Thoughts
Things have changed since I wrote my post in November, “A Real Trans Person (Reprise).” Not much has changed externally, (other than me quitting my job, but that’s not something I want to type in public much about, though I do want to acknowledge it,) but my internal landscape has shifted again.
It happens once in awhile. I’m learning to go with it, but it’s hard. My first instinct is always to pull against, deny; see if there’s another way, and then give in, when I’m satisfied there is no escape.
I realized just how much I have been attempting to reassure myself with thoughts about how I don’t suffer as much as other trans people. What am I trying to reassure myself of, exactly? I don’t know. Probably that I will be fine, just fine, if (when) this transition thing doesn’t pan out and I am doomed to stay a girl. Or maybe that I am not actually really trans, and therefore, there is hope that I can be spared transition.
Whether I suffer as much as other trans people or not, I still don’t know, and never will. I can speculate, I can listen to what they say, but I can never know, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because those other two things – that I could be fine without transition, or that I am not really trans – they just aren’t true, regardless of how much I hurt in comparison to others.
I don’t want to die most of the time. I don’t love being where I am a good deal of it, but I don’t want to die. I look forward to my life; to this adventure, which I would miss out on if I were dead. This desire to live, though, is quite purely based on the full expectation that I will transition. I can take this, as long as I know it’s not forever. As long as I know there’s something better waiting for me and that it is really going to happen. Only then, do I feel okay.
One thing that happened to me, several weeks ago, I went through a period of intense fear that I will never be able to find a therapist/doctors to help me transition; that every one I talk to will refuse, and as a result, I won’t be able to transition. True, people going back and forth from doctor to doctor and all of them refusing to help a trans person was way more prevalent in the past than it is now, and perhaps the fear that clamped down on me was not completely realistic, but it did teach me something. For those days when I was inhabiting that space, certain that I would never find help, and would never transition, my attitude changed. I couldn’t fathom a whole lifetime, however long mine is, not doing it. If this is what there is, if this is all there is….then….I can’t deal.
Of course, I’d have no choice but to deal. Suicide is not an option for me. At least for now, I feel like since I am going to ultimately die anyway, I might as well stick around and see what my transition will be like, if I have one. But when I think of a whole life without it; think about dying without having done it, it’s the most hopeless feeling. It’s just like…
….like how I always felt before. That quiet resignation in the background, all the time. The sorrow pulsing through life. Surely, there is more than this? Followed closely by the answer, No, there’s not. (Followed by, Now, run along, there’s nothing to see here; don’t think about it so hard….la la la…)
After talking to some more trans people, and getting their reassurance that I would find doctors to help me, I felt better; felt that hopelessness slipping away, but I’ll take with me what I got out of that hopelessness. More scary knowledge, but most knowledge is like that.
I call myself FtM even though I am one of those people who say I “always was.” I don’t say I “always was” just for the sake of making before and after congruent in my mind; though it does help me, and I think I have a right to that consistency, (since I want it,) the same as any cis person has, to say, “When I was a little boy/girl,” and use the term that invokes their gender identity as an adult. But I also say I “always was” because it’s just right. I always was a boy (or approximately a boy), because I never felt right being a girl, even when I assumed I must be one, even when I called myself one. If I had been a girl, then I would have been fine being a girl, and I wasn’t. I was never okay, and if I now know that the reason I was not okay is because I’m a trans man, then I was already trans, and already male, then.
Anyway, I identify as FtM still, not because I am changing my sex or gender from female to male, and not because I started off as a female and am becoming a male, but because I went from self-identifying (since that was the only word I had) from female to male. This is where the change comes in; where my life is divided into before and after; it’s not a change of my gender, or my body, but of my language; a change in the words I call myself, and an accompanying change in the way I think of myself.
Not only has there been a shift from female to male language to describe myself, but a parallel transition that goes along with that, one that I haven’t read other trans people talking about a lot. I have also shifted, necessarily, from thinking of myself as a cis person, to thinking of myself as a trans person. Admittedly, when I thought of myself as a cis person, I didn’t identify myself as a cis person. Like most cis people, I was just normal, and complete with a set of cissexist beliefs about bodies, the world, and how other people should live.
