Snippet from an old unsent letter, which I will hopefully be turning into a post

When I assert that I am a woman, I am not suggesting that the anatomical facts are anything other than what they are, nor am I merely saying that I “feel that way inside” (I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean). I’m saying that “woman” is how I make sense of myself, both in terms of my intrinsic personal traits and in terms of my socially-influenced understanding of gender. (Was I “born this way”, or does society make me this way? Answer: Yes. It’s not either-or; it’s both-and. Is it because I feel my body is wrongly shaped, or is it because I generally feel far more at ease being socially recognized as a woman? Again, the answer is yes; it’s both.)

An older selfie. I’m hoping to take a newer one here shortly. 🙂

Word to the wise

If you suffer from chronic depression, don’t do what I do and assume that feeling a little bit better means that you’re cured now and don’t need treatment anymore. You’ll just crash and burn even harder.

I really need to get this through my head.

So… I kinda forgot this place existed?

Hi.

Umm. It’s been a few years since I WordPressed, hasn’t it? I’ve been away for a while, and it took a friendly comment from the one and only Lootcritter (whose awesome starship drawing I totally won, so now I have an Annorax dreadnought in STO, woot) to make me go, “oh yeah, I still have that WordPress thingy, don’t I?”

So, my apologies to my, uhh, five-ish WordPress followers for just disappearing on you, lol.

A lot has changed since I last posted on here. Granted, a lot also hasn’t changed; I’m still very trans and very girly, I’m still a lefty, I still play probably way more STO than is healthy, and I’m still dysphoric and want surgery and stuff.

But also:

• I’m Christian now. Yeah, I know; nobody was more surprised by this than me. Obviously I go to an LGBT-friendly church, and it’s wonderful and one of the biggest sources of joy in my life at the moment.
• I can’t remember whether or not I mentioned I was writing a book (at least on here), but: my first draft is about half-done, finally. 🙂 Pretty stoked about that.
• My parents and I… sort of get along now? I mean, there’s still the occasional deadnaming, but there’s much less acrimony and it’s entirely possible that we might eventually get along in this life. I’m not holding my breath for it, but I haven’t really lost hope either.
• I’ve learned some better coping methods for dyscalculia, meaning I’m not so hopeless with numbers now, lol. Still think people need to take dyscalculia more seriously, but it’s good to know that it can be dealt with.
• I don’t sub to a guy anymore. In fact, I’m… pretty much completely lesbian now. I think I always was, but social pressures, etc. made that hard to see. My ex-boyfriend and I are still friends (best friends, in fact), but I only have eyes for women (cis or trans) from here on out.
• My trans activism now centers trans women. It’s not that I don’t care about other trans folks; it’s that trans/LGBT organizations tend to fail trans women in various ways, ways which you will probably hear me talk about here.

So that about brings you up to speed, I think!

As for my plans for this blog, well: I still plan to revisit the Anti-Trans Malarkey list at some point (in fact, I’ve written outlines for most of the entries already), as well as random trans- and disability-related stuff. And probably also STO stuff, haha.

On that note: apparently, in STO, all non-friend PMs to me are being ignored. So if you tried to send me a PM and got a message that you were ignored, I apologize deeply and I promise that it’s not deliberate. (Unless you were a jerk to me, obvs. But probably you weren’t and STO is just being weird.)

Guess that’s about it for now. Should I change the blog title to Kiri 5.0, given that it’s yet another relaunch? 🙂 Heh.

New post series: Anti-Trans Malarkey

ETA (11/17/2015): Took down the previous entries for now, because I’m “rebooting” this series, as it were. I was never satisfied with the way I wrote the previous ones, and I want to write them in a way that’s a little more detailed and open to questions. Hopefully I will actually do it this time, lol; if nothing else, I can just post my list of notes I’ve made for each entry.

So I’ve decided to build a list of a bunch of all-too-common bullshit anti-trans “arguments”, and debunkings thereof. Following is a list of “arguments” I plan to address. This list is in no particular order (though, to be sure, some of the debunkings will build upon previous ones), and will have links added as I get around to writing the debunkings. Feel free to make suggestions, too. 🙂 At some point, when I’ve got a good number of these done, I’ll put a link to the list in the top bar.

