The What

Reflecting back

Dysphoria is such a weird brain trip. There are days like yesterday where I look at photos of me even a year ago when I had a beard where I can barely recognize that as the same person. The me I see in the photo seems more like a long lost relative who I used to know well and is now a stranger.

Then there are days like today where I look back at things like my wedding photos and I can put myself back in that moment. I think the times I can relate to my past self the most are times where I felt affirmed in my gender even if my presentation wasn’t what I wanted. My aggressively queer wedding was one of those moments. And my early childhood had a lot of those moments as well. It was after puberty started hitting and before I came into my own through my relationship with my spouse that are the hard times to look back on.

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Photo by Jenny GG Photography

On losing friends

Something I talk about less, mostly because it’s hard to dwell on, is how many friends I’ve lost over the years. So many former friends have either actively or passively rejected me over the years because of various turning points in my life and a lot of it ties back to gender.

I grew up in a very conservative household and for all of my childhood, that was my only circle of friends. Being homeschooled I didn’t have much opportunity to meet people who weren’t like me. My entire social sphere were also Evangelical Christian and very socially conservative themselves. So when I started to become more liberal in my politics and thoughts in college, particularly around supporting sexuality, I lost most of my childhood friends, even my best friend and the only cis man I was really ever close to.

Of course since I am a very extroverted person, I made a lot of new friends in college, particularly in the first couple years. But many of those people were also Evangelical Christians because of where I went to school and who I was when I started. So many of them slowly drifted away as I went further left in my thinking or because of my relationship to my very toxic ex spouse who I met in college.

The third round of loss happened when I decided to get divorced because of the emotional abuse and incompatibility with my ex wife. Many of our friends at that point either took her side because of the lies she told or didn’t know how to respond (because women can’t be abusers, right?). I also lost most of my communities during that time because I could no longer go to the same church or spaces for fear of running into her.

To be quite honest, if I hadn’t already started building polyamorous community and met my now spouse before that time, I’m not sure I would have survived. I had been deeply depressed for a long time and I felt very betrayed and isolated. And because of how my ex treated me and controlled our money, I had no savings and no self worth. The final straw in that marriage was me starting to awaken to my queerness and gender and she wanted me to remain closeted for her convenience because she was ashamed of her own asexuality.

But I rebuilt and kept going. Partly because I am an obligate extrovert and I had no other choice. My new partner’s friends and chosen family took me in and were so supportive during that time and they are still my closest friends. During that time I also started building new romantic relationships with my partner as we dated together.

Unfortunately a couple years ago in what we now call “the summer of hell,” I lost a major relationship of 2 and a half years. The person I had been dating decided that instead of breaking up with me cleanly, they would say they wanted to be friends but then behind my back spread rumors and distance themselves emotionally. And when I brought it up, they tried to blame me for that distance. Unfortunately we had intertwined our communities and polyamorous households so much at that point that I felt like I lost half of my family when they betrayed me. And even over a year later, I feel that loss of community very deeply.

But again I threw myself back into relationship building. I joined a trans community group on the path to becoming a nonprofit on their board. I invested a lot of time and energy into trying to create the type of community I wanted to see. Then a fellow board member turned on me and very aggressively painted an inaccurate picture of me that cause many other community members to take their side. They set me up in a way that I couldn’t defend myself without seeming like the aggressor myself. And while there were many people who showed private support during that time, public opinion was so soured that I couldn’t see myself ever trusting that space again. And so I lost more friends and another important community space.

I’m still working on rebuilding from all those losses. And I haven’t given up. But it is hard to trust people when you have been betrayed and abandoned so many times. The thing about trying to live authentically is that you make a lot of enemies along the way. When your sexuality and gender are so politicized that living openly is guaranteed to piss some people off, you lose people. And that constant tension breeds emotional vulnerability that also plays out in inter-community trauma.

I’m still working through my fear and trust issues related to all of this so I can’t say that I have reached the other side yet. But I am extremely grateful for my spouse and the chosen family I have built that have stuck by me and supported me through all of this. I mourn the lack of community but yet I still have a deep desire to build a space where trans people can support each other without the fear of attack from within or without. I don’t know how to do that yet but I dream and I take the steps forward whenever I find them.

Queer hair

I finally got a haircut this weekend and I feel so free and like myself again!

Haircut

I spent a lot of time the last couple weeks leading up to my haircut agonizing over what to do. It turns out I have a lot of feelings wrapped up in my hair and I have a hard time balancing my needs.

