Transness

Bryn Kelly, a trans woman, took her life recently. I didn’t know her, though I knew of her. She was close to several friends of mine. She was, by all accounts, a vivacious, outgoing, successful, seemingly happy person, a writer and blogger. That was how I knew her. I don’t know why her death affected me so deeply, more than many other trans women who have died by suicide, but it did. Since I heard of her death, I have spent much of my time in isolation, grappling in my head with transness and its intersections with marginalization, depression, poverty, the daily micro-agressions of living in society, physical and psychic violence, gender dysphoria, body image, suicide, early death, and how all of that relates to me. Trans women, and trans feminine people, especially trans women of color are possibly the most marginalized people in our society. It is a constant struggle for many of us to survive. We face discrimination in housing and employment. We are often rejected by family and friends. We often live in fear in our day-to-day lives. Although I live in perhaps the most trans positive city in America, I still experience trepidation every time I go into a public restroom, or get on the MAX, or enter any unfamiliar public space. Many of us grapple with mental health issues. Severe depression is widespread. I don’t know if being trans is the cause of my bipolar and anxiety conditions, but I do know it has affected them in negative ways. Many of us live in poverty or near poverty. Sex work is a common occupation with young trans women because they cannot find other work. Trans women are more likely to drop out of school and to be homeless at some point, the most common cause being family rejection. This lack of education can perpetuate a vicious cycle of poverty. While I do not live in abject poverty, I am among the nation’s poor. My disability income is just enough, and sometimes not enough, to live month to month. I am always one rent increase or one unexpected catastrophe from being on the streets or couch surfing from friend to friend. We experience micro-aggressions on a daily basis. Every hostile look or stare while out in public, every misgendering, every transphobic remark takes a toll. This is why I try to spend most of my time in trans spaces. Even other queer spaces can be transphobic. I loathe going to the grocery store. I always use the drive up window at the pharmacy. I do the vast majority of my shopping online. I spend a lot of my time alone in my apartment, partly because of depression, but largely because I don’t want to interact with the hetero-normative culture. The ever-present possibility of physical violence takes a toll. There are many places I won’t go by myself. The possibility of encountering the police causes anxiety. My heart rate goes up every time a police car passes me on the street. Trans women encounter frequent mistreatment and violence at the hands of law enforcement. I am filled with dread every time I contemplate being arrested and incarcerated. Rape of trans women in jails and prisons is almost a certainty. Psychic violence is much more common than physical violence. The hatred we are daily assaulted with by TERFs, the religious right, political demagogues, and the mainstream media take a psychic toll. Every week, it seems, new legislation is introduced around the country to deny us our rights, even to criminalize us. We are painted as predators whose only motive in transitioning is to enter women’s restrooms and spy on or assault “real” women. The virulence of these attacks is breathtaking, and terrifying. I thought that when I transitioned I would be done with the gender dysphoria that had haunted me all my life, but that’s not how it works. I am daily beset by doubts as to the reality of my identity, my truth of being a woman. Part of this is that I do not ‘pass’. I am most often looked upon as a man when engaging with the larger world, a major reason for withdrawing into my trans community. I have major body image issues, as do many trans women. I have almost invisible breasts. I have no hips. I have enormous feet for a woman. It is almost impossible for me to find women’s shoes. I have a large masculine face and a deep voice. I was fortunate enough to be able to have sex reassignment surgery, but that is an impossibility for most trans women, as it would be for me today. If I had the money, I would have breast augmentation, vocal cord, and even facial feminization surgery. As my financial circumstances are unlikely to change drastically, I am constantly reminded that those things will likely never happen. Suicide is an ever-present reality in the trans community. I have known several trans women who took their lives, and hearing of other suicides is a regular occurrence. Over forty percent of trans women report that they have attempted suicide. I have never gotten to the point of actually making an attempt, but I have come very close. Thoughts of suicide are alluring. How lovely it would be, the voice tells me, to break free of this existence where I am judged a freak, an imposter, a monster, a grotesque, and shoot off toward the next stop on my cosmic journey if there is one, and if there is none, to sleep in blessed peace. I usually deal with all these realities by that most convenient of coping mechanisms, denial. When someone gives me a hostile stare on the sidewalk, I ignore it. When the customer service rep on the phone continues to call me sir after I have corrected them several times, I let it go. These minor indignities don’t matter, I say. Forget about it, I say. But of course they do matter, and the more I ignore them and deny them life, the deeper they delve into my psyche, until one day yet another trans woman, who I didn’t even know, takes that final plunge, and it all comes bubbling and boiling to the surface.

