it could be out of care or interest in helping the person discover their transness, but if done in a gossipy, pejorative, or confrontational way, especially if directly to them, this may only push that person more into the trans closet.

Sometimes, hearing the term just in and of itself can be transformative to a prospective egg. Once an egg is cracked it can never return to its original form — the gooey inside has been unleashed into the world. Once an egg realizes that they are trans, and feels comfortable being trans, that’s it. The baby bird is ready to grow up.

As Lavery mentions in her aforementioned 2020 essay, the metaphor also makes reference to the idea that the trans person, before realizing their identity, is merely a shell. The interior life is tucked away until that person is able to break out — sometimes just naming it can do that.

What does “egg” mean culturally for trans people now?

If we consider the term egg to represent that nebulous period before recognizing yourself as trans, where everything feels a little strange, or different, or off, we can see the appeal of art that speaks to that feeling. The cultural influence of Lavery’s “egg theory,” the logic trans people use prior to transition to internally prove “the impossibility of transition,” provides a way for trans people to engage and connect with art that is not explicitly trans, but rather feels “eggy.”

This can range from art that seems more explicitly trans-coded, like I Saw the TV Glow, where Owen’s characterization is a near explicit exploration of the feeling of egg-dom, to works that connect with trans people’s experiences more implicitly, perhaps most famously the Wachowski sisters’ The Matrix, which gives a science fiction spin to the feeling of alienation from the world, and the feeling that there is more to existence than you’re able to feel and perceive now.

“It is a trans allegory in that it was written by two closeted trans women,” Lilly Wachowski told Them in 2023. “And so all of the things that are in it are super-duper trans. The idea of transformation, even the whole ‘My name is Neo, Mr. Anderson’ — that idea of claiming identity, it’s undeniable.”

The concept of the egg provides a means of advancing trans cultural production in ways that are both funny and serious. The term lets trans people connect with media on their own terms, and provides a path for outsiders looking to better grasp the trans experience — of which egg-dom might be a critical step.

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