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Friday, January 28, 2022

So it Turns out I'm a Woman

So it turns out I'm a woman. Surprise!

Hello

I guess, to be more specific, I am a woman of the transgender variety. Which is to say that I am a woman who was mistaken for a little boy at birth, whose family and society ran with that since my body matched the expectations they had, first for a boy and later for a man, who only fully realized my own womanhood a few years ago and who is just now telling the world that—well intentioned as I am sure it was—we were all wrong about my gender. 

This sort of an announcement feels awkward. Mostly, I think, because we don't really yet have an established social practice built around it. And...yes I have thoughts about social rituals and gender—I have lots of thoughts—but this is not the time to share those thoughts. Maybe I will write them up in their own post someday. 

I am a woman. It just feels good to say that.

Read on if you want more details but before I get into the narrative I want to be clear that trans people, like most people, don't owe anyone our stories. I am sharing mine below because I happen to want to. I am therefore going to allow myself the privilege (it's my blog post after all) of commenting occasionally on my own story. This version of my story is a modified version of the letter I sent my parents when I brought them up to date on my identity. The comments will be in italics. And as a heads up, I have dealt with some really transphobic thinking so if that isn't something you are in a place to read about you might want to jump to the end.

OK, here is the history:

The first relevant memory I have of all this is of a particular day back when I was 5 or 6 years old. I looked down at myself and suddenly felt just horribly, terribly, miserably, wrong. I didn't really have any language for it but I remember that I was upset enough that my parents noticed and tried to console me. I think I tried to express it (in kid terms) as a certainty that nobody would ever like me. I have described it to people since then as a feeling like waking up to discover that a giant polka dot neon flower was growing out of the side of my head. It was like my whole body clashed. My parents were comforting (they told me that they liked me and that lots of people would and did) and eventually I calmed down a little but the feeling didn't really go away.

That feeling is one that I would much later come to understand and call dysphoria. 

From there, I remember sort of discovering some of the meanings built into the ideas that there are boys and girls in the world and realizing both that that sense of feeling wrong was related to that and that there wasn't anything I could do about it. Discovering stories and books around then felt like (and maybe was) a lifesaver for me because in my stories I found examples of boys that I thought were fun and cool and that I could borrow things from to incorporate into the person I was figuring out I had no choice but to be.

I wanted to be Susan or Lucy but I got to work figuring out how to be Peter


I don’t want to give the impression that I was “always secretly miserable” or even “always secretly sad”.  I was a pretty cheerful kid growing up. Yeah, I definitely spent a lot of nights praying that God would turn me into a girl while I slept and also make it so that nobody else would notice—that happened and not infrequently—but most of the time it all just wasn’t something I thought about and I had exactly the good or bad time I appeared to be having. 

There were also moments growing up where the whole thing got overwhelming and, in outline form, from middle school through college I “wrestled” with what I experienced at the time as a strong desire to be a girl. In high school I decided to classify that aspect of my life as a persistent perversion. I grew up Evangelical, I was (and am) very much attracted to women, and I couldn’t conceive of anything that could be done about what was going on with me and my gender identity so I mostly felt shame about it, and—outside of very private moments—tried to just not think about it at all. The thing is that when you restrict any introspection about a particular aspect of yourself to times when you are already sexually charged and feel shameful, it is fairly simple to think of that aspect as—itself—perverse and shameful. It was painful but that mentality allowed me to box one whole side of myself up so that it interfered with the rest of my life as little as possible. It was in that framework and mindset that I dated and then married my wife, I thought of "all of that" as a shameful perversion or kink which I pretty much had (mostly) under control. The thing is, as nearly all of the literature on trans people will tell you, dysphoria doesn’t go away with time no matter how much it is repressed; it just gets stronger.

I have a lot of feelings and a lot of thoughts on what it means to have been raised in a system (Evangelicalism) which taught me that something basic, true, and frankly beautiful about myself was intrinsically shameful, sexual, and perverse. I plan to blog about those thoughts and feelings in the future. In the meantime I  have already written about why, from even an Evangelical perspective, it is wrong to see trans identities as any of those things HERE.

That was the mode in which I processed my high school and college years and on into adulthood as I got married and had kids but for now I want to jump to “the end” and talk a little bit about the last four years or so, how I ended up making the decision to “do something” about this realization around my identity, and why I am genuinely convinced that, although this is a hard thing—one of the hardest in my life and likely the life our family—it is also fundamentally a good thing.

