Just Laugh

  “I felt like an imposter, a fraud, and now more than ever, a freak.”

–Max Beck, a noted Intersex Transman

I feel you Max Beck. Lord knows I know what that feels like. It is never nice to know that your mind does not match your body, what you should be capable of in your one lifetime, or how you should be perceived, and that there is nothing you can really do about it accept for medically transition. It’s an alien experience, to look down at your hands as if they are someone else’s, and to speak with a voice pitched entirely different to the one in your head. It feels like you are drowning in yourself, or being locked into your body. It’s as if you are trapped in a coma, and everybody thinks you’re one thing; asleep, but in reality you are wide awake and silently screaming...

 ...Which is why humour is such a beautiful and majestic masterpiece of human language and psychology.

“How many transgender people does it take to change a light bulb? “"- only one, but they have to live for a year in the dark to be really, definitely sure it needs changing."

Ohhhh, queer humour truly is a marvellous thing. If you don’t laugh you cry, and it is always important to stay light hearted and think of other things that are related to something entirely else. That is easier said than done though, o the more i think of it the more sarcastic i tend to become. It is better that i am like this than i am morbidly depressive. I have progressively been learning how to be softer and more honest with myself. I always tell myself that I should become some one that i would want to meet. And i enjoy meeting people with an open mind, lots of ideas and a wicked tongue of a sense of humor.

Not only does it draw people to me, it also helps to enlighten other people in a less serious method. The other day a friend posted on facebook a feminist rant about how there aren’t enough female protagonists in games. I wrote back,

“Speaking as an angry lesbian feminist myself, I can understand what they mean. There aren't many women in main stream media that are portrayed as anything but sex symbols.

However, when I'm playing a third person game I choose to play as a female character, just to watch them run from behind. So its swings and roundabouts I suppose... “

It is also good to diffuse otherwise incredibly deliberating situations. A partner nearly outed me as trans* to work colleagues before she had even told me that she thought I was trans. I hadn’t even come out to her yet. Luckily enough though, what with it being me, the entire entourage thought it was another one of my elaborate jokes about my more masculine features. I speak aloud a lot, a little too often in fact, so when I said I shouldn’t be wearing such a low cut top because I haven’t shaved my chest everyone just laughed. When a partner told me that I looked a hell of a lot like my male friend we both laughed. When a friend of a friend invited me to like a page on facebook for men who have sex with men and everyone told him I was a girl, we all laughed. It makes things all alright to talk about when a situation would otherwise be very awkward and talked about when I am not there, rather than openly with me.  Its like when someone asked me what my blog was about, and when i said LGBT issues they said is it like, “Day 47 of being trapped in my body”...my comeback was to agree wholeheartedly. The beautiful thing was that we paused and both knew that it was entirely true. And it was fine. 

Transition

Salvador Dali once said, “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs”. Well I don’t need drugs either my darlings, as I am forever high on life. While I tend to think I will try most things once, I do not find them worth the money or the after effects. I love my mind; it is all that I have that is my own, and taking something which alters it other than alcohol chills me to the bone. Imagining myself on drugs is something horrific. 

So why is it that imagining myself on male hormones seems so appealing in my mind’s eye? Granted, the affects could prove absolutely horrific but still; what would I look like on them? How would I feel? Better or worse? Regret? Mourning for the last shred of femininity that I have left? None or all of the above? 

All I know is that I am somewhat drugs already. Maybe I shouldn’t ask the question what would happen if I took hormone replacement therapy, and more like what would happen if I stopped taking the daily cocktail of drugs that try to preserve my few feminine features and habits. I cannot speak as every transgender or inter-sex person, and hell, maybe it is my imagination, or maybe it is dangerous for me to say it, but I definitely think that when I accidentally miss a few or they stop and start whatever cycle of drugs I happen to be on, I feel a lot more stereo-typically masculine, as I seem to fail to be open with my emotions. I hear a lot about trans-men on HRT whose personalities have altered since taking T and it does make me wonder.