When I first started uncovering my transness, I imagined running back to the other cis people and telling them what it was like. As long as only trans people were trans, and talked in their circular, nonsense language about being trans, cis people weren’t going to get it. But finally, one of us had crossed over, had been there, and lived to tell about it, and I was going to go right back and tell them all just how beautiful and wonderful it all was, and how we had all had it so wrong.
What ended up happening is that I can’t explain transness any better than the other trans people, because I was not a cis person who had become trans. If I’d been cis, I wouldn’t have traveled where I have; I wouldn’t know what I do.
And my cis-to-trans transition is like my female-to-male transition – a transition in the ways I talk about and view myself, and even the way I live, but not so much about a genuine change in what I am, and what I have always been. I was never a cis person. I was a trans person who didn’t know it yet. There is a difference.
Transition is not like a door. It’s more like a hallway (among other things), and it’s narrow. The walls always close up behind you. You can keep walking forward, or you can stand still for awhile, (not indefinitely,) but you can’t go back, and you can’t go in any direction – just the one in front of you.
In fact, all of life is beginning to feel that way to me, and maybe I’m just becoming more conscious of it because of my transition. My belief about the way the world works is that we have free will, but the outcomes of the choices we make are predestined. We can act, and before we act, it may seem like the world is open with possibilities, but as soon as we act, that potentiality gets replaced with something definite. We create our road, and we go down the only road available to us at the same time.
This is a scary prospect, but in a way, it is freeing. Even if I’m wrong, this idea gives me the courage I need to act when I need to, and to not feel so bad about hanging on for the ride when that’s all I can do. It’s helped me a lot to let go of the worry I have surrounding coming out to my father. However I come out, (or however someone else outs me,) will be the way it was going to be, and however he acts, is the way he was going to act. I am blessed with a father who I believe will ultimately accept me and not stand in the way of my transition. Even if I’m wrong about that, though, I’ll survive.
Sh*t Trans* Guys Say
The funniest video in the world ever. Well, maybe not ever. But it’s in the top ten. (Apologies for no transcript.)
To the person who got here searching for, “ftm transgender would make better gentlemen than natural men”…
Ftm transgender men are natural men.
(And not necessarily better gentlemen, either.)
Sideburns
Here is a picture, for all peeps who are wondering just what we’re dealing with here…
I think they are rather impressive for someone not on T yet. Or…someone not taking T yet. My body must have rustled up some T somehow at some point for this to exist.
You can also see that stubble on my chin that must be dealt with. Tomorrow.
Not sure why I think it’s so much better to not put my whole face on here. It’s not like this isn’t more than enough to identify me by. But you know…makes me feel better….
So, I was at work today…
…And this guy said, “Hey, [Female Name],” (on my name tag,) “I like your sideburns.”
Sometimes men actually do know how to coax a genuine smile of me, not a fake one that I give just to humor them. “Thank you,” I said.
“Are you going to keep growing them out?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “but I think this is as long as they will get.” (I almost added, “for now,” but then stopped myself. As if most folks would know what I even meant by that. Or maybe he might’ve known exactly what I meant by that.)
“Well, they make you look really cute, I can tell you that.”
“Thank you.”
“They are much better than I can do,” he said. “And I’ve tried.”
“My mustache is a little thin, though,” I said.
“It’s better than I can do.”
“It’s still better than he can do,” his wife agreed with a laugh.
They said all this in a lighthearted way, but yet, I really didn’t feel like they were making fun of me, and if anything, I always interpret things in the worst possible way. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt anyway, but in this case, it was like I didn’t have any doubt. I felt like he said what he meant – he liked my sideburns, he thought they made me cute, and they were better than he could do.
The whole thing meant a lot to me.
Are you a boy?
(I had forgotten about the WordPress snowflakes. That’s cute.)
I have written before about the ways people interpret my gender where I work. Including kids, even though they seem to have more of a clue than adults.
The different ways they phrase the question hint that they know what I was born, and yet, still aren’t sure what I am. Sometimes, they ask, “Is she/Are you a boy or a girl?” But typically, any mention of girlhood gets left off, and the question is about a presence of boyhood. And when they talk about me in third person, they either use she, or demonstrative that. I have never heard a kid say about me, “Is he a boy (or a girl)?” But they have asked, “Is she a boy?” Sometimes, it’s not a question, but, “She is a boy,” or, “That looks like a boy.” Once a child tried to get my attention by calling me ma’am. I was not ignoring him (I guess “him”); I was about to look up, but I was doing something and couldn’t look up right away, like putting the UPC numbers in manually or something, and before I had a chance to look up, he switched to sir.
