My dysphoria has been bad for the past two weeks. Not bad bad, but definitely more grating than it has been in the recent past. It’s just, all these little things keep getting under my skin. The mirrors have been conspiring with each other again, I’ve been deadnaming myself here and there, and the time it takes to get myself dressed in the morning has stretched out. On top of that, some things that I thought I had total clarity on - how I define my sexuality, specifics desires around vaginoplasty - suddenly feel up in the air. It’s been frustrating and bewildering, and to some degree I feel like “Shouldn’t I already be past all of this?”
I can attribute part of my instability to my aforementioned health issues - it’s hard to feel good about yourself when you don’t feel good. Other parts come from the reflection I’ve been doing since I passed the two year mark on HRT last week. When I first started spending time in community with other trans people, many of the women I looked up to were hitting two years on E. I idolized them for what I considered their obvious successes in that time. Reaching two years became a big motivator for me, and a way to let myself off the hook when I felt like I wasn’t meeting my own standards for “progress.” If I can just make it to two years, I told myself, everything will be okay. And of course as Alana likes to joke, “[insert duration of time here] is when the HRT REALLY starts to kick in.” Now that I’m here, I’m proud of how much the work of early transition has paid off, but I can see that I still have a lot of growing to do, and some struggles I face that trigger dysphoria for me are never going to go away. I’m pretty sure I’m always going to get stared at, hear a pause when I say “this is she” on the phone, feel defensive when in a room full of cis women.
Reaching this milestone seems to also be where my questions around what’s next in my material transition as well as how I define myself come in. I recently took Lilith to her vaginoplasty consult, and despite knowing most of the material we covered I found myself doubting some of the conclusions I reached over a year ago when I decided to get in the surgery pipeline. Am I willing to wait as long as three years for this operation? Am I willing to dilate for the rest of my life? Could I settle for zero/minimal depth instead? What is it that I really want? Similarly, I was offering some advice on a lex post regarding sexual orientation labels and something about writing out my understanding and affiliation with the term “lesbian” kneecapped me. Is “lesbian” a label that has ever benefited me in any way? Can I just be queer without picking a flag? I’m not so sure my quick and vocal embrace of being a lesbian is as helpful and accurate now as I thought it would be at the start of my transition.
Speaking more generally, I suspect that when it comes to my relationship with my transness I give off a really put together vibe to my trans friends and acquaintances. (I have no idea what the cis people in my life think, see my previous entry on The Void for my best guess.) I’m not sure when I learned to speak and write with authority - maybe from dashing out manifestos during my net art blogging days, maybe from leading a team of developers at a startup - but the truth is when I write with authority there’s a combination of self-persuasion and unassailability that I’m usually after. This blog has been and continues to be my aegis, where I’ve come up with these narratives that hold together so much of my current understanding of myself. The truth is, I tell stories that make it seem like I have my shit together because I need those stories.
Admitting that I’m fallible and prone to mistakes like any other person, scrutinizing my desires - and dysphoria is a reflection of desire - is really hard for me, and I feel a lot of shame when the mask slips as it inevitably does. Sometimes too, things just boil over and I find myself melting down in an embarrassing way. Bath Bomb is simultaneously one of my favorite pieces of writing on the blog and the one that makes me cringe the most. Some of my peers tell me I need to lean into the cringe, and I’m taking some baby steps there. Last month I attended a brief creative writing workshop for transes in town and managed to get some gushy feelings down on paper. What I didn’t manage to do was talk to any of the other participants. I’m going to attend another one next Friday, and I’m hoping to do better.
I’m sure that this wave of intensified dysphoria will pass and then it will be back to the long retail shift that is the bulk of transition. It hurts to sit with the idea that some dysphoria is going to continue to be a destabilizing force, no matter what milestones I’ve passed. When I surprise myself with new desires or newfound clarity on old desires, it can be scary to sit with that and to ask (to borrow a phrase I heard in support group) “how many more elephants are in the room?” But I really don’t get a choice on these things, I’m going to keep bumping into elephants just like everybody else. I need to work on finding my peace with that.