The Anti-Trans Malarkey Master List:

• “But you’re REALLY a…”
• “Chromosomes”
• “Objective reality”
• “The Bible says…”
• “The dictionary says…”
• “Making gender meaningless”
• “Reifying gender”
• “Trans* people are a minority”
• “Dialogue”
• “Deception”
• “I’m not a bigot; YOU’RE the bigot!”
• “Just because you feel that way doesn’t mean it’s true”
• “Appropriating womanhood”/”Coveting”
• “If sexual orientation can’t be changed, why can gender?”
• “Destroying the traditional family”
• “What if I identify as a cheese sandwich?”
• “Tragedy”
• “Artificial”
• “I don’t hate you; I hate your sin!”
• “My perception of reality is different than yours”
• “Confusing children”
• “But bodies MEAN things!”
• “Holistic”
• “Just pick one!”
• “What about MY feelings?”
• “Why can’t you just be a feminine man / masculine woman?”
• “Why can’t you just learn to accept yourself?”
• “Respect is earned”
• “Mutilation”
• “You don’t look the part”
• “Trans Mafia”/”SJWs”
• “Mental illness”
• “What if you regret it?”

Kiri Exposes the Profound(ly Banal) Biological Essentialism of Pope Benedict XVI

Well, it’s that time of year again: when the birth of Jesus Christ is declared to be “under attack” by those of us who don’t believe. And what better way to spread the peace and love of this Savior than shitting on trans* people? That’s the approach that Pope Benedict XVI apparently decided to take. See, he thinks that it’s necessary to bring an end to us because we are inimical to “human dignity”. War on Christmas? Pshaw. Our very existence is a war on humanity, apparently.

If not for the scary fact that people actually believe this, it’d be hilarious.

I was linked to an article on a Catholic web site about this (I’m not going to link to it myself, but you can find it easily enough if you’re so inclined), entitled “Pope Benedict XVI Exposes the Profound Falsehood of the Philosophy of the Gender Identity Movement”. (Dang, that’s a mouthful.) Since the title implied that the pope was “exposing” something, I was at least expecting some sort of new strawperson, or some kind of clever semantic twist, of the sort that the evangelical media machine comes up with every half-decade or so. But nope — this is just the same old shit. It’s almost disappointing, in a way; I mean, it’s kind of amusing when bigots get creative.

Fisking time!

The Gender Identity or Gender Expression Movement seeks the recognition in the positive law of a right to choose one’s gender and laws which accommodate, fund, and enforce such a new “right”.

You know, I like to think I’m pretty well-informed and up-to-date on trans* politics and so forth, and this is the first I’ve heard of a capital-M Movement that has a clear and singular goal. Granted, if we did have such a movement, the goal probably would be pretty close to what’s described here (though, uhh, I don’t exactly understand how one can fund a right), but this article is implying, not only that such a thing exists, but that it has its own logo and everything! Naturally, this made me curious, so I did a little research (i.e., some cursory googling) and found that this “Gender Expression Movement” is a local organization in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Yep, that’s right: the logo presented in the Catholic article as representative of some kind of worldwide Movement is the logo of this little Virginia group. Great reporting there, guys. (They don’t even give proper credit to the source of the logo, suggesting either that they did a Google image search and didn’t bother to read the site when they pulled the image, or that they’re misrepresenting this on purpose.)

Those involved in the activist wing of the movement seek to compel the rest of society to recognize their vision of a brave new world or face the Police Power of the State.

BRAVE NEW WORLD! POLICE STATE! OOGEDY BOOGEDY!

The truth, as anyone who’s been following trans* politics with any kind of honesty knows, is that a “police state” is the last thing most trans* people want, since it would come down on trans* people (and especially trans women of color) the hardest. In fact, it already does, as evidenced by the treatment of trans* people in prison and by law enforcement in general. And while there are many trans* people who are statists of some description or another, there are also many who would be better described as anarchist, or as some form of libertarian. We’re a diverse bunch, with diverse political beliefs; heck, it’s almost like we’re people or something.

Now on to the things the Pope himself said:

The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question.

He quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society.