Just to avoid any confusion or ambiguity: "do something" here means medical and social transition. I am medically and socially transitioning. Also, I chose the phrase "hard thing" intentionally; a gender transition is often hard but please don't confuse "hard" with "bad".

There is this moment that happens in a lot of trans people’s lives where two important dots are connected and the whole picture suddenly emerges. Most of you have known for quite a while now that I am an open advocate for, and supporter of, LGBTQ+ rights. It was a little over four years ago now that I realized that the complex of ideas, issues, and theory surrounding trans people actually described my experience of myself and my gender. Despite being, by then, 100% LGBTQ+ affirming and knowing a lot about trans people and how gender dysphoria (the suffering that is experienced as a felt incongruence between someone’s gender and physical sex) works I hadn’t stopped to ask myself the question “But am I trans then?” or rather I had asked that question a few times—it tends to come up when you are working with a lot of LGBTQ+ people—but I hadn’t reexamined the whole experience. Instead I had, until then, always brushed it off because I had already decided how to categorize what was going on with me and gender and that category (a shameful, unspoken “perversion”) was so unpleasant to think about that I usually just avoided it or any serious reflection on my experiences. Then one Saturday a Facebook acquaintance of mine asked why so few of the really good allies ever turn out to actually be cisgender (non-transgender) straight people. The question struck me as a little frustrating and I decided to do a proper inventory of my own experiences so as to demonstrate to myself that I, at least, could be a good straight cis ally. So I set aside some time and really asked the question. I knew that I am not attracted to men so that ruled out the “G” (gay) and “B” (bisexual) but when I asked myself about the “T” this time I saw the question and myself in an entirely different light than I had before. The specific line that ran through my head was “Cis people do not secretly always wish to be the other gender; wishing to be the other gender is what trans people do.”

I tried to glue it shut a few times but... yeah

Just to clear some things up—because the internet. First, yes I absolutely was wrong about the whole "shameful unspoken perversion" thing and yes my therapist and I have been addressing the imprint that left on my subconscious for almost a year now. If you persist in thinking that "wanting to be the other gender" is a sign of perversion please take a moment to read this paper by Julia Serano. Second, feel free to note the fairly typical straight cis ally response I exhibited and the knee jerk felt need to prove that I am "one of the good ones" that is not a good or healthy response and yes I have been doing work around that as well; and of course please enjoy the irony—I do—of me trying to prove to my self that I was a good straight cis anything. Third it is actually true that cis people do not secretly always (or, as a rule, even sometimes seriously) wish to be the other gender. If your response to that is "they do so because I am cis and I do that" um sweetheart you might want to take some time with that thought. Also I mention GB and T here but obviously all of this ended up shedding some significant light on L as well.

That realization set me reeling for a while but eventually I rallied and ended up deciding that the fact that I am trans was something I could just know and not do anything about. I had decided that this wasn’t going anywhere. I made an effort, a multi-year effort, but in the end that approach stopped working. I think that’s probably the most succinct way to say why I am now doing all of this at 39. All those years of keeping this secret of which I was so very ashamed for so very long taught me, among other things, how to repress emotions I didn’t want people to see. It taught me that lesson too well. By the summer of 2020 I was in a state. On the outside what that looked like was a sort of frequent distractedness and increasing bursts of irritability. On the inside it mostly looked like pain and sadness that came in great waves. I would be fine for up to months at a time and then I would be hit with a wash of what I would now call existential dysphoria; it's an experience that is hard to describe if you haven’t had it and the closest I can get to it is that it is to wistfulness what rage is too irritation. I had experienced it very rarely and at a low setting before I had the realization but afterwards the waves started to come far more frequently and with far greater intensity.

I was careful not to use alcohol to numb those emotions; instead I threw myself into reading, audiobooks, and podcasts (I set a personal record reading over 150 books in 2020). It worked to some extent but it worked by keeping me from feeling or fully engaging with my own life. I knew I was growing distant from my family and friends and I hated it.

