We Are Leelah

In light of the recent suicide of teen Leelah Alcorn, I have found myself thinking about and discussing my own history with suicide. For those who do not know, she committed suicide and later a suicide note appeared on her tumblr account (from her queue) explaining that she’d been dealing with parents who had been denying her access to hormones for transitioning, and who had also been forcing her into conversion therapy to try and make her stop being trans.

I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone with a shred of human decency why that is not okay. And it doesn’t take much imagination to understand why someone in that situation would have thoughts about committing suicide. For me, it doesn’t take any imagination, because I was on the verge of committing suicide at three different points in my life.

Writing this has been a little tough for me. I’ve never told anybody the details about these before, though in recent years I’ve tried to be open about their existence. But I think now is the appropriate time for full disclosure.

The first time was also the least severe. I had hidden one of my mom’s bras and taken to occasionally wearing it in my room. It was comforting. But then my dad caught me wearing it. He blew up in my face, yanking down my shirt fast enough that it hurt me (and permanently stretched the shirt) and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing. It’s important to note that my dad never swears, and it was only on this occasion and the time I accidently dropped a riding lawn mower on his foot that I’ve ever heard him do it. But it was what he said next that really did the permanent damage: “You had better not be gay.” It wasn’t just the words; it was his tone. There was utter disgust in his tone and in his eyes, and I got the feeling that if my response was anything different than what he wanted that he would throw me to the ground and squish me out of existence. Thinking back, perhaps I wanted him to discover me. As scared as I was, I wanted to stop hiding, to stop pretending. But if that was testing the waters, all signals came back screaming “Retreat!” at the top of their lungs.

I mean, I wasn’t gay. I’m still not. I’ve never been straight; I’m bisexual. But my sexual orientation had nothing to do with wearing the bra, and so I was completely honest with my response to him: “I just wanted to know what it felt like.” I also wanted to continue knowing what it felt like, every day for the rest of my life. But I left that second part out. And that moment was the first time I felt like I was never going to be able to be me. Later, when I took a shower, I broke down and cried, imagining what it would be like to kill myself. I could plug up the tub and lay face down, closing my eyes and releasing myself to the universe. Maybe the universe would actually like me.

But instead of plugging the tub and floating away, I just hugged my knees and sobbed my heart out, the shower water muffling my tears. I have wondered time and time again how my life would have been different if I had come out at that point (I was twelve). My parents have told me that of course they would have loved me and been as awesome as they are now, but that confrontation with my father certainly made me think they wouldn’t have been. And so as I see article after article reporting Leelah’s death, I wonder if that could have been me. I wonder if my (very Christian) parents would have shoved me into conversion therapy. I wonder if they would have denied me access to hormone blockers and then HRT when I became old enough.

I think I did a little bit too good of a job of hiding myself after that. Acting came easily to me – likely due to my 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week performance – and I began doing shows regularly, including being involved in some way with all but one of the shows my high school put on while I was attending. And during my junior year I auditioned for the All-State Production of Les Miserables at the Illinois High School Theatre Festival, and wasn’t cast. I was certain that it was because of how I looked. I had never liked my image post-puberty (as you might imagine), and had already been dealing with on-again, off-again anorexia for several years. And so without any specific prompt that I can remember, I felt crippled by the disappointment and transferred that frustration to my feelings about how I looked. I looked wrong and felt wrong, and I didn’t think I could ever possibly look right, much less ever feel right. I wanted to rip my consciousness out of my body. I wanted to leave the hurt and the awfulness and the “not-me-ness” behind. I didn’t care if there was nothingness or eternity waiting. Anything was better.

And so I made plans to end my life. I wrote a suicide note. I gave my stuffed animals to my sister. The plan was the same as before: in the tub, face down, relaxed. But instead of taking my shower that evening, I sat on my bed. I struggled against myself, and the only way the part of me that didn’t want me to go through with it could manage to stop me was by not letting me do anything. If I moved, then I was dead. But I didn’t move, and eventually I fell asleep. When I woke up I was still upset, still depressed, and nothing looked better, but I didn’t feel like ending my own life that day. At that point I was completely certain that the way that I would die was by suicide. I just didn’t know when.

Several years passed. I left home for college. I graduated from college. The job market was awful, so I struggled to find a job, but I eventually found one that was *slightly* above minimum wage. And I began dating a girl who lived several states away. Our relationship was really never a good one. I did all the traveling to her, we only saw each other about once a month, and we were constantly texting/messaging/skyping. After several months of being together, she kissed someone else and told me about it, and we had the conversation of me not being okay with that, but trying to figure out how to make things work; it went downhill from there. No matter what I did or what I said, she took the opposite position. She would constantly block me on facebook and refuse to answer messages/calls, then yell at me when I stopped sending them or calling. So the next time I wouldn’t stop (as per her request from the last time), and then she’d get mad at me for not stopping. This back and forth lasted for about three months. I’m terrible at ending relationships, even really bad ones, but finally we broke up, she began to date someone else (not the person she had kissed), and I was completely heartbroken. I felt worthless and that everything bad was happening because I wasn’t made right. Once again those feelings of desperation and hopelessness rose up within me, and I knew that this was the right time to end it. My extra rationale was that no one would ever suspect that it was because I was really a girl; they’d just think the breakup hit me hard. I didn’t feel like I’d be missed by anyone, and my roommate was out of town for the weekend. So I got undressed and got in the shower, turned on the water and plugged up the drain, and sat down waiting as the water filled the tub. And I hated myself and I hated my body, and I hated everything that was wrong with me. But with the water filling up, I couldn’t stand the thought of someone seeing my naked body. I knew I didn’t want to be an anonymous façade, and for the first time in my life I actively thought about what I might be able to do to fix my situation. I pulled back from the brink long enough to investigate one last sliver of hope, and the moment was past.

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t know where to look, and I didn’t have the words to even ask the right questions. So everything I discovered was either an easily debunkable “magic” spell or potion, or used words like “tranny” or “he-she” that made me feel icky about my body. My lack of results combined with quickly getting into another relationship put a damper on discovering the right words and the existence of HRT for another few years.

* * * * *

In the comments sections of the articles about Leelah, many people continue to misname and use the wrong pronouns. Several of the articles even include or supplant her name with the wrong name in their titles. And this really doesn’t make any sense to me. One set of my grandparents have yet to use the appropriate name or pronouns to refer to me, but instead they use my first initial (which is the same as the first letter of the name I was given), and awkwardly refuse to use any pronouns when referring to me. I’ve never understood why something like this is so hard for people to do. For anyone else in the world who was dissatisfied with the name their parents had given them, people would honor their nickname or chosen name without batting an eye. Robert likes to be called Bob. Gertrude wants to be called Lexi. It doesn’t matter what a person believes about trans people, it is one of the most basic human decencies to refer to someone in the way they want to be referred. I mean, in the play, Arsenic and Old Lace, “Teddy” is still called Teddy, even though he only wants to be called that because he thinks that he is Theodore Roosevelt! And nobody says crap about them extending this courtesy to someone who is *actually* suffering from delusions or some other form of mental illness.

And that leads me to my final point of the evening: why do people even have a stance on trans people anyway? It’s a bit like people having a “stance” on blondes. “Yeah, I don’t believe in blondes. They’re really just brown haired people who are confused.” The reasoning behind their logic for “not believing” in trans people is even more sketchy: “You have an experience that I have not had, but I’m sure it’s not actually real, because it’s not something that I’ve had to deal with.” By that same logic: I’ve never liked grapefruit, so clearly anyone who says they like grapefruit is lying or confused. Possibly both. Regardless, I should clearly make it my duty to make their life miserable if they insist on perpetuating this “delusion” that they like grapefruit.

