that’s me in the corner, losing my religion: on transfundamentalism

part one: an introduction and some discussion on religion itself
i had one of those revelations yesterday when leaving a comment on the always-excellent Natalie Reed’s blog, which is hosted on freethought blogs, a site for atheist/skeptic blogs. now, i’m certainly skeptic yet religious, one of those balancing games which is typical in my life…i often believe that religion is meant as a blueprint for us to be good to each other but that it shouldn’t be absolute or considered part of someone’s social or moral character. i hate the degree to which religion has been used to hurt others, justify killing, etc…these are part and parcel of fundamentalism, the especially heinous end of religious practice where people put the concerns of the religion as interpreted by a few above the concerns of other human beings. this is where zealotry, holy war, and hatred come from.

i understand that you might have a different view of religion than i do. i consider it something that, like alcohol, can be good or evil but when it’s evil it often becomes linked to stupidity and violence. i know that many people have very strongly held beliefs about religion being what defines them or what they consider the scourge of the universe and i suggest you consider i come from neither position and that be respected. i was raised fundamentalist Christian, and tried to stick to that fundamentalism through and after transition as back when i dealt with it (though they’ve since changed their mind) they didn’t care if i just married a man and adopted 9000 little white children. of course, it turned out that i’m gay and that quickly put me at odds with the church in question and i was administratively removed for reasons strongly connected to my homosexuality.

part two: cis people force the creation of trans orthodoxy
it’s pretty simple: the demands of cis people for compliance from trans people, especially trans women, are what leads to the toxic orthodoxies that permeate the trans community. i’m not saying that trans people who do bad things are blameless, but i am saying that in behaving the way they do, they’re merely submitting to what cis people want us to do and demand from us. in other words, they’re doing the work of the kyriarchy, consciously or unconsciously. i want to remind y’all that while we should consciously resist kyriarchy, i do understand that people sometimes have trouble unlearning kyriarchical values, especially when they get in the position of enforcer for a smaller community and thus believe that this is how they’re supposed to act rather than question and destroy things which in turn oppresses them. in other words, the enforcer believes that their actions and their enforcing defends them from the kyriarchy when it merely holds kyriarchy’s rage in abeyance.  in other words, your complicity will not protect you on a permanent basis.

part three: like fundamentalists, subscribers to trans orthodoxies use code words 
if you grew up in a fundamentalist religion, or were familiar with one by contact, you know that there’s a lot of coded words used to express an opinion about a person which might not have the same meaning to someone outside that religion. an example of this comes from the religion i was raised in, something i used to be called…a lot: a sweet spirit, which is a nice way of saying that a girl is charming but slow and not particularly beautiful in the heteronormative manner that said religion encourages. a similar one is what people are considered to have: free agency, which we are assumed to be required to follow in order to remain in the good graces of this church, but also to remind us that the ability to make choices is fraught with risk and responsibility.

similarly, the “trans community” uses lots of code words. we talk about stealth, which originally meant a trans person who doesn’t have to mention their transness as part of their everyday life. this is a very privileged position and i will allocute to that i do occupy a position of my transness not being a daily issue…all my documentation matches me in gender and name and it’s not a daily issue in terms of gender presentation. the problem is that stealth has become a value judgment, often hooked up in heteronormative/cisnormative beauty standards, mandatory heterosexuality, and gender-normative presentation (femme for girls, butch for boys) and used as a weapon. like free agency it’s more about satisfying leaders than being your own person. for the record: i don’t care how you choose to live your life, just remember that the term stealth is deprecated because it’s got all this baggage attached to it.  similarly, there’s a number of terms trans women use to refer to the alleged masculinity of other trans women, and i know trans men i know who have complained of similar terms in their line…but that’s not my place…and then there’s how badly we treat genderqueers generally, which is sad.  anyways, i’d rather not give any of those terms any air time. these feel a lot like sweet spirit, because they’re designed to keep a person on a specific chain. they’re often directed at outliers who don’t fit for one reason or another…a trans woman who wears pants or presents as butch, or a trans guy who’s a total dandy (seriously, how can anyone not love a dandy?) and as a result the normative structure of these orthodoxies attacks these people, often for who they are.

part four: like fundamentalist religion, trans orthodoxies know many sects and factions
fundamentalists come in many stripes, faiths, and versions of common faiths. in short, there’s a lot of different kinds of religious fundamentalism. similarly, there’s a lot of different kinds of trans orthodoxy which work to exclude. there’s my old friends the Harry Benjamin Syndrome types…they probably don’t need an introduction since they fit a very specific and narrow mindset where they have decided that they and only they are somehow diseased in a way that causes them to need hormones to cure this disease…i mean, folks, isn’t that called BEING TRANS? basically, to be an HBSer, you have to be a femme, white, able-bodied, middle-class-or-better trans woman…the question is open if you have to be heterosexual or not, it seems controversial amongst that mindset. HBSers often claim people who don’t identify with them (they *love* laying claim to Lynn Conway) and it feels like invariably they pass judgment and find almost every trans woman wanting. we call this toxic girl hate where i come from. (i dunno, and none of my trans guy friends know, if there’s a male equivalent to or version of HBSer. if there is, gentlemen, please accept my most sincere apologies.

there’s the True Transsexuals, who used to go by “classical transsexuals” (you’re into Stravinsky? omg me too!) who claim that transsexualism is a “birth defect” and that they transition for identity reasons completely unrelated to sexual orientation. of course, they also then insist that you must be heterosexual…also, last i checked this screams shrilly over the fact that many trans women have identity issues and don’t merely transition because of sexual orientation…but why do they care if someone does? i’m not listening to a pile of homophobes whine about internalized transphobia. again, you have to be femme, able-bodied, and probably in a relationship with a guy beforehand for the True Transsexual ideal to apply, and…you know what, folks? i just don’t even know. the amount of judging the True Transsexuals do is pretty close to obsessive and i often wonder, much like the HBSers, how anyone lives up to their standards. also don’t ever tell these folks they’re under the “transgender umbrella” or you’ll deal with lashing out the likes of which makes me think of some scenes from Aliens. the True Transsexual is only found in trans woman form, and they often say horrible things about trans guys that led to trans men being excluded from trans spacer and being forced to form their own groups…the True Transsexual mindset dismisses trans men altogether, which is so gross i could say “gross” 144 times.

there’s the support group mindset, a situation like the one locally where there is absolute control of resources and social space for trans people. the situation in my city is by no means unique, but it makes it a very hard place to be a trans person who doesn’t conform with an ultra-femme, able-bodied, moneyed, white ideal. are you noticing a theme here? generally in a support group there are certain distinctive features that make it a lot like an independent “nondenominational” fundamentalist church: obsession with collecting “mandatory donations”, a small flock of trans women who get to pass judgment on newcomers, strictly enforced standards of gendered dress, and, of course, some random person who’s in charge because they decided they’re important. this is the facilitator, whose ability to set the tone of a meeting and decide who should be treated with respect and without…they come awfully close to a preacher, don’t they? anyways, the flock is kept manageable and the support group itself uses its vast power over resources to make sure you have to come to their trough if you want to be trans or work without knowing where it’s safe to go. the support group mindset often only develops in places where support groups hold a lot of power and keep all their information close to the vest, where, in other words, the support group becomes a gatekeeper for trans people. in places where information is shared more freely and there is less resource scarcity, a support group sucking isn’t quite as severe a problem, yet the support group mentality seems not to form. it’s so ironic that it’s like a black fly in your chardonnay…in other words, not ironic at all, just Deeply Problematic.

