Many trans people do identify with the feeling of being trapped in the
wrong skin, and they are perfectly right in doing so. I, however, don’t.
“I am not wrong: Wrong is not my
name.” – June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights”
This is a
love story between a woman and her body.
When the
doctor asked me why I wanted to begin the hormone therapy that would lower my
production of testosterone and increase the level of estrogen in my body, I
gave the answer that I knew was the safest to give. Even in French (I live in
Montreal, where many public services are conducted in la langue de Molière), my
third language, the words were so familiar that I could feel them echoing as
they rolled bitterly off my tongue: Depuis mon enfance, je me suis senti
comme si je suis née dans le mauvais corps. Since childhood, I’ve felt like I was born in
the wrong body.
This is the
answer that the doctor was expecting, a story that was written before I was
born by Western media and the psychiatric profession, a phrase that I knew
would unlock the door to the medical care that I needed, as it has for so many
transpeople before me. This is the transgender story that has been
sensationalized and capitalized on by Western media from Tyra Banks to the BBC to Katie Couric for decades, since a transwoman named Christine Jorgensen became the first person to become famous for
undergoing sex reassignment surgery in the 1950s.
This is the
narrative that most people, trans and cisgender alike, are first exposed to
when confronted with the fact of transpeople’s existence. Indeed, many trans
people do identify with the feeling of being trapped in the wrong skin, and
they are perfectly right in doing so. I, however, don’t. That story is not, has
never been, mine. And given the chance to answer the question of why I wanted
to medically transition honestly, I would say:
(This is a
love story between a woman and her body.)
It has always
been easiest to hate my physical self – it is easy, I think, for all women to
hate our bodies, because this is what we are taught to do. We are taught that
if only we were differently shaped – taller, thinner, more angular, whiter –
then we might finally be worthy of being called beautiful, of being protected
from violence, of being loved. Our bodies exist in constant conversation with
the expectations, desires, demands, of others. We are taught that our bodies
are always failing us, because they are failing to live up to the shape that
other people have told them to be. I first learned this lesson as a four year
old, when I was told for the first time that my penis meant that I had to be a
boy, regardless of what I believed or wanted.
Transpeople
know the feeling of body failure with a deep and terrible intimacy: after all,
trans communities have long used the term “passing” to describe the experience
of being able to go undetected as trans. For many if not most trans folks,
passing is essential to survival in a hostile world. Passing means access to
employment, relative safety, friendship, dating, social services.
Yet the
truth is that for most trans bodies, passing is not always an option. The truth
is that sooner or later, the moment comes when even the “best-looking” trans
person who has completed all of the steps of medical transition does not pass,
if only when they look in the mirror. In that moment, it is so very easy to
believe that our bodies – that we – have failed.
I was angry
at my body for a long time, since before I knew the word “transgender.” I was
angry at it when it meant that I wasn’t allowed to play with girls, dance,
express myself without being punished. I was angry at my body as a teenager,
when it began to surge with forbidden sexual desires. I was angry at my body
for being racialized, male, unattractive to the white gay men in my life who
seemed to have sex so freely with each other. I hated my body when it was
harassed and attacked, over and over, in the street for wearing a dress. When
it was beaten, and not strong enough to resist. When it was raped, and unable
to say no. I have hated my body enough for one lifetime.
(This is a
love story between a woman and her body.)
As a clinical
social worker, I have been trained to assess the “validity” of transgender
clients’ identies. One of the classic psychiatric criteria that exists and is
widely used to this day is the question of how such individuals feel about
their bodies: to qualify for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (ie, to be ‘really’
transgender), trans people must often express complete repudiation of their
genitals and secondary sex characteristics. (While the precise guidelines in
the psychiatrists’ bible, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, have become
more flexible over time, the reality is that many healthcare practitioners
operate based on personal and/or outdated standards.) The result is that
transgender identity becomes defined in terms of disgust, hatred, dysphoria,
disease. Our bodies become a condition to be cured, a mistake to be corrected,
freakish, abominations.
Outside the
medical field, the view of our bodies as wrong persists to the extent that they
are targeted for destruction. We are always the wrong body for the bathroom,
for the classroom, for the job, for sex, for existence. In 2002, a young woman
named Gwen Araujo was beaten to death when some of her sexual
partners discovered that she had “male” genitalia. In 1995, Tyra Hunter was denied emergency medical care in the
aftermath of a car accident by a parademic who, upon cutting open her pants,
declared “this bitch ain’t no chick…It’s a n**ger, he got a dick.”
It is only
recently, looking back, that I have begun to recognize the endurance and
accomplishment of my body: the incredible tenacity of a body that breathed and
struggled and fought for me even while I raged against it. A body that survived
bad decisions, sexual assault, and both times I tried to kill it. A body that
saw me through self-loathing to self-forgiveness. I began to see that my body
was not the cause of the hatred directed against me – society did that. My body
did not fail to protect me when I was attacked; I did not deserve violence. My
body has never been wrong. Someone else decided that.
(This is a
love story between a woman and her body.)
In
pre-colonial times, indigenous cultures all over the world knew of, included,
and honoured a vast array of gender-diverse traditions, from the mahu of the
Hawaiian islands, to the kathooey and hijra in South Asia, to the Two-Spirit
peoples of the First Nations and Native Americans. Some of these people altered
their bodies in order to fully express their gender identities, while others
used clothing and social roles to define themselves.
Looking to
these traditions, I am inspired to re-create my own gendered self outside of
the Western, medicalized narrative of dysphoria and disease that has been
forced upon me – to, in the words of transpinay activist Sass Rogando Sasot, “reclaim this body from those who want it
to breathe and be fed by their dogmas.” I can relate to my body, transform my
body, from a place of joy instead of anger and fear.
There are
some for whom catch phrases such as “born this way” and “trapped in the wrong
body” make trans people acceptable because the narratives they represent render
us passive victims of our own freakishness – and so they justify our existence
outside the gender norm. The implication is that no one could or should choose
to be as horrifyingly wrong as my body makes me. But I do not believe that one
requires justification to live and identify as one chooses. When I decided to
start hormone therapy, I did not do it because I hated my body. I did it so the
world would see my gender closer to the way I do. I did it because I loved
myself, because my body is mine, and because I am the one who decides how to
navigate it through this complicated and violent world.
As a social
worker, I have often encountered trans people from as young as ten to as old as
sixty just beginning to consider transition, in all of the word’s many
meanings. Many are anxious, some are frantic to know what their bodies will
look and feel like “after,” if they will “pass.” They want to know what the
right decision is. I do not know the answer. What I do know is this: You were
beautiful then. You are beautiful now. Whatever you choose, you always will be.
This is a
love story between a woman and her body.
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