I am upset with Star Child. And also with myself for being upset with her. Do you know that feeling? When we want ourselves to be better, to rise above, but life, reality, get’s in the way? I am pretty sure there is a great Gary Larson cartoon on the subject.
Star Child decided “of course, that explains everything” when I told her about some aspects of my relationship with my mother as a child. She was referring to my gender dysphoria and the “obvious” link to bad parenting. You see, I shared with her that when I was little my mother dressed me in girl’s clothes. Not pinafores and things like that, but tights, yes, and there is a plaid skirt I remember…looking down at it, down my body, to the hem, and to my little red legs.
And I rebelled against being dressed like this, and against the f’ed up logic that even my four-year-old brain could outfox…
“why do I have to wear tights?” I remember asking, though I don’t remember what the reason for not wanting to was…something for hypnosis, but speculating today that I was hyper-sensitive, and didn’t like to stand out…I was a pretty boy, and at pre-school, who cares. And I had an ambiguous name. And I played with girls…I can remember one friend saying, “I don’t like boys,” and me thinking I didn’t either.
Her response to the tights question was, “so your legs don’t get cold.” That’s the f’ed up logic. And rebelling against that, and my mother’s crushing and suffocating attempts to manipulate me did shape me, absolutely, but in other ways, not in my gender. What it led to in my dynamic with my mother is a refusal to let her touch me. “Don’t touch me,” I would sometimes have to shout, to scream, and push her hands away. How could I let her touch me? At least my body was a physical container.
Star Child combined the dressing described above with my mother’s frequent lament, “Oh why couldn’t you have been born a girl?” or “I wish you were a girl.” One plus one equals why I’m transgender. I did listen to Star Child’s theory. Politely. But it didn’t, doesn’t, ring true.
“There are few things that I know in life, truly know. One of them is this. I was born not wanting to be male, of wanting to be female. Other things, kink, slave me, all of that came later,” I replied to Star Child, wishing to explain.
“Maybe she wanted it when you were still in the womb so badly, that it shaped who you were.”
“Maybe, and I do believe that such things are possible. Either way, that came a long time before being dressed in nursery school, or her words. What I do know is that she was under enormous stress facing divorce, and that science now tells us that a stress affects pregnancy, including disrupting the endocrine system. And that this is correlated with all kinds of outcomes, including this.”
Star Child didn’t buy it. She had her theory. So that’s what annoyed me. You know when you have a scab and you pick at it, even though you shouldn’t? Well, that’s what the day felt like. As we walked and talked, she revealed her views as a school teacher on gender expression in children. As a teacher in school with several trans students, I worry that her “enlightened” affect is hiding a fundamental conservatism, a kind of conversion therapy light.
Part of me thinks she was just angry with me for not jumping her bones. After all, she had flown half-way around the world to see me, having only met me a few times. I thought maybe girl me would be more willing to stick my lips out so to speak, but I find she is even less willing to than boy me…if a woman doesn’t pluck me like a flower, then there is an absence of what new Mistress calls enthusiastic consent.
I love the idea of enthusiastic consent. It allows us to speak to one another, to talk about doing things together, and never having to risk offending the other person, hurting their feelings, but inhabiting a state of grace in conversation, for enthusiastic consent takes on animal energy.
Anyway. I had not made amorous overtures to Star Child and I felt she was punishing me for it. I half-articulated this by apologizing for not kissing her, and her response was irritated, which said it all. I had a fabulous time with her. It was wonderfully instructive for me. It was great for my children to see an attractive, intelligent woman with their father, who I shall always remain, no matter what is between my legs or in my brain.
Gender Identity
Just because I have spent much of my adult life and life as a child in and out of therapy does not mean I know. Waking up literally every day of my life and hating my body, hating being a boy, does not mean I know. Having the bloody-mindedness to throw my adult male self on the pyre and my future on the mercy of society does not mean I know. Faith is blind. I know because I know. I’ve known I was different from the moment that I was conscious. Capable of thought. And that difference related to identity. Not that I think differently. I do. Or feel differently. I also do. These things are a byproduct of being different.
Gender is not something we learn. Sex is a biological fact. Interestingly, there are approximately twice as many Intersex people, or people with DNA variants outside of the XX-XY binary, as there are transgender people. We have two words, ‘gender’ and ‘sex’, for a reason. Dysphoria is not a disease, it is not contagious, it is not something you can learn to have or to cultivate. At best, it can explain what I have felt as soul-agony.
And it doesn’t go away. The daily joy I now get from transitioning doesn’t mean it has been taken care of. I still am triggered all the time, mainly by women who are like what I wish I would be like. I can’t help it. I won’t stop working on it, though. And I have found that dysphoria is impossible to explain…I have tried. The only people who really understand it are my trans brothers and sisters. My black friends have described something similar. New Mistress, bless her, is the most sympathetic one could ask for, but also admits how hard it is to wrap her head around the pain that comes with dysphoria.
Dear non-trans reader, let me ask you this. When I think of gender, being male or female, it is something that we don’t really question so much. It is so utterly and completely interlinked to our sense of self and our sense of being, that even thinking about it would be unnatural. Just imagine for a moment what it would feel like to be totally disconnected from such a fundamental aspect of yourself. Not to question, like the feeling of being a man, but to reject it, utterly, entirely, as if it something that is not you…And how can that be, when sex is the essence of our embodiment, and the dominant variable in our place in society, in life, with our fellow humans. Just imagine that this all feels wrong. Imagine that it feels like a curse, like a horrible joke, a divine punishment.