finally, there’s idol worship, which many trans people vest on folks like Kate Bornstein, Dean $pade, and various others…remember when Riki Wilchins was en vogue? idol worship is bad because it comes with uncritical thought towards the fucked-up things these people stand for, from $pade’s consistent degendering of trans women of color who he speaks over and his generally shitty attitude towards trans women in general (though he seems to consider a few tokens to be okay…kinda like a country club that takes five Black members to go with 995 white ones and thus claim they’re not racist) to Bornstein’s self-appointment as “aunt” to all the trans community and consistent use of her own narrative as typical of all trans people, a tactic which talks over trans men in general and a lot of trans women and genderqueers who aren’t like her at all!  idols can be malignant and self-serving ($pade) or well-intentioned but ultimately harmful (Bornstein), but their true believers cannot be dissuaded in a manner which matches that of religious zealotry.  you can make your point over and over, but it’s like dealing with a missionary who sits next to you on the bus, because they will not be dissuaded by facts, logic, or pointing out the hypocrisy of these people.  if we are to flourish as trans people, we have to stop the idol worship…even if we had (and deserve) better idols than $pade and Bornstein, idol worship still sucks.

part five: apologetics and heretics 
i brought up true believers in the last paragraph, so perhaps we should move on to the issue of apologetics. if you’re not familiar with the Christian version of  ”apologetic”, it means someone who defends the faith and also attempts to expose flaws in other faiths or people who choose to eschew religion altogether. trans apologetics defend their version of what it’s like to be trans against other trans people, ensuring that the brunt of their hatred is thrust at other trans people, rather than poking holes in the kyriarchy and its problems. the most egregious trans apologetics are people who know that the support group, their idol, etc. is Deeply Problematic but they defend it because they want to stay in the good graces of the group or hope that maybe their idol will toss them some favor someday. they’re often scared to stand up to the power structure for fear the power structure might cast them out and declare them lesser, too, even in private, out of fear that expressing any dissent even quietly will somehow get back to the powers that be. a lot of fundamentalist apologetics often are frightened of their own church and how they will be seen by God, even if that religious worldview does not provide for an omniscient God, so these behaviors go pretty much hand-in-hand. i remember someone apologizing profusely for how messed up the local support group was who became very afraid that i might tell *anyone* that she said that…of course later her conscience caught up with her and she decided to basically label me a heretic in public while apologizing again for doing the same privately but reminding me that she “had to.”

heretics, oh, heretics. i think the problem that people miss is that we are all, in some way, heretics. in some way, every human being is somehow imperfect by someone’s test. writing off the concerns of a trans woman excluded from a space as her being “bitter and angry” is basically stamping her a heretic. similarly, telling a trans guy that he shouldn’t complain that a support group is like 98% not guys is doing the same, and also really Not Okay to do…imagine how it feels to be one outlier in a room of 50 people? the labeling of people as heretics is part of how the trans orthodoxy works to actively keep the orthodoxy sacrosanct. it’s much like how fundamentalist sects toss people out…call them unbelievers, call them heretics, but most of all, remind them of their place and make them go away until such a time as they are willing to conform to the orthodoxy. of course, i remember being a gay kid in a church with no room for gay kids…there is no way i could fit the orthodoxy. i am not going to wake up tomorrow white, able-bodied, or possessed of money…there is no way i can fit these orthodoxies. it feels exactly the same…here is this group of people, and the rules say you’re not allowed, erica. erica the heretic, it even kind of has a ring to it.

part six, and conclusion: transfundamentalism
the “trans community” as we know it is not a community at all. it’s a patchwork where sometimes you luck out and sometimes you don’t, and certain voices, bodies, and experiences are kept out at all costs if you don’t luck out. transition too young or too old? nope. transition outside the trans-industrial complex? heretic. butch trans woman? call her “it”, that’ll learn her! (yes this actually happened to me) trans guy who doesn’t want surgery? police his life choices. trans woman who doesn’t want surgery? claim they’re not really transsexual!  genderqueer? (insert like the 9500 ways the community fails genderqueers here). when the community goes to its worst four poles, detailed above, the tactics used by these orthodoxies are indistinguishable from fundamentalist religious practice and thus constitute transfundamentalism, an ugly package of leaders, followers, and apologetics which ultimately seek to tear other trans people apart as part of what looks like a holy war rather than question why they’re obeying these commands and demonizing their trans brothers, sisters, and siblings for some illusory concept of safety and inclusion.

transfundamentalism inherently defends and upholds the kyriarchy, because that’s all it is. to be free as people who are oppressed, as trans people are, we must overturn the kyriarchy. if you’re a transfundamentalist, examine why obedience to a power structure matters more to you than your fellow human beings, as that’s exactly what fundamentalism is. it establishes that there are “these people” and “those people” rather than to focus on how we are all connected. if you’re friends with transfundamentalists, encourage them to question the power structures they uphold, work for, and support through work or money. remind them that idol worship doesn’t do a damn thing about the struggle for freedom. if you’re neither, know the signs of transfundamentalism and watch out for them pervading your support groups, social spaces, classrooms, and homes. remember that resisting transfundamentalism can be a daily struggle.

to be free, equal, and respected, we must smash transfundamentalism.

because of the shame associated with vulnerability…

so this weekend my post about my experience with psychosurgery blew up all over Reddit.

there were responses in three camps, somewhat as expected:

1. you’re so brave!
2. you’re full of shit!
3. omg that’s horrible wtf world?

while i’d rather not be either of the first two, for some reason the second hit especially hard. partially, i’m sure, because nobody wants to be accused of being full of shit, but also partially because i’m scared that judgments like that will prevent me from ever being taken seriously and i’m really afraid of that. part of the reason i started blogging was to try to figure out how to provide an alternative voice to the consistently white-and-privileged trans voices that are seen, but at the same time i know that i’ve sometimes done something else that blogs are for, namely exorcised my own personal demons for a public audience. some of those demons include the suck of isolation, the fact that the “trans community” is a treehouse open to a limited segment of trans people, and yes, that i am a survivor of various types of physical, sexual, and medical violence. i can’t be me without talking about a lot of that stuff, you see…and i think this is perfectly reasonable, but i’m kind of wondering how to be taken seriously in light of what happened this weekend.

at the same time, i discovered last week from one of the illustrious organizers of Remembering Your Dead that apparently my reports of mispronouncing and mispronouning at Remembering Your Dead (and having a dance party afterwards!) aren’t credible because nobody in the local “trans community” knows me and can verify this. this is a fine example of how to build walls: tell someone that because nobody knows who you are, you must not count. i’ve presented a consistent identity with this blog and twitter; i used to go by Violet in a few IRC channels here and there in the late-00s, but i concluded that i liked my desired-but-disallowed name of Erica and wanted to reclaim it…as i’ve said, Erica is not my real name and i have been very plain from the get-go that this is the case. not everyone lives with the social privilege of being out, and i have what is best described as a “fuckton” of student loan debt and given that it’s hard enough being visibly queer, disabled, and not especially pretty when looking for work, it’s sort of ridiculous to hold me to that standard especially given that i have no local backup whatsoever. i’m trying to work through and accept the isolation thing and i’m doing a horrible job because it just makes me very much down on myself.

i hate admitting that i’m not allowed in the treehouse, folks, it makes me feel really pathetic. i do not gain some strength from being an outsider…i’d rather not be. i am not used to being an outsider because though i’m not everyone’s BFF, i certainly am not some friendless weasel or anything…i don’t do especially well with the outsider role because it’s strange to me and i don’t know what to do when stuck in it. usually i can gather together all the outsiders and people without cliques and get them together, but that doesn’t work so well in this case. there are voices and people who are trans who are shut out by how much we don’t really show any diversity in our community, from the reality that yes, butch trans women do exist (hi) to that we come in these strange flavors like multiracial or disabled.

i’m afraid that centering any of these things makes one eternally on the fringe, and because i opened up about something admittedly fairly dramatic that happened to me, i wonder if i’m ever going to be able to get past that…i know there are going to be people who disbelieve and i accept that…hell, i’ve spent much of my life trying to disbelieve. but what i guess i’m wondering is “now what do i do?”

i don’t want to be brave, i don’t want to be seen as a liar, and dear lord i don’t want to be seen as “lobotomy girl” forever and ever, but where do i go from here?

