This wasn't the original topic for this post. It was going to be all about my experiences working in a story-telling program designed to empower kids, and how I translated that into my experiences as a trans*, non-normative, confused-POC-type person. Essentially, how storytelling acts as one of the many tools in the fight to dismantle the master's house (consciousness-raising is going to be the most recognizable example for those of you who focus on historical feminisms).
This isn't that. That one is coming, but requires a lot more research. This post is something that has been bothering me over the last week.
For the last month, each week when I go into my therapist's office, he asks me why I'm there.
My answer is uniform, practiced, and simple.
"I'm here because I have to be. I'm trans, and because of that, doctors and senators think I'm inherently unstable. So I need your signature on some forms saying I've been seeing you for a year."
He never responds.
Last week, I yelled at my therapist and left his office.
Last week, I expressed my frustrations about trying to do everything right, and still never getting ahead. I told him about the same fight I've been having with myself for the last six years - how unaffordable and unattainable an education is, how I worked hard to get ahead for a house, only to have the house fall through and set me back even further. How screwed up our economic, political, and educational systems are, to the point where the American Dream (if it hasn't always been) has finally become something more of a mirage, constantly moving further and further as we try approaching it.
All of these things that most 20/30-somethings generally express anxiety over.
He then did a 360 and instead of sitting absolutely silently (which he usually does, unless he takes a break to express one of the seven opinions he's rotated through my entire time seeing him), he asked what my identity as being a transgender male had to do with this.
...
What does it have to do with this?
Nothing.
I tried explaining that. I told him that being trans* is why I'm in therapy, but not what I actually need therapy for (if I need it at all - which I'm still ambivalent about). He went on to object and say that, of course, being trans* is this huge, all-encompassing deal that affects how I inhale and blow my nose because how could it not?
That's when I started getting angry and not simply agitated.
When I tried to explaining to him that I thought about my gender about as much as he did when he woke up and got ready for the morning, and he continuously interrupted me to tell me I was wrong, I obviously thought about it more than he ever did - that's when I left.
The entire time I've been going through this process, I've been frustrated with the degree of "accepted" stamps we need on us to be who we really are. I know I'm not the only one who finds out they need one more form, one more letter, one more doctor, to get the prescription or the surgery or the validation they need to step back off a ledge.
I also know I'm not the only one who became frustrated with one-issue politics long before I came out as transgender, quickly realizing the injustices of pushing one issue in a community forward, only to neglect the majority of folks in said community doing the grassroots and leg work.
You can only imagine how ironic I thought a lot of my own issues were when I realized my body had been wrong all along. It suddenly felt like a big ole easy button had just magically appeared. I said it, and it was. Then came the paperwork.
We need a doctor (PCP), and another doctor (an endocrinologist) and a head doctor (psychotherapist, for me), and eventually another doctor (or two!) to give us the prescribed surgeries - some of which we are required to have, even if we don't want to, if we're unlucky enough to be from certain states. I certainly got sort of lucky here - the state I currently live in doesn't change birth certificates for any reason. Ever. The one I was born in, though, only requires a minimum of one out of two irreversible surgeries. Luckily, there's one that is manageable.
So, let's talk about the government dictating what individuals can and cannot do to their bodies. The government is going to tell me it is not only okay, but I am required to sterilize myself in order to be legally seen as the gender I already identify as every single day. The only catch is, this way, all of my papers will all say the same thing - instead of my social security and birth certificate saying something contradictory to everything else I own. But then, the government will turn around and also say: "oh, you're carrying a child you don't actually want? The child was a product of rape? Drunkenness? Too bad, you're going to have to keep it, just try to look at the silver lining!"
And my therapist thinks I'm angry with our government...
So why don't we change it?
I know people who have been out there for years working on not just LGB issues, but T issues, and queer issues, and racial and social justice of all kinds, and they are amazing people. They've changed my life. They've made me a better, stronger, more confident, smarter person, and I would never change that. But it's time we got serious. It's time we stopped letting celebs and millionaires narrate the experiences of trans folks who can't afford prescriptions and are injecting unsafe concoctions, who are living on the streets, who are being shot for walking home while black and trans.
As I've said before, I love Janet Mock. She is beautiful and brilliant and she does our community a great service. I've never met Laverne or Caitlin, but I'm sure they're amazing, too.
They don't look anything like us.
They aren't us.
We don't have that kind of money, those kind of surgeons, that kind of lifestyle. And our lives aren't public in the sense that we're appearing on talk shows every single day, or magazine covers (unless it's a queer magazine or you're Aydian - congrats on the top 5, by the way!), or in tabloids, but they are very public in the sense that we get gunned down for existing and the major news outlets won't talk about it, we get cyber-bullied and real life bullies, we're threatened with physical violence in a room full of people and no one will stand up to it for us, and that when we die, our "allies" talk about changing things and rarely ever do.
We need more of our own to stand up and tell them what it's really like, to tell big pharma we don't need stamps of approval, to tell the government we're not a box full of Pinocchio puppets making wishes to the good fairy Congress so we can all become real people (this isn't that kind of drama, sorry folks).
Let's show them we're angry.
About Stonewall (the movie), about not existing, about being interrupted when we're just trying to get by, about being told we're different when we're really not.
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