Slightly confused terminology and “true structure” nonsense aside, this suggests that the Pope may actually have a pretty decent grasp of the issue. We’ve come to see gender as at least partly socially constructed, which does completely change the ways in which we see gender, and as a result, we no longer feel obligated to meekly accept our assigned sexes at birth and the social baggage thereof. As for questioning “what being human really means”, well, yeah; that’s part of it. If gender is not as crucially fundamental to personhood as we thought it was, that’s necessarily going to cause a lot of rethinking of the concept. ‘Course, I’m not really seeing why this is supposed to be a problem…

The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, which serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.

And this is where I go LOLWUT. How is embracing one’s nature “denying” it? For the Pope, once again, it comes back to this idea that having a particular set of genitals, or chromosomes, or whatever, determines the kind of person you are on a deep and fundamental level. Naturally, we disagree. And, I mean, I get that that’s the Pope’s point: that this “new” (actually pretty old at this point, but whatever) conception of gender is in direct opposition to biological essentialism. Which… yeah. That’s kind of the whole idea.

Coming soon: the Pope addresses the Roman Curia to expose the profound wetness of water.

The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will.

Again I ask, LOLWUT. Though many trans* people do believe in souls and spirits (and some do not — again, we’re people!), I don’t know of any trans* people who have seriously argued that our bodies don’t matter. (In fact, I think that we transitioning folks can tell you that bodies matter immensely.) What we do contend, and insist upon, is that our bodies do not define us, nor do they obligate us to be slaves to this or that social role.

The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.

The LOLWUTs just keep coming! I, like, literally don’t understand what he means by “abstract human being” — is he talking about some kind of Platonic thing, or what?

I do get that the whole “manipulation of nature” bit is supposed to be a dig at transition. Yep, it’s another permutation of the old, “Transition is unnatural, and unnatural is BAD!” argument. The problem with this argument (such as it is) is that manipulating nature in and of itself is not a bad thing. Some manipulations can be harmful, sure. But medicines, electronics and even agriculture qualify as “the manipulation of nature”. If there is some reason why transition is “unnatural” whereas these other things are not, I’d like to hear it.

Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed.

Well, yeah. After all, we independent women and queer folks tend to think that we’re human, too.

But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation.

By “the family”, of course, he doesn’t mean a group of people bound together by love; he means a group of people bound together by a particular heteropatriarchal power structure whether love is present or not. And we’ve all seen where that leads. So you’ll pardon me if I don’t shed a single tear for the ever-lessening influence of heteropatriarchy.

Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.

…do I even need to say anything here?

Thought not. Moving on.

When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being.

What’s this supposed to mean? Each and every person “creates themself” every second of every day. As we make choices, and as we figure out how to navigate our environments, we are changing ourselves. In fact, if I’ve understood correctly, Catholicism’s whole entire deal is that its believers are exercising their free will and making a choice to give themselves to God, and this is certainly a big self-change. So, if we take this to its logical conclusion, what the Pope is necessarily saying here is that the Gospel is inimical to human dignity. Whoops.

The defense of the family is about man himself.

Dude, we know it’s about patriarchy. You don’t need to remind us.

(And yes, I know that he was using “man” in the sense of “human species”, but I also know that he really wasn’t.)

And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.

That’s right: If you don’t submit yourself to this particular dude’s particular religion, you are not human! Or, at least, you don’t have the dignity of a human! Nice guy, eh?

The quote ends here, but the article goes on for another two freaking pages. I’m not gonna go through the rest of it, because it’s pretty predictable shit given what we’ve just read: some more silly fear-mongering, followed by a bunch of blah-blah about mutilations, chromosomes, “true gender”, “what God intended”, shit like that. You know how these articles always go. The upshot of it all, of course, is that we are not human, we should not exist, and we are a threat to everything Catholics hold dear. I deny the former two, but, under the circumstances, I think I can live with the latter.