The question or statement they have is never about what I was born. Kids understand it’s not as simple as, “People-with-this-kind-of-body are girls, and people-with-that-kind-of-body are boys,” and I love it when I hear them say things that let me know I am not invisible. They are never malicious about it, either.
The other day this kid in a buggy said, as their (because I honestly can’t guess the gender of this kid) adult started to put things on the belt, “Are you a boy?” They were smiling so big, and I laughed. Their adult was not looking at me or paying any attention. Well, this is it, I thought. I always never say anything and hope they drop the subject. I never answer them, because I feel like I can’t. I feel like it would be very risky for me to say I am a boy, when adults are standing right there, and maybe the kids can’t read my female name tag, but they can. But their grown-up was turned away, busy, and I nodded my head “yes”. Then put my finger over my mouth to mean, “It’s a secret.”
Their grown-up finished putting things on the belt, and brought the buggy around to the other end of the register. My body was trembling and I felt scared, because this is the power of the truth, especially when you’re not used to telling it. As I finished throwing a sales pitch to the old man, the kid showed me their cowboy boots. I told them I had a pair much like theirs in high school, but mine wore out, and I could not find a replacement.
It made my day, because I get tired and worn out from living in a society where my gender is bad. It’s as plain as that. Other people think my gender is bad, and that is what makes this thing so dark and heavy for me. Something so bad they don’t talk about it; don’t want to know about it. Want to pretend it doesn’t exist. Want to pretend I don’t exist, at least not as I am. I’m made out of matter, but as long as they can give that matter other names that aren’t mine. That’s why people get upset that I dress and look the way I do; it lets them know that their words for me are wrong, or at least, aren’t unproblematically right.
But someone did see me. They did have some question about what they were seeing; after all, most boys don’t get asked if they are, in fact boys. And not knowing that this is dark and heavy; some of the most dark and heavy stuff out there in the world, they asked with a smile, “Are you a boy?” Like it wasn’t dark and heavy at all.
I wonder if I did the right thing. I wonder if it would have been better just to not say anything, like I’ve always done before. I hated having to motion It’s a secret. I don’t want the kid thinking it was wrong or bad to ask, or that they shouldn’t. I don’t want them thinking the problem was with what they said. These interactions are the ones in which people learn. I don’t want to contribute to shame in the world. I don’t remember the first time I ever saw someone like me. I don’t remember asking these questions, or what I was told, or what the consequences were. But somewhere, I learned to be ashamed. Somewhere I learned that you can tell what a person is by looking, and if you can’t, that means there is something wrong with them. I learned that trans people are invisible, or just don’t exist. I didn’t want to, but part of what I taught that kid is that sometimes it has to be a secret that someone is a boy. But it’s true, unfortunately, and if they didn’t get it from me, they would get it from someone else…they already get it from everywhere. I just hope that they also got something good from it.
A Real Trans Person (Reprise)
(Trigger warning for (internalized) cissexism, misogynist language, suicide.)
So, this morning my ma left a note on the table telling me that she was going Christmas shopping. I stayed in bed as long as I could till I had to get up and get stuff done to go to work, of course. I found her note. She used my boy name. I, of course, snatched it up and put it in my room to keep. These things mean a lot to me. But even though I was happy she used my male name, it’s bittersweet. I know what I’m doing.
I put aside those bittersweet feelings, though. I got my breakfast and sat down at the old computer table. Yes, I probably am addicted. While making my rounds, I found a link someone had posted on Facebook to a video of trans men talking about being trans.
As I watched the video, the demons started screeching in my brain.
You hear these guys talking? They are real trans people. This is what it’s like. You don’t hurt this much. It never was this bad for you. You didn’t know when you were kid.
(Actually, I did, but the demons don’t seem to care; they just remind me of the much more numerous ways I didn’t.)
Does any of this sound familiar to you?
(Actually, some of it does, but the demons don’t seem to care; they just remind me that the worst stuff these guys say doesn’t.)