Gender Dysphoria is a Bitch

Gender dysphoria is a bitch. Never feeling comfortable in your head, your heart, or especially your body, takes a daily toll. It beats you down in so many ways. As long as I can remember I have been weary, not just tired, but weary. Every day is a struggle, emotionally and physically. Demons of doubt inhabit both waking and sleeping hours. I attribute much of my constant struggle with suicidal thinking through the ages to this dysphoria. There is something wrong with me. That has been a constant theme from childhood, something wrong and shameful. Something to be hidden at all costs. Exhausting. As I said, weary. I was a secretive child who grew into a secretive adult. If, as they say, we are as sick as our secrets then I have been very sick indeed. I was not like the other boys I grew up with. I was small to begin with. Always the smallest kid in the class, small and weak. And I was rarely interested in the activities of the other boys. I hated playing sports. They were always another chance to be humiliated and marked as different and defective. I felt like my skin didn’t fit properly. I had an aching and longing in my heart that could never be satisfied. As I grew, I retreated into a world of books and fantasy. Adolescence was a special circle of hell. As I look at pictures of myself during that period, I am struck by how androgynous I appeared. I was bullied unmercifully. Everyone thought I was gay. Even I eventually came to that conclusion myself. That would explain why I was so different, why I never fit in, why I felt so uncomfortable all the time. Naturally, this was yet another source of shame. I found solace in drugs and alcohol. They took me out of myself and let me, albeit only for a short while, to leave my daily existence behind. I dropped out of high school after my sophomore year. I could no longer take the bullying and gay baiting. As soon I could, I took the GED test and began attending the local community college. I had been involved in theater in high school and I decided to major in it in college. Surprise, surprise, there were actual living, breathing gay people here. And the theater crowd accepted them as part of their own. The problem was I wasn’t gay. I found our in short order that I wasn’t attracted to men. My brief sexual encounters were an ordeal. I was attracted to women, so did that make me straight? It was very confusing. I didn’t know who I was. When I left college, I retreated more and more into the straight world. I tried desperately to fit in. I moved out into the adult world of work. I kept my mask on twenty four/seven, suppressing any feelings of difference, trying to hide my otherness at all costs. My drinking and drugging grew proportionally. I was spiraling out of control. Nothing was working. I didn’t know who I was and I felt empty and hollow inside. I finally spiraled down to the point that I found myself in drug rehab. This helped me with my drug problem but left me with all my other demons, bubbling up to the surface now that I wasn’t hiding them by being drunk or high all the time. I first began to think seriously that I was supposed to be a woman and not a man. Of course this was a deep, dark secret. The thoughts grew more and more insistent and I worked harder and harder to suppress them. How could I possible be transgender? I was married with kids. I would have to live this way for the rest of my life and make the best of it. My suicidal thinking grew ever more frequent and intense. I had never been comfortable in my body, but now I grew to loathe it. I hated my penis with a passion. Sex grew more and more infrequent and finally ceased to exist. Life was hell. When I finally began to transition I thought my problems with gender dysphoria would end, but they only intensified. Starting hormone replacement therapy was like starting puberty all over again, with all its angst and drama. At times I felt like I was fourteen, obsessed with makeup, and hair, and clothes. I would burst into uncontrollable tears at the slightest provocation. The mirror became my best friend and my worst enemy. My beard shadow horrified me, as did my enormous feet. My deep voice seemed to mock me every time it boomed out. My body wasn’t built to wear women’s clothes. The list went on and on and on. I had laser hair removal treatment to deal with my five o’clock shadow. I started wearing Doc Marten boots, which were androgynous enough to partially mask the fact of my humongous feet. My breasts grew, albeit only to size A. Have you ever tried to find a size 50-A bra? I had gender confirming surgery. My hated penis was finally gone. I had thought this would finally get rid of the dysphoric feelings once and for all. I was wrong. Every time a clerk in a store called me sir instead of ma’am, every time someone gave me a second look on the street, every time I stepped inside a women’s restroom, I felt uncomfortable, ashamed, less than. I’ve dealt with some of these feelings through the years. I’ve given up hoping to ‘pass’ in public. I dress somewhat androgynously. I no longer wear makeup, or a lot of jewelry. My dreams are no longer of matching wardrobes, but of tattoos and facial piercings. Some of the dysphoria remains. I hate looking at my feet, or my tiny breasts. I tell myself that if I ever win the lottery the first thing I’m buying is boobs, great big boobs. Unfortunately, there is no surgery to make your feet smaller. I feel more and more comfortable in my skin as time goes on. I no longer worry about passing. I am generally happy with who I have become. But, boy, that gender dysphoria is a bitch.

