The Dysphoria Post

I had been planning to write a post all about sex and my transition, but that was before I knew how many close relatives read this blog (hi, Dad!). So you're getting a post about dysphoria instead.

For me, dysphoria peaks and troughs, sometimes for days at a time. When it overwhelms me, it really fucking sucks.

 
It's enervating. It completely drains me of the energy and motivation to do anything except stay alive.

 
It's crushing. It makes me feel like I'm suffocating, like every breath catches on a fish-hook embedded in my chest.

 

It's inescapable. I have always tended to seek respite from my problems – school problems, relationship problems – in fiction, whether books, TV, or movies. There are stories with no school in them. There are stories with no romance in them. But I don't know any stories with no gender in them. All the stories have gendered characters, gendered terms, gendered pronouns.

When it's bad, it's really bad. All I can do is curl up, trying not to cry from the pain, and wait for the sweet release of sleep.

I don't have wildly unrealistic aspirations. I don't dream of being a muscle-bound Adonis with washboard abs. I have felt searing envy over bodies that, by normative societal standards of masculinity, would be considered quite unenviable.

(As one friend put it, meanly but hilariously, "Dysphoria will trick you into thinking that [name redacted] is someone to aspire to.")

I wish I knew how to get out of the pit. I wish there was something I could do to stop feeling this way. I wish I could just go to sleep and wake up in the right body.

You have laid me in the lowest pit,

In darkness, in the depths. ...

You have afflicted me with all your waves.

One month on T

The little hairs in the crook of my elbow: have they always been there? The slight increase of hairiness on the back of my hands: am I imagining it? The fluff on my face might be mostly wishful thinking, but my sideburns are definitely growing square-cut now, instead of to those girlish points.

I can't be sure whether the tiny, barely-perceptible changes I see are actual physical changes caused by the hormones, or just things I never noticed before, because I never before paid this much attention to my body.

Whether the changes are physical or cognitive, this is a shift. After a lifetime spent daydreaming myself into other bodies, other selves, I think I am finally beginning to live into my own body.

(I can even call it "my body" without a shudder, without my usual periphrases: "this body," "this sack of meat," "the body with which I have been burdened.")

*  *  *

I keep seeing this FTM ur-narrative, this life story that seems to be the "perfect" FTM story. It's the "always knew" narrative: the guy who has known he was a boy for as long as he can remember, whose parents pooh-poohed his repeated assertions to that effect, who got in trouble in kindergarten for joining the boys' line, und so weiter. That's a fine narrative if it's true for you, but it troubles me that it seems to be upheld as the only or best trans* narrative.

It's not a true narrative for me. For starters, I fear it risks reinscribing the exact mind-body dualism that I'm trying to deconstruct through my transition. Part of the point of transitioning for me is to reject the mind-body dualism to which I had always subscribed. I mean, I have two brothers. The ways in which my body differed from theirs were always very apparent. I couldn't have said I was a boy when I was a child, because my understanding of what it meant to be a boy was predicated on the physical things I didn't have.

Nobody told me about gender. I think I thought gender was only a grammatical thing until I was like 19.

Sometimes that makes me angry. I feel such contempt for my younger self, for what I see as this cow-like placidity, this fear of rocking the boat, this acceptance of The Way Things Are which for so long kept me from even knowing I could do anything about it.

Other times, I hate my present self for what I am doing to myself and my family and those around me. After all, if I went for so long without rocking the boat, couldn't I have just kept it up for the rest of my life?

I can't, though. Not with what I know now. For all that it makes everything needlessly complicated and difficult, for all the shit I have to go through, I can't not do this.

I am becoming an embodied self. It's kind of amazing.

Liminality

Right now, I look androgynous.

People don't know what to do with me. When I go to a grocery store or a restaurant, I sometimes get called "sir" and sometimes "ma'am." If I'm with a male friend, I tend to get read as male, whereas I seem more likely to get gendered female when I'm with women.

Often, I just confuse people. I notice it when the waiter takes our order, addressing each of my friends as "sir" or "ma'am," then getting to me and saying, "And for you...?"

Or there was the time when the Banana Republic fitting room attendant was telling each person in line, "Sir/Ma'am, your room is ready." On seeing me, he asked me my name - which obviously helped none, because he ended up just saying, "Max, your room is ready."

