A Giant Lie Called Gender

The concept of gender, in its entirety, has been on my mind a lot lately.

This probably isn't surprising, given the entire name of this blog and the nature of my life; but in all honesty, the notion wasn't quite as centered in my awareness and thoughts for a while. I needed to work on other things.

Now, though... now it's back. And it's time to explore some more.

The following paragraph mentions various forms of violence and child abuse as I experienced them; please feel free to skip it if needed.

I've had a contentious experience of the construct of gender for as long as I can remember. As a young child, gender was the justification for much of the physical and emotional violence done to me. Most of this violence came from relatives and caregivers, in the form of gendered assumptions, based entirely on (in essence) the shape of my crotch. The superficial reasoning was usually expressed in some fashion resembling "that's not OK for a boy to do." The response for years was usually a severe beating, or later on, verbal abuse and threats of violence to accent the hateful words. I spent several of my formative years having difficulty walking without pain because of the savage bodily harm that was done to me for trying to be myself.

Needless to say, I learned fairly quickly not to be myself. At some point I buried all awareness of my reality for safekeeping and began to slowly believe the lies I was being told.

Lies about myself, about what was acceptable to do, about who was acceptable in general. Lies about people and what we "can" or "can't" do.

I was lied to, as a child, about a heart-breakingly long list of things - but the one that still stings the worst was the lie of gender.

I'm not sure I have a conclusion to any of this that I can express, not just yet. What I do have is a swirling mass of unorganized thoughts and ideas, all orbiting this central conceptual construct, all telling me that the way forward for my life as a person is to push even harder to reject that lie and find the truth hiding underneath it.

I've mused before about feminism and its inherent expansion of what "gender" is considered to entail, but lately, I've found a bit more clarity around my feelings on the subject. I think I've tended to default to self-describing as "girl" (notably not "woman" but we'll get back to that) because, in the current landscape of feminist and queer liberation efforts, it feels much less restrictive as a starting point. Toxic masculinity is still such a rampant reality that starting from "male but X/Y/Z" seems to create a massively long list of caveats, exceptions, and ideas that I can only imagine drawing weird looks from people if I tried to explain myself that way.

By contrast... girl musician? Girl with a career as an engineer? Girl who likes using power tools? Girl who likes driving fast cars? None of those are problematic, in the eyes of society at large, and are unlikely to draw the same amount of confusion.

Digging further, though, the only reason for picking a starting point in the first place is the deeply entrenched misconception that anatomical sex has a meaningful correspondence with personality traits.

I find myself wondering... if nobody thought about people in terms of physical bodies, how would I explain who I am?

Musician... career engineer... gleeful power-tool-user and fast-car-driver... deeply contemplative, concerned about others, invested in continual growth and exploration and self-improvement...

None of these things need "gender." To a large extent, I think we'd live in a much better world if we all rejected the notion that "gender" even exists in a way that's meaningfully relevant to those kinds of facts about specific people.

I understand that there is a value in the idea, to many people - a sort of shorthand way to express identity without diving into long-winded details. I'm sensitive to the sort of comforting, security-blanket-like fuzziness that accompanies gender-certainty for people who have it. I've personally felt tinges of that over the past few years, and even leaned into it occasionally to help guide my own self-exploration.

I also wonder, deep down, if gender isn't just another one of those things that we as humans cling to desperately and invest in deeply despite the fact that it's doing nothing but hurting us.

All I know for sure is my own experience, and that trying to generalize from that into anyone else's world is a mistake at best.

So returning exclusively to my own experiences... I've played with the concept of "non-binary" for quite some time now (the very first post of this blog mentions the term) but never really felt it fitting, for reasons that until recently I couldn't quite articulate. I think, at this point, my quibble is not with the idea denoted by the term but rather with the etymological construction of the term itself - after all, despite many protestations to the contrary by various groups of people, words do matter. A lot.

I'm reminded of a quintessential conundrum from within the lesbian community (another place I feel at home) - the desire to define ourselves in a way that is not simply in reference to men somehow. This is heightened by the additional layer of "Sapphic" attractions which aren't exclusively aimed at "women" either, but rather a sort of vague cloud of possibility-space within which one occasionally finds various amplitudes of femininity.

I don't want to express myself in reference to binary gender, so "non-binary" inherently feels unfitting. Hell, I don't want to express myself in reference to the lie of gender at all.

Where do we go from here? I have no idea. I have no words. I have no clarity for how to establish a commonly-useful expression that captures the essence of what I'm struggling to convey. But I'll keep looking. There's plenty of us on the hunt, all over the world. We'll find something.

For now? I feel like, if someone were to ask me what my gender identity is, I really only have one remotely satisfying answer:

"I don't interact with gender. I'm magic incarnate."

