The Damage is Done

I wonder what is going to happen next. I wonder if I can hold it together to get a job and move out on my own. I wonder if I can manage to hold on to that job and support myself. I wonder, because I am not really wanted where I am. The only support I can count on, the support of my family and friends, is conditional. It always has been. It has always been conditional on me finding a way to get steady on my own two feet. The irony of that always brings a smile of agony. I know what they want, and that they want it for me, for me to become independent. It is something I do want. The problem is that it leaves me alone inside a life that holds absolutely no meaning for me. This person that I pretend to be, because he means something to his friends and family, means nothing to me. He does not mean enough, to the people who employ him, to have any purpose. He can be replaced by anyone and cannot compete with the living.

He is useful to me; like a suit of armor, he has protected me from so much that is so much worse than I have suffered. He is a little dented and out of shape, the former because he has taken many blows for me, the latter because he cannot maintain himself and I do not know how to keep him from falling apart. I can barely carry his weight, and when I stumble, he falls and shatters. I keep picking up the pieces and putting them back together, but after so many falls, it has become a cascade, a walking disaster. The only way to keep him together is to pour more and more of myself into him. This is how I am dying. I cannot live this lie, but it’s the only life I have got. It is not a life. This tragic joke goes on only because my will to live is strong; stronger and more defiant with every rip and tear in my heart, for every blind piercing agony in my soul. I get knocked down and get up so fast, so often it is like the flicker between two frames in a film.

You cannot see it happen. You do not even know that the look in your eye hit me like a freight train. You do not realize that the small gestures you make without thinking, your unconscious responses to the man standing between me and you, strike me like fists. You cannot know, so I stand there and smile, screaming in agony inside my armor. When you ask me my name, the lie floats lightly off my tongue, the cost of uttering it slicing through me with the crack of a whip. I barely flinch. I dare not. My disguise will not hold up for an instant if I falter. If I raise the slightest suspicion, this interview is done; this door closes and the time and effort and expense of getting here is wasted, my resources diminished with less hope of replenishing them. But the first lie is followed by another, another fact that hides and obscures the truth. I am older now, and my long search for a way to fit in — misfit that I am — betrays me, raising doubts about my stability and reliability.

I already know you do not want him. He is stained with my blood, the undeniable evidence of my constant failure to be what people expect. You cannot see the brilliant light of my mind, the glorious beauty of my soul. You cannot see this angel walking proudly through hell, head high, perfect in her understanding of herself. I pity you as you gently turn me away. I came here to die for you, to add your labors to the burden I carry for a pittance of money I need only to pay the toll of my existence so that I am not a burden upon the people I love; people whose love for him blinds them to my very existence. They see my suffering through him, but they do not understand this tiny glimpse of me. They cannot fathom the true depths of my suffering. When I tried to show myself, they saw me as his defect. They do not realize that if I were not forced to be something I am not, I would be perfect. I realize that if I even speak of my desire to be myself, I will hurt them.

I struggle to survive because they love him. I struggle because no one else wants him. No one else needs him. He is not normal and they can sense it. My own weakness, my desperate attempts to express myself, have undermined his position. I have left proof of his flawed nature where it can be traced back to him. I compromised my own cover. I have rendered my armor useless. It is such a shame I cannot take it off. It is so sad that it is crushing me. The weight of this sorrow staggering. It makes me wonder. It keeps me up at night, my fingers dancing in the ache of words, the gentle sound of keystrokes the only tears I can shed. The tide of desperation gently eroding the sand on which I stand. I have to do this. I have no more choice in this than I have about searching for a job. I am alone and I am not wanted, but I must find someone who has some small thing for which they need someone — and someone like me will do.

If only I had time. If only you would stop taking more than I have to give. I am willing to do anything. I am utterly without shame. Just give back enough to me for me to be able to pay a world that has denied me everything and charges to let me stay. I can do so many things, but all of them take time. I know you expect me to prove myself, you keep telling me I have to earn my keep. Telling me that while you keep taking, taking everything you can take from me. That’s fine, if you want it so much take everything; I have nothing left but me. I don’t have anywhere to go. I cannot escape from what is happening to me. It kills me to go on living, but I do not know how to let go. I no longer want to keep moving. I need to stop and say no more. Oh, but who do I ask for mercy? I don’t know who you are. Even if you can hear me, why should you listen or care? It’s been ten years since I really stopped hiding and finally cried out for help. With only my soul left to bargain with, I need help with no strings attached.

