My gender is a foreign land

Making my way into unknown territory

Photo by Pete Nowicki on Unsplash

My beating heart bleeds

drops like red rain

splashed across an open field

feeding the roots moist and thick

under the surface

so deep they scrape against my skin,

my bones lie in wait

I do not have the strength to tear them

from the soil

not even with two hands gripping

for a moment

I can’t breathe

then I relax

I breathe again

When I was diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder in 2003 I thought I had found the answer to my struggles with depression and anxiety. I was proud of myself for the courage it took to ask for help and I was ready to embark on whatever the future held for me. I was honest about my gender nonconformity with the psychologist who assessed me. And I was open to those who were close to me that I felt not so much like a man, but definitely not like a woman. At the time I felt that if I had to pick how to live my life, I chose to live it as a man. It just so happened that was an option.

I wasn’t offered any other options for my gender dysphoria besides medical ones. I wasn’t offered any explanation for why I might feel gender dysphoric. It simply was. Like rain falling in the desert. I simply had to accept. So I did.

A diagnosis meant hormones and surgery. The message was clear — gender dysphoria was not something you could be talked out of. So I didn’t even try to better understand it. The psychologist who assessed me did recommend therapy but only to help me adjust to my new reality once I started medicalizing my body.

It seemed obvious, if not to me then to everyone else, that changing my body was the only way forward. Since nothing else had helped me feel less alienated from myself —not the litany of medications I had been on, nor the attempts at therapy for anxiety and depression that pre-dated my transition, I felt I had run out of options.

For years leading up to that moment, I had tried to live somewhere in between the masculine and the feminine, dressing androgynously and mixing mainly with lesbians socially. But even there I didn’t feel like I belonged. I remember a lesbian roommate once informing me that she could normally tell if someone was gay but that she had a hard time reading me. I recall the kid who pointed at me in a parking lot and asked their mother — is that a boy or a girl? I was asking myself that too.

I wasn’t stereotypically feminine but I wasn’t particularly masculine either. I wasn’t handy around the house or spatially gifted. I wasn’t good at math, I wasn’t interested in body building, I wasn’t a computer geek. I wasn’t a particularly good cook, I didn’t like dresses or makeup.

I was quiet, introverted, liked to read and listen to music, avoided conflict, kept to myself, and struggled to find my place.

I wanted an identity that helped me feel like I could belong. So much of the time I felt like I had neither belonging nor identity. I felt no kinship with the women in my life. I don’t say that with pride. There is not pride in it. It is the truth.

Travelling back in time and remembering exactly how depressed I was, is hard. You had to be there I guess. I was there but I wasn’t either. I was checked out most of the time. Dissociated. Distracted. Disaffected. Depressed and heavily dosed. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, sleep meds, psychotropic meds of all sorts. I felt broken and I was treated as such.

My whole life is ambiguous. Did my gender transition save me? Or did it condemn me to a life so much less rich than it could have been? Did it shorten my lifespan or extend it? Hard to say.

I could drive myself crazy trying to revisit all the decision points that led me to where I am but what good is that? Fact is, here I am. A transman who doesn’t believe he is male. Never have, though I’ve tried. I accept that I am female. A masculine female of sorts. Not so masculine. Not so feminine either. Nonbinary then? I don’t like to define myself as a negative. Too often I have felt like an absence, an emptiness where something should be but isn’t. Words have a kind of power but I struggle to find the right ones still.

If I don’t believe I am male, will I detransition? I don’t know what that means. There’s no ‘there’ to go back to. From age 12-23 I was suicidally depressed and isolated. From age 23 onward I chose to live socially as a man. My transition coincided with my first serious job, my first relationship with a woman, and my first time truly living on my own.

Returning to a female social identity would mean a potential return to the hurting person I was before. I welcome her as part of me but I do not see myself inhabiting her socially. She is light, like a ghost, immaterial and floaty. Lurking in the shadows.

Here I am, then, in a gender no man’s land. No woman’s land. A nothingness, a something.

No matter what I do or say, I know there will be those who say I am not a real man, that I am living a lie. Perhaps they are right. And yet each day, I get up, put on the clothes I feel most comfortable in, trim the beard that cross sex hormones have induced in me even though I no longer take them. Perhaps I should be miserable. I am not. I still feel lost in the wilderness, it is true. But perhaps with age, one grows more comfortable with the wilderness and one’s place in it.

This is my path. And though I can’t see yet where it will wind its way, I am ready to walk it. I feel stronger than I ever have, and hopeful. I feel fragile and scared. But I know, so many feet walk next to me, so many lives have protected mine. I am grateful for this gift, this time I have in this mysterious world. I am a child of the universe, complex and beautiful.