Around the same time, I started to realize that I had largely numbed away much of my ability to experience strong positive emotions along with the negative ones. I think I went a year and a half without belly laughing. And I discovered eventually that I couldn't physically express sadness any more either. I could feel sad (when I wasn't engaging in a numbing behavior) but I couldn't get a sad emotion to show on my face—crying wasn't even an option. When I wasn’t feeling the pain around gender, I was not feeling much of anything. So in the fall I told my wife that I thought I should start therapy. I hoped that, with counseling, I would be able to process the loneliness and anger of the pandemic and politics and that that would free up the space to get back to full functionality. I would just deal with waves of sadness around “the gender thing” every so often but without all the constant background anger and the numbing behaviors I hoped it would be manageable again.

The very short version is that the problem wasn’t with the politics or the pandemic (not that they helped of course). I did process those issues but in the end I found that it came from not being, and not being known as, my own full self. It came from 38 years of living with a secret that nobody could know and that I knew nobody would accept. It was a grief that came from not being able to be as my full self.

My therapist is of the school that doesn’t seem to believe in just telling clients what they should do—she wants to make sure that all of my decisions are my own—so she listened and we talked about it and I kept going around in circles. I realized that I was going to have to act on knowing I am trans and I didn't know how I could interrupt my family's life. Then we got to Lent and I thought that I could take Lent to decide what I should do about this trap I felt so caught in. So I did. Several times a week I would read a passage and/or pray and spend time listening to and talking to God. Those experiences all left me feeling like coming out and transitioning were the direction I ought to go but they were also layered with a strong sense of this being about my freedom, not a spiritual or religious duty. In the meantime though I was a total mess. Regardless of how much I wanted to, I couldn’t show my pain in front of other people. It was really pretty surreal to talk about these enormous agonies with my therapist in calm, even cheerful, tones buttressed by wry smiles and occasional small jokes or self-deprecating witticisms. It was also hell.


The decision came one or two weeks before the end of Lent. I was in therapy, still talking in what felt like circles, and I realized that as things stood I had already taken several steps down the road towards being a bad parent and a bad spouse. What crystalized for me was the realization that by keeping all of the gender stuff locked up, by not choosing transparency and what at that time seemed like likely transition (It took me a little longer to make that decision) I was, at the same time, destroying the family I was trying to protect from the truth of myself. The trap only existed because I was operating under the assumption that by not acting on the realization of my gender I was preserving a thing which not acting on the realization of my gender was causing me to lose. The anger, sadness, and pain were destroying my ability to be the husband and father I wanted to be.

So here is the thing: you do not need to experience dysphoria to be trans. You absolutely do not need to justify transition if you are trans. The fact that I felt that I had to is a part of my own story and if you try to use that in any way to invalidate the experiences, choices, or stories of other trans people then you are entirely wrong in doing so. My story gets to be my story and nobody gets to use my story against my trans siblings. Also I used "husband and father" there at the end specifically because that is how I was thinking about myself at the time—those are what I was trying to be. I am still very much committed to being a good spouse and parent.

When I explained this to my therapist, she asked whether I thought I would be able to be a good spouse and a good parent if I did choose to come out and transition. I realized that in fact that was probably the only shot I had at it.

Within a week of coming out to Ashley I lost the constant background anger that had been a part of my life for over a year. It took a few months but I actually belly laughed for the first time in a very long time and, while this shift has brought about a whole host of new difficulties and fears, I am far happier and a far better parent and spouse than I had been for quite some time. On a personal level I have experienced this as really exciting growth as a person and as a Christian. I hope we have all had the joy of realizing something about ourselves which just made everything click a little better—this is like that for me but multiplied by a thousand. While there have been (and remain) difficult parts of this process, the overarching experience has been one of deepening integrity, wholeness, and health as well as an ever more intimate and precious experience of the Holy Spirit.

So let me end with a few “what does this mean practically” bullet points just so that I can make sure I don’t miss important things:
  • I am going by Billie.
  • I am using she/her/hers pronouns as we women are wont to do.
  • I have started the process of transitioning and am on HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy). I have used the term “transition” a few times here and will make sure that some of the links give a full explanation of what it can entail. Beyond that I would prefer not to say any more about the relevant medical decisions involved.
P.S. Oh, and just as a point of clarification, when referring to me in the past tense the feminine should be used as well though direct quotations do not need to be updated unless you know that the person prefers to remain private about their status as a trans person (e.g. I was chatting with Billie at a conference last year and I told her "you have strange ideas man").

If you want to read about how I figured out who I am and why it was particularly difficult for me, I have written a piece about that HERE

Resources:

https://amzn.to/2YEumxt 









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