(ps: the title of this article is a reference to an Against Me! song…by the by, i loved them even when i didn’t know they had a female vocalist…if you don’t know “because of the shame” i suggest you do: youtube link to “because of the shame” )

the ‘trans community’, trans women of color, and the ‘you deserve it’ mentality

trigger warning: a lot about violence and probably some more swearing than usual. also you should probably go read Monica Maldonado’s excellent “Erasing Trans Women of Colour The Easy Way” as her piece says different things with the same basic thrust.

i started out writing this post about what happens when you get ditched off hormones for three years and the good/bad matrix of what happens when you get back on, as, of course, this is completely Not Discussed. i’ll get there sooner or later but it’s gotten thrown to the back burner because i had One of Those Revelations, namely around the idea advanced by the “trans community” that some people seem to deserve bring treated in certain ways and how it might seem innocent at first but it leads to the frame of mind that considers some of us to be so disposable that we end up nothing more than fodder for Remembering Your Dead.

what got me kicked off of hormones? the informed consent clinic that i’d been going to for hormones and basic health care alike closed. the woman who was in charge apparently absconded with the funds and ran away to Las Vegas, which ewas really depressing since they were the primary outlet for trans woman-inclusive care that was willing to take new patents in this city. they were a friendly, supportive place for women to get medical care generally, and a lot of us who are low-income and female had been thrown into the lurch by their closing. anyways, i mail-ordered for a while, but mail-order sometimes gets intercepted by Customs, and, well, it happened twice and the second time i got the notice that if you do this again, we’re going to prosecute.

so i tried the three private doctors who see trans women around here and struck out. one didn’t like that i wasn’t feminine enough, one badgered me about my weight (of course, having no hormones in your system only makes you fatter), and one wanted to list me as male on my paperwork, which is kind of a shitty solution seeing as that i’m not male. she claimed she did that for all her trans patients and nobody ever objected. so i tried a couple of doctors who allegedly work with trans women in neighboring cities; one was aggressive about wanting to see my junk, which is really not okay (i mean, hi, i’ve obviously already transitioned…looking at my junk won’t change that i need hormones and why should i be showing it to you when you’re not even gonna do a pap?) and the other didn’t like that i wasn’t heterosexual…it was a little more than just “didn’t like” but this post is too long-winded already.

reaching out to ask for information led to the first example i’d seen of “you deserve it.” i got harangued for having let this happen. i gave up for a bit, came back a couple of years later, and ran into the “you’re lying”/”you must be somehow flawed because doctors would never do this”/”it’s just hormones it can’t be that important” bullshit that defined the beginning of my willingness to fight back against this mindset. it’s all they can do, you see, is decide that people who aren’t situated the same as them deserve it. now, it’s harmless, just someone’s words? sure, if that’s all it is…but it’s much more than just that.

see, “you deserve it” translates into micromanagement of the lives of other trans people. it translates into the reality that there’s a very small core group of trans people who believe they deserve the power to decide whose concerns are and aren’t valid. unfortunately, many other people defend any decision that small core group makes…they’re like an army working on behalf of their commanders, and they follow along out of fear or out of not thinking. this army knows how to shout down any concern with the People In Charge (call them “angry and bitter”, claim they’re lying, obfuscate the facts with a wall of opinion) and they keep the core group protected and safe. by doing the will of the People In Charge, you become as evil as their agenda once you’ve had it pointed out to you and you don’t question it. playing nice with oppressive institutions always turns out the same way every time: your safety is temporary and can be revoked at any time no matter how nice you play, and you know it.

the scariest part is that when i brought up the problematic nature of the support group in these parts, what i was seeking was, you know, someone who’d just keep the flak off me if i were to go, not looking for friends or anything, just someone willing to stand up to the people who make it suck or at least keep the People In Charge and their hateful, bullshit “passing tips” away. for some reason, nobody volunteered. i think that says a whole lot about how the “trans community” works…you wouldn’t want to be seen as *responsible* for letting someone who isn’t good enough into the circle, would you? fear is a powerful, strong motivator and it’s used to keep the plebes in line…if *that one* isn’t good enough to be allowed, what would happen if you spoke up? what would happen if you expressed difference? what would happen if you mentioned that the emperor had no clothes? you might end up like *it*. (because, after all, calling me “it” reminds me of my place, right?)

i feel like this mentality builds into the idea that there are acceptable deaths in the eyes of the “trans community”. after all, Remembering Your Dead requires a nice long list of names to read each year to maintain its atmosphere at what looks like the see and be seen event for Caucasian trans people every damn year. Remembering Your Dead always comes with a mess of pronoun fuckups and flubbed names (seriously, people, how hard is “Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar” to get right?) and it’s just beyond frustrating. of course, when you point this out to the people behind it, you run into the same wall of denial because “nobody else heard that, and nobody knows who you are anyways.”  yes, direct quote. i think that if you asked the “trans community” nobody there knew who Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar was either, until she ended up murdered, and then suddenly they noticed. as trans women of color, we’re acceptable losses when we’re alive but we matter when we’re dead.  there’s so many of these examples that it’s beyond gross…Gwen Araujo, (Victoria) Carmen White, Amanda Milan, Erika Keels…misgendered in the news, ignored by the cops, and fucked over by the world, and all that the “trans community” cares about is a name they’re gonna screw up. ps: if you didn’t know how to say “Gonzalez-Andujar” right, you coulda looked it up.

i always kind of rage quietly and angrily when i get to read about another dead trans woman of color because i know damn well that the people in our community who profit off this won’t be far behind like vultures to rip apart the corpse. we’ll get a well-intentioned but ultimately poorly executed article or two about violence, a pile of misgendering (and yes, when you say “born male” about a trans woman, you’re fucking misgendering us…just like using an old/dead name), and probably a free side of racism and transmisogyny working together somewhere in the article. the journalist is almost always white, they’re pretty uniformly cis, and though people misunderstand journalists as members of the ruling class (they’re not, have you seen what it pays in the trenches?), journalists often use their position of personal power and privilege to assume everyone else reads from the same perspective and sees a dead trans woman of color as someone else/something else entirely. i read the paper, and i don’t see the epidemic of violence against trans women of color as an external issue. and, oh yeah, what you see in the paper? that’s just what gets reported. how many acts of violence go unreported because of shame or how fucking awful the cops are?