So, what kind of hope am I made of? I know better than to hope for such help. I know that I’ll just be called lazy and probably even crazy. Even the people that love him have thrown that one at me. The truth is that I have tried everything, done everything asked of me. I am lost and alone and exhausted. There is nothing left of me but my dreams, broken and bleeding as me. I’ve tried to make something of them, but it was never the right time. More and more my thoughts return to them, because it feels like I am running out of time. I just want to sit down and write them, but the opportunity dried away. What once was my one hope of salvation is now just another broken dream. It does not matter if I have something worth giving. Not if it is not in my hand. If I do not have time to produce it, well, isn’t that just too bad? I do not belong here. I wonder why I try?

A True Identity is Nothing to Fear

The response I received to my last post, Conundrum, prompted me to check out the recent posts of the people who commented or posted blogs in the transgender category yesterday. As a result, I became aware of the outcry against the appointment of Dr. Kenneth Zucker, Dr. Ray Blanchard, and J. Michael Bailey, by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), to the work group responsible for revising the entry for Gender Identity Disorder (GID) in the Manual for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders. The first blog I read on the subject, posted by Gender Outlaw, struck a very personal chord with me. In addition to being transgendered, I was put up for adoption when I was four and spent a year in foster care while the state attempted to contact my biological father so that he might claim his custody rights. It was during my time in foster care that I was terrorized out of identifying myself as a girl and learned to keep my true identity a secret. It took time to learn how to restrain my natural impulses and act like a boy, and the threat of abandonment and rejection was used to reinforce “correct” behavior. By the time I was adopted, this conditioning had scarred me for life, rendering me incapable of trusting anyone with my true thoughts and feelings. When my new family noticed my feminine traits and confronted me with questions about my behavior, or offered even a mild rebuke for “acting like a girl” I was consumed with that fear of rejection and lied to deflect any suspicions.

To this day, I can not remember where I gained the fear of being institutionalized and subjected to shock or aversion therapy. It could have been something someone said to me, or around me. I do not recall, but having suffered an accidental electrocution when I was five I knew what it would do to me, and that fear ensured that my distrust extended to medical professionals in particular. I tried to understand why no one accepted me. Between the ages of five and six I learned the physical facts, and by the time I was seven I knew what a sex change was and how society viewed transsexuals. It confirmed my belief that, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, the thoughts and feelings that made me who I am marked me as abnormal and insane. To protect myself, I could never allow my true thoughts and feelings come to light — no matter how painful it was. The promise of abuse, the threat of violence and possibly even death was certain. I did not want to live like this. I wanted to be a boy, to be sane and normal and wanted in the world.

I did everything I could to accept the reality, carefully controlling my thoughts and feelings, training myself to think and act like a boy, even though I was often clueless about how. I observed and studied boys intently, trying to understand why they did the things they did so that my own actions would seem appropriate. I learned how to be friends with boys and stopped being friends with girls. I became lonely and miserable, my confidence tattered and thin because I could never trust my own instincts. Nothing I did could alter or prevent my true thoughts and feelings from asserting themselves, however. The plain and simple fact that I was not a girl caused instant agony, whenever it crossed my mind. I could understand girls without trying; often better than they understood themselves because my intuition flowed into an analytical mind that questioned everything that others took for granted.

I knew I was supposed to be female, but I did not have the right body and no means of changing it, though I pursued every possibility in secret to the point of absolute frustration and disappointment. I have not given up. I never gave up on finding a way to get the body that goes with my soul, but I struggle and fail to obtain the resources needed. The pose that I maintain, even now that I have overcome my fears enough to assert myself, costs too much. It takes so much out of me. I pay a price for every thought, word, or gesture committed to disguise the emotional tempest that has built up inside of me.

I do not like to answer people when they ask me how I am doing or how I feel. I have to lie, because there is no way to tell the truth. There is no way to describe how I feel, but I would not ask my worst enemy, the most abominable thing in existence, to feel this; how could I ever ask a stranger? How could I put that on a loved one? One moment of this pain is too much to bear. Sadly, when it is there every moment, you learn to. It can not destroy you because it can not exist without you. It is you. It is me.

…

I followed the posts to a petition against the appointment of Dr. Kenneth Zucker, Dr. Ray Blanchard, and J. Michael Bailey. I started this post to include the comments I left along with my signature, not realizing that cracking open that door would let so much out. Now I can see that my comment expresses the conclusions I reached on the repression of identity.

The use of any method to impose a state or frame of mind upon an individual to subvert or subdue that individual’s free willed expression of identity is nothing less than assault with a deadly weapon. No external agent or agency should be permitted to impose a belief, theory or system of thought upon any individual against that individual’s will. Voluntary self examination or constructive therapy should be sufficient to ensure that an individual with ambiguous feelings or confusion is able to resolve any uncertainty that could have negative consequences if an individual were to act in haste.