And it is people like that who killed Leelah Alcorn. When a person “decides” to commit suicide, it’s not the kind of decision where you decide to hit the snooze button or where you decide what type of bread to order at Subway. When a person commits suicide, it’s because they’ve been struggling. And their “decision” is to stop swimming against the massive current. To let it pull them under. And those currents that pulled Leelah under? They’re the transphobia that is perpetuated by our society. We’re all responsible, every one of us who has ever perpetuated anything transphobic, every one of us who remains silent when someone else perpetuates something transphobic. The good news is that we’re not too late. Countless kids, teens, and adults are standing right where Leelah was standing. They’re standing there right now. I’ve stood there before. One day, I might be standing there again. I need you – we all need you – to end this cycle of hatred. We are Leelah and we are dying.

Chapter Three – The Mind and the Body

Many people seem to associate being trans with wanting to change some aspects of one’s body. While that is something that some trans folk want, that’s not the case for all, or necessarily even most. Or at least not in any way more than cis folk (we’re all inundated by the media’s ideas of what “perfect bodies” are supposed to look like). But I am someone who would very much like to change some aspects of my body, and that’s what this chapter is about. Be warned: I do discuss genitalia somewhat graphically.

Growing up, I was given many of the same misrepresentations of transwomen that I’m sure most of you are familiar with. The young me was under the assumption that transwomen were campy, sexualized women, difficult to distinguish or completely indistinguishable from crossdressers (though I never imagined that they were one and the same – *that* assumption that people make never crossed my mind). The idea of why someone would want to change their body made complete sense to me, but I thought that the process by which they changed their bodies was limited to a plethora of intensive surgeries. I even remember seeing part of a documentary (actually I think it was an extended preview of a documentary) about transwomen that talked about them going through this “socialization” period where they “learned how to be women,” mostly secluded from the world. I don’t think it’s any wonder why I never associated any of that with myself growing up. I wasn’t like those portrayals – I was already a girl, I’d always been a girl. My body was just being really stupid and not looking like it was supposed to, but I didn’t need anyone to “teach me how to be a woman.”

I also remember hearing phrases like “a woman trapped in a man’s body” and that was so removed from how I ever felt. What seemed more like my situation were depictions in science fiction and fantasy stories of people whose bodies became transformed under some circumstance, or who had the ability to shapeshift. In particular, I was obsessed for several years with the Animorphs series of books (by K.A. Applegate). In the series, the main characters are able to “store” the DNA of various animals by touching them for a few moments, and then can transform into those animals at will (though there are some restrictions). They’re able to do this with the help of alien technology and they use their abilities to fight off invader alien parasites that live inside humans’ brains. What really made my imagination go wild was when it was introduced into the series that they could copy the DNA of another human, too. One of the characters gets stuck in hawk form (the consequence if you stay transformed longer than the time limit). He eventually grew to enjoy his new form, and I had the fantasy of gaining the powers, copying the DNA of another girl, then transforming and getting stuck. Would I have given up awesome superpowers to have my body look the way it was supposed to? Faster than a heartbeat.

Another book that I loved was “Mail-Order Wings” by Beatrice Gormley. In this story, the young girl protagonist orders wings from an advertisement. When they arrive, they allow her to fly, but the side effect is that she can’t remove them, and she starts transforming into a bird against her will. It was similar to how I felt: like I had accidently tried something and got stuck with parts I wasn’t supposed to have. I was scared, but I loved how the protagonist in the book had the courage to fight against it and eventually help herself and the other children who had made the same mistake change back. I wanted to be strong like her, and I wanted to figure out how to fix what had gone wrong, but I didn’t know how.

There were others, of course, but the point is that literature and film showed me people who felt like I did, and they all had solutions to their problems that felt natural and weren’t represented as fake or external. Contrast that with the descriptions I was given of trans women, and I felt as if there wasn’t a possible natural solution for my own problem. I felt like everything was hopeless, and this feeling spiraled down into depression.

At the same time that I was getting all these media signals, my parents were still intent in trying to indoctrinate me with their religion (Christianity). There’s nothing wrong with believing in Christianity (or any other religion), but there is something terribly awful about trying to force a mind to believe something against their will. Well, I never really believed in “God,” but I sure as hell tried for years upon years. I would pray each night before bed and each morning, and my prayers only concerned one thing: that I would wake up, and that my body would be how it was supposed to be, that everyone would recognize me as having always been female, and that I could just forget that all the awfulness had ever happened. I knew that that answered prayer was really the only possible thing that could ever convince me of the existence of god. I even kept praying for years after I had given up on trying to believe (I was unwilling to let go of any chance I possibly had of making my dream a reality).

I also had this weird fantasy where I really wanted to have a twin. But this twin was always a girl and always an identical twin. And I externalized some of how I was supposed to look onto this fictional twin of myself. Of course I’d be able to talk to her about the awful feelings I was dealing with, and with her help I figured I could probably conquer the world and fix all of my issues. But she never appeared, either.

I should probably explain what I mean by “how my body was supposed to be.” I never understood the genitalia I was born with. Penises never made sense to me, and I was always incredibly embarrassed by mine any time I would think about it. Before I had ever heard of the word “vagina” or ever looked at or understood that people had different kinds of genitalia, I knew that mine was supposed to be different. As I grew and started to go through puberty, I was totally lost about what to do with my penis, but I knew intuitively and instinctively what to do with my (theoretical) vagina. It just made sense. One of the things I have always prided myself on is my ability to pleasure my female partners using my fingers and my mouth, and one of the reasons I believe that I get extra pleasure from the experience is the fact that I am doing to them what I wish someone could do to me.

My first sexual encounter was similarly awkward. As awkward teenagers, things were bound to have some level of awkwardness, but I’m pretty sure I took the amount of awkwardness to orbital heights. We first started messing around by doing what we termed “clothes sex,” which was essentially just like sex, except no penetration, and pants (usually gym shorts) were on for both of us (toplessness, however, abounded). And my first instinct was to do it with my legs spread apart, which worked out fine for both of us during “clothes sex.” But when we moved on to regular sex and I tried to approach it in the same way, legs spread apart…it didn’t quite work. I’m sure anyone who has been sexually active understands what I mean. Moving beyond the awkward positioning, we finally figured out how to make it work (legs in for me, legs out for her), and then it became awkward as we tried to figure out how to move. None of it came naturally for me. I don’t know if others have the same experience or not, but it wasn’t easy, it felt weird, my body wanted to do things that were the opposite of helpful to the experience, and I found it to be the most difficult thing in the world to even “get off.” While I’m certain that media portrayals of first sexual encounters skew out perceptions of how awkward most people are, I feel like the majority of people probably have at least a rough instinctual awareness of what to do with their parts. Some of this probably stems from my demisexuality, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier chapter, but for many years I just assumed that I was missing any trace of instinct when it comes to sex.

That is, until I had a sexual encounter where I was able to do what was natural. I’ve always preferred to be the one lying down during encounters. It just felt more natural to me. And with a partner approaching me as if I had a vagina, and allowing me to act as if I had one, I know exactly what to do. How to angle my hips, where my legs naturally go, etc, etc, etc… I’ve never wanted to stick my penis into things, but I don’t think I can begin to describe how much I want to be penetrated. And not like just any part of my body penetrated. I want to be penetrated in a very particular spot, a spot that currently doesn’t have a place to penetrate. I’m sure you can surmise, but this leads to all kinds of sexual frustration.