Monday, May 17th, 2021

I have nothing against being wrong - not in general, not in principle. Being wrong is part of guessing, and guessing is part of trying something new; and, after all, one of the biggest reliefs of my entire life was discovering just how wrong I was about who I am, a couple of years ago.

But there are times when it's harder than others. Times when I have to just admit that I was wrong, and if there's any usefulness to be had from the mistake, it's lost in the sheer pain of how awful the mistake was.

I made the mistake of thinking things were OK with my relatives.

This is the only way forward now.

* * *

The trash cans are just sitting there, on the curb.

Maybe for some people it’s "just" a "simple" matter of opening the garage, pulling them inside, and disappearing into solitude again.

Not for me.

I can’t go out there.

Instead, I have to be in here, fighting off the whispers of anxiety and dread that say someone out there is judging me for not having taken the cans inside yet.

Never mind that half the neighborhood just leaves their cans on the road all week.

Never mind that even the people who do bring them up a driveway, into a garage, around to the side yard... they often take a day or two to manage it themselves.

I almost wish I could say something, as if to explain what’s going on and just avoid further conversation entirely. Tell everyone. But why? I don’t want their pity, their offers of help, or their involvement.

All I want is to be left alone… and they already do that. No one ever bothers me here.

But I can’t go outside.

They know I’m here. It’s not some kind of secret. I’m not fooling anyone. Nor am I trying.

I know why all of this is.

It has nothing to do with being left alone. It has everything to do with not being rejected. Not being treated as a problem, as a freak, as an abnormality, as a monster.

No one here has ever given me a reason to think they would respond that way.

But I know who did.

There’s a flashing storm of images in my brain, words and sounds and faces, a parade of horrible people doing horrible things. Echoes of long-faded physical pain flash through my nerves.

Being beaten by my father at a party, him hauling me into the driveway of the host’s home and hitting me over and over again, for embarrassing and inconveniencing him. I’d had a social anxiety attack and lost control of my bladder, surrounded by strangers in an unfamiliar setting. Somehow his impression of the right response to that was to begin smacking his eight year old child.

That was the right response to everything. Hit me.

I remember exactly one time - eighth grade - when I dared to walk away from him when he started getting angry at me. I left the room, went upstairs, and quietly locked the door to my bedroom behind me. Without even leaving the kitchen table downstairs, he yelled for me, promising that if I didn’t come back down and listen to his tirade, he’d "make me remember" the consequences. I didn’t get hit - that time - but I remembered anyways.

I have no idea what he was even pissed about, all these years later.

All I remember is the depth of how awful, how profoundly terribly incomprehensible, it all felt. To be struck time and again, for almost two full decades. "This is only for your own good. I’m only doing it because I love you. It hurts me more than it hurts you."

Bullshit.

I’m not afraid of my neighbors saying something shitty, or being ignorant or rude. I can handle people acting badly.

What I’m scared of is the remote chance that I’d see the same look in someone’s eye, that tiny flicker of disgust, the judgment, the silent hurrying away as if I’d ruined their day just by existing.

The look he gave me all the time.

I dread trying to talk to them, trying to help them understand that the strange woman living on the corner lot just needs some space and some privacy... I dread the beginnings of things starting to work out, people still being just as respectful but with a little more knowing behind the casual waves from across the street... I dread the eventual outcome of the illusion shattering, the bubble bursting, and someone finally telling me they couldn’t handle being kind to me anymore because I’m just too much.

The way my mother always did when I sought refuge with her after yet another incident with my father.

* * *

I tried again, all those years later, to make it work. To tell them the truth - who I am, what they did, why I struggled for weeks deciding whether or not to even give them another chance. I sent them the recommendations… books to read, documentaries to watch, people to talk to.

For a little while, it seemed like it might have worked. We talked on the phone, now and then. Occasionally even ventured past the petty small-talk that I always find so exhaustingly pointless.

And then it stopped. The illusion broke. For everything that has changed, nothing really changed at all - not with them.

A year and a half ago, my father promised to answer the letter I wrote him explaining who I am. He has since disappeared again into whatever obsessive religious hole he’s finding interesting these days. I’ve heard nothing from him, but he’s found plenty of time to write letters - to absolute strangers, trying to sell them his advice. 

A year and a half ago, my mother promised to try and build an actual relationship with her youngest daughter - with me. And when we’d finally reached a point where I felt comfortable telling her that I am autistic, and relating some of my struggles to her, she fell back into the same old habit she always has. It’s just too much, can’t we talk about something else?

