Sed Replace

Through the past few weeks I have been reflecting on moments in my life that irked me in ways I could never name until now. I remember how in elementary and middle school I felt uncomfortable with my hair being cut too short, or being made to feel more like a boy than my parts already implicitly made me feel. As a result I have always been much more comfortable with those who do not fit into the social mold, the kids who seemed gawky, unattractive, and especially the socially-awkward geeks. The frustrations I felt with myself and how people treated me seemed analogous to their situations, but for me the problems I had were much harder to express. Thus my greatest moments of embarrassment came in the boys’ locker room.

I was constantly reminded of this wrongness of myself I could not explain. This culminated in a school-wide nickname that was ahead of its time in terms of its ironic nature, “Speedo Boy”. The origin of this nickname is due to my refusal to wear the speedo our cis female gym teacher made people wear if they forgot their bathing suit. Not that I had not been teased before, but this was the first time an adult had really branded me as a social outcast and she displayed no compassion about it. I sat through class refusing to give in to her taunts and intimidation.

I never understood the resulting name I was branded with, but it and the heightened attention by bullies isolated me even further. My time at middle school was so bad that I decided that I was just not going to do well in my studies there. Finally in high school I decided to largely ignore people socially, and no longer engage people who teased me. My go-to phrase was “fuck off,” and people thought I was stupid for not responding with something better. One person even asked me why, I explained I no longer cared about creating a clever response. It worked, and people cared less about finding ways to attract my attention. I was exhausted with people very early on.

It would suffice to say I also felt uncomfortable with romantic relationships at a young age. The first time a cis girl tried to “date” me I was quite offended (and never knew why,) then when a cis woman asked me out my first month in college I felt overwhelmed by their attraction to me but attracted to them at the same time. However when it came to sex with them I had mixed feelings, and it was weird when my parts were touched. It felt wrong, not because I am religious, but well… I had no clue. It felt like this was not a thing I did for sex, and not like that icky sense people get from sex early on.

Then I started seeking out primarily men, and I felt somewhat more accustom to things as the sex just seemed to make more sense to me at the time. As I became more comfortable with sex later on, good sex arrived in greater frequency with people of any gender identification. But the unease remained with certain acts, as I have mentioned previously in other posts, specifically those involving my genitals. It began to form this void in my sex life, akin to how astronomers identify black holes by the surrounding objects and not necessarily the object itself, so my satisfactions no longer resided in some orgasmic finish but the specific acts that eased my unacknowledged distress. This was how I finally put a name to my body dysphoria.

It feels so good put a name to it. To see its truth in every instance of my life where I felt inexplicable shame, exhaustion, and/or frustration. It felt like a black hole slowly building up momentum in my life, most significantly in the past few months. I was at work feeling short-tempered and sick of interacting with customers. While on vacation I sobbed in my friend’s arms at the Baltimore Pride without really knowing why. I felt so exposed and vulnerable. I felt a deep pain and stress that would not lift. I felt unhappy and depressive months before I was terminated from my job. But when I was, at least the stress of my IT call center job had been lifted to allow my brain to breathe and make the necessary realization.

As I no longer wanted to engage with people who called me “Speedo Boy” in middle school, now I know it was because I was never a boy and that wore me down. The value of putting a name to your problem is that the anger no longer fuels itself, it no longer repeats without redress. Now I know that I need to build a more healthy, body-affirming sex that corresponds with my trans status. I need to reclaim the gender branded to me socially, and enact what is mine. To deny this would be to let that black hole return in my life, and degrade my mental-emotional state all over again. I am a transgender female, and have been my entire life whether or not it was acknowledged and given its due respect.

When I first began to seriously realize myself as transgender, it started as an out of body experience. I was doing something I had only ever performed once (with a partner whom I was passionately in love with) and had previously felt an unknown source of unease about. I was acting as a top for anal.

Throughout it my perception of my body as though a camera were on a tripod behind me recording us. Definitely not an affirming thing to which I felt directly connected. It felt voyeuristic and created this gap in my sense of self where sexual orientation no longer was the central question. And before that night I had only ever desired sexual intercourse that, now looking back, expressed potentially both my gender and sexual identity in one.

Vaginal penetration felt pleasurable, especially when I pleased my partner effectively. But my body is no longer feeling up to maintaining this masculine role now that the mask that is slipping. And as you might guess, I am glad to see it slip. Though it has pushed me to wonder, “why not earlier?” I can remember thinking I should have been born a girl since I forever, but I didn’t ever consider how those thoughts connected to my perception of my body. What affixed this false conception of self to me for so long before I finally recognized the dysphoria for what it was?

The crucial question that helped me unravel this, “how did I identify my gender before that night?” Or rather, “how did I conceive of my gender?” What about myself told me that I am a cis male. In actuality nothing did, merely that I had presumed society around me had provided enough “encouragement” to be what my body externally presents as. So when I became sexually active and found what I enjoyed most, I rationalized my unease about what I preferred in bed and how people interacted with my parts as some part of my sexuality.