In the same way that I felt like I was supposed to have a vagina, I always expected to develop breast tissue. And now that I have, I can tell you that it feels exactly how I wanted that part of my body to feel. The fat distribution on my body is of a “typical female” at this point, and I also notice other little ways that my mind has always been expecting my body to look like this. How I stand, walk, and even sit down are more naturally accommodated by my body now than before I started transitioning. I’ve heard an “explanation” for this phenomenon (which others certainly experience, too), likening it to Phantom Limb Syndrome (the thing where people who have lost a limb still sometimes “feel” like the limb is still there). Phantom Limb Syndrome happens because of what is called your brain map. A brain map is essentially the tool your brain uses to know where all your body parts are at all times. For a demonstration, put your arm behind your back, but not touching your back. Now do something with your fingers that doesn’t cause them to touch any part of you. You still know exactly where your arm is, and exactly what your fingers are doing, don’t you? That’s because of your brain map. My brain has always thought that I had parts typically considered feminine, and it expected my body to develop other typically feminine body parts and fat distribution during puberty. All of that was part of my brain map. When something happens that clashes with the map, there’s a dysphoric sensation (the same kind that happens when someone experiencing Phantom Limb Syndrome experiences a sudden realization that their body is not the way the brain thinks it is).

So that’s “how my body was supposed to be.” And I wanted to reach that place naturally, as my body should have done. And that’s why I was not a fan of the idea of extensively changing my body with surgery. There’s nothing wrong with people who want to do so for their own bodies, but it wasn’t what I wanted. So when I first happened upon HRT (hormone replacement therapy), and I read about what it was and what it did, I was overjoyed. Mentally I said to myself, “THIS! This is exactly what I wanted!” Sure, it would have been better if it had just happened to my body without outside influence, but HRT essentially changes the hormonal balance inside a person’s endocrine system, effectively allowing the body to develop as it would have if such a hormone balance had happened during puberty. I wasn’t going to have to get breast implants to have breasts; my body was going to grow them on its own! And of course all the other body changes, too. I had never been more excited about the prospect of something than I was during those first moments of reading about what was possible. It was like being told at your husband’s funeral that he hadn’t actually died in combat; they’d found him and he was alive and coming home in a few weeks. Everything that I had thought about the world was suddenly new and wonderful, and I was about to burst.

The important part to remember is that none of these things have anything to do with my gender. I could have experienced all of it and been a guy, or been any nonbinary gender. Wanting my body to look a certain way does not define my gender, and my gender doesn’t determine how my body is supposed to look. That’s part of why things like “I’ve always been a girl” make complete and utter sense; your gender is not how you look. Your gender is a part of who you are, and while it can get a little sticky to define exactly *what* gender is, there are certain things that can clearly be said to not be one’s gender. The fact that I’ve always been female is a fact, and the fact that I’ve always felt like I was supposed to have body parts that are traditionally considered female is also a fact, but those two facts, while they influence each other, have no cause and effect relationship. Many transwomen love having a penis, just as many intersex people (both trans and cis) love their genitalia. I’m sure a nonzero number of cis women would actually prefer to have a penis (but have everything else stay the same), just as a nonzero number of cis men would probably prefer to have a vagina. And, of course, that’s not even getting into all the nonbinary folks who variously want to change certain parts of their body and at other times don’t want to.

And, in my personal opinion, all of those people should be allowed to have their body look and feel how they want it to look. It’s not about vanity – it’s about using medical science to improve a person’s quality of life. It makes complete sense to us why a person who has lost their limb would want to grow that limb back, and we understand why that person would use prosthetics to come as close to that goal as currently possible. It’s the same thing. The body is not the mind, but that doesn’t mean that a mind can’t want to reside in a certain kind of body.

The Dating Game

For a while now I’ve been using online dating. There’s quite a range of people whom you end up talking to. There are certainly pros and cons of using online dating – pro: getting some inside info on someone you’re interested in without the awkward asking questions; con: ‘Hey baby ur sexy’ – but this article isn’t a review of online dating. Instead I want to talk about an experience that many transfolks experience, both in online dating and in real life, and the implications of that experience. I’m talking about when someone finds out that you’re trans and they no longer are interested in pursuing a relationship because of that.

It is always transphobic when someone says, “I don’t date trans people” or even “I’m not attracted to trans people.” Always. It’s the same thing if someone stops being interested in or declines to even consider interest in dating trans people, though these are often harder to gauge by an outside audience. Of course, often people respond to the revelation with one of the statements above which usually is indicative that that is the only reason that they are no longer interested.

First off, such statements operate on the assumption that transpeople are all the same, or at least can fit into some large, general categories. In fact, this is no truer for transpeople than for cispeople. Transpeople –like cispeople– come in all shapes and sizes, types and qualities, personalities, prejudices, likes and dislikes. The thing is, trans and cis are both labels that don’t actually tell you anything about the person except a shared experience that that person has. For transpeople it is the experience of discrimination and disenfranchisement that society imposes. For cispeople it is the experience of privilege in those areas. But apart from such an experience, neither trans nor cis people share any single quality.

More specifically, even the assumptions about the state of a transperson’s genitalia are unfounded. No matter their gender, trans people come with all kinds of genitalia, some having changed theirs through surgical process and others who haven’t –both by choice and by necessity. It’s the same deal with cis people, where a person might have a surgical process (usually medically induced) to alter their genitalia in some way, not to mention intersex people (both cis and trans), who may have had their genitalia altered or not. The point I’m trying to make is that a neither a person being cisgender or transgender says anything about the status of their genitalia despite the assumptions people make both ways.

Not to mention, of course, that caring more about a person’s genitalia than about the person themselves is somewhat of an outdated way of viewing things. Whatever the genitalia of the participants, there are ways to enjoy sexual activity for any partner, in whatever kind of way they wish. There’s an entire industry that exists solely about making apparatuses for just such kinds of practices, not to mention the many ways the body supplies people with ways to enjoy sexual activity. I’m not going to say that preference for a certain kind of genitalia is never justified, but from a practical standpoint, there are options for everyone.

Of course, it’s pretty common for people to say things like, “but (so-and-so) doesn’t look like a woman/man!” and try to use that as an excuse for making such blanket statements. But no one is saying you have to be attracted to (so-and-so). The point is not that you have to find every transperson attractive, just as no one expects you to find every cisperson attractive. In fact, maybe you’ve never met a transperson to whom you were attracted. That’s cool, and there’s no problem with saying that. But if the only reason for not being attracted to someone is the fact that they are trans, it’s transphobic. It would be like not being attracted to someone just because they saw (in person) the events of 9/11/2001 at the World Trade Center. That is a shared experience that those people have, but they might have any number of other qualities. Perhaps you’ve never met someone who witnessed those events in person to whom you are attracted. But yet people would look at you strangely if you make a similar blanket statement about your lack of attraction to them. It’s no different for transpeople.

On the other side of all of this, it is similarly transphobic to be attracted to someone *specifically because of* them being trans, and for the exact same reasons as listed above. Only this one goes a little bit further: if you are ignoring all of a person’s qualities in favor of a single experience that they have had, you are objectifying a person. Of course this gets more tricky in conversation, because there is nothing wrong with being physically attracted to someone who might fall outside the traditional “conventions” of gender. So being attracted to taller women who have more square jawlines, higher foreheads, and broader shoulders isn’t transphobic, despite the fact that a good number of people who find these traits attractive might shorthand their attraction into the words “I like transwomen.” The problem is when someone, instead of being attracted to a person, is only attracted to their experience. It’s the same kind of problem with the fetishization of people of color. There’s nothing wrong with being physically attracted to darker skin. But when your attraction is to the experience of being a person of color, rather than the person, it becomes objectification.