You’re just playing. You’re not serious. You can’t be. Transition? You? You’re too big of a pussy. You’ll never go through with it. You? A man? You don’t even have the “balls” to talk to people on the phone. How are you even going to call the doctors? You won’t. And that’s just more proof you’re faking. If you were on the verge of suicide and wanting to claw your skin off, your “anxiety” wouldn’t stop you. But it will. Because you’re a coward, and not a real trans man besides. Making a game out of real people’s suffering. Appropriating other people’s identities.
They need testosterone. You just think it would be a nice thing to have. That’s a want, not a need. You don’t need top surgery. You don’t need this shit. You’re just grasping for something, anything to make it seem like your life has meaning. Transition wouldn’t save you from being a loser, because being a loser has nothing to do with your gender. You just are one. You always love to talk about how people “just are what they are.” Well, you just are a loser. All the testosterone in the world ain’t going to change that.
All you’re doing is making your Mama sad.
What’s that? You’re crying? Men don’t cry.
(I know I’m making progress, though, because the demons have stopped making an appeal to the unnaturalness of transition; how it’s better to be a miserable woman with all her parts than a man (however less miserable) with scars and parts missing. I don’t even pay those ideas any attention anymore.)
But you know, I’ve only been a trans man for a year and a half. *Clears throat.* I mean, I’ve only been knowing I am a trans man for a year and a half. The guys in the video spent longer. Who knows how I will feel in five years? Who knows how the pain might have grown by then? Maybe I’ll be to that point. Maybe I’ll be one of those people. Maybe I’ll have little choice left but to transition or else. I already know it gets deeper the further you go. It’s gotten worse than it was this same time last year.
One of my trans man friends who I type to on Facebook told me that his therapist he went to for transition told him that she requires all her trans people to go to a support group while in therapy. She says that some trans people need to be around other trans people and “freak out” awhile, then run and hide if they need to. But even if they go out and get married and have kids first, “they always come back.”
I seriously doubt it’s something about making the appointment and going to therapy that makes them always come back.
One of the reasons I went ahead and didn’t fight it for very long after I realized was that I have seen enough to recognize things that don’t go away; things you can’t avoid. I surrendered. I say it was June 20th, just so that I have a “other birthday” to celebrate, but it was actually a cluster of four days around that time. That’s all the fighting I did. Four days. I knew it was no use to run from it. I knew I had found The Answer. Even if I was wrong, I had to try.
(I’ve taken serious artistic license with the demons that yell at me. They are never so articulate.)
(And to you – yes, you – other trans people do feel this way.)
I’m still around…
…there just hasn’t been much time for posting. My niece was born at the beginning of October, and I have been spending as much time with her as I can when I ain’t working. She has grown so much in just a month; I heard grown-ups say it over and over when I was a kid but didn’t believe it; how fast they grow.
Also I’m going to try to do this NaNoWriMo thing, even though my brain is so tired I doubt much will come out. But anyway, whatever sit-down-to-write time I have will likely go to that. Unless I think of something that I really urgently want to put up here.
Gender Indifference
There’s something that happens to you from time to time when you’re a trans person. I know that it happens while you are biding your time, waiting on the right time to tell your dad; waiting for the right time to start looking up docs. It probably continues to happen at all stages of transition, but since I’m not there yet, I can’t say for sure. So much of our lives are about insisting that we are 100% about everything, and they have to be. We’re up against a whole world of people who say we’re wrong, who question us, who demand to know how we know what we know. Letting them know we have doubt gives them leverage.
Anyway, there’s this thing that happens where you get too tired to care (about being trans). It can be unsettling, especially the first few times it settles in, and even after you’ve felt it before, and know what it’s like, and even once you have learned that it is temporary, that it will pass, you still worry that it won’t.
When I say that you get too tired to care, what I mean is that this very firm sense of who you are and what your gender “really” is, (and what the planned trajectory of your life thus should be, as well,) become shaky. People get their slingshots ready, start firing the “ma’am”s (“sir”s) at you, and the typical resistance you feel rise up in your body; that instinctive knowledge that you aren’t a “ma’am” (“sir”) and don’t appreciate being called one, isn’t there. There is no reaction. You think about all those things that you want, (including The Operation and The Hormones) and it’s hard to do anything but shrug your shoulders and say, “Who cares?”