I’ve been trying to grow out my hair, at least on one side, because I want to be more obviously feminine and hopefully get misgendered less often (or at least as “she” not “he”). But I’m not sure how much of that is just to meet perception and societal expectations and how much I actually want long hair. Because every time I grow it out I feel miserable. Mostly because my hair gets in my face all the time and that annoys me more than just about anything. I have a lot of social anxiety / nervous ticks around keeping my hair neat and tidy which turns out doesn’t mix well with long curly hair.

I’m not sure if I’ve completely given up on that but I did need a solution that kept my hair more out of my eyes. I also want my hair to signal my queerness which I think is an even higher priority for me. And one way to do that is with asymmetry and shaving the side of my head.

I’ve been doing the shaved side pretty much since I came out 4 years ago but it had been getting long in my attempt to grow it out. I used to shave both sides and the back of my head to just have it longer on top. But this time I decided to do a higher uppercut to eliminate some of the part on the front and top that falls in my eyes and leave the back curly. I also bleached and dyed my hair purple again yesterday.

I really like how it turned out and I feel very feminine and very aggressively queer which is my goal. It’s amazing how much my emotional state relates to the state of my hair. And I’m very thankful for a great stylist who knows me well and gets what I’m saying when I come to her with a problem.

I’m published!

I’m a published author! I am so honored to be included in a book with so many icons of gender diversity. Check out my chapter on “Hypervisibility” on page 58 of “Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity.” Preorder yours now at www.amazon.com/dp/0231185332 or direct from the publisher at https://cup.columbia.edu/book/nonbinary/9780231185332 to receive your copy on April 9th.

n-dimensional hypergender

One aspect of myself that I’ve talked about less here is that I’m trained as an ecologist. And one of the coolest concepts that I learned in my ecology degree program was how ecological niches can be visualized as an n-dimensional hypervolume.

Now that’s a lot of sciency jargon there but I’ll break it down for you. In ecology, one of the most important features of an animal is how it matches up to a specific set of environmental conditions and resources it needs to find it’s unique place in the ecosystem that doesn’t completely compete with another species. And the number of factors involved are so numerous that they are theoretically infinite. Which means that you can’t really map out niches on a 2 dimensional or even 3 dimensional drawing. You need a near infinite number of dimensions (n here mathematically representing the number of dimensions) to accurately portray it.

Here’s a visual representation of an n-dimensional hypervolume (source)

The reason I bring it up is because this is how I think of gender. To a cis person, gender might seem like a simple, 2 dimensional concept. For most people who haven’t really thought about it, there are only 2 main categories and if you’re lucky, some basic variation within them. There might be some outliers or people that switch boxes but overall pretty basic.

Well for most of the queer and trans people I know, especially nonbinary folks, gender is a multifaceted abstract concept. Depending on the person you talk to, it can be static, fluid, a void, or something else entirely. But I don’t know a whole lot of nonbinary people who really describe it in a form you could easily represent in a 2 dimensional drawing. Now maybe 3 dimensions is enough but I think that when you look at all the different sets of expectations, behaviors, ways of thinking, ways of being, feelings, attitudes, context in which you are deciding, etc, that you have a hypervolume. Or in this case, a hypergender.

I’m sure that I’m not the first person to conceptualize it this way. Some quick searching shows that Asmaa Guedira wrote a bit about this idea starting in 2016. But I wanted to share my nerdery about how my concepts of ecology and gender have overlapped. Because even though I don’t work in ecology (thanks recession), the concepts I learned there have helped me synthesize knowledge by looking at a bigger picture.

There is so much diversity of gender out there in the world. Just here in Seattle I know people who are agender or gendervoid and don’t feel any strong sense of gender. I know folks who are genderfluid and switch presentation and pronouns depending on the day or mood or context. I know people who solidly feel like they are a third gender halfway between male and female. There are people who are demigender where they partially identify with a particular gender and partially not. And then there are of course hundreds of other concepts from cultures around the world, some of which have been around for thousands of years.

One of the foundational concepts that you learn in ecology is that diversity begets stability. The more species you have in more niches interacting with each other, the more stable, resilient, and resistant to extreme disturbances the ecosystem is going to be. In other words, we need all this diversity because it makes humanity greater as a whole. If you only have one or even two genders, races, cultures, etc at the table, you are missing huge chunks of human experience that are probably relevant to whatever you are discussing or deciding.

I hear a lot of people saying that “we don’t need labels” or that we are trying to create a world without gender. Which is exactly the opposite of what I’m trying to do. I want to build a world with an infinite number of genders co-existing in an ecosystem of human experience. It can feel at times like having so many labels makes gender irrelevant or meaningless but for many of us, having words that we can put to our experience is so empowering and freeing. Especially in the modern age of the internet, it gives us the ability to find people like us and the language to share what this important part of life feels like.

