One of the gifts I received for my birthday this year was a collection of queer poems, prose, and stories spanning the classical period to the present day, from Catullus to Cat Fitzpatrick. Flipping through the book I spotted a comic about coming out of the closet by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel. I recognized Bechdel’s visual style, but couldn’t place from where. I mentioned reading the story to my friend Alana, who a few days later lent me a copy of Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home. In a weird coincidence, Lindsey had also started reading Fun Home for her queer book group, so I had no choice but to dive in.
I wasn’t five pages into the book when it hit me: I had read this graphic novel before. Some loose memories started to coalesce: while I was in college 15 years ago, I used to sneak away at least once a week to the third floor alcove of the campus library where the art books - and more importantly, graphic novels - were kept. I think I discovered my “stash” looking for books on art history, but I was also a big fan of webcomics and Scott McCloud’s writings at that time, so that might have been a factor as well. I would spend hours randomly pulling out comics to read through. I remember reading Sandman this way, and discovering the beautiful but p r o b l e m a t i c world of 70s underground comix. I also read a lot of queer comics, like Bechdel’s work. In my memory I feel my face getting flushed as I paged through meditations on sex and sexuality, looked at depictions of bodies very different from mine, and saw writers and artists engaging with gender in a way that I thought I was not allowed to do. I felt voyeuristic, peering into a world that I had no business in. I was excited, but also felt trepidation and shame. I never checked out any of these books, and I didn’t share the voracious amount of queer comic reading I was doing with anyone.
Sometimes reflecting back on my pre-transition emotions feels like looking at one of those sets of talking buttons people train their dogs to use. I had four buttons: Angry, Excited, Anxious, and Silly (unlockable usually when drunk or high). This was really confusing and limiting for me. For instance, if I felt sad I would usually press the Angry or Anxious button, and I couldn’t tell that it was actually “sad” that I was trying to communicate. Similarly if I felt understood, vulnerable, or yearning for gender alignment - I would press Excited. Problem is, I would press the same button when I felt sexually aroused, so I interpreted the physical response encountering media like queer comics that brought my gender feelings to the forefront in the same way that I interpreted my response from watching porn. This led to shame (press the Anxious button), and so I thought I was a pervert and hid what I was doing. Transition has gradually healed me, and my emotional awareness now is much more nuanced than it used to be. I can remember in my first few months spending time with sadness for the first time in 20 years and just relishing the hot tears flowing down my face. I was starting to finally connect directly with my feelings.
It turns out this reduction of emotional awareness is a really common experience for trans people before we accept ourselves, and I suspect it’s part of why historically gender euphoria from practices like crossdressing has been interpreted by society as fetish. The critical misunderstanding is the assumption that everyone can access their full set of emotions, and so trans people should be able to tell the difference between sexual arousal and gender euphoria. Trans people however are often extremely practiced at disregarding our own feelings because of years of social reinforcement that our feelings around gender are “wrong,” and so that muscle of awareness atrophies. Because we have repressed our emotional awareness in order to protect ourselves, we fail to make distinctions between intense feelings, like euphoria and arousal.
One example of this wire-crossing that many trans women get scared by in early transition is the “euphoria boner.” Sometimes early forays into gender exploration can give trans women erections in addition to the joy they experience, and this can cause a lot of shame. As emotional awareness recovers, the euphoria boners go away but the feelings of affirmation stay. I’m really glad that I had heard about euphoria boners early on because otherwise I’m sure I would have been disgusted by myself in my first few experiments with clothes and makeup. Once I came out to myself and found myself using the overloaded Excited button less, I was able to better piece apart my feelings, and the erections went away - what a relief!
Returning to my comics reading in college, I'm unsure what trans stories I may have encountered back then, and if my memory of Alison Bechdel’s work is any indication I might only remember them upon rediscovery. Given my levels of emotional repression I’m not sure how much any particular comic could have helped me figure things out sooner, but my time in the library did something that helped set me in the right direction. Years later in the first few months of my gender questioning phase I sought out an inordinate amount of comics online in order to understand what I was going through. Some examples included Real Life Comics, Comics By Xan, works by Tess Scilipoti and Robin Brooks, and tons of one-off meme comics on r/egg_irl. More recently some trans comic artists I’m into include Sam Szabo, Bishakh Som, Mattie Lubchansky, and ND Stevenson. As more trans comic artists come out and share their experiences, I'm hopeful that future eggs wandering through comic and graphic novel collections will have an easier time of it.
Self reconciliation seems to come from approaching memories as they surface with gentle curiosity. Unpacking emotional repression is hard work because it requires admitting that what we think of as our conscious choices are often informed by unconscious motivations, such as protecting ourselves from gender feelings. It's especially hard to then take that acceptance and use it to peel back characterizations we may have applied to ourselves, like "sinful" or "perverted." I think the work is worth it though because addressing memories of repression can be an opportunity to find forgiveness for ourselves and unburden ourselves from shame.