The brain has a bunch of pre-wired action systems within it, and it is theorized that severe developmental trauma observable through its fallout, dissociation, can cause these evolutionary pathways to not mesh optimally, but rather to start to live lives of their own. The brain is flexible, though. All of the damage can’t be undone, but I can work around my dissociation and C-PTSD, and my hormonal shift on HRT is definitely causing my mental architecture to rapidly integrate and improve. Perhaps I sleep so much now because old connections are being taken down and new ones established?
Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done wonderful things, things planned long ago. – Isaiah 25:1, NIV
It might be impossible for a cis person to understand the pressure of living as trans in a mostly cis world, within cis infrastructure, where our transness is judged and evaluated by cis doctors and the validity of it defined through the economy of desirability and suffering. It feels difficult to allow myself the much needed rest now that I am finally on testosterone. When I was still striving to be, I’d walk to the gym even when exhaustion and sleep deprivation would make me hallucinate, because the Finnish trans clinic system would never accept a soft and weak body as a transmasculine body. Of course, it turned out that they would not accept my body in any case or in any shape, but I did get strong and reasonably buff in the process. Now I am recovering from decades of lost years, decades of playing the wrong part in the libretto… My day to day life has little to boast for, little to rub in the faces of the hateful cunts at the trans clinic, little to go ”see? I told you; you had no right to rob me of my dignity and four years of my life when I could already have gotten helped” about… Or does it?
Remember: because I’m trans, I am blessed with knowing the other metrics of success, those of the home, of gardens, of knitting women and sleepy children whose safety needs are met. By those standards my sleep is sacred. By those standards the time I spend exploring the ways in which to push air through my larynx to mimic the high register that used to be there before T is sacred as well. It’s the trans clinic that uses the language of loss about the functional and aesthetic changes trans men go through, and exposure to that language lingers as if all five of the hags who tormented me would have spat fat loogies onto my face and rubbed them in with graveyard gravel. I am now slowly sweating out their hatred from my pores. Their verbal abuses become shed like old fur, and instead of destabilising my identity they cement it; I survived them. Many cultures have known rituals that were used to initiate boys to manhood, and I do not agree with all of them, as I am an advocate for kind and nurturing and wise masculinity rather than the loud and domineering kind. But no one can say I haven’t survived some real crucibles to be where and who I am today. My physical stature has little to do with my mental resilience and yet, over the years my body has become formidable in its own way too. The lengthening of the days will initiate a new cycle of growth. I will develop cyclically like a deer with his antlers.
Andras, I am going to take this anger and do something constructive with it. All those five women who have robbed me of four years of my life I could have been medically transitioning hail from a generation that forced them to play along with the boys in order to have careers. They can not separate their own experiences with workplace sexism from their patients’ gender dysphoria. Us trans guys are the outlet for their trauma, and they project their trauma onto us, their patients.
I’ve said it to them.
They crucified me for it.
Andras, you know what you are here to sow, so please hear my plight and paint the scene with the colors of your choosing. Thank you.
Lähiönoita 