And my world was rewritten. I saw myself as being part of something not just undesirable but that could be trained out of myself for the sake of another person’s comfort. They “helped” me. Coming from an age of psychology where dogs are only creatures that salivate upon the ring of a bell, now I was the kid who no longer sounded like the gender I was not who liked people of that gender I was not actually a part of just to remind people these are merely mannerisms and not a being who will remember this “therapy” years to come. At least I would be spared that catastrophe while I was at school, right? But all they did was teach me that putting on a mask was more desirable than myself. That I needed to be how I was supposed to identify, which was all the more alien to me as I grew up. Both what I should be, and what I am.
I had no idea why I needed to lose the sibilant “S”, and to this day it only leaves me thinking that cishet culture is not a culture I am a part of at a very deep level, how I speak. But it does not stop there, my body needed to be controlled, to be improved. I needed to experience the hormone that my body does not produce to reinforce the gender I am not because the concept of intersex/transness is something a child should be protected from. Today I need to see a therapist to get the hormones that should actually be in my body, but not when I am a child with no understanding of what hormones are and how what goes into my body is my decision. Where was the real therapy? Not once was there even a question of what hormone I should be getting, or whether my body really matched the gender they perceived it to be. A doctor’s analysis is insufficient to treat a child.
I was given the option not to have hormone therapy altogether, but that was too little too late. I knew what mask I should wear at that time. I accepted the shared dream of fixed genders. However, I was given the option to remove the excess breast tissue in my pecks. I somehow made the better choice. Leave my body as is it is, perhaps it would be shed naturally or whatever may come. Now I realize I might have been drifting out of the malaise just a little, as I see now happened every now and then in my life.
One other way I would like to mention here is that the bulk of my creative writing throughout my life has been written from the perspective of a woman. I wrote a series of poems about a character named Harriet, which I have collected on deviant art. It was a mask itself, as those exploring themselves are wont to do, but it was a mask that fit well and I enjoyed wearing it. I wrote my own story, and made the space I needed to for a voice unaltered by a system. This blog is the revival of my creating that space, but without the mask, metaphor, or literary flourish.