No one has the right to tell a person who he or she is. A body might house the mind, but it is the mind that makes a body into a person. It is a person’s privilege and natural obligation to assume and assert his or her own identity in accordance with his or her best understanding of him or her self; no one else has sufficient access an individual’s psyche. Social pressure of this nature is threatening enough to the formation of identity and causes significant trauma by itself; as a medical practice it would be an abomination.

Conundrum

Today I find myself puzzling over the weird fact of my existence. The Internet created an opportunity to show a side of myself that I had long kept hidden. I am transgendered; in spite of being born and raised male the core of my identity is female. It is not a convenient or desirable situation, and it puts me in constant conflict between who I am and what I am. It would be simpler to let myself be defined by my body but the simple fact is that I am defined by my mind, or to be more accurate, my mind is what defines me. It is the nature of my thoughts and feelings that define me as a person, and it is by examining and understanding my thoughts and feelings that I find myself forced to admit I am a girl in spite of being a boy. It could mean that my brain structure and chemistry is feminine, or it could mean that the character of a soul is stronger than the imprint of a body. There is no way to know. What I do know is that being male, thinking, acting and being perceived as a man, does not make me one; it does not change who I am. It only means that few people are ever likely to see me for who I am.

That is the real curse, the real tragedy of being transgendered. Short of changing the way people perceive me, by changing my physical appearance, there is little chance I will ever be accepted for who I am. Actually, short of a miraculous and literal metamorphosis, there is no chance. What I am stands in the way. What I am distorts me no matter how I appear. I am not a woman. Looking like a woman, dressing like a woman, taking hormones and getting surgery to make my anatomy more like a woman’s, will not make me a woman. A change from transgendered to transsexual is a lateral move. I’ve been tempted, because it would allow me to be much closer to my natural self, but I’ve always known that the physical facts would still prevent people from seeing me for who I am.

But, who am I? That is the question it always comes back to. That is the question that stops me in my tracks every time I meet someone, or interview for a job. I am a lifetime full of facts that obscure the truth. I am a consciousness trapped in a reality that denies me my own reality. My body is nothing more than the earth in which my awareness is rooted. To conform to the flesh, I have to deny my own identity and assume the one that circumstance has provided. To survive, I have to conform to the flesh, and the pain it causes leaves me with no doubt as to the existence of the soul. The only thing in reality that can explain the cause and nature of this pain is the fact of my own reality, the fact that I, myself, am real. This pain, though it has repeatedly broken me and driven me to the brink of suicide, is one thing that assures me I am true.

I know who I am. In spite of having nothing to support me, nothing to confirm my identity, nothing in this world to base it upon but the understanding of what makes me true to myself, I know the truth. I have always known it, even when I tried to deny it for the sake of others who expected or demanded that I conform to their perceptions of me. I am different from most people only in knowing exactly the cost of the circumstances of my birth. In philosophy and religion, it is common to hear that we choose our place in reality, but if you examine it more carefully the choice is not one based on getting what we want out of life, it is based on getting what we need to perfect ourselves; it is a test, a trial by fire. I assumed that my test was about self-sacrifice and accepting reality. Acting on this belief, I nearly destroyed myself.

It is obvious when you think about it. It does not matter what you are if you lose sight of who you are. If you take the person out of the picture, it ceases to have a frame of reference, a perspective that gives it significance and meaning. All of my life I have listened to people asking “what is the point of all this?” and as soon as I realized that without us all of this has no point, I understood. We are the point of all of this. We give this focus. The problem has always been that we have never really understood our purpose. We do not understand what it means to be the point of existence. In today’s world, “existential” is practically a dirty word. No one wants to be existential. We have turned our backs on the spiritual, the ephemeral, the insubstantial, intangible and invisible, and in the process turned our backs on ourselves. This is the path to destruction.

All of the pain and suffering in the world is a product of us walking down this path. If we fail to see the point in our own existence, we cannot truly see the point in anyone’s existence. In a pointless existence, we are driven only by the impulses to avoid pain and seek pleasure and either way we are rendered too numb to think. Without thought we are blind and indifferent to the consequences of our actions, the pain and suffering we cause. Instead of thinking, we rationalize. Instead of solving problems that we have created, we justify them and in the process we create injustice. We end up pitting ourselves against each other, struggling for power to rise above the conflict, creating institutions that marginalize and alienate us further. Each step on this path of destruction strips away a layer of our souls and makes it easier for us to destroy each other.

As a misfit, I have always been painfully sensitive to the suffering of others, and the world’s suffering eclipses the imagination. The mere apprehension of it is overwhelming. Everyone is aware of it on some level and I am sure it is the weight of that apprehension that discourages so many, leaving them wondering if there is any point to existence, unable to understand how a meaningful universe could be so cruel and indifferent. I usually wonder why I am so desperate to find a place for myself in it. All I know is, this world is the one dream we all share and I am tired of dreaming alone.