It’s not a relief, as you know, if you’ve felt this. You don’t jump up and down and say, “Oh, joy! Just like the old days, when I did not care!” When you don’t hurt the usual way, you worry. You feel like a massive part of who you are, or at least, who you have become, is missing. When that pain is intricately tied into how you experience your identity; your self, then that’s exactly what’s happening; something fundamental is missing.
It’s not a “break” from being trans in any appreciable way. It’s like the shock my body went into when my leg was broken. I always heard, “If it’s broke, you’ll be crying!” (I had also heard, “If it is broke, you can’t move it!” Also false. You could tell with a glance that it was indeed broken, but I could still move it.) I felt no pain at all. I thought I’d get right up and keep walking, till I looked down and saw. Being able to look and see was the only way I knew something wrong, because I couldn’t tell by the way I felt. I felt fine! Even better than fine. There was a kind of unrealistic quality to my thought patterns, too, evidenced by my asking my parents if this accident were bad enough that the upcoming day trip to the beach for my brother’s birthday was going to be cancelled because of this.
That is what this is like. It’s like you just get so tired of thinking about it that something in your mind shuts off for awhile, and it tends to happen during times when your physical body is ill, or following severe periods of dysphoria. It inevitably turns back on after you’ve had some time to recover. In the meantime, though, worry fills the void of dysphoria, and in a way, this is also a manifestation of instinctive knowledge of your identity. It might help to remember that if you find yourself feeling that way. (“I don’t care about being a trans man right now, but I want to care about it again, because if I don’t care about it, then I will stay a girl, and I can’t stay a girl, because then I would never be happy.”) Ultimately, your wish for the future is still the same.
I have been in a period like this for a few days, and think I feel myself beginning to come out of it. I thought about writing this post in first person, but I like second person better, because if any of you reading feel this way or have felt this way, I want to speak directly to you. You and I are not the only ones.
more dreams
(Trigger warnings for misgendering, sexual content, ableism, and possibly others.)
So, this morning, I had a series of interesting dreams. I don’t know if I would call them nightmares or not; they were unpleasant, but not terrifying.
The main one, and the one I believe came first, was a sex dream. I dreamed that this famous actor was on a bed in a bedroom. This actor is not someone I have a crush on; not even someone I find attractive, (or unattractive.) Really, just some random guy. I went in the bedroom and lay down beside him, and with a minimum amount of communication we decided to have sex.
We were kissing and touching. He went right for my breasts and started saying stuff like, “Hmmm….women. Big soft titties. Big soft ass…” So what do I do? Do I even try to explain what a trans man is, and why this isn’t cool? I didn’t think this person had enough of a clue for me to even try. So do I say no, and stop this and leave? But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was like my body was another entity, separate from me, and it was actually being turned on harder by these objective descriptions of what was really there. Even while I was lying there hating this and wanting to leave. I was amazed at how much gender-pain I was putting up with, while the desire to stay there and be sexual with someone else, (anyone else – some random dude,) was still strong enough to overrule the gender-pain. Not cancel it out, or neutralize it, but just win out so I stayed.
(During the dream, I wondered, why my brain chose this actor, but after I woke up and thought about it, it became clear. He’s an actor from a movie that we (my mom, dad, brother, brother’s wife, and I) watched a few nights ago. Then, the next day, I was reading a blog. The blogger had posted an animated gif of this actor, from the movie I had watched the day before, dancing. They posted this gif amongst a bunch of defensive replies after they’d gotten criticism for a post they had written previously. In all, the original post and the subsequent posts added up to, “Well, I like this kind of body, and don’t like that kind of body, and I don’t really care whose identity I erase by saying that, because it’s my personal attractions, and you can’t police my personal attractions.” So, for me, that actor is associated with that sentiment. I just finished reading an article on Autostraddle yesterday where the comments especially had me thinking about these things. I thought about it all day, and went to bed with it on my mind.)
