Tell me what my body means

(Trigger warning for explict talk of sexual abuse and transphobia)

Tell me what my body means.

Tell me, when the first things I understood about it were hatred and disgust. Tell me, when the stories I told about myself as a small child were all about my own pain and destruction. Lost in a repetitious world where the only thing I could conceive of was how I’d been hurt and violated, turning every children’s movie I watched into my own retelling; here, in mine, the villains, and here, in mine, the spoils are the princesses bodies. It was my earliest understanding of myself. It was the first story I was given about the world.

Tell me what my body means.

Fourth grade when we begin to learn about sex, rudimentary, a lesson tacked onto the the lesson of upcoming puberty. Fourth grade, when sex is a joke. Sex is funny because it doesn’t make sense to anyone yet, why anyone would do such a thing. It’s a joke because adults are uncomfortable and mysterious about something that seems both straightforward and odd, something devoid of feeling or meaning.

You scream at someone for making jokes. You run away from them, you hate them for laughing at something so awful. Something humiliating and painful. Something that leaves you feeling cold and empty and sick afterward. This is what it means to live in your body, to see yourself from the inside looking outward: you’re shaking, you’re melting, your body recovering from or anticipating being hurt.

Tell me what my body means.

Your body is resignation. Puberty arrives, swift and without remorse. You’re bleeding, and you hate it, but everyone who bleeds hates it. Shut your mouth. Crying is childish. You cannot rage against what you are, you cannot deny it. Woman is a threat and an epithet for your transgressions, for the anguish coursing through your bones, for your rebellion. I don’t want this anymore, you want to tell people, but the ones who do get told the same thing: it doesn’t matter. This is inevitable. To hate it is understandable, to hate it to the point that you would do anything to stop it is pathological.

Yes, my Christian faith said, you are the rapeable thing. You have the body that is made up of the rape-components, the fragile body, the traumatizable body, the body that must be covered and protected, the body that is altered and changed because it wasn’t protected. Rape did something to you because sex does something to you, because your body is a symbol, and that symbol was ruined. You are not allowed to look at yourself naked and not be aware of every last word we use to describe you. If you want to reclaim your body, you must reclaim it through the language of femininity, through that same resignation: you are woman, woman is the rapeable thing, and we are so sorry that in the fates, in the gamble of life, it was your body chosen to be that rapeable thing. You cannot be neutral, only healed, and that healing must always be that you understand you are the rapeable body.

Please tell me what my body means.

When you have to beg and beg your partner please tell me I’m not gross. Please tell me I’m not disgusting. Please don’t look at me and laugh at me, the specter of your father’s eyes and voice always falling over you.

Your partner runs her hand down your arm sometimes, so gently, so sweetly, and on some days, it stills your whole body. This is a command, your body thinks. This has always been a command. You cannot fight. You cannot say no. Please don’t touch me like you love me, you want to tell her, but you don’t. You fight through all of it, through the panic and fear and rage and powerlessness, and ask for a hug, for a different kind of touch, for anything that isn’t that.

My body in the mouth of a terf: they have spent so long using the violence against women as a weapon, spitting her pain, and blood, and violated carcass at the feet of all of us for shock value. Or rather; they have taken the kinds of things that happened to me, they have strung it up like anti-abortion billboards, crass and dehumanizing, hoping to shock and disgust everyone. Yes, the terf says, you are the rapeable body, and your partner the weapon of rape. The grotesque words we apply to you are biology, factual, inescapeable. You are not allowed to reclaim yourself, define yourself, to find love and attraction on your own terms, to extract your body out from the actual weapons used against you. The men who hurt you saw you as a hole, because that’s what you are, a thing for penetration and destruction, a thing that has to always live within the fear of your own violation, scientifically inescapable. Fight with us, they say, because you can never forget you are the rapeable body.

My body in the mouth of a terf: the trans body, monstrous and ugly, a violation of everything that is good. Whatever things I decide to do with it, whatever ways testosterone or surgery transforms it, a broken, battered, disgusting thing, deserving only of laughing pity, or contempt. Look at the failed body, the terf says, as though I do not know what it is for someone to look at me, and screw up their face in disgust.

Gross? I ask my partner every few minutes her eyes are on me. Gross? Gross? Are you sure I’m not gross?

Give me new words for my body.

I know not everyone is a survivor, and not everyone is a survivor like I’m a survivor. I know not everyone is trans, and I know not everyone is trans like I’m trans, because I know there are people who survived puberty and sexuality and their bodies without constantly wanting to die. I know there are people who don’t see their body in the way I see my body, I know there are people who aren’t hurt by these words in the way I’m hurt by these words. I know that the things I describe here don’t make sense to most people.

