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.