thus, the solution is twofold: one, we need the “trans community” to stop being an exclusive treehouse for some. i’ve made this point before, others have made this point before, and it’s possible your mom has made this point before, and in at least two cases, someone i know’s mother HAS indeed made this point before. it’s old business, and it keeps coming up for a reason: the fact that people keep  acting in ways that perpetuate this power structure is Deeply Problematic, and when nobody questions why this same core group of people gets to exercise their vendetta against people who aren’t the same as them even when it keeps happening, people are enabling that behavior and sinking to that level, which is quite honestly pretty gross. two, the idea that acceptable human losses exist needs to be confronted. from “you don’t deserve hormones” to Erika Keels’s broken body in the street being run over by a waste of humanity who was never fucking charged with a crime though he ran her over four times, this mentality has got to change because it’s killing people, whether quickly or slowly. the acceptable losses, you’ll start noticing, are almost always trans women of color, disabled people, people whose appearance doesn’t match certain expectations…and we all know damn well why it is and that shit needs to stop. Caucasian folks, able-bodieds, etc: time to step your game up and start asking hard questions about things like this. if you’re doing so, great. if you’re making excuses for the power structure, time to stop. if you’re carrying water for the power structure, it’s time to throw that water on the ground and stop making excuses for why you’re doing it. and if you’re the power structure…your days on top are numbered and it might behoove you to clean out your treehouse because you know what happens to treehouses built without permits…they get demolished. we’ve asked nicely and you slammed the door in our face, over and over…

sister, act

so i’ve been spending some time with the good part of my family this week and not only is it a running reminder of how awesome some of the people i’m related to are, it’s also a reminder about shared experiences and lives and just how much i share with my little sis. i’ve mentioned my little sister before; we’re almost identical, even if she’s taller, a touch slimmer, and a little less beaky, i got bigger eyes and a smaller waist. we have the same weird faces and the same oddly shaped hands. we both have disturbingly quirky humor and think cats n’ racks is the greatest thing ever. we have a couple of common genetic disorders, and we’re both intersex/ed…time has softened our features slightly differently, but to look at her is still disturbingly close to looking in the mirror. though we live over 5500 miles apart, we stay in touch pretty well…international texting and lots of Rebtel calls bridge the gap nicely.

because of our age gap, my sister has known me as erica for pretty much her whole life; though her period of memory dates back to my awkward in-between-genders phase, she sensibly concluded that i was a girl even back then. she was the youngest and i the oldest for quite some time, though my family has since gained a much younger sister. she’s not as weird as we are, though…she also doesn’t have the things we have in common, from our ability to avoid parental scorn for discussing certain things by speaking in French to the silly random common words we ended up making up through our lives to refer to things that we both use, which i understand is a more frequent behavior with twins but we’re kinda like twins with a bit of an age gap and a few differences.

i remember the day i told my little sister i was trans, as it was pretty terrifying. this nine-year-old person who worshiped everything i did and looked like a little me…well, i didn’t even know how to say it, and back in the mid-90s we really didn’t have any resources for any of this. i suspect, really, that we don’t actually have much in the way of resources for it today, mostly because it’s all designed for people who are transitioning and not for people who are already transitioned and disclosing. (more on that in the next paragraph, actually.)  anyways, my heart sank pretty hard when i explained it, and she kinda shrugged and said “okay.”  easy, it turns out, as pie. she had a few questions, but not anything earth-shattering, nor did she stop worshiping me any more or less. in other words, it was a non-issue, which was nice, as in that era i felt very much alone and that there weren’t other trans people out there and i was this rarity.  i had about the same discussion with my baby sister this past december and it went about the same, but without the weirdness of her looking like a little me…baby sis looks most different. she also had a few questions and an awkward statement or two, but that’s what being the eldest is about: you put up with the awkward statements and the occasional weird moment because the role of the oldest kid is to understand…and babysit, and  look annoyed when your siblings try to be just like you but quietly on the inside wonder that anyone would ever look up to you.

now, about that part where there’s nothing in the way of resources when you’ve already transitioned but are disclosing: this is kind of a big shameful hole in our shared experiences as trans people because it brings up an uncomfortable truth that i know i’ve discussed before: even after you’ve transitioned, there are trans-specific needs you still have. saying this aloud amidst a group of trans people will get you shouted down, but the fact remains that there is jack and crap when it comes to resources for those of us who have transitioned. this isn’t selling short resources for transitioning people…hell, we probably need more of those to express the full spectrum of what trans people are, from chambermaids to CEOs, from butch to femme to none of the above…what resources exist really often reinforce a narrative of sameness, which gets hammered home by social pressure to conform to the “correct narrative.” the problem is that i don’t really know how to get on these two things in a vacuum…but perhaps this is a topic for another day.

anyways, so here we are, two silly little girls, mostly if not all grown up and sitting on their aunt’s sofa, and i wonder how much we’ve achieved in life compared to what we expected, how much we’ve gone in directions we never thought we would, and how much we probably would both amaze and disappoint the selves we were that night we sat down at the kitchen table in a house that belongs to someone else now and had a chat about one of the three primary things that makes erica not like the other children.  my little sister and i have a lot in common: we’ve survived some pretty unspeakable things, we’re children of the theatre (especially musical theatre), we’ve been called all sorts of names, we’ve been written off as subhuman, we look much alike, we’ve eaten way too much 24-hour greasy spoon food (and been waitresses at those greasy spoons), we have scars in places that no one should have scars, we’ve been told we’ll fail at everything we try (like everyone else, sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t),  and we’ve been lied to, a lot…

but you know what really intrinsically binds my little sister and i together? we both are people who society really expected to go nowhere in life but we had other ideas. during points in my life when each of us had almost nobody else they could talk to about their really dark stuff, we were there for each other. when the other one needed a shove, we were there for that, too. when our family started to splinter, we stuck together, and when someone told us no, we reminded the other to stand up, dust yourself off, throw your shoulders back, and go back to keeping at it. we both finally have people who fill these roles in our adult lives these days, so we aren’t quite as dependent on each other as we used to be, but we only got to such a place in life because of each other.

and thus, i love my little sister more than i love cheese, and i really, really love cheese. almost-grown-up as we both are, i still feel like a little piece of me goes away when we part. so i hope you’ll pardon me if i’m a little weepy today, it’s for a very good reason. i love you, little sis, and it sucks it’s gonna be seven months apart.

reparative therapy: the ultimate concern troll

i’ve written about my experiences with reparative therapy before but i couldn’t find what i posted back in the day to a board i used to hang out on. there was some discussion of the great lie that is reparative therapy on the twitters and the reddits after Dr. Robert Spitzer, one of the folks who supported reparative therapy as recently as the early 2000s, recanted his support for its alleged efficacy. while i applaud Dr. Spitzer for recanting…better late than never, he’s but one doctor on a long and shameful list of doctors who supported “reparative therapy” at one point, and many of those doctors still often end up in advisory positions to the people who think it’s a good idea to try to turn your child heterosexual and cisgender by any means necessary.

this is mostly going to be a post about the gay, and i know that you’re thinking “but i’m sure trans people get thrown into this kind of therapy, too,” but my experiences with reparative therapy are solely post-transition, and i think we all know that many people who transitioned earlier in life and/or longer ago got harassed by the transition-industrial complex for being gay. at least i only got sent to reparative therapy…they did worse to other people i know and care very much about (TW: sexual assault) so i feel like i got off easy. the trouble, of course, is that none of this should have happened in the first place since reparative therapy, like every other attempt to force a change in sexual orientation, is morally, ethically, and socially reprehensible. homosexuality is not a disease.

