What To Do If You Are Flat Like A Ken Doll

My Disappearing Act

Warning: This is a post about depression and the various life and body consequences that spin out from depression. Some of it might be triggering.

I’ve spent the last year disappearing by degrees. First, I disappeared from tumblr. Maybe you noticed that one. I couldn’t completely explain what the feeling was that took me away from blogging; I know a lot of people leave tumblr because they get fed up with the environment, but that wasn’t it for me. I alternated between feeling as though I had nothing to say and feeling as though I had no way to say what I did have to say. Even this post has had hundreds of iterations in my head, and as I’m writing it I feel the same white noise of anxiety pushing me away from the keys. I’ve been in therapy for two years now and I think my therapist is fantastic and one of the things she’s helped me realize is that I don’t allow myself to feel difficult, complicated, or painful feelings. I don’t know what I’m blocking, but something in my unconscious does not want what I’m trying to say expressed. Numbness is preferable to catharsis, apparently. I’m trying to fix that.

As I was disappearing from an internet presence I really did cherish, I was also relinquishing a physical presence I had come to use as a safety blanket. I perfunctorily documented here my process of cutting off the colorful hair that was my trademark and of learning to move through the world not being stared at all the time. I also, almost accidentally, masculinized my style of dress out of pure laziness. I didn’t have the energy to dress myself in anything that didn’t feel like pajamas or to put on makeup or style myself in any way that projected the parts of me that had been so important to make sure the world saw. In some ways, this was me learning to relax, to trust myself to be interesting, engaging, and most importantly myself regardless of how I looked. In other ways, it further sapped me of my energy and my vibrancy. 

I began to disappear from activist work and then from community spaces, from social settings, from friendships, and finally from romantic relationships. I have always found maintaining correspondence and to a lesser extent interpersonal connections to be a nerve-inducing task. As someone who has spent their life in an unacknowledged haze of depression, I have always popped in and out of people’s lives. Throughout middle and high school I would take months-long absences from my friends without explanation and return suddenly with the hope that we could pick up like no time had passed. Sometimes we could, sometimes we couldn’t. When I started dating, romances became my primary mode of interpersonal connection and the necessarily temporary nature of relationships at my age meant that I didn’t have to face up to my need to disappear. Eventually something would crumble. A friend recently suggested to me that I sabotage my relationships when things are too good. That seems true: this year it cost me one of the most amazing relationships I’ve ever been in. It was also the longest, and I guess it showed no signs of stopping on its own. I understand that not everyone can wait around for you to have the emotional latitude to respond to a text message or to get back to a place where you can focus on someone else’s needs long enough to support them through a rough day. When I can feel pain again, I’ll have a lot to reckon with, but for now all I can do is acknowledge that my depression makes me someone who does not treat people the way they deserve to be treated. 

The anxiety that comes with knowing I have mistreated someone makes it harder for me to fix this issue. Instead, I think about running away and starting over where no one needs anything from me and never allowing anyone to expect anything from me ever again. In the most intense moments, I think about disappearing from life entirely. I don’t worry too much about these thoughts (and you shouldn’t either) because they are always an impulse and the moment I actually acknowledge them I know it’s not what I want. I morbidly joke that I know it won’t happen because if I’m too averse to the idea of people thinking I killed myself over gender shit to not leave a note explaining that being trans has nothing to do with it, but by the time I wrote a note I’d have come to my senses.

I’ve disappeared from my body, too. With the help of some really amazing friends and the one lover who was physically close enough to me to escape the impact of my escape act, I usually managed to eat a meal a day. Combined with testosterone, the effect on my shape has been dramatic. The people in contact with my daily life knew and diligently invited me to meals and cajoled me to eat and tried to suggest foods I might want and were generally stellar, but even when I was able to connect to my hunger, the thought of preparing, seeking out, or even thinking too hard about food made my throat feel like it was going to close up. Super markets often leave me feeling nauseous and on the verge of tears. You can tell I’m depressed as I walk up to the checkout with some burger meat I intend to eat raw, some spinach I intend to eat raw, some cookie dough I intend to eat raw, a carton of lemonade, 3 packs of rice cakes, and some luna bars. 

At first I didn’t want to talk about the fact that I’ve hardly been eating. Because I’m taking T and it’s obvious, people want to talk to me about my body changes all the time. They shouldn’t, but they do. And when they want to ask about how much my hips have disappeared or how small my chest has gotten and is that the T? I don’t know what to tell them. It may be the T, but more likely it’s the fact that I’ve diminished in size so much that pants I could barely button now hang off me, and that’s not something I want anyone to think I did on purpose. That’s not something I want praise for and I don’t want to be asked if I’m satisfied with the results and if someone wants to see it as a positive thing I want them to know exactly how worryingly negative it actually is. 