I turned thirty-five years old over a month ago. I have heard absolutely nothing, from either of them, since the beginning of this year. For all their promises, for all their assurances that they’ve changed and become better people, they’re still just as problematic as ever.

I spend most of my nights and weekends working through the leftovers of the traumas they both put me through. Violent abuse on one hand, and dismissive neglect on the other.

Someday I will be able to get my trash cans without seeing their shadows hiding around every corner.

I am breaking the cycle.

This shit stops with me.

Thursday, July 4, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, with minor edits for privacy.]

I didn’t realize until earlier this morning how much I actually want to write about this.

The fourth of July has always been a stressful holiday for me, in one way or another. In recent years it has been largely because the entire day was a continuous hell for my poor dog, who would spend the surrounding 36 hours pacing the house in abject fright, unable to even get outside long enough to visit the yard, because of the random booms and explosions. Watching him suffer and being utterly powerless to help was not exactly conducive to enjoying the day.

But there’s more than that, and I realized that as I thought about what to do with the day when I’m by myself. For instance… why am I spending the day alone? I’ve carefully avoided getting invited anywhere. Sure, some of that is transition related, and it’s nice to just have a chance to not perform for anyone else. But there’s definitely more still.

A bunch clicked into place when I read a tiny [social media] post from someone about their own negative feelings about today. The “patriotism” still grosses me out a lot. The nationalism has waxed and waned over the years, and in the social circles I’m in these days, it’s certainly tempered compared to – say – the atmosphere in the post-9/11 south.

But there’s still some polarizing clearly visible. Presumably there’s a camp that thinks the country is good right now, and while that makes me quite sad, I at least don’t have to interact with them these days, which is important for my own health. There’s definitely a camp that feels like we’re off track and just need to stand for the Right Things and it will all get better – like there’s a core essential America that can still be salvaged. The bizarre overlap with MAGA rhetoric is not lost on me, but I do kind of worry that it might be lost on everyone else.

And then there’s the camp I feel the most affinity for: this place is fucked, we never were good to begin with, and the lies and posturing and systemic brainwashing of successive generations are just perpetuating an unforgivable disregard for basic human decency. This shit hole doesn’t deserve to be celebrated.

Learning about actual American history was one of the key threads in the process of my own discovery that authority is not to be trusted, and face value can be fatally deceptive. There were the elementary school fairytale versions of the revolutionary war, colonization, westward expansion, and so on. But they never really held up under scrutiny.

I remember a confusing process that unfolded over my time growing up overseas. In second grade I dropped into a tiny enclave of international kids that held a “school” together, courtesy of a couple of parents who had some teaching background. (I need to pause in remembrance of my teacher, who I knew as Aunt Kathy for silly cultural quirk reasons. She was an immense help in a lot of ways and I owe a lot to her loving and genuine involvement in my young life. She returned to the US to battle cancer around the end of my second grade year, and for years we thought of her as a hero. I am ashamed to confess I don’t remember much else, but we lost her several years back. Thank you, Aunt Kathy. Rest peacefully.)

In this little proto-community, there were a few kids that were “old school” is as far as one can be in elementary school I suppose. And I was the new kid. I quickly learned that America wasn’t thought of highly – not just among our host country but by the white kids too. Some of them were loyal and fond of the country we were in, the place that truly was home. That contrast stuck with me, and later in life I found it a vital clue in understanding third-culture. It also became a permanent building block of my own politics.

The next major shock was spending a year back in the US in middle school. I kind of intuited that maybe people wouldn’t really “get” why I preferred a foreign country to their home, but I was not at all prepared for the venom behind that. Not only do American middle school kids lack the experience to empathize with my affinity for a “third-world garbage heap”, they were abundantly eager to give me shit for it. I don’t think they were bad people. I think they were victims of the kind of pervasive brainwashing that patriotism tends to produce – and that I had been lucky enough to avoid.

I mean, yeah, there’s obviously something wrong with that kid! Who doesn’t think America is the best thing ever? Who would want to live in a country where you don’t have TV and can’t go to the movies and they don’t even sell the right kind of clothes?

I always found it telling, though, how I responded to that experience. I went back overseas the next year, and rejoined the community of international kids again. Except suddenly I had been promoted. I was now de facto old school, plus I had endured the dreaded rite of passage known as Furlough, so I was fucking made. The old guard saw me as having real cred now, and the next wave of new kids needed to be helped to understand what it was all about. (I want to make this sound more humane and pleasant than it was. Frankly, I was too young to actually get it properly, too angsty and teenaged to be nice or gentle at all, and honestly high school freshmen just aren’t likely to engage with a subject like this in a cultured and compassionate manner. I’m not judging anyone, least of all Past Me. Just, in the interests of honesty, I was a total shit.)

