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.

Repentance and the Cycle of Abuse

From the site whenlovehurts.ca

I don’t normally talk about “the cycle of abuse” because, though it is a useful tool, I don’t like to reduce abuse down to a single method or phrase. The experience of abuse is far more complicated than can fit on a small poster. But I want to talk for a bit about the “honeymoon” stage, and the ways in which conservative Christianity reinforces it with its emphasis on forgiveness, reconciliation, and the concept of forgiving “seventy times seven.”

My father was very good at repentance. He was very good at that aspect of being an abuser – the flowers, the begging for forgiveness, the promises to do and be better. And things would get better, for while.

And our pastors ate it up. They continued to try to help him, they continued to encourage my mother to stick by his side. There were trials of separation, sure, but they always ended with him coming back. Even the final separation was always with a caveat that God would “restore” their marriage.

There is no actual, functional difference between “forgive seventy times seven” and the repentance cycle of abuse. They both mean the same thing – because a person who continues to do the exact same thing and then apologize isn’t just slipping up or doing something on accident. After 10, 20, 30 times, the “I’m sorry”s don’t mean anything.

Now, you could argue that repentance means something different – that genuine repentance is a “real” repentance, and the cycle of abuse is different. But the problem with that is abusers know how to genuinely repentant. In fact, for many, they do sincerely mean their apologies, and their promises to be better.

And when someone genuinely means “I’m sorry,” genuinely wants to try and change, within conservative Christianity, that means you’re obligated to work it out. I can offer an example: my mother told me I was obligated to forgive and work things out with my rapist brother, because he wanted to. He was willing to move past my anger at his actions, and that should be enough right? And if I didn’t, according to my mother, I would be the one acting contrary to my Christian faith.

And that is often how abusers exploit repentance. They have the cycle of abuse on their side because all they need to do is say, “But I’m sorry, and I’m willing to work this out,” and if the victim refuses, they become the one in the wrong, the one sinning for refuses to forgive and reconcile.

Conservative Christianity has, for so long, put such an emphasis on the “rightness” of unbroken relationships, on the holiness of the image of family that it turns into this belief that all a relationship needs is two people making the choice to stay together – and whoever breaks that is the one in the wrong.

It’s the perfect environment for abusers to live and thrive. Whatever they do, whoever they hurt, is obligated to them upon their apology. They can work it out, again and again and again, with the social approval of those around them, because they just want so desperately to make things better, and how could anyone be so awful as to refuse them?

So how does a church not enable the cycle of abuse? By deciding that repentance is more important than reconciliation. By deciding that an abuse victim doesn’t actually have to keep putting up with the abuse just because their abuser apologized. By recognizing that a family can be more “broken” with an abuser in their midst than anything a divorce might do.

There is nothing righteous, holy, or good about supporting the cycle of abuse. I would even argue that it’s not particularly honoring God, and especially not loving of others, to put a family’s togetherness over and above their actual safety.

Abusers should repent, with no expectation from those they harmed. They should repent with the safety of those they’ve harmed put first and foremost. And churches should do all they can to come beside the abused, to do what they can to keep those abused safe from their abusers. Because right now, conservative Christianity’s “family values” is whitewashed tombs Jesus talked about in Matthew 23:27 – an external beauty, maybe, the perfect family photograph with pure-white smiles. But everyone else can see its decay and uncleanliness. Everyone knows its death.

Men are like waffles, women are like spaghetti, non-binaries are like pancakes

When the leaders of my youth group gave their sermon on abstinence and purity, it wasn’t just about purity. It was about gender – about who we were as people. There’s been a lot of posts on the damage that purity messages have done, but even more than messages about abstinence, it was this that hurt me the most. When they got to the differences in how men and women are different in thinking, relationships, and sex, my terror was in the knowledge of that’s not me.

I went home that day reminded: something is wrong with me.

The examples I heard were these: boys are like waffles and girls are like spaghetti. Boys compartmentalize everything, girls have all their thoughts and ideas and emotions all connecting in a noodle-like mess. Men could have sex without an emotional commitment, we were told, and it wouldn’t be damaging to them. Girly hormones meant that anyone she had sex with, she would instantly form a bond with and unless it was her husband, it would be painful and permanently damaging.

Men were relaxed, laid back, never showed physical affection. Women squealed their greetings in high pitched voices and played with each other’s hair, and needed to constantly touch one another. Men could have times where they didn’t think. A woman’s mind could never be shut off, always careening from one idea to the next. Men were logical, women emotional. Men were thinkers, women were socializers.

Men and women were different, separate from each other, needing to learn one another’s languages just so we could have relationships with each other. It was holy, God-designed, and yet if we didn’t learn the proper rules, all we could have sin and broken hearts.

Purity messages cannot be separated from gender messages. Christianity purity ideas of sex are also ideas of relationships and relationships in Patriarchal Christianity are about gender. Men and women fitting together in very specific ways. To reject these gender roles – to reject their gender entirely – is to reject your humanity, by their standards. It’s to reject who God made you to be, which, in some ways, is the ultimate sin.

