Oh no, not another post about suicide

I have to make light of it.  The simple act of posting means I am still here.  Being honest with myself means to recognise that this ghoul is with me still, may be forever, and even when I am in my euphoric joy, the beast stands lurking by my side.

Two days ago I was riding high, to the point where I felt like writing to my therapist to tell her that the danger had passed. About an hour or so later, I was blubbering on my stairs, inconsolate.

Crying is a good sign.  It’s when we stop feeling that the danger becomes imminent. 

Suicide, mine, has been with me my entire conscious life.  On a tantric retreat recently, the head “guru” voiced this to the room: that trans people suffer the highest rates of death by suicide per capita of any group of people anywhere.  Even more than Cornell students in winter.

I knew it.  I’ve written about it on this blog on more than one occasion.

But suicide is not a goal.  Its presence has a root cause, and the root cause is never what it seems.  At the most basic level, my agony of life was rooted in gender dysphoria.  The current war on transgender people is a beast we are having to carry.  When someone speaks up for me, or for us, in random acts of standing up for the vulnerable, for the weak, I usually end up crying.  I never know if someone is going to kill me, hit me, insult me, just look at me in disgust, or crack the most beautiful and warm-hearted smile.

I wish I could have been legislated out of existence.  That such a thing was possible.  For my own sake, I wish that trans didn’t even exist.  It is a painful path.  The sad thing is the angry white man campaign against us is rooted in fear and lack of compassion.  I think that there is a congenital flaw in the design of the angry white man, which is a need to “other” anyone who is outside of the group.  I’d love to see a sociological study on this, but a cursory glance at history shows that whites have generally been the most barbaric to ‘others’.  Whether this was slaving, the Crusades, the Holocaust, the Albigensian Pogrom, the slaughter of the indigenous of the Americas…all in the name of manifest destiny or racial purity.  Ironically, even the internment of the Japanese in the USA during WW2 was such a case, of a people equally prone to bouts of nasty nostalgia on racial purity.  Kind of sick.  But I digress.

I make a distinction in my life about the therapy I chose and continue to choose and that which was imposed on me.  As a child, the most profound abuse that I suffered was being forced into therapy and then medicated.  More on what this did to me below.

Let’s take a look at this in sequence.

I was born with gender dysphoria.  Superficially my testosterone levels were never high—they were at the absolute bottom of the range for what is “normal male”.  And you could see this in how my body developed.  I was a waif.  I had a snatch waist and some curves.  I was almost completely without body hair my whole life even though two of my brothers are amongst the most hirsute people I know.  As was my father.  Strawberry-blonde gorillas.  Oops, we don’t refer to men with that colour swatch.

I was also just not that aggressive.  In every way.  I found it hard to feel those feelings or understand the rage, particularly in my teen years, that other boys had.  I had my own rage, but it was different, wild and uncontrollable, and coming from some place not of my own desire, but of profound frustration.  This sense of being thwarted.  Impotent (and not in a sexual sense).

Despite these things my libido was normal.  Still is.  Possibly high.  But how it expressed itself was never the same as my male friends expressed theirs.  I was relentlessly attracted to girls growing up, invariably the prettiest in my class.  I thought I was ugly.  And I was certainly complex.  But I can’t remember a year when the prettiest girl, and also usually her friends, passed through me on the way to someone else.  Hanging on wasn’t my skill.  But being a port of call seemed to be the done thing.

I don’t need science to tell me what my life has been.  And I have sat in enough transgender support groups with people who I have absolutely nothing in common with, to the point of making me wonder why I am even there, when they open their mouths and talk about dysphoria and their lives, and I realise that all I have is things in common with my trans and intersex brothers and sisters.  It is hard for the 99% of people alive who don’t have this feeling to put themselves in our shoes.

The only way I can describe it which seems to resonate is that most people never consider for a second that their gender and their sex aren’t the same thing.  But a transgender person only ever thinks that way…it is off, meaning we are so uncomfortable in our bodies, in our skin, that we can’t stop thinking about it, which is a form of existential agony, because sex and gender sit at the core of personhood, our sense of self, of who we are.

