Trans Woman's Journey (Tower #16)
Hi,
BOOM! Everything falls apart. All our towers built of hopes and expectations collapse. For some Trans Women the collapse proves quite literal. Some of us lose everything. But Tower means so much more than just that real possibility.
As Trans Woman we constructed our world based on a lie. We did not choose that lie which treated us as Men, but because we could not escape a lie so endorsed by the rest of the world, that lie affected us. That lie became part of the foundation of our Tower of thoughts. Here that foundation finally collapses. That collapse may prove public and bring harsh consequences or it may take a more private form.
After Transition we have the same knowledge and ideas that we had before. We construct our new life from the basis of what went before. We remove the lie of male impersonation from our life and try to continue. But gender, our understanding or gender, and our relationship to gender have a fundamental importance in society and in our psyche. And while the lie ultimately proves less strong than truth, everything we built upon that lie will ultimately collapse once the lie gets removed.
I suspect that each Trans Woman collapses her ideas somewhat differently. It depends on where the fracture points lie in her beliefs. Therefore I list a few examples from my own life.
I had convinced myself that gender existed entirely as an external imposition. I believed that everyone had a free choice to abandon gender if external pressures could only disappear. And I believed I could easily live without gender. Transition proved me wrong. It taught me that I had internal gender scripts that I could only modify with difficulty and that my gender fit the box of woman far more closely than I had suspected.
I had convinced myself that intellect needed to dominate and suppress emotion. I believed that emotions disrupted the work of the mind. I believed that I understood myself intellectually and that I didn't need to understand anything else. Transition proved me wrong. I opened up new vistas of feeling and came to see intellect as a tool and emotions as a more authentic expression of my self.
I had convinced myself that religion had no value. I believed that every belief system existed purely to allow those who controlled it to dupe the gullible. I believed that everyone who embraced religion knew nothing. Transition proved me wrong. I discovered a world far broader and stranger than any I had seen and I discovered my own connections to it. I now plan to one day seek training as a minister, possibly a Unitarian Universalist one.
In some ways I think it might prove easier to list what did not change about how I thought then and think now. Everything I once believed has gotten tested, and in many cases broken and rebuilt. This rebuilding goes beyond the change of death because it remains an ongoing project of thought reconstruction rather than the relatively time dependent project of transition. And yet this rebuilding emerged from my own quiet collapse and though the changes seem less visible than transition in some ways they feel more extensive and profound.
Thanks,
Lorrraine
BOOM! Everything falls apart. All our towers built of hopes and expectations collapse. For some Trans Women the collapse proves quite literal. Some of us lose everything. But Tower means so much more than just that real possibility.
As Trans Woman we constructed our world based on a lie. We did not choose that lie which treated us as Men, but because we could not escape a lie so endorsed by the rest of the world, that lie affected us. That lie became part of the foundation of our Tower of thoughts. Here that foundation finally collapses. That collapse may prove public and bring harsh consequences or it may take a more private form.
After Transition we have the same knowledge and ideas that we had before. We construct our new life from the basis of what went before. We remove the lie of male impersonation from our life and try to continue. But gender, our understanding or gender, and our relationship to gender have a fundamental importance in society and in our psyche. And while the lie ultimately proves less strong than truth, everything we built upon that lie will ultimately collapse once the lie gets removed.
I suspect that each Trans Woman collapses her ideas somewhat differently. It depends on where the fracture points lie in her beliefs. Therefore I list a few examples from my own life.
I had convinced myself that gender existed entirely as an external imposition. I believed that everyone had a free choice to abandon gender if external pressures could only disappear. And I believed I could easily live without gender. Transition proved me wrong. It taught me that I had internal gender scripts that I could only modify with difficulty and that my gender fit the box of woman far more closely than I had suspected.
I had convinced myself that intellect needed to dominate and suppress emotion. I believed that emotions disrupted the work of the mind. I believed that I understood myself intellectually and that I didn't need to understand anything else. Transition proved me wrong. I opened up new vistas of feeling and came to see intellect as a tool and emotions as a more authentic expression of my self.
I had convinced myself that religion had no value. I believed that every belief system existed purely to allow those who controlled it to dupe the gullible. I believed that everyone who embraced religion knew nothing. Transition proved me wrong. I discovered a world far broader and stranger than any I had seen and I discovered my own connections to it. I now plan to one day seek training as a minister, possibly a Unitarian Universalist one.
In some ways I think it might prove easier to list what did not change about how I thought then and think now. Everything I once believed has gotten tested, and in many cases broken and rebuilt. This rebuilding goes beyond the change of death because it remains an ongoing project of thought reconstruction rather than the relatively time dependent project of transition. And yet this rebuilding emerged from my own quiet collapse and though the changes seem less visible than transition in some ways they feel more extensive and profound.
Thanks,
Lorrraine