I didn’t know the words. I didn’t have a map.
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| Maria & Katerina, from 'Within 15 Minutes' series, 2017 © Alma Haser |
There was a song in me, but I could only catch the faintest of notes.
My journals offered glances of a life I’d noted but tried to ignore, forget, bury. I wrote in a kind of code to myself, a code that for so long I didn’t know how to, or want to, break. I hadn’t been able to face myself or decipher my own story or follow the map of own trans path. Not until I moved away from my life, from the only world I knew.
It’s hard to live in a world that doesn’t want you. Where you’re not seen as fully human. Where you may be cut off from family. Where you’re considered a freak. A mistake.
But the alternative—to not transition—is so much worse.
Did anyone here sense my “gender confusion”? Was I confused by my gender? Here, as granddaughter, daughter, sister—in my terrible shoes, the shirt too tight across my chest—I didn’t want to be seen. I wanted to disappear.
I didn’t know where to turn. The only narrative I’d ever heard about trans people didn’t apply to me. I didn’t feel trapped inside my body. More like I wasn’t even there.
“Gender confusion,” I realized, wasn’t correct or accurate. I hadn’t been confused, just lost and scared. I didn’t know the words. I didn’t have a map.
“I didn’t feel trapped in the wrong body,” Stephen said. “When I was little, I never felt like I should have been a boy or that I was a mistake. I was just me. Now this is me too.”
A happier me, a more truthful me, Stephen explained.
Trapped in the body was shorthand for trans, but didn’t ring true for him or for me. To be trapped was to be imprisoned inside a body that didn’t belong to you. Stephen had made medical changes to their body not to escape, but so that they would feel more present inside the body that had always belonged to them.
When I looked at Stephen, I felt some deep, terrifying, joyful resonance inside me that I eventually realized was recognition.
And jealousy.
I wanted to feel present in my own body and in the world—to be here, and not over there.
Which is maybe another way of saying, I wanted to live.
It’s hard to live in a world that doesn’t want you. Where you’re not seen as fully human. Where you may be cut off from family. Where you’re considered a freak. A mistake.
But the alternative—to not transition—is so much worse.
Did anyone here sense my “gender confusion”? Was I confused by my gender? Here, as granddaughter, daughter, sister—in my terrible shoes, the shirt too tight across my chest—I didn’t want to be seen. I wanted to disappear.
I didn’t know where to turn. The only narrative I’d ever heard about trans people didn’t apply to me. I didn’t feel trapped inside my body. More like I wasn’t even there.
“Gender confusion,” I realized, wasn’t correct or accurate. I hadn’t been confused, just lost and scared. I didn’t know the words. I didn’t have a map.
“I didn’t feel trapped in the wrong body,” Stephen said. “When I was little, I never felt like I should have been a boy or that I was a mistake. I was just me. Now this is me too.”
A happier me, a more truthful me, Stephen explained.
Trapped in the body was shorthand for trans, but didn’t ring true for him or for me. To be trapped was to be imprisoned inside a body that didn’t belong to you. Stephen had made medical changes to their body not to escape, but so that they would feel more present inside the body that had always belonged to them.
When I looked at Stephen, I felt some deep, terrifying, joyful resonance inside me that I eventually realized was recognition.
And jealousy.
I wanted to feel present in my own body and in the world—to be here, and not over there.
Which is maybe another way of saying, I wanted to live.
[...] it’s difficult to feel at home when you don’t know who you are, who you want to be.
Carter Sickels - Rescued (Cutleaf Journal, Issue 23, December 2021)
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