Anyway, should I ever stop my medication altogether or further still start to take testosterone and transition, I genuinely wonder if I would look the way that I see myself in my minds eye, or instead of curing all of my problems, would it simply generate more and change me to the point where I am barely recognizable to myself? Because to transition and feel dysphoria about having a male body, or to miss my more emotional personality traits would be absolutely heart breaking to me, and I would truly miss myself. When it comes to relationships as well i am not sure how I would feel, but the one thing that both equally worries me and comforts me is this poem.

"When you peel layers of clothing from his skin

Do not act as though you are changing dressings on a trauma patient

Even though it’s highly likely that you are.

Do not ask if she’s “had the surgery.”

Do not tell him that the needlepoint bruises on his thighs look like they hurt

If you are being offered a body

That has already been laid upon an altar of surgical steel

A sacrifice to whatever gods govern bodies

That come with some assembly required

Whatever you do,

Do not say that the carefully sculpted landscape

Bordered by rocky ridges of scar tissue

Looks almost natural."

-How to Make Love to a Trans Person' by Gabe Moses.

I find it beautiful, and it highlights genuine problems and solutions on how my transitioned body would look to another and how positively or negatively I might be received. I have after all only partially dipped my toes in the ocean of dating while being out and openly trans*. At the same time though, I have not yet ruled anything out, and maybe one day I will wake up everyday, instead of the occasional week or month, believing that transitioning will make me feel much more comfortable, confident when I am with a partner and ultimately, it will actually get me closer to be me. 

Uniform

You turn to your wardrobe and don’t know what to make of it. You just stare for the longest time. You stretch out weak, yet hairy arms and slip on a dress that’s too tight in the shoulders, too loose around your misshapen breasts, but they are breasts all the same, and the dress is tight around a beer belly and birthing hips for a child that you can never carry. It flows over where your seedless male genitals should be, covers legs that begin curvy and then become muscular, and you just stand there for a moment in the ill fitting garment wondering if you can handle walking with a swish and having people treat you like you’re delicate all day.

So then you tear it off, feeling all of the curves and muscle of your oddly shaped form and you don a light polo shirt and chinos that sit tight on your hips, which gives them a shrunken affect. You think for a moment this might be good, but there is no bulge in them, and while the shirt fits you in the shoulders and stomach your chest is all too apparent, and they feel unnatural jutting out against the straight cut clothing. For that, you will still be read as female, but no one will give you sympathy today, and you wonder if you can handle being mocked by your peers or forced to wrestle words apologetically with the boys.

The only other option is a blend of both. You start completely neutral from top to bottom: sports bra and girl boxer briefs. Jeans, t-shirt and converses. Lip balm and side fringe. But what will people call you today? If you hear ‘she’ will you feel incredibly weak and pathetic? Will your friends not include you as they usually do, worse yet come on to you? And what if you are called ‘he’? Will you be able to cope with the responsibility of yourself today, when you are suffering so silently? Can you handle the banter? And will you take the male pronouns as an insult to your femininity?

All you can do is begin to paint your short clipped nails on your oversized hands and empty your handbag into a rucksack, hoping that someone will call you pretty or handsome, because you really aren’t sure which you would prefer to be called and which would crush you. Then you sit, trying not to analyse yourself too much, trying not to ask awful questions like ‘why me?’ or ‘who could ever love this?’ And you struggle to breathe; you shake, your palms are sweaty and your heart races. You try to ignore that you are completely stuck, with no way out and nowhere to go. You try not to panic and flee or claw at your prison so you just cling to the edge of the bed in your too tight and too baggy clothes, hiding from mirrors, hiding from people, trying to ignore your own mind and your own body.

Then time stops, and your’e still frozen with fear when your loved one comes in and asks you why you didn’t go to school today. You can’t say, you can’t put it into words, and then when the school phones and asks why your attendance is so low you struggle to speak to them with a breaking voice which will never be more one or the other, spoken from lips that aren’t one or the other from a face and body and mind and soul that isn’t ever going to be one or the other. You tell them that you are ill again. You do, after all, feel very very ill. You feel mentally drained and still breathless.

