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09/15/24 |
        
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Content Warnings for: Transphobia, internalized and otherwise, depression, suicidal ideation, violence, other similarly dark subjects. There is a feeling that is hard to describe to people who have never felt it. It is similar to depression, it often goes hand in hand with it, sometimes indeterminable from it. Dysphoria has many forms, many ways to manifest and poison you. The most obvious one, the fairytale one, the poster child, even, is “I was born in the wrong body.” It’s a simple sentiment, easily digestible to most who have no frame of reference for this feeling. It is also, at least in my experience, and others, overly simplified at best. Realistically, it is complete and utter bullshit. It is simplified, to a fault, a story we tell because it is easy and sympathetic, it is what trans people told their doctors to get access to happiness in the form of HRT and surgery. Perhaps there are people who truly felt that way, who had such an obvious dragon to slay, such a plain and easy path to clarity and happiness. I envy them if so. Dysphoria did not present itself in such an obvious way. I was given no clear and present enemy to fight, no visible target, no plain and simple enemy to defeat. For me, and so many that I’ve talked to, it was so much more insidious. Depression clouds everything. It, quite literally, rewrites your brain and sullies all that it touches, it has been shown to negatively affect recalled memories, slowly convincing you that nothing was ever good, that nothing could ever be good. Dysphoria, at least for me, worked almost in the same way. It convinced me that what I felt was normal. That the pain I felt from the first signs of puberty was normal. This was just how it was from now on. That everyone hated how they looked, that every “guy” wanted to actually be a girl. Puberty isn’t easy for most people, but it plunged me into suicidal depression in middle school. Being someone with ADHD and ASD, I slowly learned that both disorders are often treated as monoliths, with a set of symptoms, and the variance in presentation is largely limited to severity. That is not true. People with the same mental illness have a wide variety of symptoms that others may not. One of the stronger ones for me that made everything so much worse, is called Alexithymia. It is not a well-known term, but it means in short that I have a very hard time making sense of how I feel, and that extends to pretty much all feelings. In particular, it clouded the true source of my depression, which was overwhelming, crushing dysphoria. At puberty, I started growing a lot more hair, my body started masculinizing in ways I hated, from my voice deepening, to my shoulders broadening, to more hair growing everywhere. It was awful, and the worst part was that I didn’t even know why it bothered me, arguably, I didn’t even realize that it bothered me. And I was taught that some amount of suffering through puberty was normal, so I didn’t question it or what it could mean. From a young age, I was always very fascinated by any sort of nonstandard gender presentation. I couldn’t figure out why, but I was always very attentive specifically when any sort of trans fem, or more realistically, effeminate AMAB person was portrayed, be it on television or anime. Unfortunately for me, I was a child born in the mid 90s, growing up in the late 90s and the early 2000s. This was a time where the joke was “man in a dress”. It was everywhere. It was inescapable. It was the height of comedy, and it was prolific in everything from children’s media to murder mysteries. Fetishism, and twisted fascination with trans fem people was also at a high, on shows like Jerry Springer, the Maury Show, and CSI. All the sorts of things a kid home on a sick or snow day without their parents around might end up watching. I am a transgender lesbian. These are both inextricable parts of my identity and they are equally important to me. From the day I was born to more recent days, the only time I saw people like me, they were predators, sick “men” trying to trick men into sex. Or they were dead. A corpse on a screen, and simultaneously, a punchline. On the lesbian side, they were often treated as promiscuous, similarly predatory, and, again, quite often, dead. There is a specific episode of CSI, where a murder victim is discovered in a bathroom. She is treated as she should be, a tragic victim. Not knowing her name, they refer to her as “Jane Doe” and start to investigate. Shortly after, “Better make that a John Doe”, as they discover she had a penis. From that moment, she is now a “he” and treated as such, despite the fact that she clearly wanted nothing to do with such association. A similar thing, and, I apologize: I do not know if what I am about to