i got sent to a “youth camp,” replete with locked doors akin to a prison, in  Utah.  i’d rather not name which, though it is one of the primary choices that Evergreen International, an LDS Church-funded program for those seeking “freedom from homosexuality” which covers for a lot of non-consensual degaying that seems to magically happen every summer with “orientation-troubled teens.”  i mean, uh, seriously, they even used to tell parents that you can send a “happy heterosexual son or daughter” back to school that fall. they downplay their nefarious side and claim to be for adults seeking this “freedom” but that’s only part of what they do.

after i transitioned, you know, lying through my teeth about how i liked the boys and i wanted to be a princess so i’d be allowed, it didn’t take long for my fancy to turn to other girls. i got outed in fairly spectacular fashion, along with my first girlfriend Rebecca, because we were making out in a broom closet and about half the school seemed to witness us doing so after the door was opened. we weren’t the only queers in our school, thank God, but it didn’t take long for my piece-of-crap little New England town to all know that Erica was a homosexual. needless to say, when i came out to my mother in an attempt to get out ahead of this, it did not go well.

seven months passed, and then i got shipped off to Utah. i was not suspicious that we were going there at first, as we had relatives there, but we ended up driving out on some stretch of I-15 i’d never seen before, and i ended up checked in to something that, i assure you, looked nothing like But I’m a Cheerleader and looked everything like a minimum-security prison. there were some pretty draconian rules…of these, skirts figured into my loathing strongly, i had to shave my legs, and i had to dye my  hair a “normal” color.  we couldn’t touch each other, which is vexing when someone’s crying her eyes out and you can’t put a comforting hand on her shoulder? it all felt so empty, and getting locked in your room was kind of bad. they had a two-week “evaluation” period and then decided how long they’d keep you there by asking your parent/parents. i only made it two weeks, for reasons i’ll discuss later.

“but erica, weren’t you on hormones?” why yes, yes i was. it’s amazing what a bunch of phobes will believe when a parent says they’re “supplements.” my little sister and i joke to this day about how i need to remember to take my “supplements”. i think they were legitimately too stupid to know what those pills were.

“were there people there who had gender issues?” yeah, probably, but i was scared of my own shadow on the trans front back then on top of the fact that none of the boys looked comfortable in their hyper-masculine presentations,  and none of the girls were happy at all about anything, so i kind of pinged on almost everyone. if i knew now what i knew then i probably could have been more effective there, but i still believed i was some impossible freak of nature and that trans people were rarer than platypi because that’s what i’d been told.

“but people’s sexual orientations change!!!!!” perhaps yours did, and that’s your experience. despite degaying camp and six months of a “restorative sexuality”-focused therapist, and all the shit that you get for being a visible dyke, from how it was as a teenager to how it is in my life these days, i’m still gay. i don’t know, or give a shit, if it’s nature, nurture, noodles, or what the fuck have you, some people are gay. some people are straight. some people are bi. some people are pan. some people have sexual orientations that have changed, and some don’t, and  i’m just not into boys. it’s not internalized transphobia (and yes, i have been told that’s what it is!), it’s not because i’m an expert u-haul navigator, it’s not because i’m a rape survivor, it’s because this is just how i am and i am happy this way. 

so anyways, my mother’s check bounced for the next eight weeks they intended to keep me in because i was a “hardened socialized and enabled lesbian” so they put me up for a couple of extra days to prepare for her to come get me. i thought better of it, grabbed my stuff from the “reception center” and made a break for it at lunch, when our jailers were busy doing other things. it was a good two miles out to a highway, and it didn’t take long for a passer-by to pick me up…and i spent the entire ride to Provo praying that this gentleman wouldn’t see a teenager gussied up like a 50s housewife as easy prey. as it turns out, he was indeed a gentleman. when he let me off, he said he always looks for people by “that camp” since “they shouldn’t do bad things to you folks.” he gave me quarters for the payphone and the UTA, his business card, and made sure i knew where i was going. i count that man, who i exchange holiday cards with to this day, as a blessing in my life. i knew my mother would have found the money somehow, and i knew it would have gotten worse. i still owe him $6 in quarters, actually. he has a lovely family and i bet he’s saved others since.

i took the three buses (this was back when the UTA sucked) to my aunt’s house in north Salt Lake. though she hadn’t seen me in some time, she knew i was coming, dragged me out to The Pie to feed me properly,  spent the next three days making sure i was in a good way, and even took me to the ZCMI to buy me some pants so i wouldn’t look like Stepford Erica anymore. i have a lot of good aunts, but i think she takes the cake. when she put me on a flight back east she told me that she’d never treat her children like that, which she’s definitely lived up to through three of her four kids turning out queer, including the other trans woman in my family, my awesome cousin.

my mother did not take it well and i ended up dealing with the “restorative sexuality” (that’s what he called it) therapist, who mostly tried to hypnotize me and tell me i was straight. you can imagine how well this went, but it kept up for a while until he proclaimed i was too “willful” and was not interested in “fixing” myself. well, of course not, since nothing was wrong with me in the first place. reparative therapy, as the title suggests, is the ultimate concern troll. it’s a bunch of people who really believe that their being concerned that you’re  queer can somehow justify their actions to attempt to “convert” you to heterosexuality, which is modeled as what is “normal” and expected. it’s proof that no matter how much you yank things out of the DSM, someone will always have a problem when it comes to human sexuality (think like Cathy Brennan and her trolly troll squad, lol), and that some people will throw endless amounts of time and money trying to cure fictitious ills while completely ignoring that right here in the US, right here in whatever state you’re in, someone else’s children are dying of actual disease.

my cunt, or “none of your beeswax”

trigger warning: talks a lot about genitals, and a little about gendered violence so if you’re squeamish you ought to read something else…

as trans women so much about our bodies is rendered public property (have you had the surgery? what surgeon did you go to? the surgery the surgery the surgery!) and so little about us is allowed to be ours. many of us who must choose general nondisclosure for survival know well how differently people react toward many things about your body when you’ve disclosed being trans.

it’s the age-old tool of patriarchal body policing of women (her ass is just too big for those shorts! oh god her breasts are uneven! why are her eyes puffy?) with an exciting new opportunity to micromanage your genitals. the worst part is that sometimes knowing someone’s operative status leads to lots of questions (who cares how deep it is?) and the reprehensible suggestion that someone having surgery makes them a “real man” or a “real woman” and all that rot. i feel reduced by much of this to being 90% cunt, 10% Erica, and i don’t like that.

i say we need to stop…because in the end, that’s all patriarchal society reduces women to. (you’re a cunt!)

when we give in to the pressure to let genitals define us, we give in to patriarchal society. it’s time to stop genital policing. do it for our trans sisters, brothers, and siblings who can’t afford/haven’t been funded for/can’t have/don’t want/aren’t comfortable with genital surgery. do it for people who have had genital surgery and deserve something better than to be badgered about it. do it for people who had genital surgery but consider it an imperfect solution. do it for our cis allies (and even not-allies) who have a crotch that isn’t exactly what they want in life, whether because of genital mutilation or because of injury…a surprising number of burn victims, generally women, have damage in places where the sun don’t shine. do it because it’s your body and you deserve to be treated as a whole person no matter what’s in your unders and so does everyone else regardless of their gender, gender identity, or what have you. but do it to affirm that nobody’s body should be public property. 

the bitch/man conundrum

so while we’re on the topic of double-binds, let’s talk for a bit about one of the more disturbing ones because it’s as often used inside the “trans community” as outside and it really ends up having some pretty fucked-up results: the bitch/man conundrum, as i call it.