Breathless

While I don’t usually look in the mirror and hate what I see, there are days when I am scared to look down at myself. There are days when I wake up and I just know it’s one of those days. It is apparent for the moment I wake up in bed that it’s one of those days and I feel sick to my stomach. I am under the covers and I daren’t move out from under them. I breathe carefully because I can feel my breasts rubbing against the quilt and I hate it, and at the same time I’m reminded that they exist I’m reminded that my nipples have almost no sensitivity. I roll over and feel my legs rub together. There’s space between them where I think a dick should be, but the feeling of long black hairs all over them make me feel just as queasy.

I reach out to my stomach and there’s even more hair there, there’s hair on my chest, which should be flat, and my hands that feel all of this are far too big to be female but far too soft to be a males. I feel my face with these odd appendages that can’t be my own and there’s this alien stubble and far too supple cheeks, far too strong a jaw and forehead, too small a nose, so I put my arms at my side and just try to keep my breathing steady and stable with my eyes tightly shut.

See, it’s hard to even breathe when you can feel your chest rise and fall, and it’s hard to move at all when you are in a body that just isn’t your own. All I can describe it as is being claustrophobic; stuck in a room with no windows that you can’t get out of, because the cruel reality is that you are in your body and you will never ever get out of it until the day you die. Think about it, if you woke up in the wrong gender, how hard it would be to function on the most fundamental of levels. 

Breathing. Is. Hard.

Puberty

I decided that life was being deliberately cruel the day that all of the designer clothes I had scrimped to afford  failed to fit me, not going past my shoulders or hugging the air where my hips and chest should have been. Buying my heels and jackets from drag queen websites left me feeling crestfallen, and when forgetting my P.E kit I had to wear a boys one, the teacher repeating incredulously “you’re a shoe size 9!?” did nothing for me either. That happened frequently; awkward stares that everyone else knew something was different, it wasn’t so obvious so that I could pinpoint it, it started off as sniggers but grew to something much worse.

When in the changing rooms people were no longer teasing, they were staring at my body silently, coldly, and questioningly because they didn’t know what I was. What hurt the most was that I didn’t know what I was either. I got changed in the toilet cubicles when the body hair started to grow, and stopped participating in sports altogether when I grew scared my rugby tackle would hurt someone. Call it testosterone, or call it the final straw, I got into a lot of fights in that lesson. ‘Dyke’ was thrown around a lot, and I would fight that label tooth and nail, because I was certain that I wasn’t a lesbian, it was just a cruel twist of puberty that was making me look like one.

My teachers did nothing, they would look at me up and down then silently agree with the class, their bleach blonde ponytails bobbing and lip glossed mouth pouting in disapproval. I didn’t want to watch the other girls get changed. Quite the opposite, actually. Everybody was so smooth; nice skin, glossy hair, petite. I looked rugged, with a face pock marked from acne and muscle definition on my arms and thighs. I resembled all of the boys in the other changing room, but if I was 3 years older. I was more masculine than most of them already. As soon as mixed gender lessons started the similarities between me and the boys in the way that I moved around the hall were made more difficult to ignore, and the new teacher would make a sweeping addresses of ‘lads’, ‘boys’, ‘gents’ and ‘guys’, always accidentally including me.

While the girls would laugh at me, the boys laughed with me, and I learned very quickly that beating people to the punch line that is my body, it would soften the blow that I was a freak. Banter was something I took to well though I suppose, whatever that means. That P.E group would chat to me occasionally, they took a shine to me in some way; they thought I was funny, and would mention their girlfriends a lot, and then look at me expectantly. They had obviously figured out something about me which I wouldn’t for at least three more years, but at the time I assumed that I had been friend zoned, and I grew incredibly upset about it. The irony now of course is that I detest it when male friends hit on me...

Image

Just when I thought it was only cis girls that worried about their body image and that I was immune from all of that, I found myself saying ‘does this shirt make me look flat?’ thinking about it, my breast tissue does not seem to make me feel like any less of a man. It does have that effect on everyone else though, as once I am no longer in my pyjamas and entered the outside world the questioning begins; the drift of eyes over the line of my body and ears straining to catch higher or deeper tones in my voice.