It also is in no way the responsibility of a transperson to announce being trans at the beginning or early on in the relationship. While things such as lying about transness have their own issues for a relationship (you know, the whole lying thing), but an omission of stating something is not the same thing as lying. Each transperson is entitled to inform their partner or potential partner at whatever time they so choose, and in the way that they choose, just as with any other information about a person’s history. The same reasons above apply to this: there is nothing special about being trans that makes it something that should be mentioned. At the end of the day, if a person is upset because of not being told right away, or upset because of the other person’s transness, then that is their choice. People can choose to be transphobic, but beyond that, it is important to realize how much such a response can hurt a transperson. You have boiled down everything in their existence to be completely mitigated and overshadowed by the fact that they are trans. You have taken their hopes and dreams and personality and hidden them under a blanket of transness. I’m not sure what kind of a heartless person you’d have to be to do such a thing knowingly, so I have to assume that the majority of people who have done so and who continue to do so don’t understand the implications of their actions.

In the end, of course no one is here to police your sexual or romantic preferences. But it is important to realize that your preferences can be transphobic, and be mostly based on misconceptions, stereotypes, and a lack of understanding. This is a subject that often is difficult to talk out, oftentimes because a lot of transpeople have internalized the idea that being trans is someone an *undesirable trait,* in the same ways that a lot of cispeople have. But it isn’t an undesirable trait and it shouldn’t be deemed socially acceptable for someone to lose interest in someone else when they find out that that person is trans. If you’re ever confused about how to avoid this, ignore the fact that a person is trans when figuring out if you like the person. If the answer is yes, then go for it. If the answer is no, then you don’t really like the person. That’s how you move forward without being transphobic. Please, spread a little more love in the world.

How Everything You Thought You Knew About “Biological Sex” is Probably Wrong

When someone mentions the term “biological sex,” what are the thoughts that come to your mind? Peoples’ genitalia? Peoples’ chromosomes? I know at various times in my life I was told the myths “boys have penises, girls have vaginas,” and “your chromosomes determine your sex; XX is female, XY is male.” However, neither of these things is actually scientifically correct (even ignoring the fact that sex is often confused with gender, but that is a whole other post).

In any species that has more than one sexual distinction (organisms that are not asexual), an organism’s sex is determined by the size of the gametes they produce. There are two different gamete sizes: large and small. However, despite only two different sizes, there are actually four different combination in which humans can produce gametes: only producing large gametes (termed “female”), only producing small gametes (termed “male”), producing both large and small gametes (not named as a sex), and producing no gametes at all (not named as a sex).

I guess maybe I should explain what a gamete is. According to Wikipedia, a gamete is “a cell that fuses with another cell during fertilization (conception) in organisms that sexually reproduce.” In high school biology, we are taught to call these “sperm” and “eggs.” And people usually have two gonads (testicles or ovaries). We classify a gonad as a testicle if it produces small gametes, and an ovary if it produces large gametes. The problem with our classification system comes when things don’t go according to the sterilized, textbook, “plan” (as they almost never do in real life; humans are immensely complex organisms with a wide range of diversity). Instead of sticking with a consistent system of classification, we still classify a person’s gonads as either testicles or ovaries based on their position in the body, even if they don’t produce ANY gametes. Sometimes we even casually classify a person’s gonads based on their location, even if the gonads produce gametes of a size not consistent with that classification.

Essentially, human reproductive science often becomes less about science and more about “fitting everything into the mold of what *they* think it should be” (they referring alternatively to the system, the patriarchy, the man, the government, or whomever it is that is behind such ridiculous ideas). This is especially apparent in the fact that doctors will classify an infant’s gonads as one type or the other upon birth, despite the fact that gamete production doesn’t begin in humans until puberty, and therefore is impossible to know. Even invasive procedures to predict the kind of gametes produced aren’t 100% accurate (and aren’t something I’d recommend for infants, anyway).

And that’s not even considering intersex children, who do not even fit into the “assign by genitalia” method that doctors use, but whom doctors still assign one of two sex classifications (most of the time). Often, this results in doctors suggesting surgical processes to *fix* a natural expression of humanity. I don’t think extreme surgery of this nature should be done to infants anyway (barring a life-threatening condition, of course), but performing surgical modification of a person’s body before they are able to consent to it just seems like an awful idea, and is paramount with genital mutilation.

This, of course, feeds into the larger issue of sexual classification of humans. Babies are assigned a sex at birth, despite no evidence being searched for at such a point to imply that such a sex is accurate. If the goal of birth classification was to accurately describe a quality of the baby (as is the case with length, weight, etc…), you would assume that some sort of accurate measurement device would be used to gauge it. Not a simple glance at the apparent genitalia of a child.

So let me line up my grievances with the current system:
1 – We don’t classify all the possible human sexes, only half of them, and we shove members of the other half into one of the two categories we do use.
2 – Birth sex assignment is made using ambiguous and inaccurate methods that neither consider what *actually* is a determiner of human sex, nor all the possibilities of physical expression that a human could show.
3 – Everything is made to try and fit a system that doesn’t actually work, yet we are summarily taught that such a system is law and foolproof in schools, and many aspects of daily life and healthcare are ENTIRELY determined by the results of this flawed system.
(Not to mention how lambasted you get from people of all walks of life for trying to suggest that this system is somehow flawed)

“Biological sex,” as we know it and as our system refers to it, is a completely made up and ambiguous concept. While there is an *intrinsic* sex that each human has, our system neither recognizes all the possibilities for such sex, nor pursues methods to even find such a quality out about a human when assigning them a sex at birth. So the next time someone tries to rationalize something because of “biological sex,” calmly explain to them how their conception of biological sex is completely made up.

SIDE NOTE
Also, this is only part of the reason why defining a trans person as someone whose gender *doesn’t match* their sex is just silly. A trans person is someone who was assigned the wrong gender at birth. A cis person isn’t someone whose gender *matches* their sex, but rather someone who wasn’t assigned the wrong gender at birth. When I talk about gender assignments at birth, I will address the nuances between saying “wasn’t assigned the wrong gender” and “assigned the right gender,” as that gets into a whole range of topics that I haven’t mentioned yet in this post.

OTHER SIDE NOTE
This is not to imply that a “four-sex” model is the only or the most accurate system for classifying “biological sex.” Sex as a completely socially constructed idea isn’t inherently problematic, but our current incarnation is viciously problematic and doesn’t use consistency. What I’ve discussed above is simply an extrapolation for our current system, using logical extrapolations. There are plenty of other wonderful models which exist, and I’d recommend further research if you are interested in the subject.

Chapter Two – Fear and Courage in the Face of Oblivion

I am often congratulated on my bravery or courage about coming out and transitioning. I’m afraid I’m always terrified about how to respond, and usually end up either muttering a robotic “thank you” or try to laugh it off and say that “oh, I’m not brave. It was more like a necessity.” I always worry that the second kind of response will somehow minimize the other person, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t feel like any of this journey has been brave. And trying to bottle my experience down into a single word like that makes me feel as if my experiences are being taken away from me and commoditized in an easy-to-consume package. I’m 100% sure that it’s never meant that way, so I don’t ever take or hold offense. But there’s a part of me that hates that I can’t just take the compliment and move on with my life. I can’t stand people getting the wrong impression of me, though, and I think that is a side effect from having lied to so many people about my existence for as long as I did.