The power of support

Have I mentioned recently how amazing my chosen family is? I am incredibly lucky to find myself at this point in my life surrounded by the queerest, most supportive friends and partners imaginable. And I want to take a moment to acknowledge how much that support means to me and keeps me going.

Do you know how wonderful it is to come home every day to a house full of amazing queer and trans humans who have chosen to make me a part of their lives? I live with my spouse and anchor partner of 4 years, a bold, proudly fat and femme, queer cis woman who supports me in all the little ways that matter so much. I never feel like an oddity or burden when I’m around her because she has shown repeatedly that she can handle the hard stuff, saying the right things to reassure me when my brain is being mean and holding me close when I’m depressed. Not to mention providing fashion inspiration!

My household also includes my spouses partner, my metamour, a sweet Southern transmasculine person who joined us last year, as well as an amazing queer woman who defies categorization filling simultaneously best friend, romantic-turned-platonic partner, and close chosen family places in my heart. Life isn’t always easy when you live in a house with a bunch of queers with anxiety disorders but we hold each other up and support each other both emotionally and financially by sharing expenses based on how much we make relative to each other. Sharing a house together holds so many perks, especially knowing that when you have a hard day there will be someone to talk to and hold close.

Then there’s my chosen family and friends who cheer each other along as we stride through this world that isn’t always so friendly for us. I have so many queer and trans friends, and a few token cishet ones, who show up for the hard work. When I’m down I know that support is only a message away and that helps a lot. And being polyamorous, there’s plenty of people that blur the lines too. My life is full of former partners, either of mine or my spouses, and budding new relationships with other nonbinary folks. The best part is that I’m never lacking in cuddles!

I’ve talked a lot here about some of the hard parts of growing up in a conservative religious family but for all that my parents have been far more supportive than I could have imagined. Despite some incredibly vast ideological differences, they have stuck around and showed me that they do love me even when they don’t understand me. They live close enough that I get to see them at least once a month and they have opened up their hearts and home to all my partners and friends as well. They still struggle with pronouns but are slowly getting better and have grown so much in the past dozen years.

I am so sad that every person doesn’t have the kind of love and support in their life that I have found but I want to offer some proof that you can find that even if things seem bleak at the time. I went through some very isolating years in my previous marriage where even when I had friends, there were very few I could truly be honest with. I’m really lucky that my best friend from college survived all my ex’s attempts to sabotage our attempts to stick together. I’ve lost almost all my friends several times now but seeing who sticks around when it’s hard does help you find your true friends.

I know it sounds cliche but the point is that you need to keep trying. It does get better. And it’s because of all the support that I have gotten as far as I have in my transition.

What is dysphoria?

So I’ve talked quite a bit here about my experiences with dysphoria but I’m not sure I’ve ever attempted to define it, partly because it is a tricky concept to convey to someone who has never experienced it. But I’ll take a stab at it with the disclaimer that trans people don’t all experience dysphoria in the same way and some trans people never experience it because contrary to what psychologists think, being trans doesn’t require dysphoria. Some people are lucky enough to discover their true self through the experience of gender euphoria which is when you have extreme joy in finding something about your body, presentation, or the way people perceive you that affirms your gender.

On most days, I have a low level of background dysphoria going on. Some of it has always been there and I was kinda successfully ignoring it and some of it may not have been and has developed or been revealed as I’ve gotten closer to bring other parts in alignment with my gender. It’s hard to look back and accurately know what I was thinking in the past because one of my experiences of gender dysphoria is that my brain blocks out a lot of memories that don’t align with who I really am. A lot of my past is fuzzy or completely blocked from my consciousness due to trauma as well.

What I do know is that there were times that do clearly stick in my head where I experienced bursts of gender euphoria as a kid such as when I would play dress up and walk around in heels, or when I would play imaginary fairies or mermaids with my sister, or when I felt accepted as “one of the girls” in my friend groups. A lot of that went away as I reached an age where gender roles were more strictly enforced and in particular, a lot of my puberty is blocked from my memory both due to how I was treated by society and because more of my dysphoria started becoming apparent as the wrong hormone was taking front seat. I am so jealous of kids who have affirming parents and figure it out early enough to use hormone blockers or transition early on before the wrong puberty goes too far. It makes a lot of things easier.

One of the things I do know is that early on, stubble gave me dysphoria similar to how it does now. That, and my dysphoria around my prominent chin, are the biggest reasons I grew a beard at 18. I was getting to the point that I would have to shave my chin twice a day to look clean shaven. At first it was just a goatee but by 21 I think I was able to grow a full beard. A positive for combating dysphoria at the time but unfortunately now I have to get rid of all that thick, dense hair very painfully.

