Death of Dysphoria

I wrote a couple of days ago about growing up clueless and about how my life seemed to be a race against gender dysphoria until it finally caught up with me in 2006. I’d like to tell you about what happened after GID caught up with me, and what has happened to my life-long enemy.

Something really interesting has happened to me since I started what the Standards of Care call the RLE, or Real Life Experience, which means living in your target sex full-time. I have noticed that I don’t have any distress about gender at all — no waking up in the middle of the night wringing my hands about being a woman inside, no fear of being utterly consumed by this nasty feeling, no shame about how I’m made, and no fear about my “secret” being discovered.

This is not to say that I don’t care about a bunch of little projects involved with becoming myself, including clean up electrolysis and laser, smoothing out relationships with neighbors and old friends, working on my voice, going to therapy with Mary Jo and the boys, and trying to build a suitable wardrobe. No, all those things are still important and I still feel annoyed at how fumblingly clumsy I am about so much of femininity. But what’s missing is an urgency or a desperation to simply DO SOMETHING, to take steps to quit hurting so much. In fact, it’s remarkably calm inside my psyche, and it’s an unusual feeling for me — it’s been a really long time since I felt something like this inner calmness, and I have to confess that I’m a bit confused about what to do with it.

I don’t believe I’m sad, and I don’t think this feeling is grief, although a member of my support group suggested it might be grief. It’s a kind of loss, yes, but the loss of something I am happy to see leave my life. It’s possible that I grew close to my torturer, as in the Stockholm Syndrome or as partners in an abusive relationship sometimes do. Maybe Gender Identity Disorder gave me an edgy quality, teaching me to be defensive and secretive in my youth, but ending up ruthlessly driven to try to survive in these past few years. It was not only a tormentor, but a motivator (a creative one, at that), and it drove me to do and think all sorts of odd thoughts that people without GID probably never have, like “If I win this solitaire game, then maybe I’ll magically be turned into a girl,” or “If I hit 5 yellow traffic lights in a row, then it’s a sign that I should change my sex,” and that sort of thing.

As GID has faded and left me, I guess I feel depleted and a little tired. I am fairly certain that the happiness of being free at last to be myself will fill those empty spaces, but at the moment, they’re just little gaps rather than white-hot crises. A let-down of sorts might be inevitable.

In my “Clueless” post, I described a life-long race to try to stay ahead of GID, lest it caught me and destroyed me. But what I ultimately learned and began to realize about a year ago was that no amount of running or fighting or struggle would defeat this beast. The only way to destroy it was to give in to my transsexual nature, and in accepting it and loving myself for being made thus, the power of GID over me would be wiped out. The paradox that simply baffled me for months upon thinking these thoughts was that to defeat Gender Dysphoria, you had to embrace it, deflecting its energy, Kung Fu-like, instead of trying to butt heads with it in a direct battle.

In picturing this metaphoric fight, I am reminded of John Donne’s Sonnet that begins “Death, be not proud” and continues in Donne-like logic to explain to Death that although he thinks he wields great powers, he always loses because in dying, we (Christians, in Donne’s case) live again, thereby robbing Death of his imaginary powers. Logically and ironically, Donne’s last line proclaims, ‘Death, thou shalt die!” It’s typical Donne, logical and clever and pleasant to read and enjoy.

Go read it and, just for fun, picture GID where you read “Death.” It works almost without modification and it expresses the triumphant, in-your-face feeling that transsexuals get when they finally discover what do to about their life-long distress. You can almost hear their collective self-whisper, “I figured it out — if I “surrender” to these feelings, then the distressful feelings will have nowhere to grow and they’ll leave me alone.”

 

Self Definitions

Suppressing and repressing your true gender is really hard on your psyche. I have been quite a wreck at different times in my life as I tried to grapple with just who and what I was. When did I know I was different? I knew something around age 4 or 5, but what that ’something’ was shifted during my life, probably because an understanding of that “something” was confined and constrained by experience, education, and culture. The more I experienced the world, the better I understood what “IT” was.

When I was young, I just thought I was different — I didn’t have a word for what I felt, and thus my self definition was only that I felt weird.

When I found the library, both in high school and in college, I found books on the subject and learned that I was probably a garden-variety crossdresser, and knowing this label actually brought me a degree of comfort since the books and articles had statistics about how prevalent this feeling is, and knowing I wasn’t alone was important to me at the time.