Moreover, I can’t be silent about my depression any more. I speak to so many queers, badasses, and activists who tell me that they wish we were all talking about this, about how many of us go through this and how we can support one another. And I think I’m figuring out how people can support me: let me disappear. I need it right now. More than anything, I have spent so much of my life trying to exist, trying to be stable and reliable, exhausting myself with the effort or never quite managing this seemingly necessary act. Right now I’m trying not to fight myself. I need to be fluid and free. 

But there are different ways of letting a wanderer like me disappear. Be the place I can disappear to; Be the place I know I can come back to when I’m ready; Reach out to me but don’t take it personally if I don’t reach back; Invite me to a meal and choose the place so I don’t have to think about what I want to eat; If I don’t respond to your attempts to get in touch or hang out, wait a few days and give it another try; please don’t make me feel like I’m failing you or slighting you. 

I have always had difficulty imagining the future. The closest I come is when I desperately hope there will be a time in my life when I will be able to feel relaxed in a way that isn’t just a mask for my massive anxiety. This summer has the potential to be that time for me, as long as I actually let myself disappear.

buythesea answered your question: Serious Question:

sweats. mood swings. yes.

Luckily, no mood swings for me. But hot flashes, definitely.

kaydentransguy answered your question: Serious Question:

I kind of went through it when I was on Lupron (horomone blocker) but idk if regular T will cause it. have fun with your hot flashes!

Did you go on Lupron before your first puberty? If not, I’m very curious about that. I didn’t know they did hormone blockers for people whose bodies produce estrogen after their estrogen-dominated puberties had set in…

Is menopause a thing I am going through right now?

#translyfe

I guess that’s one meaning for the phrase “growing up trans”?

I spoke about my transition in a way I hoped I never would.

I was hanging out with some new acquaintances complaining about how the professor I want to do super hard core queer gender theory with didn’t get that I was trans, and someone started a sentence, “can I ask, when did you…”

And, like, I knew where this was going. Duh. “…come out as trans?”

“Yeah.”

And I was feeling lazy. And I didn’t want to go through my whole saga, so I said, “well, I started thinking about it about half way through 10th grade, and then I came out right before 11th grade, and then I started testosterone a month ago.”

As though those were the bullet points that were most important to know. I immediately realized my mistake, and backpeddled with a pretty soggy “and, I mean, obviously my transition meant a lot of other things, but that’s probably what you were asking, right?”

And the thing is, when a cis person who knows nothing about trans people asks you about your transition, or your coming out process, or how you knew you were trans, or anything like that, they have no idea what they’re asking you. They will listen to pretty much anything you want to say to them, because you are a foreign world and they want to find a path through their culture shock.

And somehow I decided that the years I spent not doing testosterone were less important to this person’s understanding of me than the month I’ve spent doing testosterone.

This is a rant, but I’ve been having difficulties around talking about my testosterone use.

When I talk about T, I get defensive about T. Even people who should have known better received the news with the assumption that I had finally copped out to a binary identity  and the ease of being something recognizable (in case anyone read that as insulting to binary identities: if a binary identity come naturally to you, it is not a cop out. However, for someone like me, who consistently struggles to be seen in a way that technically does not exist in the world, taking on a binary identity would be akin to stopping your doggy paddle in the middle of the ocean: everyone gets why you would do such a thing, but you have given into exhaustion and let yourself drown.). And it’s funny, because I am indeed hoping that T will make things easier for me, but not at all in that way; never in that way. I’m hoping it’ll make genderfuck less of a presentation I have to work for every morning as I get ready to face the world, and more of something that will just be consistently true of the way I look, regardless of how much effort I’ve put into my clothing or makeup.

And the thing is, I want to be able to talk about taking T. It’s exciting, it’s a big step for me, it’s a new phase and a new curiosity. But I don’t exactly know why I need to share with every person that this is happening for me. Honestly, when I decided to do it, I thought, what if I just keep it a secret? What if I just allow what happens to happen, and people will notice or not notice and then it’ll be about me and my body and my desires, rather than me and the whole world’s perceptions of what it means to undergo medical transition. But I can already feel myself slipping into thinking of T as a notch on my trans proof belt. It’s something people think they understand, and I’m worried about letting it signify me without elaboration, and sinking me a little further into that ocean.

I inject synthetic hormones into my body.

When I was 16, I began to question what it would mean to change genders. How could you tell, I wondered, what gender you felt in a given moment? What did gender entail? I wondered, too, whether an ideological disagreement with a gender binary was enough to put you outside it. I started to research how different people were approaching their gender questions, what the world of gender and sex possibility looked like. 