The struggle unfolded. There were a few of us who still fiercely advocated for the value of our host nation and culture, and of international experience in general; but we lost numbers steadily, as people graduated school and left, or had to go for other reasons. The scene was slowly flooding with bitter, grumpy Americans who resented being taken away from their cushy lives and privilege.

Frankly it was exhausting, and it was one of the single biggest reasons why I was mortified to learn, around late 2000, that we were moving to Florida after the end of the school year. I remembered middle school. I didn’t want to face that treatment again, especially when I felt like I’d been losing ground in that war on my own fucking home turf. Summer of 2001 we slogged through the infinitely unhappy process of moving across the planet, and after a bunch of unpleasant crap, finally wound up in a tiny duplex apartment in a backwater town in Central Florida.

Somehow I wound up getting shunted into a “home schooling” situation which, ultimately, I find a painfully mixed blessing. My “high school” experience was fucked, but it did come with the cold comfort of not having to walk into classrooms full of people who hated me every day.

The details are fading with time, but the moment – and especially the emotions – I don’t think will ever dim. I was doing some stupid busywork under the guise of school. Dad was working on the lawn. Mom I think answered the phone when my sister called.

“Go get Dad and then turn on the TV.”

Some moments in life you don’t have to recognize to know exactly what they mean. I’d never heard that tone, but it was unmistakably clear.

The first plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York City just a few minutes prior. We watched live as the second hit, then the Pentagon after that, and the crash in Pennsylvania after that. Watched live as the towers came down.

Nobody knew what it meant; fuck, for weeks it wasn’t even entirely clear what had happened. But everybody was definitely scared.

I don’t remember how much I said at all those days, or how much I was honest about things. I suspect I followed my gut and just lied, if I even spoke. I don’t even think I had many people to talk to about it. But regardless, my true fear was unspeakable – it wasn’t safe to admit.

I’d left the world and come to Florida with a low, rumbling unease about how America thought of itself and the rest of the planet. The morning of September 11, 2001, I felt so alien and alone. I was scared, absolutely, but my fear wasn’t about America being attacked. I was scared for everyone else.

The next months and years were like a waking horror nightmare, as that fear turned into increasingly awful reality. Within hours the American flag paraphernalia was everywhere, and it stayed that way for months, if not longer. The rhetoric made a sudden and dramatic surge towards violent retribution and “sending a message.” People drew encouragement, I guess, from the patriotic melodrama and the nationalistic frenzy.

We started a war, and then more. There was a stomach-churning phase of “debate” about clamping down on people’s lives and rights in the name of protection. The cynics were right, ultimately; the debate happened, faded out and whimpered into nothingness out of sheer exhaustion, and despite the apparent “compromises” that were supposed to come from it, here we are, years later, happily chugging down the path of surveillance state and dehumanizing as many people as we can possibly manage.

The sick twist, of course, is that the “government” isn’t directly acting as the face of most of this shit. (They’re doing some, yes, and it’s vile how happy they are to own it.) Most of the insidious erosion has been outsourced to private corporations. Shouldn’t really shock me, I suppose, that’s the fucking American way.

By the time I was in high school I had done more air travel than most adults in the US, by any number of different metrics. Going through an airport shortly after 9/11 was unspeakably painful to me. The inconvenience didn’t matter; I’d had far more annoying experiences already, but… stories for another time. I sat in the winding security lines and watched people be molested by “security personnel” and watched people suffer through incredible amounts of blatant bigotry. I often wondered, in those airport lines, if I had the strength to do anything. There’s a young mother, wearing an understated head-scarf, traveling alone with her infant child, struggling to communicate in fragmented English with someone who is overtly and proudly treating her like shit.

And here’s me, a dozen people back in line. I feel visceral pain for her, in so many ways. What could I do? What would anyone else in that line see? There goes some pasty, scrawny white boy, to do… what? Being forced to watch suffering, and being entirely powerless to stop it, is my ultimate hell.

Almost 18 years later. The post-9/11 America is almost old enough to vote. Airports have tamed a bit, and I can almost fly without having to consciously force down the nausea and unease. My disgust with this country has faded into the background from time to time, no less intense but certainly less visible and demanding of attention.

I haven’t lost the awareness. I know, all too well, how big of a gap there is between American perception of America, and what everyone else sees. I haven’t lost the deep, rending pangs for the small moments when I see someone being abused and mistreated because of it. For many reasons, I think it has all needed to stay in the background for a while, and it may still be some time before I can safely work with it again. But I intend to.

I will not celebrate the fourth of July. I won’t attend the light shows or the barbeques or the parties. I will reserve a moment of silence, instead, to mourn for what this country has done to the world. I will keep holding on to my seething anger. And to everyone who has bled at the hands of this nation – I dearly wish I could promise you more than this, but at least know that you are not forgotten.