I’m not brave. I’ve done some brave things in my life, but I don’t think it’s courageous to unshackle weights from your legs when you’re drowning; that’s self-preservation. Bravery assumes that somewhere along this journey I made a choice, and the only thing that I’ve chosen is to live rather than to face oblivion. Perhaps that is a kind of bravery, but it’s the kind of bravery that each person demonstrates every day that they are alive. It’s the kind of ordinary bravery that we call waking up, getting dressed, and eating a healthy breakfast – and I never skip breakfast.

My life is full of fears. I am a battlefield – my body is basically fighting against itself. My endocrine system, when left to its own devices, ravages my body, physically twisting it in ways that feel unnatural and agitating my brain chemistry enough that I want to shut down and remove myself from my physical form. I spent more than a decade of my existence warring with those feelings (both physical and mental), and I assure you that experiencing all levels of hell simultaneously would be preferable to going through that kind of experience again. So I fear that at some point I might have some trouble with my HRT prescription. I don’t know what it would be – money problems, access to healthcare problems, legal reforms that further discriminate against me; take your pick – but the threat of returning to how things were looms on the horizon. It is the darkness sneaking around the edge of my field of bliss, a memory that I don’t think I could ever erase.

Growing up, dreams were my escape from that darkness. I’ve been a lucid dreamer since I was very little. I don’t remember ever specifically working on the skill, but I am in complete control and completely aware in every dream, and I can remember all my dreams upon waking. I have never dreamed of myself as male. Sometimes in my dreams I am just female, with no indication of being cis or trans, in others I’m clearly cis, while in others I’m clearly trans. Sometimes I’m not an active participant in the dream, but rather an outside observer, and during these times the dream’s protagonist might be of any gender. But my dreams have always been a refuge into which I could retreat. I don’t know if it’s because of the control I have over my dreaming or due to the amount of fear my waking life had to deal with, but I also don’t have nightmares. I’ve only had two different nightmares in my life, one of which was repeated a total of seven times. Both of them happened before I turned twelve.

The first one was the one that recurred seven times. I first had this dream when I was around five, and the final time was around when I was eleven. In the nightmare, my family and I are vacationing on a mountain. There’s a lodge/gift store kind of place about halfway up, and the upper reaches of the mountain are green and forested. We set out for the day to explore the mountain, and very quickly I find myself alone, my family nowhere in sight. I search all day on the mountain, with no luck at finding them. Finally, I return to the lodge/gift shop, only they’re not there. The lodge is crowded with people, but I somehow know that they’re not there, either, and that they didn’t abandon me, but that they just disappeared from existence. A sinking feeling in my stomach, I continue to search the mountain in vain hope of finding them, only giving up when I’ve used up every ounce of energy. I can’t stop crying, and that crying lasts until I wake up. None of the details changed any time it repeated.

The other nightmare I had happened when I was nine. I had just watched an episode of something on the history channel that was talking about aliens (no, this was before “Ancient Aliens,” but it was the same kind of content), and as I went to bed I was suddenly completely freaked out that aliens were going to abduct me. Determined to be strong and to not call for parents to help (I knew they’d start to censor what I watched if I showed them that something had made me so scared), I closed my eyes and tried for sleep. Well, I dreamed about the abduction and woke up in a very cold sweat sometime in the middle of the night. The fact that it had been a dream immediately calmed me down. Taking a deep breath, I fell back into sleep, purposefully repeating the dream, only this time when the aliens abducted me I was ready for them. I escaped from their ship, leaving it to blow up as I returned to earth. And I never had problems from aliens ever again.

It was the same kind of attitude that I tried to take to every part of life. I was scared of the water before I learned how to swim, but I still jumped in the deep end (and had to be rescued). I was terrified of heights, so I chose to climb the tallest trees and hang out on top of the monkey bars at every opportunity I got. And as I conquered each of these fears, I felt more powerful and in control of my life. I was a very brave little daredevil, but this was before puberty and depression.

As I was told less and less to be me and more and more to be something that I wasn’t, I became less and less brave. The accomplishments of my youth slowed and ground to a halt. No more was I the daredevil. No more was I the risk taker. Gone was my confidence, but there was still the expectation of everyone for me to be confident. So I acted confident. I talked a big talk, and I learned how to mislead people into believing things about me that weren’t true, without ever saying anything that was technically a lie. This behavior became my armor to shield my existence. People were going to believe I was a boy, even if I knew I wasn’t, and even if I really didn’t want them to believe I was a boy.

And every night I would dream of myself without any of the pretention. I could just be me in my dreams. And every morning I would hope that somehow I would wake up and the outside of me would magically look like how I imagined I was supposed to look. And everyone would just accept that I was female and had always been female, and I wouldn’t ever have to mention to anyone that I remembered a part of it differently.

Two conflicting fears dominated my life at this point: the fear that someone would find out that I was really a girl in disguise (and hate me for it); and the fear that I would always be in disguise and never be allowed to be myself. I worked through years of problems with anorexia. I came close to taking my own life on three separate occasions. I would go through cycles of engaging with people in my life and disengaging, leaving me mostly friendless, with almost nobody knowing me very well.

And I spent years living with that fear. I was too cowardly to face any of them head on – I wasn’t brave like I had been when I was little. I knew that oblivion was my fate. At some point I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from taking my own life, and a part of me couldn’t wait. I was just biding my time until the end.

I’m still not sure what changed or what spawned my interest, but one day while I was on a break at work, I decided to do a google search to try and find out if there was some way to describe how I felt, how I was. I wondered if there were others who were struggling like me, and I longed to have the words to talk about my experience. I somehow found curiosity at a time in my life when I rarely found anything worthwhile, and it led me to understand that what I thought I knew about trans people was, in fact, terribly flawed. And as I read about HRT for the first time, I saw a ray of hope. What was being described was exactly what I had dreamed about, what I had always wanted but had never dared to believe could actually come true. Maybe oblivion wasn’t the only possibility.

And even though it was about thirteen years later than I had hoped, my body finally began to match my dreams. No more were dreams just a refuge from life, now they started becoming an extension of it. And that is why I don’t feel worthy of being called brave for coming out and transitioning – because it was the simplest, easiest choice to make. It was the only option. Who wouldn’t walk away from oblivion?

Chapter One – Let’s Talk about My Identities

Identity can be a weird thing, and I think I’m probably a little stranger than most when it comes to some of this stuff. But I’m going to attempt to give a complete description of how I got to where I am today, and how I came to understand some of my various identities, specifically ones relating to gender and sexuality (though a few other identities are mentioned). Also a warning note: while none of this post is graphic, it does talk about some specific practices with regards to sex and masturbation, so be prepared for that kind of explicit content.

*   *   *   *   *

I have to start by saying that my first identity is that of being female. This happened first chronologically (somewhere before I can remember), and it is also probably the identity with which I most strongly identify. It’s very possible that the early understanding of this identity is somehow the reason for such strong identification, but that’s moving into the realm of speculation that can really never be verified. But I cannot remember a time before I understood what “female” was and could recognize it as something that I was.

I also remember this early understanding leading me to some strange conclusions, circumstances, and interactions as a child. I had a concept of female long before I understood the idea of “male,” and so the young me just assumed that everyone was female. I don’t remember ever specifically thinking such a thought, but I do vividly recall the day when I first realized that not all adults had boobs. Like, bam! I was younger than five, and suddenly my mind was blown, and I began to see boobless adults everywhere (generally people call these people “men,” though presence or lack of boobs is in no way a determiner of gender). And I didn’t know what that meant, and it made me scared because I didn’t know what I’d be like as an adult, and I recall having a very specific aversion to the idea of not having boobs as an adult.