So there are words. There are meanings to my body I could have had but I don’t. There is a body like mine that is a neutral body, maybe even a positive body, devoid of all these symbols, the words that were written over me, the ways I was taught to see myself through the eyes of people who hurt me, who hate me, who are greedy for my destruction. What are they? What does my body look like through the eyes of a world that is a different world than the one I was given?

More than words. More than platitudes, more than anything we could contain within simplified reassurances, more than theory and listicles, more than the medicinal and the medicalized. The reason the grotesque and the bloody words work is because they’re intended to shock, to slice you open and embedded them in the very structures of how you see yourself, to make you feel as though you are turned inside out, your organs spilling in front of everyone. They’re intended to change how you look at yourself in your mind’s eye, in the mirror, through the gaze of other people.

I need words just as visceral, just as poetic and loud, words that can take everything written on my body and in my mind and shove it back down the non-existent throat of my father’s ashes, pour them over the heads of purity culture and gender essentialism. I need words more powerful than any of the words I have ever seen, words that are their own claws, scratching and marring the body that lives in my head and in my mind’s eye, created out of hatred, violence, and destruction, break it, this false idol I have been made to see myself through.

I want to be be something else for once. I want to see myself from the other side. I just don’t know what the words are. I don’t know where I’m supposed to stand, what the vantage point is, what I’m supposed to look through, that finally let’s me see myself from an angle so safe, so wonderful, so perfect and mine, no one could ever take it away from me.

The Abuse is in the Fear

Growing up in abuse meant learning fear as a real, protective thing. I didn’t have to imagine what sorts of things I feared coming true, they already had. I couldn’t reassure the fear away–the things that threatened me were real. Even my irrational childhood fears usually involved the lessons I’d already learned about how safe I was and the knowledge that no one would protect me. Some of my irrational fears were even encouraged by my mother, who treated me asking if some rare or absurd scary thing was possible like a challenge to come up with ways it might be possible. Fear was necessary. It was logical. It existed to both keep me safe, and because it was exactly what was trying to be evoked in me.

This fear though…I only know how to operate under it. It’s gotten worse over the past few years—as stress climbs and current events make my anxiety worse—I don’t have the emotional energy required to challenge them. People have no idea how much work it is to understand that you’re free now. How it’s not just like unlocking the chains and running across an uninhibited landscape—the ability to challenge each and every fear—fear of violence, fear of powerlessness, fear of everyone—is a risk. You don’t know until you do it again, and again, and again, that your fears won’t be reaffirmed in front of your eyes. And the smallest thing can unravel all of that work for a long time, sometimes without you even realizing it’s unraveled.

Everyday you have to challenge that fear, and the challenge isn’t just about trying to accept that your fears are unfounded. The challenge is actually in accepting the risk of it. A problem I have is that I get stuck thinking, “I want to do x, but what if my girlfriend yells at me for it?” and I answer that fear with, “that’s stupid and irrational” but that’s not actually challenging it. Challenging it is saying, “no one has a right to do that to me, and if that were to happen, I would have the right to say ‘you cannot treat me like that,’” which is where the real risk lies, the real fear is: in my ability to stand up for myself, in my ability to draw hard and fast boundaries, and never give, never give. But it requires having the power and strength to believe you have the power and strength, which is as difficult as the “you need a flashlight to find the flashlight” problem.

The emotional cost, the stress of every want you have being rung out through these fears that once were the only ways to keep yourself safe, is a daily, constant, exhausting battle. Do you know how tired I am all the time? Do you know how little I enjoy things anymore, because either I’m not doing what I want, or this is the stress and fear raging in my head when I am doing what I want? Sucking the joy out of it, making me feel small and powerless again.

I am trying, but energy is finite, but the trying feels unsatisfying and without payoff. We act like the act of being a survivor is about endlessly working toward recovery until we are better. We don’t ask the question: do you have the space to be better? Do you have the time? Do you have the energy? Do you have the money? To be free, to know you are free, to feel as though something will catch you if you fall—can you do it without it destroying you?

I always say “PTSD is a full time job” (and in my crasser moments, “c-PTSD is a full time job that starts with child labor”) and that’s not even a comment about recovery, a term I generally hate (but that’s for another post). That’s just about living. It’s hard. It’s so hard, and I am more tired than I ever say, so tired that sometimes the act of being a person and not the appeasing, accommodating, emotionless, motionless, endlessly agreeable creature my abusive family designed is more work than I have in me.

They disarrange your mind, they make you so skittish, they make you afraid to be wrong, afraid to take up space, afraid of something unexplainable and unnameable, because your mind is so twisted and contorted around itself you can’t begin understand anymore what you should do or say, what you should be, what the lines of the world are, what boundaries mean, what it is to be good, what it is to be safe, what it is to be able to think clearly and confidently, having sussed out your own wants and needs correctly; they scramble you so completely, until there is nothing more inside of you. Until blank, empty misery is a better peace than the terror and risk of fighting it. That’s the fear they taught you. That’s so much of what the abuse was.