Fuck the United States of America.

 

 

Side note – I very, very much need to sit down and do a true archival session sometime. There’s some interesting snippets from [a long-vanished website] that are still surviving in pockets of the web. (I don’t think the record of my brief but very public flirtation-slash-idolization exchange with the T-shirt ad model chick made it, which is sad, because she was super cute, but such is life.) I’m poking around my old high-traffic blog and there are definitely a lot of fascinating bits there too, going back to 2005 and tapering off a couple of years ago. I could also stand to comb through some relics from old computers, especially the laptop that’s still running and the one that I think I can use if I plug it into a monitor, although I probably can’t remember the passwords.

 

 

I’m trying an experiment tonight.

The nationalism is making a lot of noise outside right now. It’s 22:41 hours but also northern latitudes in summer, so the sky is actually still a tiny bit light. The fireworks will probably continue to be a pest for at least another hour, maybe two.

I already wrote about how all that shit makes me feel.

A bit ago I played some bass, in a very unambiguously girly outfit, in front of the picture window in the room upstairs. Didn’t keep careful track of time but probably close to an hour. It was fun, and I felt good being me, and being potentially visible even though I know nobody around here would notice in the middle of all the holiday junk.

I wore out eventually – I’m still very out of shape and low on practice and physical stamina overall – and wandered back downstairs. I was happy for a second and then suddenly just slammed with this urge to drink heavily and just… torture myself emotionally. I think it’s mostly the holiday, but I’m sure the extra strain of all the recent dysphoria and anxiety and such has contributed too.

So I was sitting around sort of paralyzed by this conflict in my head. Some miniscule slice of me remembered that I could, after all, just not do that and maybe go to bed or something if I really needed to put a line in the sand. I am incredibly grateful for that slice. In times past, if I had been struck by the urge to be self destructive and create myself a bunch of emotional pain, I would have just gone and done it, then and there. There’s been a lot of my life when I wouldn’t even realize there were options.

It’s still a fight. I knew from the first moments that I had no persuasive reasons to do it – I knew I would hate the experience, that I would be pissed and miserable about it in the morning, and that there’s no way it would have been “worth it” in any imaginable sense. But I still almost did it.

Honestly, what saved me was remembering a brief, fleeting impression I had recently. I don’t remember when or really anything else about it. I just remember seeing me, in my head, maybe in a vague Someday or maybe just in a universe that can never be. The details weren’t the point. What mattered was that I knew immediately I was seeing myself, and after that was certain, I realized what was happening. I was just… laughing.

It was that kind of unbelievably pure, joyful laugh, of a girl who had clearly known pain and awful things, and still immovably refused to stop seeing beauty and happiness and wonder in everything.

I’ve lived through hell. I know pain and darkness and all the ways the world can be despicable. I know I can journey around in those feelings. I don’t need more practice experiencing suffering.

So I’m trying an experiment tonight.

I saw a tiny glimpse of a reality where I am happy and bright and unstoppable. I know that girl is no fool. She isn’t naïve, she isn’t oblivious, and she isn’t hiding. She carries the stature and scars of a fearsome warrior. She has proven her power before, and if it is needed, she will do it again.

That strength will always be hers to command. And she will always reach for love, and caring, and happiness first.

There’s a reason I knew my middle name belonged to me as soon as I found it.

I am Amelia Joy.

Saturday, June 29, 2019 - Part Two

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, with only very minor edits.]

The last entry was from like 1AM and then I went to bed and then I did today and now it’s close to 11PM. So mleh.

 

I’m going to try and stay simple here because I don’t want to get stuck trying to be fancy with words. A bit ago I was poking around reading about thought habits and wandered into an article on CPTSD. It talked about some of the awful things that can appear in survivors and victims. A lot of it was sadly familiar (which isn’t terribly surprising) – problems with emotional processing, relationships, self-image, etc. I’ve known for a while now that this model fits me very, very well.

But I re-read some of the symptoms with recent events in mind, and it was unsettling. It just kind of added up to making me feel really uncertain. I had the sudden question that maybe I’ve been thinking that I am trans but really it’s just the confluence of a bunch of fucked up trauma stuff.

I think that “usually” it would have been really easy to dismiss that out of hand and not even really notice the thought. But given the bumps I’ve had lately with doubting my identity and feeling like it’s hard to stay visible even to myself… it was scary for a moment.

I did talk myself out of it pretty quickly. In fact I very nearly just moved on without writing anything at all. But I want to poke at this a bit, because maybe the process will be helpful to reflect on later. And, if I’m really honest, I kind of hope that this can help create something that others can benefit from too.