Things I Wish I’d Been Told Years Ago

1. You are a woman. You are a real woman. You have every right to call yourself one, regardless of what anyone says.
2. Cis women are not more “natural” or “biological” or “real” than you are, and they have no more right to womanhood than you do.
3. Your chosen name is your real name. You did not choose the name that was imposed upon you, and you are under no obligation to accept it.
4. You have the right to want your identity to be respected. You have the right to demand that respect. You are not being “unreasonable” when you do this; you are simply asking for the same basic human consideration as everyone else.
5. Your facial hair does not make you less of a woman. Your frame does not make you less of a woman. Your body hair does not make you less of a woman. Your lack of knowledge of makeup does not make you less of a woman. Your penis does not make you less of a woman.
6. You don’t need to buy expensive DVDs to “find your female voice”. Your female voice is in your neck; it’s called the larynx. If you don’t like how it sounds and you want to change it, more power to you, but your identity is not contingent on how you sound.
7. Don’t listen to all those people who tell you not to transition unless you’re sure you’re ready. You’ll never feel ready. If you know you want this, that’s enough. Go for it.
8. Surround yourself with people who will support you. Do this now, not later, so that it won’t be quite so devastating when people from your “old life” reject you.
9. There’s no trick to coming out, no “right time”, no way to make it any easier on yourself. The only way to do it is, well, to do it.
10. For the most part, you’re gonna love transition. Seriously, it’s awesome. Your body will get better and better every day, you’ll be regarded as a woman socially, people will call you the right name… it’ll be everything you’ve wanted, and then some. Look forward to it, and savor it as you experience it, because it’ll never stop feeling magical.
11. Love yourself.

Proof that I’m not dead…

…and also of my new hair! 😀

WordPress blogging will resume when I have time! I just, uhh, still don’t know when that’ll be. ^^; So sorry! I’ll be back when I can.

Why is this “disclosure” “debate” still a thing?

[ETA: WordPress keeps breaking my formatting, and I don’t know why. Hopefully now the post is at least readable, though.]

[trigger warning]

Once again, it seems, my little corner of the Internet has exploded with posts and threads about whether or not trans* people should disclose their genital status in a variety of situations — usually dating, but also things such as bathroom use, participation in gendered clubs/events, school attendance (yes, really) and various other things. What’s infuriating (besides the way in which people are perfectly willing to talk about “what society should do” about us without actually including us in the conversation) is the fact that this is even considered a discussion-worthy question. After all, cis people aren’t required to describe their genitals to people to do any of these things, nor is the state of cis people’s genitals (even those who, for whatever reason, have genitals that society would consider “abnormal”) held to invalidate their genders or raise questions about their character. Yet if we trans* people (trans women especially) fail to let everyone know what our genitals look like at all times, people flip out like it’s the apocalypse. So what’s the deal?

From what I can tell, it comes down to a few things:

1. Insecurity about one’s own sexual orientation. This is an obvious one, I think. So many straight cis men are terribly, terribly concerned that a woman they’re attracted to will turn out to have a penis, and that this will make them “gay” somehow. (Never mind that, if you’re a straight man who’s attracted to a woman because of her feminine features — as is basically always the case in these instances — then you are quite clearly straight!) This is a dangerous belief that literally gets trans women murdered. You also see it (albeit less commonly, and certainly less fatally) from cis lesbians who base a big part of their identity in hating penises, and from straight cis women who are scared of “turning lesbian” if they find themselves attracted to trans men.

   I’ve long since stopped outing myself as trans on gamer forums and such, because inevitably I’d get a bunch of PMs from dudes I’d never even met, nervously “wanting to make sure” that I was always open and up-front about my genitals so that no guy would ever be “tricked” into sleeping with me. I always wondered why these guys, who would never meet me IRL and who knew I was just there to talk about videogames, saw fit to immediately reduce me to my (un)fuckability without so much as a hello beforehand. I mean, I know male gamers don’t exactly tend to be paragons of humanity, but even cis women usually get at least something of a reprieve from the sexualization every once in a while. I must have really caused these guys a lot of anxiety!

   Well, said dudes (and ladies with similar hangups), if it makes you feel any better, I think it’s safe to say that the vast, vast majority of us are not interested in fucking you. Also, we don’t want to make out with you, we don’t want to date you, and we don’t even want to be your friend. Because clearly, in your mind, your own issues are crowding out everything else about us — and why would we want to subject ourselves to that? You’re so concerned about not wanting to sleep with us that you haven’t recognized the arrogance of your presumption that we would want to sleep with you. Which, by and large, we don’t. So, relax; your oh-so-fragile sexuality is safe from our evil, evil junk.

