Bodies

Content notes: ableism, transphobia, racism

Author notes: updated 12/23/2021

I have a complicated relationship with my body.

It’s this short, weird little thing that doesn’t quite seem to work right. The joints clatter and pop in and out. Sometimes it can walk fine. Other times there’s a bit of a waddle, resembling a penguin on ice. Its voice marked me as trans even before T, holding the pitches and annunciations culturally associated with women until I began to sing. It attracts all sorts of unwanted attention, ranging from skinheads in the woods to weirdos on the internet. This body is all I have and yet it has never truly been mine. A foreign, clunky thing beholden with fluctuations and contradictions.

When you sit outside of a group’s norms, your body is a public spectacle. Property of the masses. This gets talked about time and time again even when little changes. Every little feature that seems “odd” is fair game — especially if you hold different opinions from the group.

When I began exploring detransitioned spaces, conversations about the objectification of the body were common. Women’s bodies were abused, distorted, and marketed for a patriarchal capitalist culture that saw them as nothing more than products to consume. Detrans women’s bodies were also abused, but this time from those that claimed to be “allies.” Comments about mutilation, disfigurement, genderweird atrocities brought about by the knife and needles of the establishment. And it met resistance. Detrans women pushed back, recognizing that this was not a respectful way to speak of their experiences. True, they were critical of the establishment, but that didn’t mean that their bodies were broken or permanently marked. They could reclaim their power and recognize that women are women regardless of how they look.

As a genderfreaky, transitioned, disabled weirdo, this was comforting. “Here are people who can understand me,” I thought to myself. Occasionally I met people who did. Most of the time I was wrong.

The issue with bodies, groups, and norms is that they are always conditional to the in-group. Humans are by nature judgmental creatures, a nature that must always be reflected on and kept in check if it means treating others with respect. Combine it with being social creatures that gravitate toward each other to find their people and this can get messy fast.

The more time I spent navigating detrans scenes, albeit to a limited capacity (I was never fully incorporated into the in-group; too weird, too medically dependent, too genderfreaky), the more it became apparent that many of the same societal problems persisted. For unless that tendency is checked and held in solidarity with other experiences, there is always the risk of falling into self- and in-group preservation.

And how do you preserve the in-group? You disconnect yourself from the out-group, either cognitively or behaviorally. Your body is fine, you say to yourself. The bodies of your peers are fine. No one should take issue with that. The bodies of outsiders? Whatever. And either you vocalize it yourself or you sit around and do nothing as your peers do.

As I navigated the scenes, I encountered many comments and ideas that derided bodies like mine. Life-long medical patient. Pained, damaged, distressed. Recovery meant disconnecting from the system in its entirety, for the system was responsible for the damage caused. Anyone who continued to be wedded to that system was pitiful or, worse, delusional and out to harm themselves and others for enabling the existence of said system.

This is why I left, though not without internalizing the venom first.

When I began talking about my vision loss and [what I thought was] its connection to stopping T in 2019, I was met with a flood of sympathy laced with condescending language of how tragic it was that I was permanently disfigured in such a way. Surely, justice must be done. Surely, such experiences could be beneficial to the masses. Surely, my pain could dissuade those poor, vulnerable, delusional kids from picking up the needle. Surely, my experience was transformative. I was damaged but others didn’t have to be. Take one for the team.

And I bought it. I bought it, I organized based on it, I parroted the appropriate talking points and crafted public relations campaigns under the guise of “informing” people. All while my mind was destroying itself, trying to disconnect from being trans and disabled. Trying to scrub away flesh and blood that the world saw, no matter my own efforts, and would fight to eliminate.

There is a very fine line between informing and fear mongering. You’re walking a tight rope, waiting to fall. Fall I did.

As GCCAN constructed its list of resources, tossing blood into the shark tank of Twitter with studies and interviews, most trans people picked up on the underlying intent immediately. As they should have. The organization presented itself as being for all when it was in fact another in-group. I did what damage control I could, vetoing tweets or resources that came off as too transphobic, but let’s be real. It was clear from the start. To date, it still is.

Transitioned bodies are to be respected unless they’re trans. Unless they’re disabled or Mad. Unless they’re Black, or Indigenous, or Jewish. Unless they’re transfeminine. Unless they use drugs. Unless they come with the belief that we cannot and should not control the autonomy of others.

Have you ever noticed how this in-group will defend their own but never hold themselves or each other accountable for attacks against others? Against Mad and disabled people, people of color, trans women, people in recovery or who currently use? I have. Even when immersed in the spaces, I have. Sure, my vision loss made this more apparent, but the virulent racism, ableism, transphobia, and transmisogyny were there from the start. Calling attention to this fact means marking yourself. You become part of the out-group. You become fair game. Objectification only persists while you’re useful. Speak up and you’re no longer useful, you’re a threat. Threats need to be taken out.

Bodies that cannot be molded, that cannot be assimilated, that cannot be controlled, are threatening. Especially when they have a voice. Especially when they have a voice that speaks a different truth than people want to hear. Especially if they hold contradictions and complications and nuance. Especially if they challenge the idea that autonomy is connected to health is connected to perfection.

I reflect on the words of bell hooks in Ain’t I a Woman as she challenged white feminists in the 70s. “Ain’t I a woman?” she argued, noting that her peers supposedly fighting for her experiences as a woman were ignoring the way it intersected with race. White feminists, lesbian separatists included, treated her and other Black women with contempt. She did not have equal access to womanhood that they did. They fought for their womanhood and, too often, access to greater degrees of white privilege at the expense of her and other Black people. She pushed back against this, noting that living within a white supremacist culture was just as crucial and intertwined with living in a patriarchal one, within both Black communities and feminist ones.

Not much has changed. In this wave of “gender critical” and “radical” feminism, the problem persists. Many of us are still not women. Disabled women, for instance, are not women. We’re objects. Scare stories. Bodies without heads, without voices, without fingers to type and challenge and protest. Be seen but not heard. Be heard but only in snippets. “Get the slogans right or we’ll do it for you.” And rarely, if ever, is that brought to light.

This body is all I have ever known. We don’t always get along. Yet it holds my voice, even when others hold that voice in contempt.

Voices sing the song of truth. Can you hear it?

Am I your sister too or aren’t I?