see, when you’re an assumed-cis female and you have independent thoughts that differentiate you from a doormat, to paraphrase Rebecca West and remove the messed-up part of that quote that denigrates sex workers, you often find yourself getting called a “bitch.” and, well, i am disturbingly meek and shy in person until i get to know and trust someone (and then i’m neither meek  nor shy at all), so it’s probably not the attitude i present with. i am far more of a baller on the internet, in other words.

the paradigm shifts a bit when you’ve disclosed being trans, you’re female, and you have independent thoughts that differentiate you from a doormat. see, this tends to shift things very rapidly from “bitch” to “man.” now, uh, listen, “man” is not an insult to someone who identifies as such, but at the same time, in case you missed the memo, i’m a trans woman, if you know me at all you know why it’s particularly laughable to call me a “man,” as even with some effort toward that goal i still can’t fake it as one for the life of me, at least in the eyes of others, but at the same time i know who is most likely to use that imprimatur: cis gays/lesbians who are deeply threatened by trans women, but most often, it’s used by other trans women.

alright, sometimes they use “it”, which is the more politically correct version of “man” in trans space. nevertheless, the reality is the same: statements which differentiate me from a doormat, which absent the knowledge that i’m trans, would merely get me called a “bitch”, instead magically transform me into a “man.”

i don’t like this conundrum, just in case you missed it. it’s binding, it’s frustrating, and it’s one of the tools in the toolbox of silencing that a lot of our “trans community” leaders seem to believe is reasonable to use. of course, you have to do it quietly, or use oblique angles of attack like that someone is “bitter and angry” and then in the next paragraph refer to how “men are bitter and angry”, but…it’s sort of like the social equivalent of what the little white children used to call “nigger-knocking.” you know, where you pound on the door of a Black person and run away. that’s all any of this is…it’s reminding someone that you find undesirable for a reason you can’t elucidate in polite company that they’re not supposed to be here because of that reason. naturally, you can’t actually say “nigger” to my face, but you sure can pound on the door, scream it, and run like hell.

we need to stop enabling the bitch/man thing within the “trans community” because it’s the only way we’re ever going to get cis people to stop doing it. we have to stand up and stop it all the time, every time. i don’t really care how much you don’t like someone, it’s never acceptable to call another trans woman “it” or refer to her as a man. ever. like, seriously, if we don’t knock it off, how can we ask the cis world to knock it off? i know that behind my back, it’s probably fun to mock my mental shortcomings and my weird features, but these are things you never would have paid attention to if you didn’t know i was trans, and the fact that you are paying attention to them once you know i am is pretty freakin’ reprehensible because it means you’re looking for markings, looking for differences which you can use to other someone and take away their gender identity…this is something that nobody does to cis people, but it’s pretty much a fact of daily life in the “trans community.”

now, of course, we’ve delved at length into the reasons why one is “undesirable” in the “trans community.” or, well, i’ve at least touched on the attempts at reason that the “trans community” provides, since i really don’t understand what part of dogma makes a legitimate case for the idea that you can’t be, say, a trans woman and disabled at the same time, but i don’t get the hater dogma to start with mostly because it’s primarily directed at anyone who doesn’t fit a specific narrow concept of what a “woman” is. at the risk of repeating myself, the definition of “woman” promulgated by the trans community has nothing to do with the definition of “woman” promulgated by Western society generally.  because of this, the “trans community” enforces such a narrow standard that most cis women wouldn’t actually fit it, and if you can’t see why this is problematic, you’re probably one of the people who thinks it’s funny to call me a “man” or “it” and make sure that i’m not allowed in your treehouse.

to which i say: we’re adults, grow the fuck up and get over your treehouse.

date of last menstrual period and if irregular:

many of us who are trans women live in a unique double-bind when it comes to basic medical care: this question on intake paperwork, which has a completely benign intent but ends up leading to the very bad decision: do you lie, or do you tell the truth and probably deal with problematic behavior?

i know why it has to be asked of womankind generally: it’s critical to know if someone is or isn’t pregnant before giving them medication for the condition they present with. it’s a bad idea to give a number of meds to a pregnant woman, or, god forbid, send her for x-rays. it’s not designed to block medical care for trans women, but the end result ends up being that it does, and there needs to be a better way to handle it because in many situations disclosure really isn’t necessary and  the danger to our health, person, and dignity is really unacceptable.

i’m sick of lying to appease people, especially people who should know better, and medical professionals, from the office staff to doctors, really ought to know better by now.  i know all the excuses, from Anne Lawrence to “we’re not familiar with…that, somebody else deals with that” to the reality that someone will either freak out and start yelling or alternately you get treated like a freak, asked improper questions, and probably misgendered by someone who would never have thought twice about you if you hadn’t said anything. it’s a bad scene because even if the doctor might be cool, a nurse or an office staffer might not; similarly, a nurse might be totally okay with it but the doctor themselves can’t discern you from Anne Lawrence and the results are expectedly horrible.

there is no special medical procedure involved in treating a trans person when they present with a sinus infection or a rash that would somehow differ from how you’d treat a cis person in the same situation. no matter how you try to throw in variables, there’s no magic difference between our bodies. yes, there can be a few minor differences, but estradiol does not somehow have a magic pull over the snot in your sinuses which causes your disease or disorder to be different.

i often end up getting much sicker because of this dichotomy. i live in a city where there are fairly few “trans-friendly” medical professionals (or at least there are fairly few who anyone will speak of publicly) and they generally focus on being dispensers of hormones and thus gatekeep your fitness for being seen by their practice that way, which is pretty much bullshit but such is life. for some reason, nobody has bothered to figure out the radical idea that a trans person (locally, specifically a trans woman, as there are a number of medical access options for trans guys that we don’t have) might need routine medical care, so it becomes a nasty waiting game: try to fake it without medical care, but have an established point where once you’re so sick, you go to the urgent care and forge your answers to this question (five days ago, haven’t had procreative sex since…you’re welcome), and then hate yourself for the next week and hope you don’t do anything stupid to yourself out of the self-loathing over lying, but at least the pneumonia won’t kill you, this time.

i’m not saying medicine shouldn’t ask this question…what i am saying is that you should probably have an option for “yes, i’m sure i’m not pregnant” while we’re at it. it would be helpful for cis women who don’t bleed, and most cis women don’t really want to talk about their menstrual cycle with some random doctor of the day who knows nothing about their body and cycle anyways, since, really, everyone’s so different and medicine really believes 28 days is normal, 28 days is absolute, and 28 days…well, guess what? it’s not, and it’s never been. it’s an average, a number which is designed to represent fictitious Average Fertile Cis Woman in her average stress-free life with her average (white) Toyota Camry who lives in Averageville, U.S.A. if you see a doctor for a while, they might get to figuring that out, but when it’s some random dude at the urgent care (and why are all the local urgent care doctors male, anyways?), it’s useless for a thousand reasons.

medicine, alas, is not a beast that is likely to embrace change. it’s stayed painfully white, cis, hetero, and male for a very long time, and this reality is much of what keeps it so hostile to trans people generally and trans women in specific.  i do not know how and why doctors form their opinion of trans women; i am quite aware that we’ve had our share of trans women who were doctors and behaved rather problematically in public, but it’s not like Joe Blow at the local urgent care knows any of these people, and besides, even if he did, one bad apple doesn’t mean we’re all like that, yet no matter what, medicine sticks rabidly to its fears and the worst-case scenario when it comes to trans people, especially when it comes to trans women.  somehow, at the end of the day, i think that’s my real problem: i can do all these things in life and yet i can’t manage to convince some random doctor that i am good enough to be treated like an actual human…i can’t convince them that i am any different from, well, Anne Lawrence.