I also had this dream where I was scrambling to find enough clothes to wear, but there weren’t any men’s clothes available. It was like there were only women’s clothes in the stores, or the stores were empty except for a few picked-over women’s clothes, or men’s clothes were so expensive I couldn’t afford them, so it was either buy women’s clothes or don’t have any clothes at all. It was all blouses, and I needed clothes, so I didn’t really have a choice. And I would have to wear bras, too. This was not like my dress dreams, where I put on dresses with a spirit of adventure and experimentation. This was a situation of coercion. I even broke into my grandmother’s house to try to steal her clothes, but of course, all she had were women’s clothes, too, (which seemed obvious once I had broken in and was going through her closets, since she is a woman.)
In the dream I had just before waking up, I dreamed that my mom was going to have a baby. (The young’nes are about to have a baby in real life, and that is tripping me out, and stays on my mind quite a bit.) The baby that my mom was going to have was my baby, but I couldn’t handle having a baby, so she was going to do it for me. She had the baby, and they were much smaller than babies usually are. They were also born with the ability to scurry around the room like a rabbit; about the same movement and speed. This made them very hard to keep up with and keep out of things. My mom, who had looked as I expected her to in the context of the dream, (she looked similar to my mom in Real Life, but not exactly,) got down on the floor to play with the baby, then lay on her back to rest for a moment. I looked over and noticed that she didn’t have any arms or legs; she had a typical-sized head, but a very small body, and small breasts. I was shocked. I knew her body was worn away by giving up so much for other people over so many years, and on top of that, she had just had a baby; a baby that I was supposed to have, but she had taken that burden off of me and done it herself. I was surprised that the baby was even alive and that she was still alive. I was trying to act like I didn’t notice anything seemed different about her body, and said something like, “A baby. What are we going to do?” And she said something like, “Well, we just deal with things as they come.” Then she got up, and the dream continued, and her body seemed typical again, but I couldn’t put out of my mind what I had seen and what I knew. I wanted to help her out, so I decided to feed the baby. Except I couldn’t remember where the baby was. I freaked out. “Ma, where’s the baby!?” She said, “Right here, in the laundry basket.” We had a crib, but for some reason, didn’t use it. We just used a laundry basket for the baby’s bed. So I went to pick up the baby, and I realized that I didn’t know what babies eat. Was I supposed to cook adult foods that were soft enough for the baby to eat? In the recesses of my brain, I could remember that there were foods made for babies. They came in little jars you could buy at the store. Did we have any? Did I need to go buy some? “Hey, Ma! What am I supposed to feed this baby?” I asked. She said, “How about milk?” I felt the same way I did about finding women’s clothes in my grandmother’s house. Duh! Of course. The baby was still too young to eat anything but milk. Then I woke up.
I have read several books on dream interpretation, and the general idea is that it’s better for the person who has the dream to interpret them. You can interpret other people’s, but the person whose dreams they are has the best chance of knowing what they are about. I’ve also found since reading about dream interpretation, that my mind sometimes can insert symbols mentioned in dream dictionaries, and I can rely on the definitions provided in the books because my mind remembers reading about those symbols.
I don’t think everything in a dream is a symbol for something else. I think sometimes things stand for themselves in dreams. I don’t know if my mother in my dreams indicates my own mother in Real Life. It’s possible. Also possible for my mother to be the part of myself that nurtures – for my mother to mean the mother (part) of myself. (Dream books suggest.) Or maybe it’s both. I don’t see why it can’t be both. All I know is my heart is broken for her, whoever she is.
I had another dream, but I can’t remember where sequentially it happened in relation to the other dreams. I dreamed I was about to go into a Kmart to see if they had painting supplies. Since they aren’t an art supplies store, I doubted it, but I was just going in to see. Before I could get to the door, the sky clouded up and started looking dangerous. Then all these straight, vertical lines started forming in the sky. A sure sign, in the context of my dream, that tornadoes were coming. I also had some kind of metal thing in my hand, like a utensil or a wrench, and I didn’t know if it would cause lightning to strike me, but I felt compelled to keep holding it and not let go of it. Seemed like it took forever for me to get inside the Kmart. Then, once I did, it wasn’t actually a Kmart, but was like a house inside, and there were a bunch of strangers (to me) inside. It seemed like they knew each other, though, and were getting ready to have some kind of gathering. People had brought different dishes. I’m quite sure they were a church, and maybe the inside of the building was a church. I decided to try to stay there and “pass” for one of them – whoever/whatever they were, during the storm.