Or the time at Eucharist, when the presider had been saying to each communicant, "My sister, the body of Christ! My brother, the body of Christ!" When it came to me, there was a very long pause; and then, "Max, the body of Christ!"

At first it was fun, destabilizing people's neat little gender categories like that. I hadn't been so ambiguous since I was sixteen and beholden to a ghastly and neutralizing school uniform. I felt like a gender warrior, smashing the crap out of the stupid gender binary simply by existing.

I'm getting a little tired of it, though.

I don't want to spend my whole life thinking about gender every damn minute of every damn day. I don't want going out in public to be this big exhausting palaver of will-I-get-misgendered-today. If I could be certain that I would only ever get seen as male or neutral, I would be okay with it; but, in a world of binaries, visible androgyny carries the risk of being read as female.

(I've had more than enough of that for one lifetime.)

In a world where the vast majority of people didn't feel the need to instantaneously classify everyone they see as either M or F, perhaps I could be happily androgynous forever. But we do not live in that world, and I don't want to spend my life in the in-between space.

I'm a guy. I just want people to see me that way.

Transgender Jesus

“Jesus exists precisely to be a blank sheet onto which we can write, project and reinscribe our longings and fears. The narrative locations in which Christ comes to find himself are multiple. This does not undermine but rather expands his historic specificity. The ultimate palimpsest, Jesus gives up and gives over the authorship of his signification into the hands of others. A queer understanding of Jesus makes clear that colonial authority is to be resisted, since the latter elides multiplicities of stories. Rather, difference and diversity are written and overwritten here, the parchment becoming denser and darker as spiralling narratives feed off and subvert one another.”

Susannah Cornwall, Controversies in Queer Theology

I read this paragraph for class weeks ago, and I keep coming back to it. It gets me very stoked about the constructive theological possibilities of rewriting Jesus; but it also troubles me enormously.

I do believe very strongly in constantly refiguring Christ to reflect the face of the outcast, whoever that may be. This is basically the core of my theological praxis: to reinscribe the Christs who look like me, and to encounter others' reinscriptions of the Christs who look like them.

The part that bothers me is the “blank sheet.”

Is that all Jesus is? Is he nothing but a mirror, an empty page, the reflection of our own deepest needs and longings? Does he have no substance in himself?

I do not like what this implies about my God.

In researching a paper this past couple weeks, I have been surprised at the apparent lack of a sustained theological treatment of a transgender post-resurrection Christ. People have likened the hypostatic union of the incarnate Christ (fully God and fully human) to being transgender; it's been suggested that, if God encompasses all genders, then becoming incarnate as a male was for Jesus a kind of gender transition; Virginia Ramey Mollenkott most famously combined parthenogenesis with an intersex condition to propose a chromosomally-female, phenotypically-male Jesus, suggesting that intersex people and trans guys most closely resemble the historical Jesus – but nobody has done much work on this with the resurrected Jesus.

I'm thinking of something like Nancy Eiesland's Disabled God, where she explicitly claims the post-resurrection body of Christ as a disabled body and draws out some theological implications for the reconciliation of PwD with their own disabled bodies and with the body of Christ that is the church.

Without wanting to appropriate the Disabled God or imply a conflation of transness with disability, I don't see why we can't borrow this method for imaging a Trans Christ. If we can claim the post-resurrection body of Christ as a trans body, maybe we can draw out some theological implications for the reconciliation of trans people with our own trans bodies and with the body of Christ that is the church.

I think this has some enormously liberating possibilities. My own relationship with my body is so hopelessly conflicted and tangled up that I don't know where to start seeking reconciliation with it. I do know that there is more hope for that now than I ever had before.

I've only been living as a guy for a few months, and already I look back on my time as female like a kind of imprisonment. I do feel liberated, and I haven't even started making the big physical changes. I want there to be a theology of this. Justin Tanis' Trans-Gendered is the best I've found, but I'm trying to do more.

I'm trying to remake Jesus in my own image. Should I be?

The Embodiment Problem

I'm beginning to worry that I'm nothing more than a ferocious, obstreperous, intractable contrarian; that all of my philosophy, theology, and metaphysics are based on nothing more than denial and negativity; that I have an uncontrollable urge to qualify, mitigate, and negate any statement I see, simply because it is a positive or categorical statement.

