Remembrance

 

I recently came out as Trans, NonBinary, to my best friend.  

His response was about as good as you could ask for. 

It was a long conversation over IM, but the two lines that stuck for me were, "Im always gonna support you" and "Im sorry you were in agony… thats sounds really painful" 

"That sounds really painful"  
He said that in response to me telling him that it was a secret I had held tight all my life and one I had agonized about even addressing now.  Until he said it, even though my own words were the language of suffering, I never thought about how painful it was. 

I imagine I am not alone. I imagine that pain is so fundamental to the Trans experience that we can grow numb to it.

When I had cancer, I would sit for chemo for several hours per treatment.  This was before smart phones, so your options were to read a book or talk to the other people being treated nearby. One man I spoke to had cancer in his spine.  The pain was brutal and constant.  He depended on a constant flow of pain medication that would kill any of us, just to get through each day.  When we talked, it wasn't about his pain.  We talked about his son.  

The pain was just a mundane fact of life.  It was background noise. His son was what mattered to him.  

Imagine being missgendered.  If you are a CIS man and someone calls you "Miss" You immediately feel like you have been called 'weak' or 'soft' you feel emasculated, insulted, and angry.  If you are a CIS woman and someone calls you "Sir" you might feel ugly, large, rough, insulted and angry.  Now imagine that sensation every time you talk to every one every day, all day, your whole life.  The pain becomes a constant bubble.   

Imagine, as a child, you are told to play with a bunch of kids who all know how to play their games, know what the unwritten rules are, know what is expected of them and who will fault you, mock you, or attack you if you do not follow those rules?  You try so hard to "fake it till you make it" sometimes you may make it.  Most of the time, you feel like you are faking it. 

My whole life, I had felt displaced.  I didn't feel like a "girl trapped inside a boy" but I also didn't feel like a typical boy either.  I never played catch, or cared much about professional sports.  I enjoyed football because I could hit people and it helped me deal with bottled up frustration who's source I couldn't pinpoint.  I did scouts, but I mostly enjoyed time outside by myself rather than roughhousing with the other boys. 

I knew there was something wrong with my gender, but everything I read was based on the late 80s understanding of the issue.  It treated "Transexuals" and "Transvestites" as differnt types of mentaly disturbed people.  The idea that I could be one of those "sick" people was terrifying.  I tried to run from it.  But in doing so, the feelings came with me.  So it became a source of shame, and thus it was pain.  

But pain was just what I lived with.  Even after I started openly admitting and trying to define myself, I hadn't considered it a factor of pain.  Not until my friend said those words. 

"That sounds really painful"  

Because, he is right.  For 46 years, I had a secret I was ashamed of, a secret I didn't want, a secret that I could not escape, no matter how much I tried.  This secret would bubble up inside me from time to time until my chest was about to burst and I would snap at my loved ones, overcome by a rush of emotional tension who's source I convinced myself I didn't understand because I was so ashamed of it.  

46 years of being ashamed of myself.  46 years of hiding "her" in the deepest dungeon of my mind. 

I was lucky.  

My sense of gender incongruence has always been here, but somehow I managed it.  Even coming out to myself now, it's enough to admit it, and give Katie an outlet.  

But that is only MY experience.  

For many others, the sense of displacement, suffocation and dysphoria are much stronger than anything I could imagine.  For others the girl or boy inside them isn't a part of them, but it is all of them and keeping themselves hidden is magnitudes more painful than my experience.  

For too many of them, forced to hide who they are, forced to live the fantasy imposed on them by a society that shuffles them in to pink and blue piles based on body parts seen in an ultrasound, the pain was too great.  

For many, of them, the pain could not be survived. People in the Transgender community suffer suicide at a rate more than 3x greater than the general population.  More than half of us have attempted sucide, and more than 80% of us have thought about suicide.  

The sense of incongruence we carry is internal, but so many of the conditions that deepen that pain are external.  We live in a world that tries to force us into gender roles we don't fit into, and when we push back we can face anything from a gentle nudge, to violent reprisal and rejection.  

How many of those suicides are the result of a world that will not accept people when they say who they are?  How many suicides go unlisted because the victims are hiding from themselves even in death because it is too scary to be alive and trans in this world? 

"That sounds really painful"  

Yes, my friend. It was, and it is. But I am living through it, I am a lucky one. I am a survivor in so much that everyone is until they are not.  

Today, November 20th, is the Transgender day or Remembrance.  

Today I remember those who did not survive. 

Today I remember my own pain and I let it be motivation.  

Today, I recommit to one of the greatest quotes in television from Dr. Who. 

"you know what you do with all that pain? Shall I tell you where you put it? You hold it tight... Til it burns your hand. And you say this -- no one else will ever have to live like this. No one else will ever have to feel this pain. Not on my watch."

I will see you at the Statehouse, at the School Board and on the Soapbox.  
I will fight for Trans kids, because I was a trans kid. I remember the pain, and I don't want any more kids to feel like I felt.