Slowly this revelation morphed into the societal concepts of men and women. I came to understand that you could very much know what you’d be like as an adult, and I felt so unlucky when everyone was telling me that I was male. I think this was the first time that I really hated the concept of “the system” or “the world” for making things this way. However, the idea of being left out because somehow I was “male” and not “female” according to everyone else was largely pushed to the back of my mind. Adulthood was eons away from the present, and right now I was just like everyone else and so it didn’t matter.

My closest friends were usually girls growing up. They were just more fun to hang around. And while I knew I’d get made fun of if I played with “girl toys” where others could see, they were usually way prettier than “boy toys.” Then I discovered legos, and at that point in time (the early nineties), legos weren’t really segregated as a gender-specific toy. There were so many possibilities with legos! And I could build anything that I could imagine. This was the first of many obsessions that I had growing up. My first complaint about legos? None of the sets ever came with enough minifigs. And there were like rarely any girls. Luckily, you could take the hair from some of the girl minifigs and put it on the “standard” smiling face to make that character a girl, too, which allowed me to decrease the size of the minifig gender gap (a gender gap that still doesn’t make any sense to me).

As I started attending school, my friendships with girls began to crumble and fade away. There was societal expectation or something, and they saw me as “the other group” instead of “one of them” and this was only heightened by the way that school separated us into boys and girls. Restrooms, gym classes. Teams for activities (“boys on this side of the room, girls on that side”). A few of my really close friendships with other girls remained, but I was told that I was supposed to hang out with the boys and in boy groups. This was when I first started getting depressed. I mean, boys were okay to hang out with occasionally, but they got pretty boring pretty quickly. I would retreat to my room, spending hours and hours playing with legos. I built entire worlds, made up stories. I also began writing down some of those stories, and I spent a lot of time making maps of my fictional worlds, and drawing my characters. All of those things (writing, sketching, and fictional map making) are important parts of my life even to this day.

But shortly after this point, the world was introduced to a phenomenon: Pokemon. And Pokemon was the greatest thing that I had ever seen. It made me interested in video games, it made me interested in card games, it made me interested in anime, and it made me interested in collecting things. Also, there were adorable pokemon, and badass pokemon, and pokemon for every kind of situation you could imagine! I grew up with pets (dogs, 4 cats, many fish in fish tanks), and pets that were bonded to you and had special powers? That was just amazing. This was my second obsession growing up.

However, unlike legos, my parents had a problem with pokemon. They didn’t like that they evolved (“it promotes The Theory of Evolution!” and even the nine year old me knew that the theory of evolution made a lot more sense than god creating the world in seven days), they didn’t like the violence (my retort: but they don’t fight to the death! They only fight to being knocked out, and then you make them better at a Pokecenter!), and they said the card game made them think of tarot cards. So Pokemon was banned in our house, and I was forced to get rid of my cards and games and everything that had to do with Pokemon.

So I had all of this obsession, and nothing to obsess over. What’s a girl to do? I was at summer camp when I saw these older kids playing another card game. And this one was much more mature. It had angels and demons and elves and goblins and wizards and magic. And that’s what it was called: Magic: the Gathering. I asked them to teach me how to play, and they obliged. Some of the rules I was taught weren’t quite correct (regeneration was like the most powerful ability ever according to these rules), but by partway through the next school year I had a couple of decks of my own and was playing regularly (if casually). By the time my parents thought to question my involvement in magic, I was immersed too deeply for them to even think about extricating me. I remember my mom asked me if it was a “good” game (meaning not evil, not if the mechanics and stuff were awesome), and she mentioned reservations about some of the menacing looking creatures and characters. So I told her that those were the bad guys and the point was to overcome the bad guys. I put together a deck that only features angels and knights and soldiers and pretty looking things and showed it to her. This satisfied her enough that she really never questioned Magic again.

A combination of getting involved in Magic, my dad teaching me to play DnD, a growing interest in video games, and my always love for books and comics made me realize that I was absolutely and definitely a geek. Or a nerd. Those terms were very undefined for me for many years. And while there weren’t any local card shops or comic shops to meet with fellow geeks, I had pretty much infinite access to the internet, and so I was able to connect with other people with shared interests.

But the joys of those kinds of connections were tempered with the awfulness that was the onset of puberty. Like the girls that I had been friends with, my puberty started several years earlier than most guys. But unlike those girls, my puberty came with the sharp realization of what that meant for my changing body. When body and facial hair began to grow, I felt so ashamed of it. I noticed the chests and hips of other women developing, and I saw that mine weren’t, and so my depression grew. And with puberty comes the onset of sexuality, so I had to figure out all about that while dealing with growing issues with how my body physically looked. Not to mention getting erections (for no discernable reason) in public places. That was the most embarrassing experience for me ever, made even more embarrassing by the fact that I wanted to hide the fact that I had a penis from everyone. I knew people assumed it, but I didn’t want to give them any proof of its existence.

Well, combine unlimited internet access with growing sexuality and you get plenty of room for exploration. I tried many things during those years, and I quickly discovered a few things: I was not in the least bit interested in pornography, and masturbation was one of the least pleasant experiences ever. It became sort of utilitarian: I’d become aroused and the only thing that stopped the arousal was masturbation, even if it made me feel awful every time, and never felt good. And masturbation is hard to do while wincing at the act. And so I finally stumbled upon a method that worked better than all the others: if I could forget about what the mirror said I looked like and focus on how I knew I was supposed to look (breasts, vag, hips, etc…), kept my junk hidden under underwear, and stroked it as I would stroke the proper equipment, the experience could be at least neutral. Not awful, but not amazing either.

And so to correspond with this process, it often was nice to look at pictures of women, of how I imagined my body to be. Not naked women – this wasn’t about masturbating TO the women in the pictures – but women in clothes, sometimes in underwear. It was about pretending that I was those women just long enough for me to disassociate with the parts that I had in order to stop feeling aroused and get on with my day.

It was during my exploration of pornography that I came to realize that I found peoples’ bodies attractive regardless of their gender. Of course, I told myself, I wasn’t gay, though. I don’t know how my parents would have reacted, but I wasn’t about to tell anyone, let alone admit to myself that my sexuality was anything other than heterosexual. And, besides, I generally was happier being around women anyway, so there was no reason for me to worry about that part of my sexuality. As time passed, I was always super conscious about LGBTQA issues that I heard about, and always tried to act in support, and even got into quite a few fights with my parents over marriage equality, all the while removing my own sexuality from the conversation. It wasn’t until I was at college that I had my first encounters with male partners. I was also exposed to the idea of bisexuality (thanks in part to friend of mine who has identified as bi for most of the time that I have known her), and began to realize that that was an identity that accurately described my approach to sexuality – I don’t really care what a person’s gender is so much as what that person is like.

During my college years I also had my first encounters with sex. I slept with several partners, but I never enjoyed myself. I became really good at faking an orgasm, because I didn’t want my partners to feel bad, and I was really happy when I was able to cause them pleasure. In retrospect, I wish I had been more honest about how I felt towards sex. But I thought they might hate me, or think that I was less of a person or something. And so I lied that it was a good time, time and time again, and I hid how much work it was to fake an orgasm, do the motion of having sex, and imagine my parts as being different (similar to with masturbating, I had problems functioning unless I did so). I term this kind of performance “sexual acrobatics.” It was physically exhausting and required me to do what felt like unnatural things with my body.