Maybe I'm being a good deconstructionist, drawing attention to Derrida's insistence that every word or statement contains a trace of its negation, or maybe I'm just a buzz-killing, problematizing Negative Nigel (not that the two are mutually exclusive). What's clear is that I am intensely suspicious of any position, idea, belief, or argument, and I will find ways to criticize even the ones I agree with.

Of course, this makes it rather difficult to establish which ones I do agree with, because literally everything in the world seems fatally flawed to me. One area where I have absolutely no idea what I think or believe is to do with embodiment.

Queer theologians LOVE embodiment. In an understandable reaction to the sex-negativity of the matter-denigrating dualism that still pervades our culture (the religious form descending through Christian thinkers heavily influenced by popular Greco-Roman philosophy; the secular flavor popularized by Descartes), queer theologians take Merleau-Ponty's observation that the body is inseparable from the self and use that to unproblematically celebrate embodiment as an innate good. Susannah Cornwall writes that she's never met a queer theologian who didn't agree with the statement that embodiment is good (yes you have, Susannah, I just didn't mention it).

Well, if it's a consensus view in my field, I'm going to have to problematize it. I'm a contrarian like that.

Truth be told, though, my need to problematize the simplistic “embodiment = good” equation stems ultimately not from theory but from my personal, very complex and conflicted, relationship with being embodied.

Early childhood was probably the time I was most comfortable in my skin. I played sports, took my shirt off when I felt like it, got rough-and-tumble sometimes and curled up quietly with a book at other times. I've never been coordinated or graceful (ask my mother about my disastrous semester of ballet lessons), but I haven't always been as uncomfortable and awkward as I am today. Sadly, I hit every single branch on my way down the puberty tree, from bad posture to bad skin to a severe case of the Bella Swan lolclumsies, all of which still afflict me today (to the point where there is an evil plot on the part of my more Schadenfreude-prone friends to kidnap me and take me ice-skating, just for the lulz).

It's not that I hate my body precisely. I hate some of the things that it does (every month: this time it's not going to happen, this time I have willed it out of existence with the sheer force of my hatred for it), I hate its limitations (third arm and stalk eyes now, pls – or at the very least a sense of spatial awareness and a cure for motion sickness), and I hate most of all the meanings other people read onto it. Sometimes I think that all this fumbling toward a trans* identity is simply an attempt to wrest a modicum of control over how others read my body.

Like, I often think that I would like T and top surgery, but is that because I want those things themselves or because I want the meaning they would cause others to read onto my body? And it's not as though you can separate those things. (One reason why the “man trapped in a woman's body” narrative is unhelpful for me: completely detached from the body, what possible meaning can “man” or “woman” have? I've been trying to answer that question my entire life.)

And I know that T and top surgery wouldn't magically make me enjoy being embodied. This isn't a straightforward case of “here are the things wrong with my body, let's fix them.” It's more a case of ontological dissatisfaction with the very fact of my having a body at all. T and top surgery might alleviate the symptoms, but there's no cure.

The problem with YAY EMBODIMENT is that I don't feel that way about embodiment. If embodiment is a good thing and I should love my body, then my dysphoria and general antipathy toward physical reality have to be pathologized. And that puts me in the weird position of wanting to defend my dysphoria. Like, don't tell me how to feel about my own body! I can hate it if I want to!

Shit's complicated, yo. And, as abstract as it sounds to debate embodiment and the nature of the relationship between mind/soul/self and body/matter/physicality, it's not mere ivory-tower pontification. It's really important for how I live out the rest of my life.

Yes, I made this. Yes, it helped me figure stuff out.

A Short List Of Things That Do And Don't Matter In The Ongoing Quest For Authentic Discernment Of My Gender Identity

Things that don't matter

My parents' opinion

Wider society's opinion

Anybody at all's opinion but mine

My mother's desire for a daughter

“Why” I feel the way I do

What, precisely, I “really” am (trans, genderqueer, just confused...)

How long it's taken me to admit any of this to myself

Things that do matter

My pain and dysphoria at being gendered female

My delight at being gendered neutral or masculine

So It Begins

So, I finally bought a binder.