However, after meeting cross-dressers, attending support groups and social groups, and wearing the label of “cross-dresser” for a while, it began to dawn on me that I didn’t really feel that I fit in with those girls. They seemed to get a great deal of joy out of wearing a dress as if it were a special Halloween costume, and while I myself also felt a lot of initial excitement about clothing, that feeling wore off quickly, and I realized that I probably really needed to a woman in a more essential way, whatever that might entail, instead of just being happy dressing like a woman.

Bear in mind that I think one can be a perfectly happy cross-dresser — it’s a harmless and healthy activity that channels gender dysphoria into safe and fun places. I would never knock CD’s, believe me — I remember as recently as 9 months ago telling Mary Jo that I wish I were a normal crossdresser, which was a pretty funny utterance when you think of it, but at the time, it seemed as if being a transsexual was so awful that I’d settle for anything else.

In any case, I found I needed a lot more than just clothes, and that’s when it began dawning on me that I probably wasn’t a CD, but something more, or different. I began to hope that maybe I was some kind of socialite trans*person, not quite full TS, but more social/psychological than a CD. I hosted dinner parties as Joyce, went to the theater as Joyce, went for coffee as Joyce, and began telling friends about the new me — and this new self-definition worked for quite a while.

But after marrying Mary Jo, having Lane and Ezra, and changing professions, I put Joyce away (she wasn’t needed, wasn’t even interesting), and my self-definition became something like “a non-dressing transgender person,” which is a little like the idea of the non-drinking alcoholic, a person who is always biologically alcoholic, but who can choose not to drink. And this was a viable self-definition for 11 years, during which time the trans* part of me was safely folded on a shelf like a heavy sweater you know you’ll never need because you live where it hardly ever snows, almost forgotten up there with the other never-worn clothes.

But even this highly-functional self-definition eventually fell apart, and when it did, it was a mighty tumble, everything I’d done and believed simply crumbling around me until all I was left to define myself was “wreckage.” You have read the blog posts and know that I have somehow managed to reclaim a self-definition that combines “transsexual” and “father/parent” and “husband/spouse” and “brother/sister” and “professor” and, much to my surprise, finally “human” again.

I’m not saying my evolution is complete or my self-definition written in permanent ink, but it’s a nice place to be, here in this spot of calm, enjoying life and friendship and work and family.

 

Childhood Transsexualism

When you research transsexualism, particularly theories of its origins, severity, and course of therapy, you will run across a couple of terms that used to be a lot more. The literature categorized transsexuals into “early-onset” and “late-onset,” sometimes called “primary” and “secondary” transsexuals. This distinction tried to describe the difference in people who knew of their gender dysphoria very early and those who slowly became aware of its severity over a longer period of time. Although the literature does not assign a particular age to these categories, it seems to me that early-onset covers youth through the 20’s, and late-onset covers 30’s onwards.

Current therapeutic models generally agree that if you feel you’re transsexual and you don’t have any personality disorders or mental illnesses, then you probably are a transsexual and, as an adult, you can determine the speed and direction of your life. It is a very progressive philosophy, one I’ve come to appreciate, especially in my early forays into the medical and psychological establishment, fully expecting to be thwarted at every turn, only to discover that I have been in control of my transition at every step.

Lately, there have been several newsworthy cases of very young transsexuals seeking to come to school as the opposite sex, or to simply be accepted pre-school as the opposite sex. There was the case of the 8-year-old MTF transsexual student in Colorado. Then there was a 2-part series on NPR (Part 1 and Part 2) just last week.

Google “transgender children” and see how many hits you get. I think one of the next big waves will have to deal with “childhood-onset” transsexualism and it will intersect therapy, school-access issues, bathroom policies, bullying issues, to name a few. Besides the obvious starting points (PFLAG, Family Equality Council, COLAGE, and TransYouth Family Allies) Here are some of the sources that might be useful in beginning to think about our transgendered children:

Jezebel.com

Alex Blaze’s piece in Bilerico.

Mercedes Allen, 3 Models of Transsexuality, also on Bilerico

Shannon Garcia’s “Transgender Children for Dummies,” also on Bilerico

 

Thorny Pain

I have tried to articulate how I have felt about my torment during this transition, but I really haven’t attempted to delve into my history or the specific existential or spiritual nature of that pain very much. It’s still on my “to-do” list, but until I get around to writing it, I would like to point you to an intelligent and meaningful articulation of these feelings over on Allyson Robinson’s blog, Crossing The T.

I wish I could have written these words, but having abandoned all bible study when it became clear to me that I wanted nothing to do with a God who would torment me in this way, I find that I now return to the question of existential and spiritual pain untrained, undereducated, and inarticulate.