I quickly found Hudson’s Guide and read everything. Because I started from a fundamental lack of understanding of even the basics of gender, I absorbed any opinion and advice I read. On Hudson’s Guide, this specifically meant some pretty binarist ideas about what it meant to walk through the world as a trans guy whose gender was acknowledged as valid. Still, Hudson is helpful for some things, and it was where I did all of my research on medical transition.

I was obsessive in my research during this period. I remember spending hours doing nothing but trolling the internet for the perfect answers to my ineffable questions. I couldn’t think about anything else. Still, somehow I don’t have a very strong recollection of my research into hormones and surgery. It must have been very quick. If people were posting their entire transition chronologies on youtube and tumblr at that time, I didn’t know about it. I must have looked at a couple of pictures, read that genetics dictated your likelihood of baldness and the density of your body hair, and decided that it wasn’t for me, never mind how appealing some of the other changes sounded. I was changing gender presentations every day at that time, and the idea of making intentional, permanent, gendered changes to my body felt senseless given the constantly shifting nature of my body needs.

That was it; I never looked back.

There were times over the years that I would wistfully watch someone else’s testosterone-induced transformation and wonder if I had made the right decision, but I would always quickly decide that I had. At the time—and in many ways still—it felt like a non-normative decision to make. I didn’t make the decision in order to be non-normative, but I have always taken special pride in the things that are true of me that set me apart. Many of the people around me had never met a trans person before, and the answers they were able to find from the internet and pop culture painted pictures I wasn’t in, so that meant that I was constantly asked to defend my choices and, by extension, to defend my gender. I lost friends as they got bored and impatient with the effort it took to justify my existence. 

As I moved away from gender-switching towards seeking an understanding of my gender as constant, whole, and all-encompassing, the choices I had made despite all the pressure to do anything other than what felt right solidified into an identity, a badge I had to wear proudly so as not to lose it. I developed rhetoric and scrambled to spread it as I witnessed a lack of resources causing so many trans people to adopt the official narrative before their stories had even had a chance to unfold. Identity policing from in and outside of trans communities disheartened me, but also hardened me. I worried a lot about the exhaustion involved in pushing yourself beyond sanctioned existence and hoped for myself that I would find ways not to bow to the binary and end up medically transitioning to make life easy rather than honest. I adopted an anti-assimilationist ideology that I hoped would bolster my resolve if things got tough. 

I never really found community, but I met individuals who understood what I was doing and why—people for whom the personal and the political also spiraled around one another. My ideal lifestyle involves my methods of survival and my political rhetoric refining and redefining one another until they become indistinguishable—until I am an angel dancing on the head of a pin—the perfect point of liberation. In reality, this has often ended up with me taking up my stance too extremely in my own life, forcing constancy and rationality onto my passions. Maybe my stead-fastness with my no-ho status was one of those times.

My first shot is tomorrow.

So what’s changed, and why am I allowing it?

Well, probably the biggest thing that’s happened is that I’m in therapy and I’m in a healthy relationship. I love myself more now than my 16-year-old self could have imagined possible.

See, when I was 16 and making decisions I was going to force myself to stand by for the rest of my life, I hated bodies. Now, don’t misread that. It isn’t that I hated my body (I mean, I did hate my body, but I didn’t especially hate my body) I hated all bodies. I thought all bodies were horrifying. In fact, I was in the habit of comparing my body to other bodies and preferring mine. This habit (and some choice reinforcement from my parents) caused a panic at the idea that anything might change about my body. It was beautiful as it was, but only because it fit a certain idea of what beauty looked like. My decision not to take T wasn’t just about not wanting to put effort into permanent changes that would only occasionally be right for me—it was about a complete terror that my body, with its high likelihood of hair going everywhere but the top of my head, would become disgusting.

Turns out I developed an anti-cissexist, body liberationist theory out of a deep-seeded fear of bodies born of cissexism and body colonization.

Lucky for me, the theory holds water. Even luckier for me, it’s actually been helping me to liberate myself as a person with a body. As my fear and loathing of bodies has been eroded by my belief that all bodies are valid, worthy, and beautiful and that they should be autonomous, I’ve come to really, really love my body. And unlike my old “love,” which was based on the shaky foundation of stasis, this new love is firmly rooted in a love and understanding for all bodies that my 16-year-old self would never have thought possible. What this means is that I’m no longer terrified that my body might do the thing that bodies do best: change. I am not even perturbed by the idea that I might not like all the ways that it changes. I feel able to approach any changes that don’t excite me with the understanding that I have the capacity to find love, healing, or both. 