   Speaking of which:

2. Fear of penises. This is a big one, and it’s why the “debate” tends to focus on trans women specifically. The idea is that, since penises can be used as instruments of rape, and since they are heavily related to violent masculinity in the minds of most people, they are inherently dangerous to safety and sexuality.

   And I mean, look, I don’t want to be insensitive here. I’m a rape survivor, and the man who raped me used his penis to do it. So even now, there are times when the sight (or sometimes even the mere thought) of a penis, my own included, can turn me into a triggered, frightened, bawling wreck. So, I mean, I do get it; hell, I probably get it more than most.

   Yet even I understand that the mere presence of a penis does not mean that a rape will occur. As much as certain cis men would like us to believe that they’re slaves to their horndog impulses, there just isn’t any evidence of this, and most men (of any variety) would agree that they are, in fact, perfectly capable of controlling themselves. (And even if testosterone was this irresistible mind-controlling drug, surely the fact that trans women take testosterone blockers would at least mitigate that effect, if not outright eliminate it.) Meanwhile, women — ciswomen, women without penises — are just as capable of committing rape as cis men are, yet these rapes tend to be ignored and overlooked despite the fact that they are just as devastating to their victims. And as far as I know, there’s no campaign to protect women and children from cis female rapists in bathrooms.

   Come on, y’all, this is Feminism 101 here: The only way to avoid being raped is not to be in the presence of a rapist. Banning penises from women’s spaces, or insinuating that a trans woman’s self-presentation as a woman is “sneaking in” a penis or attempting to “trap” others with a penis, does not meaningfully help to stop rape. All it does is alienate and demonize an already-vulnerable group of women — many of whom, frankly, hate their own penises more than anyone else possibly could.

   (As a side note: In theory, I don’t have a problem with the existence of vagina-only spaces, or DFAB-only spaces. If people need such spaces, then great; more power to them. Just please don’t call them “women’s spaces”, alright?)

3. Just plain essentialism. This is another one that seems really obvious, but I think it’s worth discussing nonetheless. One of our ongoing frustrations in the struggle for gender liberation is that, despite our best efforts to explain that sex and gender are separate concepts, most of society still hasn’t gotten the memo. So we have to contend with policies and arguments based in absurdities such as, “Every cell in your body is male!” or, “Wearing a dress doesn’t change who you really are!”

   If you’re trans* (and especially if your presentation tends to be “opposite” your assigned sex), you’ve probably experienced this at least once: You talk to somebody. They seem polite and nice enough, and they treat you as you want to be treated… until they learn that you have different bits than they thought, at which point their entire demeanor changes and they start treating you like you’re a gender you’re not. What makes this experience so bizarre is that, clearly, nothing’s changed — you’re still the same person with the same personality — but they act like everything has changed, and that you’re a completely different person than they thought, all because of a little piece of flesh that you keep hidden and that was never any of their business.

   The idea that genitals determine personality/identity/etc. seems ludicrously goofy to those of us who know what’s really up with gender, but to those who don’t, to those who’ve swallowed common gender narratives whole, it seems like “common sense”. This is why, even in seemingly innocuous contexts where genitals are otherwise irrelevant, trans* people are so often accused of “deception” and “lying about who they really are”. (In reality, of course, the opposite is true: we’re being honest about who we really are.)

So, to sum up: People make assumptions about our bodies and identities from our presentation. When they find out that our bodies are not what they thought, they feel as if they’ve been “tricked”, and mentally edit their assumptions about our identities and personalities (usually erasing our real selves in the process). Based upon this, they make judgments about “who we really are” and therefore what our motivations must be, etc. in order to keep their own mental gender frameworks intact.

The solution, I guess, is to keep challenging those frameworks — to keep insisting that biology isn’t destiny, that not all men have penises and that not all who have penises are men (and similarly for vaginas and women), that gender identity is something that transcends body parts and binaries, and that private parts really are just that: private. Once people realize this, I hope, they’ll also realize that the “disclosure” “debate” is a giant (and sadly influential) red herring that has nothing to do with anything besides the bigots’ own fears and hangups with regard to gender.

Reclaiming My Story

You know, lately, I’ve been getting very good at answering cis people’s questions — at least, for the most part.

“Why are you doing this?” Because body dissonance leaves me no other choice. It’s either transition or suicide.

