Isn’t That How Cisgender People Do it Too?

This is a content warning. I was going to call this Cutting Off Your Own Balls is Not Easy. Consider that a warning for dysphoria, transphobia, self harm, torture of trans people and medical themes.

Gender Dysphoria:

Being ‘mistaken’ for a girl used to happen quite often and people weren’t afraid to comment.

That flat in Glasgow. I used to live in Glasgow. One day I overheard one of the neighbours kids saying to their friends “my dad said it’s half man and half woman” as I walked by. About me. I felt so much shame I died a little bit. I wasn’t half of anything. Except I was.

The old perv in the changing rooms at the public swimming baths who used to comment loud enough for me to hear “Is that a lassie, I thought that was a lassie?” Me ashamed without reason staring at my feet as I hurried to the pool.

One day looking in the mirror at a face that needs shaving. Gender Dysphoria is a countdown clock, a dirty bomb toxifying your whole life. A face that cannot belong to you. The arguments that people without gender dysphoria make are things like “everyone has a hard time during puberty.” Not like this. This is not just your body changing in ways you don’t understand or don’t like. This is your whole life fading away in a supernova. Every atom of the person you thought you would become burning to ashes. It isn’t about an uncomfortable moment in the present and anxiety of what may lie ahead, although they are part of it. It is the absolute certainty that what you thought lay ahead, what you ached for, planned for, and dreamed of, who you are, is being taken away. Forcing trans kids through an inappropriate puberty is forcing them to watch their future being taken away. It is to strip them of hope, before they are even 14. I knew that. I was aware of that, it stabbed me through the heart every day. I was supposed to become a woman, this was not supposed to happen and when it started to happen I did everything I could to stop it. Including attempted self-mutilation, but cutting off your own balls is not easy. I knew it had to be the balls, chemically speaking, they were the seat of the problem, being the major production site of testosterone. I researched methods of castration. The one I tried several times is sometimes used on animals, or so I read, I still don’t know if that is true. It had the advantage of not involving blood loss. You wrap elastic bands around and around the neck of the scrotum, tighter and tighter. As tight as you possibly can, trapping the testicles below the elastic and strangulating their blood supply. If I could stop them from causing harm to my body I could possibly hold onto some of myself. I made myself quite ill wearing a strangulation tourniquet *down there* for days at a time trying to get those little fucks to die. All I managed to do was give myself horrible abdominal pain so bad I almost fainted more than once at school.

Denying transgender kids care causes self harm. It creates attempts at self mutilation.

I thought starvation would be a good way to prevent puberty. So I began to live on a seriously calorie restricted diet.

Forcing trans kids through an inappropriate puberty causes eating disorders. I would put money on there being a connection.

Whenever I thought about being an adult, as a child, I wondered about what sort of woman I wanted to be. I wanted to be happy, I wanted to be loved. I wanted to live a life that was mobile. In my childish imagination I was like Jaime Sommers moving across America. I always imagined that some day I would live in America, it was so pervasive culturally it seemed nearby. I wanted to be like Jane Fonda or my cousins. Smart, funny, brilliant women, who had each other’s backs. Generous, loving and thoughtful. I wanted to be like the women I read about. Gloria Steinem, and the women I saw on tv leading independent lives. I wanted to fit within the bounds of ordinary challenges and experiences. I didn’t want to be marked as a deranged freak. Some day I imagined I might get married to a man who loved me. I imagined what that would be like, I imagined having kids. What would it be like to be pregnant? I romanticised being a mother, with the women around me as the models. Isn’t that how cisgender people do it too?

I exist within a state called depression. Sometimes it is easy to forget I live there, like people who live on the side of a volcano only tend to really think about it when the volcano starts to grumble.

Forcing trans kids through an inappropriate puberty causes lifelong depression.

Denying young trans people care makes the ones who aren’t completely broken into the survivors of an apocalypse, eking out a life. Alive but not really living.

I had my first appointment with a psychiatrist, a man who had no idea what to do with someone like me when I was 16. Desperate to change sex. A 16 year old boy. I have no idea how I even managed to get to see him. I remember sitting in the high ceilinged Victorian building asking to be referred to a gender identity unit and him saying I wasn’t old enough. And I died a little more.

Going through the wrong puberty meant more medical interventions, not fewer. Physiological and psychological. Endless psychiatric evaluations. I still need more surgery to this day. I have never been able to afford facial feminization surgery – which if I had the benefits of puberty blockers I would never have needed.

When you force a young person with gender dysphoria through a puberty they should not experience you are stealing their future and breaking their hearts. You are sentencing them to more medical interventions. More surgeries to reverse the effects. Let them live the lives they know they want to live and be the people they see themselves being, I beg you.

This post is a bit of a mess.

Note to the parents of trans kids who think they can stop their kids.

Help them or lose them.

If you aren’t willing to fight for young trans people to get the care they need then you are a liar. You don’t care about their well-being, you only care about your own feelings. If you aren’t willing to tell young trans people that who they are, that being transgender, is fine, you are, as Philip Larkin said, a fuck up. And you are going to fuck them up. The one thing you are not going to do is stop them. They are going to bury it and learn to lie to your face because they already know that is the only way they will survive. They are going to be quietly managing you, as they plan to get as far away as they can from you. Your trans kids already know you are a danger. They worked that out as soon as language became available to their growing brains. Through your deeds they know you. And trans kids are forced by the insight they have about you, which you lack about them, to know if they can trust you or not. You are not going to stop them because they already have a plan to stop you.