…and you know what? that’s why this really sucks. we’re still considered freaks by medicine unless there’s some clear way to profit off of us, and then we’re good enough as long as we know our place, but don’t expect to be allowed luxuries like basic medical care or treatment for chronic conditions, because that’s just asking too much.

it’s not the way i’m meant to be, it’s just the way the operation made me

TRIGGER WARNING:

This post contains explicit descriptions of psychosurgery, sexual assault, emotional abuse, and violence in general. If you’re at all unsure if you should read this, you probably shouldn’t.

please note i’ve written a follow-up to this article, “sing for the teachers who told you that you couldn’t sing” and this follow-up clarifies and refines a few things. i’d appreciate it if you saw them as a unit, but i’m leaving this post otherwise untouched. 

In case you’re wondering why the tone of this is different, it’s a draft of something I’m preparing for a more formal audience. They care about things like capital letters and citations and all that rot that i ordinarily don’t. Further blog posts will return you to your normally scheduled “hi i’m erica and i want to be e.e. cummings omg i’m so emooooooooo” style. 

“Do you know what these scars are?”, Valerie persisted.
“No, what are they?”
“I’ve had a lobotomy.”
-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, p.192

Hi, I’m Erica. You might know me from my Twitter antics, from the extensive navelgazing that is my blog, or because you have the misfortune to know me IRL. Like most women my age, I wear a lot of hats: big sister, college student, nanny, goalie, best friend, bad dancer, trans woman, former lead singer of a bad high school riot grrl band, etc.  I also have a much darker hat that I don’t really like to talk about: lobotomy survivor. Just like Valerie, I’ve had a lobotomy. Unlike Valerie, I don’t tell everyone I meet…this is the farthest I’ve ever stuck my head out of the psychosurgery closet and let me tell you, dear reader, I am terrified.

People tend to greet this with what ends up being a slew of rapidfire questions, so let’s get them out of the way:

• I was eight and a half.
• It had something to do with gender identity but it also had something to do with that I had a “maladaptive personality” but no specific diagnosis was ever given. I’ll discuss this a bit more later.
• Yes, this happened in the United States.
• Yes, this happened in the 1980s.
• I had a transorbital, aka “icepick” lobotomy, where an instrument called an orbitoclast is placed above the tear duct in a patient’s eye and forced through the skull and into the frontal lobe, where it is then swung about to separate the frontal lobe from the thalamus, followed by a deep cut across the frontal lobe, and then the instrument is removed.
• No, I’m not a unique case; the hospital in question performs lobotomies to this day, as well as the more socially acceptable versions of psychosurgery like cingulotomy. (They admittedly do fewer than five lobotomies a year so far as anyone can tell, as the hospital in question is fairly secretive.)
• No, I’m not telling you this because I want you to take pity on me.
• Yes, I’m still angry.
• Yes, I’m sure. 

The thing about being a lobotomy survivor is that it’s not exactly polite dinner table conversation, so it’s kind of developed a bit of a parallel to being trans in my life. As a person without a whole lot of privilege, the relative blessing of being able to pass for cis in a world which requires it as a condition of existence is somewhat useful, but it can make it difficult to talk about being trans and find an appropriate space to do it. Similarly, I have to pass as an ordinary, whole-brained person on any given day, since as much as the writer of the song in the title treats disability for attention and laughs, I don’t have the option of ascribing everything that I do right or wrong to the fact that there’s this dead chunk of my brain sitting in my skull. I can’t just say please excuse her for the day, it’s just the way the medication makes her.  In other words, just like I have to pass for cis the second I walk out the door of my bedroom, I have to be able to pass for someone who hasn’t had a lobotomy.

For years, since I had a diagnosis of such, I was just told to say I was autistic, though that’s disrespectful to autistic people since autism is naturally occurring (whereas lobotomies are not), poorly studied, and mostly surrounded by curebies, non-autistic people who speak for autistic people and effectively silence them rather than encouraging society to look at them on the whole. My little sister is autistic, and we’re like peas in a pod anyways, but…it’s unfair to both someone who has had a lobotomy and someone who is autistic alike to tell me to just say that’s what it is. I mean, after all, “I have a diagnosis…” just means a doctor says that’s how it is, and my track record with doctors is not great. I’m not telling a half-truth to cover for them anymore, I shall not be their dupe.

Though we remain many, we’re hard to locate, and the veil of shame around psychosurgery is truly wretched. I’ve talked online to someone else who’s a lobotomy survivor…one other person. She’s a bit older and had a lobotomy for a condition which sounded a lot like schizophrenia but she was never formally diagnosed other than by the doctor who lobotomized her;  she was one of Walter Freeman’s last creations in the 1960s, a contemporary of the most famous living lobotomy survivor, Howard Dully.  For me, confronting my identity as a lobotomy survivor is much akin to when I pulled myself out of my post-transition denial of being trans: I just haven’t found other people like me, even though I know they’re out there. Unlike being trans, there isn’t just a random chatroom out there on the internet, so finding each other is a lot harder, especially for the post-Freeman era of lobotomies because Freeman’s narcissism led him to keep extensive records, something that isn’t as likely when it’s a bunch of doctors trying to figure out whether or not something works. I know that the hospital in question was involved with a number of dubious experiments around gender identity and sexual orientation at the time and I know that until the time comes that I have better answers, I am assuming that this was done to attempt to force me to be happily cisgender, especially given the dark past the doctor in question has.  As for making me happily cisgender, it didn’t work.

Crawling through the web of shame and horror has been pretty messy. I’ve known since I was 16. My mother, who was still angry that I had commenced eating meat, took me clear across town to my favorite restaurant, the Shady Glen Dairy Store (the original, not the poser one in the Parkade) and told me, as I ate the second bite of my delicious Bernice Original cheeseburger, that I’d had a lobotomy and it wasn’t her fault. That’s exactly what she said: Well, you had a lobotomy but it wasn’t my fault. I assumed this was one of my mother’s many lies and just let her keep talking, trying to pick up if there was so much detail in her story that it must be true. The Shady Glen, full of depections of laughing gnomes and smiling children eating ice cream, would never be the same again; I had nightmares about those gnomes for years.  My mother, for once, told me the truth, and did it on her terms in the most abusive way possible. I never ate at the Shady Glen since, and I pretty much put up a solid wall of denial that my mother could be actually telling the truth, even though her narrative was filled with a level of detail and blame-shifting that I knew damn well indicated she’d found the will to pull through her pseudologia fantastica for long enough to tell the truth. She even told the truth as to why, basically that I wouldn’t refer to myself as male and that I had had a ‘psychological break’ about a year before lobotomizing me. With every detail, it was like watching snow pile up…there comes a point where there’s so much snow that they’ll cancel school, and with a pathological liar, there’s a point where there’s so much detail you realize they’re telling the truth.

One night, the next summer, I “fell down the stairs and hit my head” at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother drove me to the hospital, where they promptly performed a head CT (that’s a CAT scan of the head) to preclude serious injury. I had indeed fallen down the stairs, but there was planning involved. The doctor who handled the head CT looked like he’d seen a ghost and ran the head CT again, and I knew then that something had indeed happened. Eventually he pulled my grandmother and I into a room, and after dropping the slide four times, just asked point-blank if there was some kind of head injury that could explain this. I muttered like a transorbital lobotomy? and he said but they don’t do those anymore… Oh, sir, how I wish you had been right. He treated me with respect, compassion, and kindness, though, and gave me a copy of the slides and told me to keep them somewhere very safe.

