Off My Chest

It’s the first week of the semester, and I am struggling to work. Even at halfway through I could understand feeling exhausted and avoiding speaking or writing. But this is too soon, and with too far to go.
School isn’t what’s exhausting me right now, and speaking is not what tires me. Holding back is what wears me out, makes me avoid looking at my syllabai until the last moment. So for the sake of my work, I’ll say what’s on my mind.

Near the end of the session this summer, I had what I would call a “mental health event”. I was in a foreign country, surrounded by new people, and doing difficult academic work. No surprise then that the feelings of alienation and isolation that I’ve dealt with for so long were intensified. So I reached out to a counselor through the school to talk about what I had been thinking of as culture shock/homesickness. Glory to God, that counselor is helping me to heal from trauma that has diverted the entire course of my life.

I’ll cut to it; my parents abused me mentally, spiritually, and physically. At home I was hit, threatened, and yelled at by my father, and I watched him do the same to my mother and sister. My mother struck me as well, but more often engaged in psychological manipulation.

The church she took me to laid the groundwork for self-doubt. Anxiety in the evangelical world about the “rapture” made me doubt I could ever be sure I was a good person. My mother’s frequent lectures added to that worry and made me doubt I was even trying.

Threats and acts of violence, both sudden and anticipated (“Wait until your father gets home”), formed a basic background of my childhood. On top of this, I was exposed to pornography at an extremely young age. This wasn’t intentional exposure, but that didn’t change the way I saw them as a pre-pubescent child. I tried to act the images out with other children, and even before my body developed I began understanding it primarily as an implement of sexuality.

When I began developing as a teenager, thankfully without high-speed internet access, images continued to mold my psychological development. At the same time my physical development was increasingly uncomfortable. I didn’t like my body for a couple of reasons. For one, the more I resembled a man, the more frightened I was of becoming an abuser. For another, it seemed to me that men’s bodies lacked erotic possibilities.

When I went of to college for the first time, all I really did was experiment with sex and drugs. I thought I was having a good time, but in retrospect it is obvious that I was running from the trauma and anxiety of my childhood. I experimented with witchcraft and magic[k], seeking feelings of power in spirituality, and trying to transform myself. I’m sure with all this that if I had been more exposed to transgenderism, I would have tried to transition sooner.

As it was, it wasn’t until I was 28 or so that I decided my fluid sexuality and “gender expression” meant that I was a woman. I had habitually worn dresses and makeup for a couple of years before, so when I started considering the question of trans-ness, I had an answer just over the horizon. I also found an explanation for the time in second grade I thought about kissing boys in the library, or any myriad other incidents of gender non-conformity.

So I took steps. I announced to a couple of close friends that I was beginning to transition. One of them got me hormones, which thankfully I never took. I started trying to swing my hips more when I walked, adopt other feminine traits. I thought about what I should change my name to.

What I hadn’t thought about through this initial phase was what it really meant to be a woman. It didn’t take long though to figure out that something was missing in the conventional explanations. Putting work into my physical appearance didn’t seem to be giving me a feminine perspective on life. In fact, reading about how women felt about their bodies brought me right back to where I started: I didn't love my body, and didn’t love myself. To put it another way I felt inhuman and degraded, and my way of making that real was to become something degraded: a woman.

Whatever changes I was making died as soon as I realized that I wanted to be a woman because of my own misogyny. I read real women’s experiences of being women, read Dworkin’s critiques of pornography, read about radical feminist critiques of transgenderism. This was a monstrous thing to do, and would bring me no closer to authentic life and healing.

From my present perspective, I can see now how this happened, and how intimately connected my traumas were with the desire to transition. I see why I feared being a man, why I thought I had failed, and why I desired to be something other. I see how much I desired to be transformed personally into a more pure being. I see the connections between trauma and the body, and little by little I am learning to let them be healed.

I’ve always loved starting out journals; writing something like “This time I’ll write more” or “Here I am ready to change” at the top of the first page. I’ve always wanted to get to tell my story, but I’ve also always been intimidated. I still feel guilty right now for what I’ve said about my family; even though we are thousands of miles apart, even though we hardly speak, even though it’s all true.

My family abused me, and it took me years to recover. When I was at my lowest point, wanting to be humiliated and destroyed, I thought gender transition was the way out. I’m glad that I found the voices of gender-critical women to guide me back to reality. I’m glad that I found Christ, so that I can continue to develop into a whole person. To Him be glory forever and ever amen.