On a daily basis, dysphoria is like having little pin pricks constantly poking your skin. Or like wearing shoes that are too tight. It’s annoying and eventually it brings you to a breaking point. Everyone’s tolerance of that breaking point is why some people don’t come out until later while others figure it out early on. That can also be helped along by someone effectively helping you find the right size shoe and suddenly you realize how they didn’t fit all along. And trying to push past that background pain every day is exhausting and means that you can’t bring your full self to what you are doing until it is dealt with. I sometimes wonder where I would be in life if I had been born cis and been able to just move along happily through life without having to stop and deal with the dysphoria or the self worth issues that go along with it.

On days when my dysphoria is more acute, that pain is brought more to the forefront of my mind. Sometimes it is bad enough that I will look into a mirror and I can see enough to style my hair or assess my outfit but my face will be completely blurred out – as in I physically cannot get my brain to see my facial features. Dysphoria, as far as I can tell, is the brain not being able to handle the cognitive dissonance between the reality of your brain’s self image of you and what is physically in front of you. It also means that even on less bad days, parts of my body are often distorted so that what other people see isn’t the same as what I see. For me that most often revolves around my chin, or shoulders, or body hair. I will look at myself and all I can see is what feels to me like a giant, cartoonishly distorted chin with a cleft so big that I feel like Gaston from Beauty and the Beast.

Another way that dysphoria plays out for me, especially lately, is that an area of my body may feel completely absent. Most days now my genital area essentially feels like a black hole. It doesn’t exactly feel like there’s nothing there but almost the opposite of nothing like antimatter or something. That’s probably the biggest reason I’ve been much more asexual lately, at least with my own body. It is hard to think about sex when your mind is actively avoiding thinking about what body parts you might use. I’ve had to be much more creative and luckily when you have queer partners, using your own genitals isn’t as essential.

I’ve found that what helps the most when I’m feeling actively dysphoric is to focus on the parts of my body that I do like. Often it doesn’t help to have people compliment the areas you are feeling dysphoria around because it just brings more attention to them. But focusing on things like how great my legs are or how soft my skin is gets my mind to see the positives and less of the negatives. Sometimes affirmations can be helpful though, even if in the moment you can’t hear them. Lately I’ve been feeling more dysphoric around my speaking voice but when I’ve told people that, many have told me that it isn’t particularly deep and is actually rather feminine. Those are the things that I come back to later and think about when I’m struggling.

The reason that it is so essential to have insurance that covers gender affirming treatments and low barriers to accessing them is because dysphoria is such an insidious beast. It often feels like you can’t be a whole human until these parts of yourself are aligned with who you really are. And ultimately, all most of us really want is to be fully seen as ourselves. So please, don’t put up barriers to keep trans folks from getting there.

PS – I just remembered another trick I found to help combat dysphoria. Find things that you can do with your body to make it feel like your own that you can focus on when the rest of it feels wrong. For me it really helped me to be able to see myself to get my ears pierced, get fun glasses, get visible tattoos, and dye my hair. These things remind me that I can make changes because it is my body and my rules.

Brief thought of the day

I honestly thought I would have a beard my whole life because I couldn’t imagine a world where I was happy with my face. Other than the stubble which I’m working on, I think I’m getting there. I’m excited to see what it looks like after my jaw surgery.

Facial dysphoria

I’m still in this weird place where I go back and forth almost every other day about whether I like my face better now or with the beard. But today as I was feeling wishful for my beard again I looked back at my photos and realized I’ve gotten used to my face as it is now and my beard looks odd to me. I guess I’ve successfully adapted my brain to my facial  structure.

I am still having a lot of dysphoria around how dark and thick my hair follicles are on my face. And how my face constantly has red bumps, whiteheads, and cuts from shaving. So I reached out to a trans electrolysis esthetician about starting the process of permanent hair removal on my face. I can’t really afford it but I also can’t afford to live with this level of dysphoria either so I’ll have to find a way. It takes so long that I know I should start now.

Today I’m also having dysphoria around my double chin. I’ve tried to ignore it as I’ve continued to put on more weight over the last 10 years but it’s a lot more obvious without the beard. My jaw surgeon said that setting my chin back may make that part worse but he will do his best to reduce it. I may need a chin tuck at some point though.

Sometimes I regret shaving but I think realistically the only way through is forward.

Beard update pt 2

So the bad news is that my facial hair grows back a lot more slowly now and the stubble gives me so much dysphoria that I’m not sure it’s worth it. The good news is my hair grows so slowly now that I think I can get away with shaving every other day.