Trans Woman's Journey (Death #13)
Hi,
Eventually Trans Woman dies, the end... and maybe the beginning as well. It depends on a lot of factors.
Death comes to Trans Woman more easily than most. Homicide and assault against Trans Women, especially impoverished Trans Women and Trans Women of color, remains a major cause of death. Trans Women often have trouble finding competent and respectful medical care even when we feel brave enough to seek it out. In most places it remains legal for medical insurance to deny us even basic care. As a result we remain more susceptible to death from diseases and medical complications than most. Accessing black market medical help or self-medicating also involve a risk of death. And suicide acts as an absolute scourge on our numbers. Many of us attempt suicide and far too many succeed. No small number of us abuse our bodies with drugs, alcohol, or other means that help us to suppress or ignore our pain at the cost of increased risk of death. All these risk factors hit us because as a group we suffer a great deal of oppression, with the multiple oppressions that many of us suffer compounding the problem.
Others of us technically avoid death, but fail to truly live. We cut off so much of our selves in order to fit in the male gender box that we qualify as members of the living dead for most practical purposes. We shamble through our days in ill fitting "male" clothes and ill fitting "male" lives. I survived that way for years.
But death for Trans Woman also has a potentially very positive aspect, Transition. The details vary amongst us. For some hormones take on great importance, for others surgery has paramount importance, while still others focus on a social rather than medical transition. Tremendous quantities of ink and numbers of megabytes have been employed exploring the technical aspects of transition. And yet for the purpose of the journey, the distinctions and details prove far less important than the commonality. In all case transition means death.
Trans Woman's previous identity dies. Maybe that identity dies on an operating table cut by a surgeons knife, or more slowly eaten away by the chemical changes of switching to an estrogen based system, or perhaps that identity fades away under the gradual eradication of a persistent social change, or some combination of these factors.
The once prevalent model of Transition required that Trans Woman completely abandon her life, manufacture a new history, and completely emerge as a new person unconnected to the old. I won't pretend that model doesn't have some appeal to me even now. I don't want to deceive people about my past, but I like the idea of a completely clean start.
In Transition we lose our name. We may choose a new name, but we seldom maintain our old name. Even if Trans Woman has and retains a gender neutral name, that name will take on new connotations because names have such strong gender bias attached to them.
In Transition we lose our friendships, families, and relationships. Sometimes we lose people who reject us or who simply grow distant, but even those people who stay in our lives we will relate to differently and they will relate to us differently. Too much of how people relate to one another comes from gender for this not to occur almost without exception.
In Transition we lose our reputations, our credentials, and often our careers. Again, sometimes we lost them literally, but even when we maintain them, they will get interpreted differently because society filters all these things through gender.
In Transition we lose our self. We have built up a careful sense of our identity and of our limitations that includes such factors as sexual orientation, sexual preferences, and other key interests. Sexual orientation may change and will become different simply because we have changed and the same goes for other preferences and interests.
In Transition we lose our lies. All the deceit that society required so that we could pretend that the identity some doctor assigned us really fit goes away. All the lies we tell ourselves to make life bearable under the weight of that deception become unnecessary. We can still lie to ourselves after transition, but even the lies mean different things. From my perspective this loss makes all the other losses worthwhile.
Transition adds up to Death and rebirth, and while I know from my own experience how strange and rough and wonderful it can get, I know in my heart that it provided a superior alternative to either physical Death or the living Death I once endured.
Thanks,
Lorrraine
Eventually Trans Woman dies, the end... and maybe the beginning as well. It depends on a lot of factors.
Death comes to Trans Woman more easily than most. Homicide and assault against Trans Women, especially impoverished Trans Women and Trans Women of color, remains a major cause of death. Trans Women often have trouble finding competent and respectful medical care even when we feel brave enough to seek it out. In most places it remains legal for medical insurance to deny us even basic care. As a result we remain more susceptible to death from diseases and medical complications than most. Accessing black market medical help or self-medicating also involve a risk of death. And suicide acts as an absolute scourge on our numbers. Many of us attempt suicide and far too many succeed. No small number of us abuse our bodies with drugs, alcohol, or other means that help us to suppress or ignore our pain at the cost of increased risk of death. All these risk factors hit us because as a group we suffer a great deal of oppression, with the multiple oppressions that many of us suffer compounding the problem.
Others of us technically avoid death, but fail to truly live. We cut off so much of our selves in order to fit in the male gender box that we qualify as members of the living dead for most practical purposes. We shamble through our days in ill fitting "male" clothes and ill fitting "male" lives. I survived that way for years.
But death for Trans Woman also has a potentially very positive aspect, Transition. The details vary amongst us. For some hormones take on great importance, for others surgery has paramount importance, while still others focus on a social rather than medical transition. Tremendous quantities of ink and numbers of megabytes have been employed exploring the technical aspects of transition. And yet for the purpose of the journey, the distinctions and details prove far less important than the commonality. In all case transition means death.
Trans Woman's previous identity dies. Maybe that identity dies on an operating table cut by a surgeons knife, or more slowly eaten away by the chemical changes of switching to an estrogen based system, or perhaps that identity fades away under the gradual eradication of a persistent social change, or some combination of these factors.
The once prevalent model of Transition required that Trans Woman completely abandon her life, manufacture a new history, and completely emerge as a new person unconnected to the old. I won't pretend that model doesn't have some appeal to me even now. I don't want to deceive people about my past, but I like the idea of a completely clean start.
In Transition we lose our name. We may choose a new name, but we seldom maintain our old name. Even if Trans Woman has and retains a gender neutral name, that name will take on new connotations because names have such strong gender bias attached to them.
In Transition we lose our friendships, families, and relationships. Sometimes we lose people who reject us or who simply grow distant, but even those people who stay in our lives we will relate to differently and they will relate to us differently. Too much of how people relate to one another comes from gender for this not to occur almost without exception.
In Transition we lose our reputations, our credentials, and often our careers. Again, sometimes we lost them literally, but even when we maintain them, they will get interpreted differently because society filters all these things through gender.
In Transition we lose our self. We have built up a careful sense of our identity and of our limitations that includes such factors as sexual orientation, sexual preferences, and other key interests. Sexual orientation may change and will become different simply because we have changed and the same goes for other preferences and interests.
In Transition we lose our lies. All the deceit that society required so that we could pretend that the identity some doctor assigned us really fit goes away. All the lies we tell ourselves to make life bearable under the weight of that deception become unnecessary. We can still lie to ourselves after transition, but even the lies mean different things. From my perspective this loss makes all the other losses worthwhile.
Transition adds up to Death and rebirth, and while I know from my own experience how strange and rough and wonderful it can get, I know in my heart that it provided a superior alternative to either physical Death or the living Death I once endured.
Thanks,
Lorrraine