The entire drive back to my grandparents’ farm was pretty much my grandmother muttering about how much she wanted to kill her firstborn and me complaining about how much the seatbelt hurt my chest. The next morning at breakfast we explained things to my grandfather, who did as he does and nodded and grunted a lot and just made sure I was okay. I owe much of my being allowed to be myself to my grandparents and this was no exception. I mentioned that I didn’t really want to talk about it anymore and they’ve respected that boundary ever since. My grandmother had business in Minneapolis that week, and I went to the library and started reading. I found out about Rosemary Kennedy and realized that we’d both been tarred with the same words and lies. I learned about Sigrid Hjertén and that a botched lobotomy killed her. I learned that for once, I wish my mother had been lying. My grandmother and I really grew together that whole summer to the point that I’ve considered her my real mother ever since.

Being a lobotomy survivor makes you a little different, yes. Your frontal lobe controls a lot more than your ability to avoid saying bitchy things (the rest of my brain has to do that), but also lobotomy survivors have certain patterns to our existences. The almost inescapable consequences are childishness, weight gain, seizures of various sorts (mine look like I’m shivering and are mercifully rare), apathy, and often incontinence. I have all of those except, thank whatever belief system you have, incontinence…and most days, I’m not apathetic, actually. The issues of mental development are open to debate, as all the studies done about the effect of lobotomy on intelligence involved lobotomies on adult women, given that women accounted for 60-70% of all lobotomies, not people who were lobotomized as children or in early adolescence.

The prevalence of lobotomy in women is particularly chilling given that frequently the very traits that led to someone being targeted for lobotomy were the same traits that society suppressed in women, such as assertiveness, sexual aggressiveness, and oppositional behavior. In other words, being an uppity woman could cost you your frontal lobe. As for how I turned out, it didn’t make me a happy cis man , it didn’t make me any less “uppity”, and though it does diminish how I perform on stupid statistical tests like IQ or whatever standardized “intelligence” test is in vogue this week, I’m happy to report I’m about a month and a half from being, at least on paper, Dr. Erica. You can keep calling me just Erica, thank you very much, that whole honorific thing makes me feel old, as we discussed yesterday.

A couple of years ago, when I started to figure out how to stop being ashamed of being trans, I started telling a few people in my life what was really going on with me, because I know I have to stop being ashamed of being a lobotomy survivor. The interlinked stories of my trans narrative and my psychosurgery narrative are woven in the same cloth perilously close to each other. And though I feel like talking about it is begging for attention, I really need to say it because this is why I bristle so hard at accusations of being “lucky” for the age I transitioned at: I’d already paid the price earlier in life and that price has left me with lasting damage both in my brain and to my body, because messing with someone’s brain does that. By the time I transitioned, they’d tried to cure me with everything from rape to physical violence and then when that didn’t work they came for my brain. In short, though there are many ways in which I am fortunate in life.  from being a poor disabled female with another statistical anomaly, secure safe housing, to having gone to college to my amazing friends to yes, having lived most of my life in the right body. But please don’t ever think I’m “lucky”…as much as I’ve learned to live without an entire mind and with the flaws that come with it, I do wish I were whole.

and there’s the name of my blog explained: inchoate — imperfectly formed or developed. erica – well, duh, that’s me.

There are many things I’ve learned on this journey: that a security clearance done on me (come get me, Cathy Brennan) will show that I’ve had a lobotomy but not that I’ve ever had another name. (You do get about 15 misspellings of my legal name, though.)  I learned that lobotomy’s ugly children have enjoyed a rebound in popularity in procedures like cingulotomy amongst others, and that on occasion, lobotomy remains part of medicine’s awful toolbox. I’ve learned that I inherited an awful bit of my mother’s pseudologia fantastica myself…not the ability to lie, but the ability to believe that you have done awful and bad things in life, including the belief that I deserved to be lobotomized for some unspeakable horror that I had done, for some reason too complex to ever explain.

My little sister has the same problem that I do, namely believing herself to be some subhuman creature who deserves all the bad she’s lived with…except she’s autistic and hasn’t had a lobotomy. She and i both are recovering from a lot of unspeakable and unpleasant horror, and discovering that maybe we’re both strong enough to make it.  She’s working through the horror of how my mother and society tortured her,  too, and you know…we’re both getting better little by little in our own ways, and writing this piece is part of that for me. I don’t believe I deserved it anymore, and it’s taken me until a few weeks ago to know this, though I’ve been trying to believe I didn’t deserve it since, well, the day I had my last cheeseburger at the Shady Glen.

Thank you for listening and thank you for your support…I love each and every one of you.

what do you call three trans females going down the street on a bike?

lest you think this crosses any lines, i let Grace’s mom read this before i hit “post”. she didn’t change a word, and she’s about to serve dinner…so with that…read on.

so a classmate of mine’s daughter, presently in the throes of grade school, is trans. (we’ll call her Grace, which is so not her real name, duh) i often babysit for her and her little bro, who isn’t even 2 yet and has figured out how to properly fistbump, and sometimes i just end up around the house, sometimes because of school, sometimes because her dad owes me money, but mostly because they’ve asked me to be in their life, which they did long before they knew i was trans…anyways, i get to be one of her positive role models, you know, Erica, who is (mostly) an adult and (generally) fairly responsible and (for the most part) pretty close to normal. unlike her many role models, from her awesome dad to her amazing aunt to her mother, who i wish i were half as cool as, i’m trans.

growing up trans sucked for those of us who had voiced ourselves successfully and for those who could not do so for any number of reasons, because we never got to see anyone like us in the media or in the community, and the transphobic nature of media outlets led to trans people, especially trans women, being played for laughs, mocked, or used as a shitty plot twist for shock value. these representations robbed many younger trans women of our voices when we needed them most and provided negative reinforcement about who and what we were in the cruelest fashion.

it’s kind of cool to be able to be part of that difference. honestly, it’s…weird. i am erica, a pebble against the avalanche, remember? it’s cool to do things like bring non-bad music to Grace’s world, to impart advice in that distant and appropriate way which should be shown to children, and to be the occasional reminder that she’s not alone. of late she’s taken to using the quasi-family honorific of “auntie”, which means i’m old, but it also means i’m pretty loved. “auntie Erica” has a ring to it, though she keeps advising me that i need to find a girlfriend, which is pretty sage wisdom from someone who non-ironically has a Trapper Keeper. this is a lot of backstory (and they changed Trapper Keepers, dammit) for the point of this post, though!

so i rolled by Grace’s house because her mom and i needed to talk school-related tofurkey, and she excitedly told me all about her new cargo bike, a Madsen kg271. i really was excited about it too, and she offered to let me ride it to the store, since she volunteered to cook dinner for us if i’d go pick up the food, an excellent deal! Grace has an out-of-town friend visiting who was really excited to talk to me so she insisted on tagging along. “oh, this is your auntie Erica?”  it probably should have made sense to me why she said this, but it took a moment for it to dawn on me.

load kids into bucket, make sure everyone has a helmet, fasten seat belts, and a leisurely ride down the street. smile at pedestrians, listen to two happy little girls playing patty-cake, and realize what you call three trans females (one woman, two girls) going down the street on a bike: completely normal.