Transformation

When I was in high school, I had a blog which was part of a "body modification" community. In order to get a subscription, one had to either pay or submit a story of a "body modification experience." Thankfully, when I joined the community was still in its fledgling stages and was still accepting articles on such "mundane" topics as getting one's ears pierced, which was the content of my submission. I joined that community as much because of what I was as I did because of what I was not. The "average" user was full of ink, holes, scars, and stories of society's tragic misunderstandings of their personality, identity, and way of life. I joined partly because I was deeply fascinated by the psychology of people who would do such extreme things to themselves, partly because, like any other teenager, I needed a place where I could "belong", and partly out of a jealous desire to monitor what my boyfriend was posting on his blog.

I always look back on high school with a bit of a cringe, and wonder why I ever let things go or turn out the way they did. I can remember sitting in classes, watching the other kids talk and joke amongst themselves. I remember watching the "good Catholics" help plan the masses and decorate for holy days, myself pretending to mock the entire religious establishment but secretly just wishing that I could be a part of them, a part of the "good", a part of the "normal", a part of the "retreat leaders", the "ministers", and just telling myself that I wasn't one of them; I wasn't "made" for it, I wasn't "allowed" to be that, hating myself and them simultaneously for it.

Looking back I can see no concrete reason for why things had to be so. I can only conclude that my outlook was largely the result of a poorly made assumption about myself - somewhere along the line I got the idea that I just wasn't the same, wasn't worthy, and so I had to be something else. At the same time, it felt like some of the interests I was legitimately developing did conflict largely with the worldview and attitudes of those around me.

I can remember a lot of the entries I wrote (which have since been deleted, thank goodness) and cringe again at the overly emotive and naive ways in which I looked at the world and expressed myself. I'm talking partly about normal teenage angst, and partly about what was a semi-conscious "exposure" of my poor, bleeding, misunderstood soul to the world. It was like I was using the right sorts of highly charged phrases and ideologies because they were what fit me into the culture around me, a culture which was on the surface more accepting than the one I had really wanted to be a part of. It was also like I was manufacturing a lot of that emotion and drama - in other words, I didn't really have that bad of a life, I really wasn't that upset, but if I tried hard enough I could create a convincing drama with which to occupy the hours in between homework and sleep.

The hard part since then has been "rolling" back from that mindset - reconnecting with a healthy sense of optimism and trust in people and letting go of the cynicism and the "what can drama do for me today?" sort of mindset. I can remember what it was like to consciously train myself to think and emote relative to that community (sorry, Mom and Dad. That had to suck for ya'll...) and now I am trying just as consciously to reground myself in a sensible sort of reality. (As an aside, some of the cynicism is entirely valid and came from a number of experiences which, while extremely hurtful, did lend an interesting perspective to human nature and the male psyche. But that's a dissertation for another day.)

I'm slowly (very slowly) getting to a point here. Around the time I deleted my blog, a transsexual named Cora started posting a series of articles. Cora had begun life as a male named James and had decided around the age of 30-something that she had had enough of pretending to be a "he" and that it was time to really do something outward about the fact that she had always been a guy and wanted to fully become a girl. The articles were supposed to update the reader on Cora's progress from physical male to physical-and-mental female.

One of the articles I'd read was posted about two years ago, and she was talking about how the whole transgender situation was, for her, almost certainly "genetic". Her evidence for this was simply that her monther had told her that her father (who incidentally walked out while Cora was a newborn) had also harbored doubts about his gender identity and sexuality. To Cora it seemed statistically unreasonable that a man and his father could both be transsexual without one knowing the other at all *unless* there was some kind of genetic link. She went on to discuss how when she was in kindergarden it confused her greatly to get categorized with the "boys" because until then she had assumed that she was a girl. She apparently went on to spend the great rest of her life resenting that she was not a girl while at the same time acting like an alpha male. (A fake one, of course). At the time of the article, she was on hormone replacement therapy, and was hoping to have an operation in a year or a year and a half.

As I went on with my life, I gradually forgot about the community and about following her updates.

Over the weekend I was talking with Brian, and for some reason I mentioned Cora and her articles. Tonight I had some time to kill and so I surfed back to the place* so I could find out what happened to her. I figured that by now she had successfully undergone surgery and was more or less as psychologically adapted as one could be after such an experience. (Even though she'd apparently been a "girl" all of her life).

What happened next was, at the risk of sounding hypocrtically dramatic, nothing short of momentous.

It turns out that Cora decided that she was not a girl, would never be a girl, and was actually the same man named James that she'd been for her entire life. He never had the surgery, quit the hormone replacement therapy, and within a few days was wholly unable to write anything about the experience that was nearly as emotional or "open" as the articles he'd written while taking the estrogen. Instead he listed a few different apparently "medical" categorizations of transvestitism, transgenderism, cross dressing, and sexuality and discussed where he fit within all of them. Interestingly, his conclusion seemed to be mostly that there are some things in life which are truly immutable. A male is a male, even if he sometimes wants to pretend to be a female, or even if he wants to be intimate with other males. Such desires are generally harmless; the important thing is that there is actually some concrete, undeniable, essence to gender - and therefore, normalcy has a basis.

As Mr. Hoefler would say, this is HUGE!!!

One thing that has always made me uncomfortable with the body modification community is the notion that "normal" is a fallacy, that there actually is no baseline for identity, values, or behavior, and that to think so was nothing short of judgmental, irrational, and (worst of all) hurtful.

After I read James' last article, I re-read some of the ones written by Cora. I was able to identify some illogical reasoning of his that I'd completely missed years ago. He mentioned that he was raised without a father figure, and that in kindergarden he was deeply distressed to find that he was not a female. It makes so much sense to me that, far from being a genetic precondition, that he was simply naive as a youth and took for granted that he was the "same" as his mother, whom he spent the bulk of his time around. (It may seem hard for some of you to imagine being so naive, but I can remember being in second grade and still thinking that people were either Catholic or completely religionless....) It is interesting to me that his mistaken assumption about himself as a youth seemed to trigger such deep personal conflicts for a large part of his adult life.

People who know me now always have a hard time imagining that I was ever a "goth", or "into" body modification, and there are times when I have felt like a stranger amidst people who seem much more innocent and "normal" than I. Overall, however, I feel much more comfortable with myself now than myself years ago. I'd rather be the easygoing, Church-going, engineering dork who listens to heavy metal and knows an inordinate amount about paganism and body modifications than the dramatic goth who has decided that she isn't "allowed" to be normal. It makes more sense to allow that "I am essentially _______, but I have these desires and interests" than to decry any sense of the absolute.



*I can give the URL to anyone who IMs me and is willing to peruse the site as a mature adult, but I am not going to post it here as there is a LOT of potentially offensive and disturbing material linked to from the site and I do not want assumptions made about the sorts of things that I do with my spare time, nor do I want its contents to disturb my unsuspecting web audience, especially those of you who have met me long after (or long before, hehe) my days of high school weirdness.