“Why should I call you ‘she’ if I know you as ‘he?'” Because it’s polite, and because I am not willing to talk to you at all if you don’t. Your choice.

“Why would a man want to cut his dick off?” I don’t know. I don’t understand men. Why don’t you ask one of them?

“How can you say you’re a woman?” That’s easy. Given my social context, my experiences in my body, my understanding of myself and my excellent responses to transition treatment so far, “woman” is the gender category that makes the most sense for me (in fact, it’s the only one that makes sense for me).

“Did you always feel this way?” Uhh.

Crap. I don’t know how to answer that one.

I mean, I know what I’m supposed to say. I’m supposed to say yes. After all, the usual narrative is that we knew our true selves from a very young age, and we were driven to transition literally as soon as we had the means to do so. We cling to this narrative because it could “legitimize” our genders in the eyes of essentialists, and because, up until now, a lot of “LGBT” political messaging has revolved around the idea that queerness is “not a choice” and that we were “born this way.”

Is this entirely honest, though? I realize that it may be for some people, and I don’t want to erase their stories at all. But I do know that, for me at least, the reality was a little more complicated, a little less neat and tidy. And since my transition is largely about honesty and integrity, shouldn’t I also be honest about my past?

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, which is why Natalie Reed’s latest post resonates with me so much:

In telling and retelling those stories of our childhood, clinging to and exaggerating those “legitimizing” moments that are no more likely to be the memories of a trans woman than of a cis man, we rewrite ourselves, and distort our own memories. We build a childhood we never had. The heartbreaking part, though, is that we end up sacrificing what our histories really were, the actual complexity and multifaceted nature of our narratives, in order to allow ourselves to feel valid within what is ultimately a cissexist, patriarchal, invalidating conception of what is required to be “legitimately” one gender or another. We don’t just rewrite our own histories in order to find a sense of comfort. We also allow the cissexist narrative of gender to rewrite all of us, collectively, and erase the actual complex (and perhaps beautiful) story of human gender itself, participate in and become complicit with that rewritten conception of what we are and the larger cis-patriarchal structures it supports… and punish those who remember.

Lately, I’m realizing the degree to which I’ve done this, contributed to this. We all have, to some degree; the pressure to “correctly” narratize our lives is immense. For some of us, it’s even been necessary. Up until very recently, any trans person whose life didn’t follow the cis-prescribed narrative could be denied transition treatment; and even now, those of us who have access to it face the very real possibility of having it blocked or revoked based on a misconception of who we are and what transsexuality is. This leads to one of most bitter ironies of transition: in order to get the help we need to live honest lives, we often have to lie. And in doing so, we perpetuate the lies that cis people tell about us to invalidate us, to deny us our very selves.

I’m tired of that.

When did I first “know?” I can’t pinpoint a particular time frame; for me, it was more a growing awareness than a sudden realization. I knew I was uncomfortable with my genitals, and I knew that I felt kind of out-of-place as a “boy,” but I didn’t really know how to interpret these things, or what they “meant” for me. To my recollection, I didn’t actually think to use the phrase “I am a girl” (or even, “I want to be a girl”) until I was ten years old or so. (Under the old SoC rubric, this would have meant that I was a “secondary transsexual”, as opposed to a “primary transsexual” who was considered to be “truly” trans. I’m so glad they dropped those BS classifications.) Even then, I fought it really fucking hard, first by doubling down on biological essentialism, then by diving into some of the more destructive aspects of Western masculinity, and finally by throwing myself into an “intensive discipleship program” at my local church. It wasn’t until 2002(ish) that I finally started truly embracing my female identity, and it took me many more years to work up the courage (or, rather, desperation) to begin my transition.

That’s (an extremely abridged version of) my trans history. And you know what? I really think I’m starting to be okay with that. Oh, sure, I wish I’d started sooner, and I also wish I hadn’t felt so driven to deny what was happening to me. But the story above is true (at least as far as I remember it), and it does not make me even slightly less trans, or less of a woman.

I really want to explore my history some more. I feel as if it’s been stolen from me. Even if I was the one who erased it, I erased it due to social coercion and fear that telling my story truthfully would cause me to lose the acceptance and help that I needed. I’ve taken back my selfhood and my right to self-definition; now, it’s time to take back my past.