Welcome to #TransTuesday! This one came as an unhappy surprise, as something happened recently that brought up feelings I thought were far behind me. It kinda wrecked me for a bit. We’re going to call this: TRANSPHOBIA IS ALWAYS WITH US aka THAT OLD DYSPHORIC FEELING.
I hit some kind of milestone this year where a lot of my gender dysphoria faded away. I don’t know why, possibly a combination of factors. But you can see it play out in PHOTOS 2 aka THE SELFIE APOCALYPSE.
You can see it play out in CONFIDENCE 2: INTO THE UNKNOWN aka WHAT IS HAPPENING aka A WHOLE NEW WORLD, where I was suddenly able to interact with people in ways I’d never been able to before.
You can see it play out in FREEING UP MY BRAIN aka LUNCH WITH TILLY, where the mental and emotional energy freed up by lessening dysphoria let me experience the world in ways I’d never been able to before.
I want to say my dysphoria is still mostly gone. Which is not to say it doesn’t still pop up here and there, because it does. Maybe it always will. But mostly it leaves me alone, which feels like a miracle.
And what’s weird is that what happened to me, that brought about this thread, had no relation to my dysphoria at all. Or to gender, mine or otherwise. Not directly, anyway.
That’s what made this so surprising, because it was completely disconnected from everything I thought my transness touched. But then transness touches almost every part of our lives even when we don’t realize it or want it to.
You may have seen me recently having a… difficult evening of feelings. It took me a while to figure out what it was, and to process it enough to talk about
.https://twitter.com/TillyBridges/status/1577823307755229184
https://www.facebook.com/tillysbridges/posts/pfbid0yrCHSaC4P3Vfnh642rMTCP9AZH4pyNtNPXogSnECiH3fu1MNJEUXrJHDQfhX1ewel
The important bit there is “feelings I haven’t had since pre-transition.” And yet it’s not dysphoria related! It’s so hard to explain.
Susan and I have recently dipped our toes into a new medium in terms of our writing. And it’s been a great and wonderful experience and you’ll learn all about it when we can tell you more.
As part of that we got invited to an event for people who work in this medium, to celebrate people who’ve worked in the medium for a long time and made wonderful contributions to it.
This wasn’t a personal invite, it was a sort of mass invite to everyone who’d worked on X or Y for Z company type thing. I could give you specifics but I don’t want to make anyone feel bad, because literally nobody did anything wrong! It was an honor to be invited.
The problem was that as people who’ve only just started working in this medium … I felt like there was absolutely no way we belonged at said event. After we’ve done a little more, sure! I’d have been delighted to go.
But we were still in the middle of our first writing for this medium. It wasn’t even finished yet, we were mid-revisions!
It made me feel like I’d be some kind of impostor who had no business being there. This isn’t impostor syndrome, not really. I have total confidence in our work and our ability as writers.
This was just an instance of me feeling like we didn’t yet have the right to attend this event. And you may feel differently, I mean we were invited after all. Someone somewhere thought we could go. But here’s where all the bad pre-transition feelings came up.
The thought of going, and how it would make me feel… like I was out of place, like I was the one person who didn’t fit, like I had absolutely no business being at this place to celebrate people far more experienced than we are…
It made me feel almost EXACTLY like I did at any gathering pre-transition EVEN THOUGH there were no feelings of gender dysphoria!
Because (rightly or wrongly) I felt like I DID NOT BELONG, like I would be PUTTING ON A PERFORMANCE OF SOMEONE WHO BELONGED THERE, like I would be WEARING A COSTUME OF SOMEONE I’M NOT, PLAYING A PART I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO PLAY.
And THAT was so STARTLINGLY, SHOCKINGLY SIMILAR to how gender dysphoria made me feel, always and forever with no escape. Even though the root of the feelings was in an entirely different place!
I was not prepared for that AT ALL. My dysphoria has lessened so much and I’ve felt so much like the real me for so long that I honestly thought, barring my dysphoria getting worse somehow, I’d never have to deal with those feelings ever again.
And yet here they were. And they had nothing at all to do with my gender, or perceived gender, or being trans, but they had EVERYTHING to do with my own sense of IDENTITY and never, ever, EVER again wanting to pretend to be something I’m not.
Because I did that for my entire life pre-transition, and will not and CANNOT, *CANNOT* go back to that. Even just writing about it here is making my chest tighten and my pulse race and I’m getting anxious and scared. Like I’m about to drown.
If you’re not familiar with that metaphor, here’s my very first Trans Tuesday in which I try to describe what my own GENDER DYSPHORIA was like. Drowning is a big part of it.
I’m sure it also didn’t help that this event was taking place ON MY BIRTHDAY, each of which is a very weird thing for me to experience post-transition and always brings up reminders of the ones spent lost in the sea of dysphoria. See the trans tuesday on TRANS BIRTHDAYS.
Once I realized WHY I was having these old feelings when simply thinking about going to this new event, I was able to get ahold of them and work through it. It was still a rough night for me emotionally, because the feelings came from such a complex and convoluted source.
What it made me realize is that my transness will likely continue to touch aspects of my life that seem entirely unrelated, possibly for the rest of my life.
I mentioned before that I think I knew the reason for that, and here it is: transphobic society.
I wish I had better news for you, but I’m pretty sure that’s yet again the culprit. Because if I’d been raised in a society and a family and a home that accepted trans people as normal and just how some people are…
I’d never have spent a lifetime pretending to be cis, trying to be cis, not knowing how to be cis, hating the thought of being a cis man, hating every single moment of not being the real me, feeling like I was eternally drowning and nobody could see me or hear my calls for help.
And if I’d never had those old dysphoric feelings at having to pretend to be someone I’m not, I wouldn’t have felt that way about possibly going to this event. I might still have felt like it was too early in our work in this medium for us to go to attend…
But it wouldn’t have made me feel like I was back underwater, inside a false shell, pretending to be some fake human being and not who I really am, buried under crushing weight with all the air forced out of me, isolated and alone for eternity.
For many trans people who transition as adults, and obviously quite certainly for me, the ramifications of a lifetime of transphobia and dysphoria is something we may never be able to entirely escape from. And that’s a hard pill to swallow.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com