I am afraid, afraid that you think I came across this easily, that somehow it is some childish whim, this dialectic between body and mind. I am afraid that because I cannot find the words to tell you, that the best I can do is point dumbly at a TV screen when something similar to the way I feel comes on. That you see me as some kind of perverse child pointing out the latest toy of obsession from the Saturday morning advertisements. That I am somehow playing with fashion, a desire to be special and cool like the other kids. Not that this has wriggled around inside me for decades, that it eats away at my flesh from day to day. Each time some stranger sees me, the not me, not the me, each time a friend calls me out exposes my un me ness to someone I have just met and am hoping for a second or two that they may see the me ness and know me thus.
It is like I am a boy in a dress, I know I am a boy yet everyone can only see the dress. They do not care that I walk and talk and feel like a boy, they only know that girls wear dresses and so I am a girl. I cannot take the dress off, at least not easily and I am afraid that if I do take off the dress then I will loose a part of me I can never have again. What does it all mean, what does this mean? Am I imagining this? One day I am sure I want to take the dress off and the next I am clouded with confusion, drowning in questions and self doubt. Waiting for some magic answer to answer all my questions and set me down on the road I need to travel.
It's not like this body and I do not share intimacy, we have shared the same space for 30 odd years now, felt the same joys and pains. We have known love and self destruction together and survived and although I know it is not mine I cannot deny like my oldest of friends this body knows me. It bends to my will, whether it wants to or not, whether I want it to or not. I am afraid that if I finally give in to this need to change this body I will be doing it for the wrong reasons. Afraid that in change I will become part of the problem and not the solution. Where does my responsibility lie? And yet here I am again and again and again, the same question, the same need to rid myself of this body and find my body, to keep this body and learn to live with this my body. Over and over again, I am exhausted by it, demoralized that I have come so far and yet it is the same set of questions over and over that I still cannot answer.
I think the "trapped in the wrong body" meme doesn't actually work for most trans people. Most trans people like their bodies fine, they just want specific modifications. I mean, it's not like my spleen will lead my internal organs to a jailbreak and freedom.
ReplyDeleteIf you had imperfect vision and wanted to get your eyes lasered, that's not trapped in the wrong body. You don't have the wrong eyeballs. You just want to change them so they work better for you.
When people decide to transition, it's not all in one go. It's a process - one that can be taken at any speed and one that can be halted.
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Hey Charles,
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting your comment, I probably went a bit far with this particular analogy, I was not really striving for a trapped in my body image, just that certain markers dictate my identity for other people more powerfully than my internal identity does. I do understand that I can stop when ever I want to but at the same time. I question my ability to really know when that is for me, it's not so much the process forcing me but me getting swept away by the process ..