We call it the wrong body. This trans person does not feel that I have the wrong body. I just reject it, reject my masculinity, reject being a man. I always have. It gets easier and easier each day. I know many trans people feel differently, but the result is the same…this most fundamental aspect of the self is rejected.
I have yet to meet a trans person who has not felt, known, that they were born this way. Many of them take a long time to put a name to it, maybe realising what it was later in life. But it’s there. And one of the biggest reasons that I love Sex Workers so much, is just how deeply I have felt embraced by them. Yes, I pay, generally, but this kind of understanding comes outside of the pay wall.
The highest expression of the divine female is Mercy. This is what I feel in the company of the Sex Workers that I return to…a glimpse of divine forgiveness felt through their caresses and kind words, seen in their eyes as they look at me not as a freak, but as I see myself, as you see my avatar. Even if I liked men, no man could give that to me. It might be me, but men give something different.
And my soul-wound is a belief that being put on this planet as a man was to force me to learn something, to confront something. The fundamentalists might say to me that God’s will is that I go on learning that lesson. I say that we are put her to grow and to become enlightened. To love. All of these things are enhanced by shedding the wrong shell, by stepping into my true identity.
Sexuality
For someone who can’t get enough of titillating thoughts, I am hopelessly out of touch. When I think I am kinky something pops up in my Twitter feed that is way beyond anything I have dreampt of. Oh well.
We call it gay and straight. That is the most common spectrum, and now there are many way-points along its stretch. Kink is another axis, however. It is an orientation in itself. Yes kinky, not kinky. Never mind the variety of kinks.
All the people who I know who are gay were ‘born that way’. And why shouldn’t they be? Straight people don’t even to have to say it, it’s just assumed.
With kink though, I am not entirely sure. In my case, I think that kink became the necessary bridge between my sex, my gender, and my place in life. It was this incredible somersault and logic loop that made all these incompatible parts hold together.
Most of them I blog about all the time. Dysfunctional, sexualised, highly inappropriate parenting from my mother. Largely absent, verbally abusive, violent father. Dysphoria. Is it any wonder that I never stopped wanting to be a baby? To go back to a time when everything was easy? Without worries?
And absolutely, being leashed is the same. And doing what I am doing to my body is just chastity to an entirely deeper degree.
The separation of gender from sexuality also explains why I don’t get turned on by women’s clothes, by even wearing them. I just feel comfortable. Its soothing. What I need. I can relax into being me. And thank goodness the vast majority of people just don’t give a damn.
Some silly bugger might say that if I feel female then I should like men…but that’s perverse. The biology of sex does not prove heterosexuality. Sexuality is not necessarily driven by either sex or gender.
All I can say is thank goodness that we are all different. That means we can all find someone to love.
I have had a couple of those moments where someone did not go straight to the place I have half expected them to go, to make the argument I half expected them to make, but instead have seen something I had previously thought was invisible to them.
These moments can be deeply liberating, cathartic, devastating…
and sometimes, they are what hope looks like.
I’d be curious to know some examples…but it is true, we often expect people to say one thing and then they say something completely different, and I find that this is most often based on our own biases, our own perceptions, are own points of view, needs, etc. And that when we simply listen, really tune in, then we can get somewhere much further with others. And listening requires active silence…something which comes very hard…
I think often people don’t even expect to be listened to. The number of times I have mentioned things in conversation, only to be met with a shocked: “How did you know about that?”
Only to reply: “You told me last time we chatted.”
But I remember one particularly affecting moment, not long after my mother passed.
We were very close, and she had often said how, even before I came into her life, she had felt a sense of my presence, of knowing that we had somehow always “been”.
I was staying with my ex sister-in-law, just a few days after the funeral, and when I mentioned this, I suddenly regretted doing so, expecting her to go to the assumption others had made when I shared this – that my mother had always known she would have a child “of her own” (my two older siblings were both adopted, and some thoughtlessly cruel comments like “won’t it be nice to have one of your own?” had been thrown around quite carelessly in front of my brother and sister when mum was pregnant with me).
This assumption had tended to irk me a little, as the distinction of whether family was “blood” or not was never one that either I or my mother considered relevant.
So I started to say: “and just in case you think she meant she knew she’d have…”
and she stopped me, saying: “it’s ok, I know what your mother was talking about.”
The fact is, we didn’t go to to attempt to define what exactly this connection was. We didn’t put any kind of spiritualized label on it – and we didn’t need to. Simply knowing that she took my mother’s comment on its own merit… and that, as our conversation made increasingly clear, she actually appreciated the particular mature of my relationship with mum on a far deeper level than I expected… this was incredibly cathartic at a time when all sorts of family pressures were pulling me in different directions and much of my grief was tangled and knotted deep inside.
That night, I was suddenly able to open the floodgates and let out a level of grief I thought nobody else knew existed. Not sure how well I am explaining this – it was really a “you had to be there” thing, and it’s a long time since I have thought about that particular evening, but something in your post reminded me.
Hi Woodsy. This is really powerful, thank you for sharing. I know what she meant too, as I suspect you also feel the truth in her words.
Many rational people would call it wishful thinking or just fantasy, but sometimes faith works like that…and I am not talking about faith in a religious or spiritual sense, but a sense of knowing which is at least as deep as our bones.
Sometimes I wonder about reincarnation, about being a soul that has been here before, about the various forms we might take should such be true…and I did have a similar feeling at one point.
It was someone who was dismissive of the idea, but I don’t think it was because she was not spiritual, she was…but rather, she didn’t like the implications of such a thing. But I felt it very strongly, that we had known each other before, drifted in and out of each others existences.
If one of you “knows” then it is enough.
Even when we know in this sense of faith, it has the uncanny nature of truth about it, regardless of the empirical evidence.