One of the big points I found helpful was remembering that there are definitely plenty of trans people with CPTSD. It’s totally a legit thing to have both experiences in one person. So the “argument” becomes more focused; if I am “not trans because it’s just trauma” then what exactly distinguishes that from the (acknowledged) case where maybe I’m both?

Obviously the simplest refutation requires demonstrating that “me being trans” is a real thing, independently of “me being a trauma survivor.” This gets murky really fast. I can’t rely on chronology, for example; my early recollections of trans-indicative experiences are still very much in the same time period as the ongoing trauma itself, so it’s difficult to say “ha, I was trans before I was fucked up by the other stuff.”

So there’s more subtlety needed than simply “here, trans and trauma are totally separate buckets.” Instead of reasoning that I am both trans and traumatized by pointing out that the two exist independently, there is promise in doubling down on the idea of them coexisting. Specifically: trauma is assumed to be the more “stable” element (I’m not scared of being wrong that I have CPTSD…) so how, exactly, would things look if I had CPTSD but the “trans identity” was a retroactive idea that I had constructed recently to “explain” trauma effects?

I keyed most of this in my head on one central observation. I learned about CPTSD a while ago, and first really began to explore the framework as a way to help myself heal right around a year ago, almost exactly. For months I tried to use things like affective self-therapy (“inner child” type approaches) and found them disheartening and frustrating. I seemed to always resist the attempts and even recoil or lash out very negatively in response to them. I actually had pretty much given up on self-talk until very recently… when I discovered, basically by accident, that my intense negative responses to self-talk were not based on the actual content or ideas involved. I wasn’t rejecting the concept of communicating with myself; I was disgusted and defensive about it because I had always been trying to talk to a boy. I started over, looking to make contact with a girl instead, and almost literally overnight everything I felt about affective therapy changed completely. Since then I have had incredible and increasing success with interacting with facets of myself, provided I am respectful and (often most importantly) I gender them correctly.

These pages open, in fact, with a very vivid example of this. I learned, in short order, not only to operate from the “inner child” paradigm, but also to see parts of me that are in the present. I talk and joke and reassure Little Amelia almost constantly now; and I am always tickled when she quips back at her Big Sister Amelia in her distinct, adorable, elementary school girl voice. I spent time with my contemporary facets – boy mode, Sarah the enigmatic enby genius, and of course Amelia as I have settled into now. (I had a fascinating trip into the ideas of plurality/multiplicity and, although I now feel quite stable and singular, I have a lot of unanswered questions I would love to explore someday, when the spoon reserves are a bit less depleted.)

Anyways, my key reasoning was pretty simple. CPTSD is a set of responses that develop in reaction to prolonged trauma; affective therapy is aimed at engaging the portion of the self that most intensely remains trapped in that horrific experience. I started attempting inner-child work long before I had any conscious notion that I might be trans. And it didn’t work, because I was trying to operate with the notion that I was a cis male. It began to work once I involved the new understanding that I’m a girl. The inner perception I had of myself, in CPTSD’s framework, was formed and locked in long ago – and already a girl, long before I had any thoughts at all that maybe I’m trans.

(Pedantically, lest the objection be attempted that maybe I just ret-conned my past to be a girl out of wishful thinking or something, at that time I was still very much hesitant to even think about female identity; consciously I was still identifying as male and maybe enby in a fluid configuration. Discovering that my past was a girl was a surprise to me – far from any kind of overt revisionist bullshit.)

So really… far from CPTSD being the source of some kind of delusional belief that I am a trans girl, it’s actually a pretty compelling (not to mention validating) argument that I am definitely trans, and have been for a long time indeed.

Saturday, June 22, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, unedited.]

Something I’ve been enjoying a lot in the past couple of months is the feeling of freedom in how I move. It’s incredible to me… not just that certain physical motions are intensely gendered, but how utterly invisible that is to most people. I mean – they can probably spot something “wrong” but that’s probably the extent. I don’t think it’s typical for people to be low-key conscious of every muscle contraction in their body because they feel compelled to make sure it’s gendered “correctly.”

I like moving around, when I can, in a fashion that feels more natural to me. Maybe it’s feminine? Hard to tell at this point. It’s definitely not straight-guy.

The dancing is definitely the distilled, refined, pure form of this. There is something amazing about just dancing like a girl.

I thought about this a bit ago, and realized that I have wanted to move, freely, for a very long time. I remember a moment in I think 5^th grade or so. For a while I would spend time alone in one room in the house, carefully isolated away from everyone else, and just dance. I think there was probably music involved but I honestly can’t be sure.