I've been wanting one for so long, but I was too afraid to actually get it. Oh, they're too expensive. Oh, figuring out the sizing is too confusing. Oh, making one is beyond me because I have no arts-and-crafts skills. (Am I still allowed to be part of the queer and/or blogging communities if I admit that I have no arts-and-crafts skills?)

A week ago, the excuses ran out. I just couldn't stand it any longer. I ordered one online, and yesterday it finally arrived.

I'd been really on edge waiting for it. I knew it was ridiculous, but I just felt like putting it on for the first time would be this ~magical moment of truth~, an epiphany where everything fell into place and I would be able to stand up straight and tall and say LOOK AT ME, WORLD, THIS IS WHAT I AM.

Of course, this is not exactly what happened. It's a nice thing to have; I like what it does to my body shape a lot; but it doesn't make me completely flat, and it certainly doesn't solve all my issues in one swoop. But I did think that my first day wearing it out would be a day without (or, okay, with less) dysphoria.

It started out grand enough. I went into the city with a group of friends. It was a beautiful day, and I was wearing my new binder under one of my favorite T-shirts. I felt okay about myself, or at least as close to okay as I ever get.

Then we went to a bowling alley, and I nipped to the bathroom. There were non-gendered bathrooms, which was nice. I adjusted my binder and made sure I looked okay, and then went to join my friends in the bowling alley. They'd already paid for two lanes and entered everyone's names. They'd split up the group into “men” and “women”, and included me among the latter.

Do you want to know what the dysphoria felt like? I will tell you. It felt not unlike a panic attack: waves of nausea would crash over me, so intense I could barely stand upright, and then recede just enough to make me think I could cope before hitting me again in full force.

I am not very good at confronting issues head-on, and anyway I didn't want to ruin anyone else's fun, so I did not say anything. And it's not that I expect my friends to read my mind or anything – I haven't spoken about it openly with many of them and I don't expect them all to be totally sensitive about it – but they see the gender-neutral pronoun buttons I wear; they know gender is kind of a difficult subject for me; they know I prefer gender-neutral language wherever possible.

They should've fucking known this would upset me.

Like, I don't know, maybe gender dysphoria is trivial or a joke to them; but it's really, really painful for me. Every time someone uses female pronouns for me, it stings a little; every time someone calls attention to my assumed femaleness in a major way, it's like a punch in the gut. It really does feel like a physical injury.

The other day one of my friends referred to me as a “girl”. I didn't say anything, but afterward I cried about it in the shower.

All my life, I've been suppressing this. At a very, very early age I intuited the need to suppress it. I assumed every girl wanted to be a boy, but nobody talked about it because (a) it would upset their mother and (b) there was nothing you could do about it anyway. I channeled all of these feelings into fiction: I desperately sought out novels written by female authors from the perspective of a male character as legitimation that it was okay to do this, and I wrote all my own stories from the perspective of boys or gender-non-conforming girls. I guess the gender policing I encountered as a very small child made it clear to me that “not being a girl” would have to sit alongside “walking with dinosaurs” and “solving mysteries” as belonging to the realm of pure imagination.

Well, guess what? I give up. I give up trying to be who everyone wants me to be. I don't have a clue who I am, but I know who I'm not. The bowling incident has made that crystal clear: if I were a woman, it would not have upset me so much to be called one.

I packed up my not-girl-ness in a box marked PURE FANTASY at a very early age. Inside the box, it festered and grew; now it's a big ugly mess that has burst free of the childhood fetters, and what it will look like once I've given it two decades' worth of care and attention is anybody's guess.

Genderqueer, Or Internalized Misogyny?

[ETA: It's been brought to my attention that this post is founded on certain cissexist assumptions. It's true that I haven't engaged with my ingrained cissexism as much as I should, and I hope to work on that. Apologies for fucking up.]

The other night I dreamed I was at a church that had three bathrooms marked Men, Women, and Genderqueer. Entering the last, I found a glorious wonderland that was everything I could possibly want from a bathroom: talking Japanese supertoilet, hot tub, surround-sound entertainment system, etc.