How each of us deals with it is our own cross to bear.  For me, a sex change and hormone therapy was my only way out.  I know that had I not taken this course a few years ago I’d be dead now.  I tried to prevent it, to fit in, for as long as I possibly could, and then I couldn’t anymore.

To call that a choice is to think that two wrongs make a right, that only bad options mean you have no excuse.  It is just ugly.  Thankfully, I was able to do it.

My suicidal ideation was certainly rooted in the pain of this.  But that is gone now.  Even the social blowback for being trans and so out, doesn’t hurt in the same way.  Yes, it really sucks to be hated for being different, but I relish the increased compassion I have for others, especially those who suffer discrimination of different kinds.  My black sisters, for example, have been such Goddesses to me, and this is rooted in a shared understanding of how nasty people can be to the ‘other’.

When the “guru” voiced the transgender experience as he did, it resonated inside me in different ways…because I was already able to say, “it’s not because I am trans that I will kill myself.  There are other more fundamental issues in there.”

On the retreat right at the beginning we were divided into small groups and asked to speak briefly about how our egos had protected us and what might sit behind it, and what we might hope to achieve by taking a closer look at it.  In my group of 5 there were two women.  We went last.  The men spoke easily.  She cried a bit, but not much.  I wasn’t speaking about really hard or difficult things, or so I thought, but I didn’t just cry.  I lost my voice.  I lost the ability to speak.  I’m sure that we have all been there, but usually this comes with some profound event, an argument, a hurt from a lover…but something was stopping me from uttering what was there.

Ten days later, yes it was that long, I stood in front the entire group and spoke of being sexually abused by mother as a baby.  I want to repeat that.  As a baby.  It is hard to remember, it comes back mostly as feelings.  She touched me inappropriately when she changed my diapers.  Playing with my genitals, cooing to me, just being wrong.

I don’t know why she did that.  She’s dead.  I can’t ask.  And I don’t know why I make excuses for her, have forgiven her.  In some ways I blamed myself.  My sense of shame at being sexually aroused by being treated like a baby came from this.  A life of therapy and some judicious and enjoyable work with a Sex Worker dethroned the importance of this fetish in my life, and has allowed to settle into just enjoying women’s energy in a more healthy and non-needy way.

But my mother’s behaviour led to a lifetime of consequences.  The first thing I did as a child was to stop letting her touch me.  And because I couldn’t physically do anything, I withdrew, ran away, and if that didn’t work, I screamed.  I wanted to reassert bodily autonomy.  To own me.  

And yet, I was also filled with sorrow.  I think of this a lot, and how the person that hurts you can also be the person you need to love you.  It sucks.  It’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, I guess.  Only I rebelled and rebelled and just kept a longing inside of me for my mother’s affection, a mother, just the warmth and forgiving and loving kindness of a woman.  Even today, in all my affectionate relationships, I have sought this energy out, tried to cultivate it.  Ironically this was absolutely not my ex-wife’s way.

Me evolution into submission is painful.  There is a sense of letting go which is one rooted in giving up the fight.  Of coming home.  The symbolism of being whipped, experiencing pain, reaching my breaking point, and then being held, scooped up, by the woman who hurt me, is no longer lost on me.

My first domme broke through the first gate around my heart through touch.  Why her, why that situation, why that moment?  I don’t even know what she was thinking, if she was thinking, whether it was conscious, whether she even noticed, but I remember the very moment when she put her hand on me, and I realised that my relationship to being touched had just been changed forever.  That I discovered in that moment that touch is what I need most of all.

My closest friends are all touch-oriented people.  They touch me all the time.  Most of them are Mediterranean.  Is it any wonder that I have ended up living in a country where people touch all the time?  And yet, I don’t touch, don’t reach out. I’m learning and certainly with intimate partners this is not a barrier, more a habit…but with strangers or acquaintances I wouldn’t dream of it.

