Dear God, Please Make Me A Cis Boy

I don't want to be a trans boy.

I want to be a boy. I've always wanted to be a boy, as long as I can remember; and, as long as I can remember, I've been told I was a girl. From the K-I-S-S-I-N-G rhymes kids used to chant about me and my closest male friends, to my mother's repeated statements that “boys are great, but I'm so glad I have you for a daughter,” my femaleness was constantly reinforced. Not maliciously, not with any ill intent, but just as a taken-for-granted, self-evident fact of reality. Of course I was a girl.

I wish – I've always wished – that I'd been born a boy.

The truth is, I don't want to be trans. It's hard and scary, and it's a life sentence. Right now I have the immense good fortune to be living in a hugely supportive and understanding community, where most people's only question with respect to a name change is “What pronouns?” – but at some point I will have to face the rest of the world: uninformed relatives, future employers, TSA agents and bank tellers and bartenders. And it's a lifetime of being misgendered, of disclosure and fear, of trying to explain, of dealing with legal names and legal genders, of fighting constantly with bank accounts and passports and driving licenses and filling out forms, of doing Trans 101, of CONSTANT BULLSHIT from a society built for cis people. I don't want to do it.

I feel as though I start each day with a certain allocation of spoons, dependent on my mood and dysphoria level, and then the rest of the day is a zero-sum game of gender-related spoon accumulation and loss.

Getting called “her”: -1 spoon for each pronoun.

Getting called “sir”: +5 spoons.

Getting called “missy”: -9000 spoons.

Etc. etc., and if I get below a certain number of HP spoons, it throws me off for the rest of the day and completely wrecks my ability to get anything done apart from brood and listen to “My Body Is A Cage” four million times.

For certain tasks, I know I have to prepare myself psychologically. Anything where I have to show ID is tough: a trip to the bank, a beer run. There have been days when I wanted booze, but didn't buy any because I couldn't face showing somebody my driver's license with its MISS [FEMALENAME]. (And anyone who knows anything about my relationship with booze will know that that really means something.) I dread going to the bank; because of course when she calls me “she” the teller is only acting on the information available to her. She doesn't know that it feels like a blast of “Harrison Bergeron”-esque white noise to my brain, throwing me for a loop like an air-raid siren going WRONG WRONG WRONG. She can't know that unless I tell her; and who has the spoons to explain their preferred name and pronouns to every bank teller? It's hard enough explaining that stuff to your friends and your parents, the people who know you and care about you and will want to get it right.

People say stupid things. Even here, even where I'm surrounded by trans people and supportive friends and students of queer theory, people say really stupid things. Gold medal thus far goes to the person who earnestly told me they could “kind of understand” what it's like to be transgender because they “changed religious identities.” (Silver goes to the dearly beloved friend who reacted to the very mention of top surgery with a frantic, “You know people pay thousands of dollars to have breasts like yours??”)

I have so much left to figure out. I have to get therapy. I have to get on hormones. I have to try to get my name and legal gender changed, while living as a non-resident alien on a student visa. I have to decide how to fill out my PhD application forms. God help me, I have to tell my parents.

I just want to wake up tomorrow morning and have always been a boy.

You Are A Boring, Selfish Jerk

It's a fundamental tenet of my theology and my anthropology that admitting you are a boring, selfish jerk is the first step on the lifelong road to not being a boring, selfish jerk.

The trouble is, sometimes I find myself unable to take any other steps.

When I haven't written anything in a while, it's usually because I've been getting bogged down in self-recrimination. There's no point. I have nothing to say. God, I am such a boring, selfish jerk.

External validation doesn't really help. In fact, my psyche can get quite creative in trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of, say, having many awesome friends whilst knowing myself to be a boring, selfish jerk. At best, I am cheered that I have at last developed some ability to pretend to other humans that I am not (entirely) a boring, selfish jerk.

After all, what is human interaction but a continuous endeavor to pretend to one another that we are not (or, to put it less cynically, to try not to be) boring, selfish jerks?

And how am I supposed to live out the sacred mantra Be True To Yourself when even I can't stand my true self?

I think seminary probably has a higher-than-average concentration of people who loathe themselves. I think an acute awareness of and furious frustration with your own total depravity can be a very powerful motivating factor to orient yourself toward the Ultimate.

Sometimes, though, it swamps you. It's not that life doesn't go on. It's not that you don't still have plenty to enjoy and be grateful for. It's just that you go about it all stooped under the consuming burden of self-knowledge. And what are you supposed to do with that?

What do you do with all that self-loathing?

Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome

There's this messed-up thing my brain does sometimes, usually when I'm lying in bed at night hoping to switch off (though sometimes in the middle of my daily life, which is scarier). Typically I'll have been engaging in one of my favorite meditative practices, wherein I enumerate the people who mean a lot to me. I take a moment to think about each of them in turn, expressing my gratefulness for their presence in my life and asking for God's blessing on them.

And that's when my brain suddenly sabotages itself, unleashing a scenario where I learn that a parent, sibling, or best friend of mine has died (almost always in an auto accident). Now I'm careening down the path of emotional responses to the terrible news: my chest tightens, pain wells in my abdomen, and I'm picturing a future where I never get to see this individual again. Just like that, they're gone. I try to rein in the morbid fantasy as quickly as I can, but sometimes I get as far as composing a full-blown eulogy, and quite often tears are making themselves known before I manage to get the vision under control.

I can think of a couple of psychological explanations for these little episodes. I think they have an apotropaic function: like, if I can make myself experience the emotional distress of losing a dear friend, this will somehow convince the universe to leave all my friends alive (because The Universe, as a conscious being bent on dispensing suffering to all humans without discrimination, will see my distress, assume it's already killed someone I love, and therefore move on to murdering the loved ones of someone who hasn't experienced this distress? Hey, these are rationalizations, not rational thoughts). I also suspect, though I'm a little ashamed to admit this, that they're kind of practice – just checking, for the inevitable day when I will lose someone I love, that my emotion circuits are correctly wired and I am in fact capable of having the “right” emotional response.

What I want to know is: is this normal? Do other people experience little horror-fantasies like these, bubbling up unbidden in the silence of the night or in a moment of unguarded thought, or is there something wrong with me?

Keeping The Faith

When I finished my BA, this time last year, I hadn't the slightest idea what to do next. My profound joy at bidding farewell to the hated Greek participles of my degree would seem to rule out further study; finding a job seemed less than likely, given the recession and my utter lack of useful skills. (An encyclopedic knowledge of schlock cinema, contemporary US sitcoms, and up-to-the-minute politically correct terminology does not, it seems, constitute a valuable skillbase in today's job market.)

And so I sought ways to avoid even thinking about it. I traveled Europe with the then girlfriend (good for 2 months of the rest of my life). I traded on the subsequent distance-enforced breakup for as long as possible (another 6 weeks or so). I earned a little bit from a one-off editing job (2 weeks). I slept on my brother's couch whilst undertaking an assortment of unpaid work experience (kept me going till Christmas). Finally, though, I was out of money and out of ideas, and I had to submit to the post-college experience most dreaded by graduates and their parents. It was time to move back home.

Forced, however unwillingly, to contemplate The Rest Of My Life, I committed to some soul- and Internet-searching. Much to my surprise, I found two ambitions had taken root in my heart and grown there intertwined. The first was to move to California; the second, to study theology in an academic setting. The two joined together when I found one particular, very exciting course, to which I underwent the arduous process of applying: taking the GRE, writing an academic statement, filling out the online forms, emailing the university, convincing three erstwhile lecturers to write me references, and having my transcripts couriered, at vast expense, across eight time zones.

And then – I waited.

My parents were dubious. Might I not want to apply to some other courses, just in case? Ought I not to have a plan B? Shouldn't I at least look for a job of some kind?

I didn't dismiss these gentle suggestions out of hand. I looked at other courses at a variety of institutions, both British and American, but found nothing that seemed worth the Herculean effort of applying. Nothing else set my heart pounding like this one course. I searched for jobs in the realm of publishing, which seemed the only field even vaguely appealing to me, but there was nothing for someone in my position. I pounded pavements until I found a minimum-wage customer-service job to tide me over.

And, at last, I got accepted into the program; and, after a couple of nerve-racking weeks, I got my funding.

My mother tells me she feels humbled by my faith, by the way I ignored her (perfectly reasonable) counsel to have a back-up plan and clung to the belief that this was the thing I was meant to do. But I don't feel at all that I was being especially faithful. Certainly, as I worked on my application, I felt a powerful sense of rightness; but, looking back over the past year, my overwhelming emotion was fear. I believed then, as I believe now, that God planted that initial longing for California in my heart two years ago as an arrow pointing in this direction, and that in fact all the strands of my life woven together form a giant flashing neon sign pointing in this direction, but I was still beset with debilitating doubts and fears.

Please don't count me among the great faithful, because I really, really am not. I've been so afraid – so consumingly, devastatingly afraid – and the best I can say is that God used that fear to make me depend less and less on myself and more and more on God. God works through the least of us, and the least faithful of us: God worked through Jonah, and God worked through Peter, and God is working through me, and God is working through you.