It is very hard to explain, but imagine if you will every single breath reminding you of what you should or shouldn’t be, and then your mind not registering it. Think about that constant reminder, the way that your clothes and you brush against yourself when you move. The fact that when you look in the mirror you cannot see yourself at all: not just little things that you like or don’t like, but you can’t see yourself. It looks like someone else is looking back at you, something else entirely. it doesn’t make sense at all, and then you hear someone in the street saying that they couldn’t tell if ‘it’ was a boy or a girl, when in fact they meant you, you want to turn round and tell them what you are, but you just don’t know what you are yourself.

You really do feel like an ‘it’, and its days like that when I truly do question whether I’m human or not. I don’t think I’m a person like everyone else, and I feel physically sick, just like when I’m standing on top of a really tall building. Being scared of your gender is a woozy and threatening feeling; it’s just like being scared of heights. But on a rare day, and thankfully, I mean a very rare day, this is exactly what I feel like, and the more masculine I become the more I’m so scared of this happening more often, or more terrifyingly, for this feeling to never go away.

For the most part though, I love the freedom of gender expression that my body gives me, and I actually like a lot of things about my body, it’s just other people that tend not to appreciate it quiet so much. Passing at first used to mean everything to me, but now that I have learned to deal with my dysphoria and come to terms with my sexuality and gender I know what I am in my heart. At the end of the day, even when passing, people will try to claim a view on those things. I cannot stop this bigotry or the opinions of others on my personal life. I can, however, feel comfortable leaving my house as a man in my head without the need of binding. I see that as a most marvelous breakthrough, even if at first it seemed like a horrific compromise when dealing with society.  

Sugar, spice, and C19H28O2

I can honestly say that I have no idea how I first questioned my gender. If I look back at myself through the years, then lord knows it was always staring me in the face, but the problem was I had no idea that it was even a thing; I didn’t know that you could even question your identity, I wasn’t aware that you could look at yourself in the mirror and see something unrecognizable to most staring back. One day, though, that is exactly what happened. At around the 17 mark I realised that this was it; I was not necessarily a man, and I had definitely not suddenly woken up and found myself like a lost set of keys. On the contrary, it was only the very beginning of my journey of ‘rediscovery’ or whatever dramatic titles you would want to give it.  

 I remember being little relatively well. I was always particularly boisterous, and always encouraged to stop being that way. My first little boyfriend when I was 5 is now gay, and when we slow danced at a party I led. I played conkers, climbed trees and had hot wheels sets. I cried when presented with a pink goody bag stead of blue. The men I took to; the older boys that everyone else was crushing on were more like role models to me. When the age came to wear makeup and like boys I lost all confidence and I became a painfully inverted and nervous child. It was alright being young and not caring for these things, but you stick out like a sore thumb when you don’t enjoy chick flicks or eyeliner at the age of 12.

I had to research how to dress effeminately, what men liked, even what men I should like. I never once thought I was gay, but I knew that I felt absolutely nothing for men, and I hid that well. I don’t think it is at all healthy that I would go home from school, revise, and then proceed to memorise a list of teenage heartthrobs so I would have something to say to my peers the following morning. Men were all that they talked about. Butterflies and lust were things I had no concept of, and it left me distraught, as I genuinely believed I would never have an interest in relationships or know what it is to love.

I assumed this would change. I thought I would grow out of it, or snap out of it in some way; that I would wake up and perhaps walking with my hips and head back would come naturally to me instead of being a constant struggle. Quite the opposite happened, actually. I was gangly and awkward, so while everyone else developed curves on petite frames I quiet literally woke up one day three heads taller than the rest of the girls in the class. If this was any indication that my body was fundamentally different than I chose to ignore it, just as I ignored every other indicator that I wasn’t quiet female. 

I felt as though I was always a positive person, and I believe that I still am to some extents, but I promise you now that everything felt as if it were designed to make me hate myself.  No one thing was a harrowing experience, but I can safely say that the build up of little things slowly whittled away at my confidence. Like most teenage girls my self worth seemed to be born of what men thought of my appearance and nothing more or less. It was the most important thing to every girl I spoke to, and instead of questioning it I lapped it up as gospel.