Trans for the Holidays

There is a photo of me, age three, coming out of the house in a cowboy outfit, guns blazing. My brother, Christopher, also in Wild West shoot 'em up garb, has a gleeful grin on his face. I look like a deer in the headlights, stunned and not sure how it got here. I looked like that a lot as a child.

My parents would have never gotten us guns for Christmas, so it must have been my father's mother. I think she delighted in buying us things my parents didn't approve of. The tension on those occasions was palpable. Grandma, the boozing hairdresser with the third grade education, and Father, the shy, self effacing, Philosophy professor. It was not a match made in heaven.

Though guns were not a part of many childhood Christmases, there were plenty of boy toys. Building blocks and erector sets, kites and trains, Hardy Boys and compasses. Nothing in pink, nothing soft and feminine. There was a dialectic to those childhood Christmases that has remained to this day. On the one hand, anticipation and excitement in the air. On the other hand, the hidden knowledge that my expectations would never be met. At the end of the day I would still be odd, little Philip, the weird kid with his nose in a book. I wouldn't find a package from Santa under the tree with a new me inside. One without secrets. One that didn't look like the deer in the headlights. One that could connect with others and feel comfortable in her skin.

As I grew older, the alienation with people only deepened. I was especially reminded of my aloneness during the holidays, because togetherness is the main virtue of Thanksgiving and Christmas (along with mass consumerism). All I want for Christmas is not found at the mall. Feeling disconnected in a room full of people celebrating has never been my idea of a good time, so I isolated more and more.

Through the years; through drug addiction and alcoholism, through recovery, through children and marriage, through birth and death, there was one constant. I was always alone. This weighed most heavily during the holiday season. The more I surrounded myself with family and friends, the more alienated I felt.

Three Christmases ago, I began my transition in earnest. I needed to finally find me under the tree. I thought it would be different. I would discover how to connect with people and put an end to my alienation.  The hormones would make me whole. That weird little boy would find a little girl under the Christmas tree, all tied up with a pink bow. She would make him whole. Santa would finally deliver after all those years.

Life's not like that. I feel happy and sad, joyful and angry, manic and depressed. I feel. I feel sometimes for the first time. Yet, I am still alone in a room full of people I love. I still isolate for the holidays. Change takes time. I do feel hope.

I received an amazing gift this year. When I was in the last throes of overcoming my fears of transition, I read a book 'She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders' by Jennifer Finney Boylan. It moved me beyond words and pushed me, finally, past my fears and out in the open. Jenny Boylan is one of my heroes. Sometime later, I noticed that one of my friends was FB buddies with Jenny Boylan and I sent her a friend request on the spot. And then, a few days before Christmas, Jenny posted on FB that she was willing to talk with any of her Trans friends who had a hard time with the holidays (I'm not alone here). I sent her a message without any kind of expectations that it would amount to anything. Surely she would be too busy, or we would fail to connect.

Thursday afternoon the phone rang send a strange voice said 'Is this Phyllicia Daria? It’s Jenny Boylan'. We chatted for about 15 minutes, sharing pieces of our lives. We agreed that I was, as she put it, 'a real mess'. We connected. I was no longer alone for the holidays. Bless you, Jenny Boylan.

At this point, it would be nice to ride off into the sunset as the music swells. That won't happen. I will still be depressed and disconnected, alone in a crowded room. It's a start.