Not Born this Way: On Transitioning as a Transwoman Who Has Never Felt Trapped

[suzifrommd]

Not Born this Way: On Transitioning as a Transwoman Who Has Never Felt "Trapped in the Wrong Body"

Kai Cheng Thom  Jul 9, 2015

http://www.xojane.com/issues/im-a-transwoman-who-never-felt-trapped-in-the-wrong-body

As a clinical social worker, I have been trained to assess the "validity" of transgender clients' identies. One of the classic psychiatric criteria that exists and is widely used to this day is the question of how such individuals feel about their bodies: to qualify for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (ie, to be 'really' transgender), trans people must often express complete repudiation of their genitals and secondary sex characteristics. (While the precise guidelines in the psychiatrists' bible, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, have become more flexible over time, the reality is that many healthcare practitioners operate based on personal and/or outdated standards.) The result is that transgender identity becomes defined in terms of disgust, hatred, dysphoria, disease. Our bodies become a condition to be cured, a mistake to be corrected, freakish, abominations.

[Picklehorse]

I relate so well to this.

[Rejennyrated]

Although to put the other side of this - some of us who were greatly accepted by our family and friends, even as far back as the 1960's did feel revulsion but absolutely NOT because anyone had imposed that on us.

Indeed my own family were very clear that they would have far preferred me to be a "chick with a dick" even as far back as 1980! But I LOATHED the "filthy abomination" which I just knew had no right to be there - it was tumour, an alien growth which did NOT belong, and no amount of pleading and telling me I could be a woman without it being removed would EVER have changed that.

So while I fully support the idea that everyone should be allowed to see themselves as valid and wholesome I absolutely HATE and oppose the idea which some people are going to take from this that I am "wrong" to see my previous form as a deformity.

Sorry but people who think like that are, and were, the real opressors in my eyes - not the sane people who agreed with my own feelings that it was a sickness to cured!

If people can live like that then i'm delghted for them - but please dont set up a new transoppressive norm against those of us who geniunely cant, by suggesting that we have been somehow pressureed into the feeling by negative programming because thats just not true.

[smdh]

When I decided to start hormone therapy, I did not do it because I hated my body. I did it so the world would see my gender closer to the way I do. I did it because I loved myself, because my body is mine, and because I am the one who decides how to navigate it through this complicated and violent world.

This really speaks to me. Thanks a million for posting it.