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.