After I came out, I finally told my (now ex) girlfriend about my feelings toward sex, and we tried several things to make it more pleasing for me, but nothing really worked. It wasn’t until almost a year after we had broken up that I really gave thought to the fact that maybe I was asexual. A therapist I had been seeing at the time was encouraging me to “make sure to masturbate” all the time to keep my “sexual sensitivity” as I transitioned. But I didn’t want to. HRT had curbed my libido so I no longer needed to masturbate to stop feeling sexually aroused, and I was aroused much less often which was such a relief to me. And as I wondered why I was so opposed to doing what my therapist was suggesting, I began to think that maybe it was just part of who I was. Perhaps there wasn’t something wrong with me, or perhaps it wasn’t just a consequence of the dysphoria I had with certain parts of my body (which had been my theories about it up to that point). So I did some research and came to the conclusion that I was asexual.

However, more recently I have refined my identity even further, and consider myself demisexual rather than asexual, partially due to the influence of a partner that I had who identified as demisexual herself. I found that that word was a better description of how I feel about sex. I don’t like sex, but I like the idea of sex. I like being able to sexually please my partners, and I get my own kind of pleasure from their pleasure. And while none of those things mean that I couldn’t identify as asexual, demisexual just feels like a more accurate description to me.

Piper Chapman is one of the most fucked up characters I have ever had the pleasure of watching, and I have seen most of Martin McDonough’s (In Bruges, The Pillowman) work (if you are unfamiliar with McDonough and don’t like violence or awful people, you should probably remain unfamiliar).  In Orange is the New Black, we follow Chapman – and her fellow inmates – from their lives before prison into a messy pit of drama, hypocrisy, and betrayal.  But if Orange was only a show that featured interesting characters, a compelling story, and brilliant dialogue, it would be good.  What makes it great is that it goes beyond just being well done, pushing boundaries and telling stories that most of Hollywood pushes to the sidelines or completely ignores.  This story is about women, and all the shit that happens to women, but they can never speak about.  It’s about the users and those who are used.  It’s about the players and the fighters and the lovers.  It’s about the ones who just want to get off, and the ones who just want to get out.  It’s about our insecurities and convictions, the parts of each and every one of us that just want to scream at the universe sometimes.  It’s about us.

I think the best place to start while examining this series is the “love triangle” that is at the forefront of the plot.  Piper is engaged to Larry, but is incarcerated with her ex-girlfriend Alex, for whom she still has feelings.  Unlike almost every other girl centered film or series, it does not make one of the two relationships Piper is having out to be better than the other.  Piper is a terrible girlfriend, and just an awful person to most of the people around her.  Larry trumps it a little bit by being a pretty decent guy, but a terrible boyfriend; and Alex foils him in that she’s not really a great person, but she’s a really fucking good girlfriend.  Neither of these relationships is healthy, and the series does a great job of showing that by having neither of them work out for Piper at all by the end of the season.

Again, this is very contrary to what most “chick flicks” portray, in that a girl’s worth is defined by her ability to discern a good relationship from a bad, and that there is always a good option available.  Not to mention that most of the choices that Piper makes are identical to the choices that most leading female characters in “chick flicks” make, but hers end up going to shit, because those kinds of entitled, self-centered choices don’t help build relationships or make friends, and they aren’t good choices to make.

I think the show also handles Piper’s sexuality very well.  Her brother mentions – and I think this is somewhat the crux of what the show is trying to portray in the area of her sexuality – that people can’t just be defined “exactly.”  Being bisexual myself, I’m very familiar about how most other people don’t understand it enough to even start to talk about it in conversations.  Piper glosses over the hard conversations by mentioning that she’s “not gay anymore,” or that she “used to be gay.”  Her brother seems to be the only character from her before prison life who seems to understand.  He mentions sexuality falling along a spectrum, and not being defined in exacts.  The subtlety is there, the context is there, and yet the series doesn’t overdo it by bashing its audience over the head with it.  Instead of using contrived repetition to hone its point, it uses acceptance and clarity.  Her bisexuality isn’t weird in the show.  A few characters find it weird, but the show doesn’t.

And the same is true for the show’s transgender character, Sophia.  She’s not comical or a farce, though she has some pretty hilariously witty lines.  But she is accepted by the show.  Not by all of the show’s characters, but by the show itself.  And the really great part is that it shows her (in flashbacks) pre-transition as well, without sacrificing any of her reality.  She’s not even clearly transgender to the audience until the show tells you that she is.

It also offers what I feel are some very truthful insights into real world problems for trans people.  She has a son who refuses to talk to her, a wife who is “okay with her transition, but not with her sexual reassignment surgery,” and then who later in the series wants Sophia’s blessing to see a man romantically.  She’s placed in a position where the continuance of her hormone replacement therapy is threatened.  For me, I know all too well the strain that many people place on trans people.  Others view transitioning as doing something selfish, as doing something for yourself, and it really feels like they’re equating it to going to the spa, or getting a gym membership.  But what they don’t understand is that trans people are just trying to reach ground zero, reach an equal playing field.  Cis people start there.  When a person is drowning, it is not a selfish act to swim for a buoy.  It is not a selfish act to work hard and long, building the best kind of raft you can out of whatever driftwood you find while clinging to that buoy.  And it is especially not selfish to ask for help from all the people floating around who were given boats at birth.  It’s not fair, and it never will be, but it is certainly not selfish.

I also want to talk about Alex.  Laura Prepon’s Donna on That 70s Show was by far my favorite, and she delivers again with an Alex that I fell in love with.  I wanted her and Piper to end up together so badly, despite knowing that Piper was terrible for Alex, because I knew Alex would take her on anyway.  She is smart, confident, witty, and really good at moving large quantities of heroine.  You know, everything I look for in a girl.  I am honestly just too in love with her character to talk more about her at this point, but I plan on making another blog post just about Alex, but we’ll see if I ever get to a point where I can write about her with gushing.

There are so many more things to talk about, but this is getting long and there’s enough more to mention to take up several articles worth of space.  If you haven’t seen Orange, you definitely should.

Disney’s Frozen

Frozen will definitely find itself ranked among my favorite Disney movies of all time.  It features dynamic characters that easily move outside the bounds of stereotypes, a stellar track of original songs, and a non-traditional plot that seamlessly worked with the magical fantasy world.  I could laud about the film’s triumphs for an entire essay, but I’d rather focus this post on how the film spoke to me as a woman, as being transgender, and as someone who has grown up loving and watching Disney movies, especially Disney princess movies.

While past Disney films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Mulan have had strong female protagonists, those protagonists’ lives and stories have been overpopulated with an emphasis on “finding true love,” or extolling the beauty and benefits of loving a significant other.  Even Mulan – which strays a noticeable distance from love for most of the plot – begins with a matchmaker sequence and ends with a romance between Mulan and Shang.  While there is nothing wrong with the concept of searching for a compatible romantic partner, a girl should never feel like that is the thing which defines her worth.  Mulan is awesome because she saves all of China, despite all the things (including her culture) working against her, but framing her story with the search for love at the beginning and the end removes some of the focus from her accomplishments and replaces them with the “accomplishment” of finding a good match.

I know that I’ve had some trouble with this in my own life.  For many years I judged myself on the status of my relationship with someone: if I was single, I was a failure; if I was in a relationship, I was succeeding.  This not only led to me getting into relationships that I shouldn’t have for the sake of having a relationship, but I was also filled with unreasonable expectations for those relationships.  I expected to find “true love” when I should have been focusing on fostering things like good communication skills and looking at things like our compatible desires.  I wanted so much to be in love that I would pretend that I was, lying to my partners and to myself about how I really felt in the relationships.

On no level am I trying to say that Disney movies are solely responsible for those problems that I had, but if there had been more Disney movies for me to watch like Frozen and Brave, where the women were not defined primarily by the concept of “True Love,” then it would have been a voice working against the system, rather than adding its voice to the cacophony of influences on young girls’ lives.