This is all to say that when the question of whether I had made the right decision came back up for me recently and wouldn’t go away, I thought that changing my mind might be a betrayal of my politics. How could I continue to tell people that being trans didn’t require a cissexist understanding of how bodies are sexed, doesn’t require self-hatred or medical transition? How can I continue to argue that it is the world that must change, not us? I don’t worry about that anymore. My politics have always asked the questions, how can we counter a normative gender narrative? How can I keep from getting caught up in gender norms coming from anywhere but inside me? How can I live my life as a trans person whose gender is mostly a source of great joy to them? Taking testosterone does not stop me from asking these questions; it actually helps me answer them. It also doesn’t mean I have copped out to pressures to assimilate myself into the binary. That isn’t why I’m taking T, and my hope is that it never will be.

My entire exploration has been chasing an answer to the question, “what if?” So now I’m asking it again: What if I stopped allowing my fear of change to stifle my curiosity? What if it took people 5 seconds to decide which binary gender applied to me, instead of the two it takes them now? What if I took this hard-won love for my body and let it propel me forward? What if things could be even better than they already are? 

I want to be clear now that this decision is not a reversal of my previous one. Rather, it is a continuation of my previous one. There is no moment in which I wish that I had started T earlier, no moment of my gender exploration that I regret. Indeed, I could not have made this decision at any point in my life before now, because I could not have made this decision out of anything but a deep, deep love for myself, my body, and my gender. It is not a concession to any of the forces that have tried to tell me my life was impossible. It is the decision to acknowledge and prioritize my desires. And I feel pretty damn good about that.

Pretty sure I live like this and the only family member I’m out to in any way finds it frustrating and inaccessible. we’re growing though :)

I mean, I’ve been making myself accessible for years now, and it still feels frustrating to some people in my life, and frustrating to me too. The thing is that most of the people I actually feel safe around usually didn’t need me to be all that accessible in the first place. I’m lucky and privileged to have found so many people like that, and I’m currently not feeling very patient with anyone else.

Sending strength and patience your way!

1. Treat everyone as though they are a badass ally who already knows the basics and is ready to validate and engage with my lived experience. Act as though they aren’t unduly curious and don’t have any questions. Don’t give them any opportunity to exoticize me or treat me like a magical, mystical other. Make it clear that my expectations are high, but not unreasonable. Remove the “you are special” element of allyship.
2. When it turns out I’m wrong, make sure they feel like they let me down by not listening hard enough and not trying to figure out the answers on their own; don’t allow them to imply that I let them down by not making myself available enough to their curiosity and ignorance. 
3. Don’t give any fucks; don’t make any concessions.
4. Get free.

This’ll work, right?

idk, while Freud really perpetuated the oppression of women through his work, HB did a lot of actual good to promote the needs of trans folk. Continued… The HB joke is funnier if you’re telegraphing your trans status and playing off of anatomical expectations, but it feels mean to HB, whereas Freud really should be sucking dick. “Envy” indeed…

Brin, while I’m sure he appreciates your concern for him, have you read the standards of care written and carried out in our pal Harry’s name? I definitely recommend it if you can stomach it.

Here are some choice exerpts (TRIGGER WARNING for cissexism, gatekeeping, and other assorted bullshit)

Two Primary Populations with GID Exist—Biological Males and Biological Females. The sex of a patient always is a significant factor in the management of GID. Clinicians need to separately consider the biological, social, psychological, and economic dilemmas of each sex.For example, when first requesting professional assistance, the typical biological female seems to be further along in consolidating a male gender identity than does the typical biological male in his quest for a comfortable female gender identity. This often enables the sequences of therapy to proceed more rapidly for male-identified persons. All patients, however, must follow the SOC.

The Clinical Threshold. A clinical threshold is passed when concerns, uncertainties, and questions about gender identity persist in development, become so intense as to seem to be the most important aspect of a person’s life, or prevent the establishment of a relatively unconflicted gender identity. The person’s struggles are then variously informally referred to as a gender identity problem, gender dysphoria, a gender problem, a gender concern, gender distress, or transsexualism. Such struggles are known to be manifested from the preschool years to old age and have many alternate forms.

1. in order to provide puberty delaying hormones to a person less than age 18, the following criteria must be met
2. throughout childhood they have demonstrated an intense pattern of cross-gender identity and aversion to expected gender role behaviors
3. gender discomfort has significantly increased with the onset of puberty
4. social, intellectual, psychological, and interpersonal development are limited as a consequence of their GID
5. serious psychopathology, except as a consequence of the GID, is absent
6. the family consents and participates in the triadic therapy

I mean, I get that this was a cool first step and all, and that, thank goodness, more and more places are moving away from these requirements, but the joke that is so great about “Harry Benjamin can suck my dick” is that Harry would never, ever, allow someone like me to have a dick. 

That’s a funnier joke, right?