BODYQUEASY

I have had lots of responses to my request for stories and resources on my LJ (it's friends-locked and slightly filtered, which might mean people are more comfortable discussing things there). A lot of those responses have been from people who have (at this point) decided they are not trans but genderqueer or something else or not-a-woman-women, or have decided not to identify as trans. I'd ideally like some more responses from trans people, too, but I feel lucky to I have such a variety of people as friends! People are awesome (sometimes)!

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I wanted to add something to what I wrote about in the last post, and it's something I kind of forgot before reading the responses to my LiveJournal post . . . I was reading with interest about people who have struggled with how they want to identify, and have come up as 'not trans', and I started to feel physically ill.

Living as a guy, surrounding myself with friends who accept me as a guy, being naked/less than fully armoured (no binder) around people who I trust not to read my body as female, being able to read my own body as a-certain-kind-of-male has meant that I don't often run up against feelings of intense dysphoria. I'm not ashamed of my body, it's not a bad body, it does most of the things I'd like a body to do - I'm very lucky. But reading these responses, started to wonder, what if I was told not to live as a guy? If I didn't have a large group of friends and acquaintances that accept me? If I didn't get read as a guy as often as I do?

I realised that actually the thought of not being trans/a guy myself was making me nauseous in a back-of-my-mind-familiar way. I felt queasy, and like i wanted to curl in a ball and cry, and my throat felt tight and panicky. So I guess that's a kind of dysphoria, and I suppose that's another thing that makes me trans.

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Most of the time I don't quite remember, but it seems that my body remembers this queasiness from another time - over two decades of it sitting placidly just below the surface, almost like a second skin, so close and natural that I never thought it was anything but normal. And this morning (after a night full of bad dreams: clawing my way along chicken wire fences beside freeways in the dark and the rain, vehicles hurtling by close enough to touch, footpath on the other side of the fence) I woke up with a sense of relief - almost re-living that original moment of recognition.

I don't have to be female, I don't have to be a woman, it's OK, it's OK, it's OK.