I remember feeling so right – moving, unfettered, just expressing myself by flowing around the room. It was like a direct tap into a spring of some kind of primal, beautiful joy.

I am much less certain about why that ended. Maybe someone saw and said something, maybe not; maybe I just thought too much and got myself scared. I think I remember a rush of the shame and fear. Whatever happened, I left the experience with a very loud and clear lesson, which is that proper boys do not do “that” and I better not do it ever again if I knew what was good for me.

It still churns in my soul… that I can’t remember much of anything, that the pervasive abuse even happened in the first place that led to all that memory loss, that it’s taken so long to re-emerge, that I still have incredibly conflicted feelings about the people who hurt and abused me in the first place. It hurts to know that an ecstatic, happy little girl once got told she wasn’t allowed to dance, and she had to carry that lashing in her heart for so many years.

But now… now it is 2019. It may have taken a while for her to heal, to find the smuggled memories from so long ago and lovingly dust them off again, but they’re intact.

I still love dancing like a girl.

And for the first time in my life, I really understand why.

Friday, May 24, 2019

Editorial note: published retroactively July 6, 2020, unedited. See the recap post of 2019 for crucial spoilers on how this ended up turning out.

I’m resisting the urge to write on a really weirdly primal level, which is probably a strong indicator that I should write something.

I’ve been reflecting a bit today; not entirely sure what prompted any of it anymore, or how I wound up in this particular thought-region, but here we are. I usually try to be really disciplined about distinguishing between relatives and actual family, but I feel pretty raw at the moment and probably need to just get things on the page instead of crafting my wording too much, so for the next little while, I may be imprecise in that particular set of language.

I fucking hate my family.

I mean… I have a bunch of people related to me who I don’t even really know and barely even remember exist. They’re… indifferent, I suppose. I have one sister who is actually pretty cool but still at a place where interaction with her is a net negative for me in terms of energy and such. One nibling I actually really want to connect with better. One brother-in-law who is a metric fuckton of human shit and deserves a category of rage and ire all for himself.

So I guess what I really mean is I hate my parents.

I… wish I didn’t, in a way. I wish I could still care about them and trust them and want to have any kind of a relationship with them. Deep down in my heart I am still really sad that they did what they did. And deep down I wish there was some path through the future where I could tell them who I really am. Before they’re gone.

But for all the ache and tears that well up when I think of that, I just keep coming back to all the harm.

I come back to the beatings. Never enough to leave discernible marks; that would arouse suspicion and maybe even make them think twice about what they were doing to their own goddamn child. But beatings. The sweet spot is to leave the kid unable to walk comfortably but provide no observable evidence that they were repeatedly struck to create that situation.

There is a certain tier of fucked up depravity that drives a person to violently beat their own child on a frequent basis. There is another, worse tier where someone will have “funny” conversations with other like-minded parents about whether or not it counts as “child abuse” with the clear implication that they’re simply looking to justify and rationalize their behavior.

And it gets worse; there’s a tier where people will systematically combine psychological and emotional abuse with the beatings, to the point where simply making a particular facial expression, or using a specific tone of voice, or alluding to a particular word – any of these things can instantly produce terror and helpless submissiveness in the child. I don’t need to hit you anymore, because all I need to do is give you that shitty head-tilt and stare, and you know that if you don’t fall the fuck in line immediately I will end up wailing on you with some random fucking object until you do what I want.

Bonus points: tell your child to contemplate how it’s actually all your fault as they convalesce from their contusions. It’s all for your own good. It hurts me more than it hurts you. This is what love looks like.

If you ever, in any situation in life whatsoever, find yourself about to rationalize non-consensual violence by claiming it is acceptable as an act of love – and especially if you’re talking about smacking your own child around – please press pause, step away from things for a second, and ask yourself what the fucking hell is wrong with you that you have become such a degenerate and vile sack of fucking shit. Do not return to existence until you can provide reasonable assurances to the human realm that you have thought better of your idiocy and will, as appropriate, go fuck yourself in an act of humility and contrition.

Mom didn’t hit me much. I suppose I sort of appreciate that. But she also never did anything to stop it, or any of the myriad other forms of blatant abuse I had to live through.

I remember a moment when I was 17 and nearly ready to move the fuck out of the house. I don’t recall exactly what my misdeed was, but I do remember my dad grabbing me roughly, and essentially saying, “You’re not 18 yet; I can still hit you.”

Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a terrible threat. Maybe I should have responded differently, or something, I don’t know. What I do know is that 17+ years of being hit, and hundreds of times as many threats, added up to a lot; there was no way in fuck I wasn’t going to freeze and panic and drop directly into subservience mode.