But I remember feeling embarrassed and a little angry the first time somebody touched my genitals in a sexual manner, and just having no clue why. The first exploration into a reason why was that I was attracted to male-identifying people as well, and that I felt confused about that. So I came out to people in my social circle and my then budding relationship with a woman as bisexual.

While now I identify as pansexual/queer, I think my identification then never included reflection on gender, which could be another good reason for why the term bisexual is problematic for the trans community. Any lens with which I could truly understand myself was only available to me much later on in life, when I actually met other trans people, read books about other people’s experiences, and saw more trans people in the public sphere. Primarily dating a genderqueer person who’s primary partner was also trans was what really allowed me to escape my socially-derived role just enough to get a better view of my own identity, as it was the most personal method for exploring my own unexamined notions.

Now, one of the ideas I have seen posed and considered myself is that gender is itself a spectrum. No one person commands all presenting aspects of it, no one body displays all the same characteristics of an established gender, and the questions people pose to trans people should also be posed to cis people. We live in a society in the U.S. that categorizes out of ease rather than accuracy resulting in everyone at some point feeling excluded from parts of ourselves. And thus gender the concept begins to outweigh gender as a reality when people police each other and socialize outmoded concepts.

In the past three weeks since coming out to my partner at the time, I have slowly built a network of trans-friendly people I can talk to if need be. I have talked to a local support group, past lovers, a therapist, distant friends, my doctor, and my housemates. The last being the most difficult as of course the result could be a relationship straining exercise in personal inquiry, fortunately reactions have been pretty positive and supportive.

The experience has been exciting when I have taken steps toward affirming my trans status as a female. Using the pronouns of she/her/hers and deciding on my name as Samantha Eleanor were two big early steps toward turning what I initially conceived of myself into real perceived actions and something I could see written down. On that note, entering my name in for deliveries has been an exciting low-risk(?) adventure.

But to take a step back a bit, let’s go with maybe 8 months ago, let’s consider a younger, less aware Samantha, who at this time reported as a bisexual, cis-gendered male. She’s on the OkCupid looking for love in more or less the right places when a particularly humorous interaction occurs between her and a lovely person who reported as a polyamorous, genderqueer, non-binary, not-robot potential date. They were an unexpected delight in what so far had been a wash for a year in terms of relationships.

As we saw each other, I felt more at ease to let go of my own social constructions of what gender meant to me. I also had other partners on occasion while seeing them, but I can be too easy going for my own good which can mean slipping back into assumed gender roles or dynamics and failing to express myself as I desire. Looking back at it, these relationships were unsuccessful for good reason. I did not want to be treated as male performing an assumed role. I wanted autonomy, which was what my genderqueer partner provided. I did not want to be subject to other people’s concepts of who or what I am.

What I have experienced throughout my life but especially recent months were bouts of feeling extremely exhausted and irritable. My job at the time was in IT support, and dealing with other people’s problems began to ebb at my soul. It was difficult to keep calm when people expressed their own confusion, even when they had good reason. And sometimes I would realize afterward my anger was unfounded and even preventing me from thinking problems through clearly. Unraveling what might have just been stress from life and work from the dysphoria I experienced (and always  have) was not easy, but it has become far clearer why I was so agitated now that I can put words to the anxiety and unease I have felt about aspects of my life and my own body.  I can now perceive what makes me feel like shit.

It is the constant oppression of my own self. My mannerisms, my speech, my hormones, how I dress, wear my hair, and how I even relate to others has been constantly bent to fit others’ perceptions. It is very much clear to me now why I feel more comfortable with those that are feminine presenting in forced social situations, such as work or in the dojo. I feel like locks are being picked and opened all the time now that I am freely expressing my transness, those aspects of my personality that have since catered to those who need to maintain/constrain gender are now breathing sighs of relief.

I love this. I love the transition. I love that I can write about it now, and I hope you can appreciate these words for being those of a free woman making empowering decisions about their own body.

My name is Sami D. I am a transgender female. From my birth my body has been examined and declared by all to be deficient to some capacity. To be lacking in hormones that I was supposed to have. That I would never be able to have children of my own without special treatment. That what would be best for me is to hope for testosterone to restore what was supposed to be me and my perceived gender.

With that in mind at some points in my life I had questioned my gender, not to any serious degree more so than passing thoughts that I could have easily been born a woman and it might have been better for me. This thought has stuck to me through the years without much further introspection, so too has the time when I first heard about people who were like me. Those who thought their gender does not match the one assigned to them at birth. Until recently I prescribed my feelings about my body to my sexuality, as somebody who considered themself a bisexual cis male (but really loved being a bottom.)

However through experiences with poly partners, one who was genderqueer, and a night out with a cis female, I found myself now very uncomfortable with that assumed role. I had an out of body experience realizing that something is off with my sexual encounter with the cis female. My genderqueer partner at the time with whom we played with gender a lot, and had developed our own unique form intercourse. That experience provided me with the vantage point whereupon I could see myself more clearly. They allowed me to understand the truth of my identity, removing sexuality as a lens to view the world altogether.

I never needed to explain myself, but I am so grateful for the support of my friends this far. I want to give you this, so you might give me the strength to carry on my transition.I am also a IT person, Judoka, partner, friend, sibling, my parents’ child, and hard worker.