describe is a deleted scene that is only present on certain releases of the movie, if I conflate this with another movie I saw, or if I am truly insane. I have spent a not-insignificant amount of time trying to hunt this down with no success. I distinctly remember a scene from “Silence of the Lambs” where they are discussing Buffalo Bill, and how they sought treatment at, and I remember this specifically, “John Hopkins”, but was turned away because they “weren’t trans enough” in essence. In that moment I learned two things, 1. That treatment of some sort existed, and 2. That there was a threshold you had to meet. Hope, and hope extinguished all in one. I couldn’t even convince myself this was something I felt relation to, how would I convince someone else? My first exposure to what I realize now was an actual, true trans fem person, as opposed to an actor, a caricature on a screen, was on one of the many *chans. This thread was chronicling a trans woman’s personal journey to get an orchiectomy, and, specifically to keep their testicles afterwards, for the express purpose of cooking and eating them. In a twisted way, this was an important moment for me, for two reasons: 1. This was a real trans fem person, an actual human. 2. She was trans fem without any desire to get GRS. I distinctly remember her saying in response to someone asking if they were planning on labiaplasty (surely not said as eloquently as I did here) “Why? My penis has never done anything wrong.” (Note, I cannot find this quote exactly, but it may be from a thread I cannot find an archive for. I did find something with a similar sentiment) The only narrative of a trans fem person I’d seen thus far was largely contingent on an almost singular focus on getting rid of one’s penis by any means. That has never been my experience, and I took that, among other things, to mean I wasn’t really trans. This, despite the fact that one of my earliest memories is me crying because my parents told me I couldn’t be a girl. Despite the fact that it was really all I ever wanted, despite the fact that I never asked to be a man, and given a choice, I would have switched genders from the start. Along with being drawn to any sort of character I could interpret as trans fem in my head, I was just as much enamored with anything sapphic. I was so intensely envious of lesbian couples, to the point of damn near obsession at times. I remember on multiple occasions being deeply upset because I felt like I was holding my partner back from what I perceived as ideal, a relationship where neither person was a man. I realize now that was me projecting what I wanted to have. One of the first depictions of a sapphic relationship I ever saw was in Elfen Lied with Lucy and Aiko, it is debatable if the intention was to depict them in a relationship, but that is how I interpreted it. They care deeply about each other and Lucy essentially gives her life to try and save Aiko’s. One of the few seemingly more innocuous examples I can point to, is “All the Things She Said” by t.A.T.u. The music video in particular really meant a lot to me as a kid. Later I find out that it was pretty much all a publicity stunt, there was a huge scandal about it, there was no real couple there, no actual sapphic feelings being portrayed. In the grand scheme of things, not a huge deal, and I do still very much enjoy both the song and the music video as a matter of nostalgia, but it hurt a bit to learn that nonetheless. You have probably (hopefully, or I have failed utterly) noticed a trend has been established here. I remember many things very vividly that spoke to me, and many of them are of questionable quality. I think this is a huge part of why I tend to gravitate to what I call “Grimy Media” quite consistently. I was raised Christian, and many of the things I wanted were often portrayed as evil, degenerate, or otherwise bad. That, coupled with some of the little representation I saw of myself in dark or otherwise problematic media, led to a sort of intertwining of the two for me personally. It became a source of comfort, to an extent, and also a part of my identity. I tend to cycle avatars for Discord, etc based on mood and feelings, and I tend to cycle fairly often, but I often come back to various pictures of Elfen Lied characters. I take a weird comfort in things that are often considered “problematic” like Saya no Uta. I love characters that are portrayed as imperfect or crass, one specifically being Riamu Yumemi from Idolm@ster Cinderella Girls. She is impulsive, cringy, stupid, and consistently says things that are inflammatory, but immediately retreating when she is met with any sort of pushback. She’s literally me. In general, I love things that are dumb, edgy, and to some extent, purposefully shocking or upsetting.
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This site was last updated 04/19/23