For fuck’s sake, he could probably still make certain gestures now and I’d reflexively panic. Train up a child? Nah, fuck that. Beat the shit out of your kid, and they’ll definitely never get over it.

 

A small handful of times, at a certain window in my life, it made sense for me to babysit one of my nephews. For a portion of those events, I had “disciplinary rights” – idiot euphemism for “you can spank the kid if you want.”

I only remember even trying to do it maybe two or three times, ever. I vividly remember being confused by the results. Even at that phase of my life I had a vicious (but carefully concealed) habit of punching inanimate objects. I generally had to be careful about hitting things because I knew I could easily break my hands. I had technique and a moderate amount of strength to draw on. And yet when I went to hit my nephew I simply couldn’t. I ordered a sickening smack and delivered a negligible tap.

It bothered me, for a few years. What did it mean? Why couldn’t I do this simple act? And then I put it out of my head and ignored it for ages.

Tonight, earlier, I finally realized the blindingly obvious truth. I couldn’t hit a child because I can’t hit a child. This isn’t some indicator of my deficiency as a parent or some shit. I just fundamentally can’t bring myself to violently strike a kid.

I’m a little proud of this, now. Certainly, I’m very relieved that, even after all the fucked up nonsense I had to crawl through in life, I didn’t really internalize the barbaric poison idea that it’s a good thing to beat a kid.

 

I go back to the image, of one or both of my parents passing on, and me just sitting there trying to comprehend the reality that they died not knowing who I am.

Maybe it would be better that way. I have no way to know. I never did manage to make a committed decision about any of this; sometimes it’s really just as simple as you lost your rights to your daughter somewhere around the time you started beating her.

And sometimes I just can’t quite let go of that lonely, desperate ache, of a scared girl, lost and helpless, who just wants her parents to come and make everything OK again.

Did you ever actually love me? Or are you the reason why it’s easier for me to believe that I don’t deserve to be loved? Because I just can’t handle the idea that you’re so fucked up you would do all of that shit to your own child?

 

On a significantly happier wavelength… I love my name. Amelia is just… so fucking yes. I need a word for perfect, right, snug-fitting, warm and comfy and comforting, worn in but an eternity from being worn out.

I’ve written about the feelings I had the day I discovered my name. I still love the moments when whatever layer of my brain refreshes the linkage… “Amelia? Oh, shit, that’s me!” Chills.

I hope that never fades. I don’t know if that’s a silly thing to hope for, but then I’ve never actually known my name before, so I have no idea what to expect. In any case, I kind of hope that someday, locked in the maddening confines of the nursing home or whatever, I still have those moments – where I do some horrendous elderly maladaptation of flirty shit with a nurse or whatever, and she just gives me a coy smile, and she quietly says, “shut up and take your pills, Amelia.”

Fucking. Chills.

Sunday, May 12, 2019 - Mother's Day

Ah, fuck.

For some trans women this is a tough day because it’s a heartless reminder that things will always be a bit different for us than cis women. For some it’s a chance for affirmation and belonging – to be included in the population of “mothers” as it always should have been. For some it’s a chance for acceptance – to be a mother’s child, unbroken and righted, as was not always the case.

And then there’s my contingent. This day is nothing but a spiteful twisting of the knife. We have to spend the day being reminded that blood relatives are a thing, and that ours are fucked and we wish they wouldn’t continue to invade our reality anymore.

My mother is very sentimental and prone to taking things very personally. I know she’s hurt that I’ve broken off ties with my relatives and that I am pushing to widen that distance as much as I feasibly can. I’m not heartless or evil – it hurts me to know that this is how she’s taking it all, and I feel bad for being responsible for it.

But only to a point.

I didn’t choose to be beaten routinely as a child. I didn’t choose to endure almost twenty years of emotional and psychological abuse, or to spend another ten just trying to figure out what the fuck happened. I didn’t choose to be born into a world that would never accept me, let alone care about me, and god forbid actually fucking love me. I didn’t choose to be born into a world that almost successfully convinced me to live my entire life like something I’m not. I didn’t choose to be mocked, ostracized, struck, or threatened with worse, until I learned that who I am is not acceptable and she should be hidden away forever.

So fuck you. All of you.

I did choose to get the fuck away from you. I did choose to try to learn something about reality – not the corrupted, warped idiocy that you pass off as some kind of life. I did choose to dig into the rubble and ashes and mines buried all through my soul. I did choose to listen to the voice of the girl I heard trapped under there. I did choose to keep digging, until my fingers bled and my body would barely move. I did choose to get her free, and I will keep choosing to fight for her life.

She’s worth it. And she’s the best fuck you I could possibly hope for, to all of you.

Happy fucking Mother’s Day. It’s a girl.