It wouldn't be quite accurate to say that I trust my dreams. Dreams are your brain sorting through its junk drawer: most of it is pure junk, and occasionally something important turns up. I trust my reactions to my dreams. I've had sexual dreams about male friends which didn't disturb me at all, because I instinctively classified them as junk (hell, if everyone keeps calling him your boyfriend, your subconscious is eventually going to try it on for size, even if the notion is quite revolting). And it was a thoroughly PG-13 teenage dream about a female friend which unleashed the initial torrent of panicked self-reflection that is the first tender step on toward the closet door.

I wish I had access to the diary entry of the time so you could see it in its full, verbatim hilarity. “I'm not gay,” I wrote desperately (or something to that effect), “though it would make sense of a lot of things I like (hot girl-on-girl makeouts on Sugar Rush; scantily clad women in horror movies)...”

(I know! Bless, right?)

It took me a couple more years of self-torture – writing things like, “I'm not gay. I'm just homosexual”, which presumably made sense to me at the time – before I gave up trying to resist The Gay. (“Suck it, haters,” I at last wrote triumphantly: “I am a lesbian.”) My reluctance to accept The Genderqueer reminds me a lot of my reluctance to accept The Gay. I'm probably scrabbling for any available reason to deny something I pretty much know is true.

And yet, and yet...

I can't stop obsessively second-guessing myself. Just as I used to fear that my homosexuality was nothing more than intense fear and disgust at the penis, I now worry that my inclination toward genderfuckery is nothing more than internalized misogyny.

Like, when I reject the societal performance of femininity (shaving, makeup, skirts, long hair), is it because I consider the feminine-coded to be lesser?

If I accept the proposition that no true generalization can be made about women without resorting to tautology – if I accept that you don't have to be, have, or do anything to “qualify” as a woman, apart from identifying as a woman – why then am I not comfortably identifying as a woman?

When I'm enraged by someone in a store calling me “Missy” (THIS LITERALLY HAPPENED LAST WEEK, IN BERKELEY, IN 2012), am I enraged because it's fucking patronizing as shit, or because it genders me as female?

Does my general feeling that being gendered female is wrong mean that it's wrong for me, or that deep down I buy into the patriarchal equation female = wrong?

I feel increasingly disconnected from the pronoun she/her. When somebody refers to me as she/her, it feels as though they're talking about someone else. I like it when I get read as male or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. I would love to ask people to use ey/em, but they probably wouldn't: even in out oh-so-progressive, wonderfully accepting and queer-friendly community, most people are terrible at respecting the pronouns of our openly genderqueer friends. And even if I could convince my friends to make the switch, how can I stop strangers from gendering me female?

We're so indoctrinated to categorize everyone into this M/F binary that people immersed in a supposedly queer-embracing environment won't even refer to someone as “they” after being explicitly asked to. And yet I pull on one thread and the whole gender thing comes apart in my hands. The existence of trans men and women is proof that it's possible to scrutinize and deconstruct your gender identity and reach a conclusion other than “Gender is bullshit”; but more and more that seems like the inevitable endpoint of my own inquiry.

27 Days Later

That's all I fucking need, I think furiously. I check my planner: 27 days. Lately the intervals have gotten a few days shorter, hovering around the textbook 28, but flow duration is still longer than average. I've had 17 days off.

Looking at my planner, I remember what I thought last month, and the month before, and the month before that: That's all I fucking need. I think back over the past decade. Ten years – that's approaching half my life – I've been putting up with this monthly exodus of dark matter, and not once have I been able to feel anything remotely positive about it.

Every month: That's all I fucking need.

Fifteen years old, in the bathroom, crying and cursing my body for its monthly betrayal, uncontrollable, infuriating, pointless. Twenty-one years old, in the bedroom, being upbraided by my girlfriend for my squeamishness about bodily fluids. All the years in between, growing into feminism, learning to deconstruct my internalized misogyny, reading Steinem, finding out that many women see this as something empowering, something beautiful, something to celebrate.

I don't find it empowering.

I don't find it beautiful.

I don't want to celebrate it.

I'm utterly sick of trying not to hate it. I'm sick of trying to locate some essential femininity in it. Sick of trying to see it as emblematic of the life-giving facility of the female body. Sick of trying to view that same facility as a source of power rather than a source of visceral horror, something I would gladly relinquish given half a chance.

I hate it, this thing my body does. I want to be rid of it.