Is it any wonder that I became a somatic therapist?  Don’t they say that therapists are just working through their own trauma?  Certainly true with me, though not understood at the outset.

Is it any wonder I have become a dominatrix?  Same logic.  I realise also, the way I domme, is very in line with what I need to receive.  I behave towards my clients in the same way that I seek in a dominatrix.  I am playing out mothering.

On a recent jaunt into my BDSM professional community, I was in a house with 5 dominatrixes.  And I ended up defaulting to my favourite role, which was to feed them.  Years of semi-professional cheffing, including running a cooking school, writing about food, and even making TV shows with well-known chefs (my part off camera) comes from passion, and how I express affection to people.  At the end of the experience, one of the dommes referred to me as ‘mommy’ which just about melted me.  I am a mommy domme, and I guess I now understand why.

So what’s killing me now?  My divorce has been brutal.  It is also so wasteful and undeserved.  It really has caught me out of the blue.  It is “over” in most ways, but not quite, because the disentangling process has only just begun, and the way it is being done is a travesty.  I can only say that it feels profoundly discriminatory, and that is overwhelming my ability to self-regulate.

All of this dancing around and talking about abuse really circles back to personal autonomy.  I have no desire to be a victim, to be made into a victim, to succumb to feelings of victimhood.  Even if the consequences are crushing me, the refusal to give satisfaction to the other side, is inspiring to stay alive and to fight.  I don’t want to give her the right to write the narrative.

But there is something else, which is the feeling of the absence of justice.  This is what being ‘othered’ really feels like.  Coping with irrational hate.

Today, I decided to go for a big run.  I wanted to cry.  Needed the catharsis.  Running is an almost certain way to get me crying.  My body just releases on a run.  Despite the need, the well-spring did not break forth.  Instead, I had a group of 3 boys and bicycles ride past me and make nasty comments and laugh.  The two girls riding with them were at a safe distance behind.  I regret not chasing or shouting at them, or talking about their dysfunctional behaviour to their female friends…ages between 14-16 I am guessing.

Where am I going with this?  Well, the flipside of my mother’s abuse was that I had recurring nightmares of being bound and trundled into darkness, of not being able to help myself.  This was another form of her abuse, when she locked me in her closet as punishment for something or other.  And she was of the school, let the baby cry themselves to sleep in the crib, only the darkness scared the shit out of me, and so I cried beyond desperation.  I do remember that feeling…that nobody would help, not even the one person who should have.

This sense ruled my life growing up.  It was compounded by my first experiences of psychiatrists, who she took me to until she got the diagnosis she need to medicate me.  I still don’t know why we went to so many different ones only a time or two, but I never liked them, and maybe they told her no.  Ironically, it was the “kind” one, who played checkers with me and asked me gentle questions, and seemed like a nice man, who was the one who gave her what she wanted.

I didn’t really process how traumatising that was, because it was also a betrayal of my trust of him.  It was my absent father who stepped in and stopped it…but he didn’t do it out of love for me, but his own narcissistic need to not have a kid who needed to be medicated.  Still, it worked, and it showed the fallacy of the diagnosis.

But my sense of betrayal, of injustice, remained with me, and has ruled all of my relationships ever since.  When I think of how I tested my then future wife at the beginning of our relationship, consciously needing to know that she wouldn’t leave me, abandon me, until I was satisfied that she wouldn’t.  Part of me had contempt for her for showing that level of commitment and attachment.  And that’s my own core wound acting up…

In the end, I was wrong.  And we were not suited.  Sometimes we marry that which hurts us rather than that which would heal us.  So, this divorce business and the way it has come to its end, has been very triggering for me, and has brought to the surface all of these wounds from my childhood.

I look at all the things I am doing in my life to bring them to the surface, and how this has been happening kind of pell-mell, with things tumbling out as they can, for none of it is rational.  Post-facto it is dead obvious.  But living it, I never had a clue.

Thanks for reading, and if you made it this far, a big fat kiss to you.