For me, Frozen was a welcome reminder of things that I had already discovered.  Like Ana, I realized long ago that not all Prince Charmings are quite so charming, and like Elsa, I realized that hiding my true self was only self-destructive, and that I cannot be afraid of being myself just because someone might get hurt.  It hurts people to shut them out of your life.

Elsa’s character was definitely what drew me most into the movie.  I understand all too well the fear of hiding a secret about yourself, and the even greater fear that strikes when someone uncovers part of the truth.  The uproar, the accusations and name-calling, and the “talking about what to do with me” are all symptoms that I have experienced, and none of it is fun.  Like Elsa, I tried to “conceal, don’t feel,” but of course it only worked in the short term.  Like her ice powers, my true gender identity was building pressure to escape and let the world know the truth about me.

If the song, “Part of Your World,” from The Little Mermaid is an accurate representation of the hidden desire to transition, “Let it Go,” from Frozen is similarly perfect at describing the freedom of coming out.

“Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back any more
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door
I don’t care what they’re going to say
Let the storm rage on
the cold never bothered me anyway”

When I came out, I started with one person, then two more, then a few more, until it became easier and easier to tell people and I reached a point where I just said to myself, “screw it,” and came out publicly on facebook and across all media and means.  The song builds in a similar way, starting soft with her barely accepting of herself and growing until she’s howling back at the wind and the mountains that she is who she is, and that’s okay.  It would have been inspiring to have heard that song and seen this movie while I was going through that process.

Transitioning is hard, but if a Snow Queen can be loved by her sister and accepted – differences and all – by her people, then how hard can it be to be loved and accepted for being a woman, something people see every day?

Personal Advocacy

One thing I really hate is when people simultaneously try to convince me that religion is an “answer” to my problems and tell me that “god doesn’t make mistakes.” There are quite a few things wrong with this approach.
First of all, religion (no matter which one, but I’ll specifically use Christianity, as that is the religion I encounter most in my daily life) is not supposed to be an “answer,” even if you look at the religion internally. For Christianity, the “answer” already happen. Jesus died, “answering” everyone’s sins. Religion is a journey through which insight might be found (depending on who you talk to). If religion was all about being an answer, things like faith, mysterious ways of greater beings, and cryptic allusions wouldn’t be needed or used.
Secondly, “god doesn’t make mistakes” is just about the least helpful way of saying anything about being transgender. So, since god doesn’t make mistakes, my gender dysphoria was intended? And he also intended for me to have the means to correct that so that I can use my personal advocacy to improve my life? Okay, I could be on board with that (but it’s just a way of inserting god extraneously into the conversation). Or maybe they mean that god just doesn’t make mistakes with physical forms (this is the interpretation that they seem to imply), and so we shouldn’t mess with that part of a person. So either they believe messing with the mind (where I guess god made a mistake?) is okay, or they believe that severe depression and dysphoria should just be suffered through (probably resulting in suicide, as statistics show about untreated individuals). Now, even ignoring the fact that trying to correct gender dysphoria with mind-alteration has been tried in the past (and the fact that it is not recommended by the DSM as proper treatment), what gives them the power to “play god” in such a selective way? So I’m just supposed to trust that you have a better idea of how to deal with this than the professionals who have training and schooling and research and experience to back them up? How is that a good way to convince me of anything?
And while I’m on the subject of convincing people of things, this has come up multiple times as someone is trying to sell me on their religion. This is where they go first after “you should believe in god.” Now, I might give your religion a chance if you are accepting of me for who I am, and then offer me a compelling or interesting reason to look into it. This process does the opposite of both.
One thing I am glad about is the fact that some parts of popular media seem to be moving away from this kind of thinking. In Fringe (I told you I’d write more about it), I really appreciate the fact that all of the problems in the series have human origins and also have human solutions. There is no “greater power” who fixes things, nor is there some “greater power” who causes all of our problems. I like to call this “Personal Advocacy.”
Personal Advocacy means that we have the power (individually and in a group) to create our own problems and solve them.
One of the major themes across the first four seasons is Walter dealing with the consequences of crossing between universes to save Peter. In the end, though, Walter is able to fix what he messed up (to be fair, Peter does the fixing, but by using Walter’s machine, and with Walter also helping him to realize what choice to make).
This theme of personal advocacy is reiterated across the series from the problem of the Observers in season five, to Olivia making her own escape from the alternate universe in season three.
The most wonderful part about this theme is the fact that it supports thinking which enables trans people to be an advocate for improving their own lives. But it does so in a way that doesn’t seek to alienate the trans person from those who would lend support.

Fringe – First Three Seasons

So, lately I have been binging on episodes of the TV show “Fringe.”  For those unfamiliar, it follows a division of the FBI called Fringe Division as they investigate extra-ordinary events, which often appear paranormal or supernatural, but which all end up being able to be explained by the science within the show (which definitely goes well outside the realm of recognized scientific fact).  I’m about halfway through season four, so I’ll probably do another review once I’ve finished the series, but I feel like there’s a lot to talk about in the first three seasons, anyway.

One of the best things about the show is the fact that there are three distinct major female characters, all of whom feature significant character development, screen time, and who frequently interact with each other in meaningful ways.

Olivia Dunham is the main protagonist of the series, and she’s a great example of a strong female character that isn’t just “thrown in” as a token strong female character.  She is never portrayed as a character who is “overcoming” being a woman, or succeeding despite being a woman; nor is her character portrayed as being better because she’s a woman.  I think that is absolutely wonderful.  Too many series and films let the genders of their characters matter more than the characters themselves, often resulting in sexist portrayals and places where otherwise captivating characters fall flat.

Nina Sharp is the second main female character.  She is cunning, mysterious, and completely outside the realm of being defined by her gender.  Singlehandedly (one of her arms is cybernetic), she runs the largest corporation in the world of the series.  It’s often hinted at that her ethics might not line up with what most people would term “good,” but there are other points (mainly in flashbacks) that hint in the other direction.  Either way, she is deeply self-motivated and in control of her own character’s progression.

Astrid Farnsworth is the third main female character.  At first (and throughout most of the first season) she seemed like a throw-in character.  Her role within the world is as an investigative research assistant to Olivia and the two Bishops (Peter and Walter), so she is often tasked with the grunt work.  This led to most of her dialogue and interactions in the first season being mostly technical and about progressing the individual episode’s plot line for the other characters.  However, starting in the second season, she is written in as an actual character, with her own story and plot pieces.  She’s still subordinate to the other major characters, but that mostly seems a victim of limited space to expound upon individual storylines.

Overall, I feel like the show is very positive towards women.  There are, however, a few moments which bother me.  The show basically ignores the existence of LGBT persons.  While it doesn’t negatively portray LGBT people, it also doesn’t even acknowledge their existence, which I think is a huge flaw in the overall writing.  Additionally, the entire way to resolve the conflict between the two parallel universes in season three is described by one of the characters as “if Peter Bishop chooses our Olivia, our universe survives.  If he chooses their Olivia…”  Literally the fate of two entire universes hang in the balance, and the writers put it in a perspective of a man has to choose between two different women (parallel universe copies of each other) to resolve the conflict.  Except that choosing between the two Olivias doesn’t even end up being the resolution to the conflict.  It’s a complete red herring, and, in my opinion, an interchangeable element to the plot (as in, any kind of red herring would have worked in its place).  The plot line didn’t have to line up with typical patriarchal paradigms, and I believe it would have taken very little effort (with no negative effect on the plot) to pursue a different line.  Of course, this isn’t the most grievous of offenses, especially coming from a show that already is doing so many things well without going down those lines.  However, I think it is important to point out and realize instances where even wonderful things fall short.