Femininity is God-created. It’s an essence inside of you that exists whether you acknowledge it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you believe it’s in you or not. This is the message I got. What, specifically, you’re supposed to do as a woman might change depending on the book or pastor, but every church I attended and the Christian culture surrounding me all agreed that femininity (or masculinity) was imbued in the soul. That by your body’s configuration, you were either man or woman and in being man or woman, femininity and masculinity are you. Your self; your sense of “you” is femininity or masculinity. Whatever personality you have cannot be divorced from the gendered essence of yourself, and to do so is to say that you have a problem with the way that God designed you. That’s an unacceptable level of blasphemy.

I lived, and still live, playing the game of “if I don’t call attention to the fact that I look like a woman, no one will see me as such” but this was the first time that the message really hit home that I could be doing something wrong by being who I am. I got by ignoring the ways I felt and how I saw myself, but by that point in my life it was becoming impossible: I was “supposed” to be a girl, so I better find a way to fit.

In the spaghetti and waffle dichotomy, I am a pancake. I went home from church that day, hurt and upset, feeling once again completely out of place. I already knew I wasn’t living up to the expected gender roles. But this broke down that game I played with myself. In the category of “boy” or “girl” I was supposed to be a girl and I didn’t feel like either one.

I knew I failed and I knew people around me noted the failure. My best friend, A, at the time, especially. She embodied everything that Patriarchal Christian womanhood was. She was sweet and kind, with a smile for everyone, acquiescing to those around her. Christian boys loved her. Every boyfriend she had hated me upon meeting me. Sometimes I swear they were picking up on my repressed attraction toward women, because at least one of her boyfriend’s treated me like I was competition, like he had to win her away from me.

Her first boyfriend was the second time I felt called out for being “wrong.” After a long day together at the amusement park, A and I got into a discussion where were on opposite sides. I asked him his opinion and he said, “It’s been my experience that you always agree with the girl.” I asked, “What are you going to do, since there’s two girls here?” He replied, “That’s debatable.”

That was the moment when I asked my mother — is there something wrong with me? Am I living in sin by being that way? She said maybe, maybe I was. And I took it to heart.

I didn’t know how to be what was wanted. Part of this was the trauma – I felt trapped, locked inside myself, unable to express my emotions because the abuse taught me that I wasn’t allowed. But part of this was that I didn’t feel I could connect with the girl I was told I was supposed to be. But my church lived by the gender roles of Captivating and Wild at Heart (“it’s not gender roles, it’s about being who God made you!” the books claimed) but I didn’t connect with being a skirt-twirling girl who wanted to be pursued by a man.

Attending an independent study school meant that the entirety of my social circle was church, and I was surrounded by churchgoing teenagers who lived within the realm of gender roles. How much of it came genuinely to them, I don’t know. It seemed as though junior high and high school we spent our days internalizing these lessons of who we were supposed to be, but every time a conversation contained the words, “you know how us girls are!” I felt even more alienated and disconnected. I felt like all these people  were in on secrets that I didn’t know, but was supposed to.  We were supposed to be playing the superficial game of gender roles, trying desperately to prove our modesty, purity, and femininity, and I felt like I was miserably failing.

Something was wrong with me. That’s all I could figure. My one friend didn’t attend church with me, so I let church be the time I stood off to the side, watching everyone. I spoke only when spoken to. I became the strange one of youth group, or at least that’s how it felt, standing in the same exact spot every Sunday, every Wednesday, unsure of what to do with myself, feeling like there was no one I could talk to. I spoke only when spoken to, and many times that entailed people trying to figure out what was wrong with me, and how they could make me fit in.

In an old journal entry, I wrote about this very thing. While I didn’t verbalize that it was about gender, that was exactly what I was trying to express:

Thursday, September 21, 2006 (I was 19)

“I don’t know who it is God created me to be. Half the time I’m stuck between liking myself and feeling unsure if this is the self I should like. …it’s a matter of knowing if who I am is who God created me to be. And who he wants me to grow up into. I know it’s too much for one journal entry to figure out, but I wish I had some clarity on the matter. I suppose I just have to pray…and trust God, and if I keep my heart open to the changes he wants for me, then I doubt I will be rejected. After all, God is not a God that creates someone, doesn’t show them where they should be, and then rejects that person because the person never acted or was the way God intended them to be, does he?”

I was trying. I wanted confirmation from God that who I was was okay, but nothing seemed to suffice. I searched the scriptures, trying to bridge the gap between who I was and who I was being told to be. I tried to justify myself with the women in the Bible – strong women, powerful women, and how many times were they told that who they were wasn’t what God wanted? But in my heart, I knew I was searching for justifications, which probably meant I was trying to “justify my sin.”

I was hoping that if I was supposed to be this girl, this woman, this spaghetti, that God would turn me into her. I didn’t want to be a skirt-twirling girl longing to be pursued by a man, needing to know that she’s beautiful. I wanted to be…well, I wasn’t quite sure. I didn’t let myself figure it out. Thinking about what I wanted was a sinful thought process, so instead I tried to focus on praying and becoming what God wanted me to be.

This is the message that nearly destroyed me. I was able to repress my sexuality down to nothing. But I was never quite able to live up to the standards of femininity that I was supposed to be. Around the same time I wrote that journal entry, A invited me to a girls’ bible study. And I refused, because I couldn’t imagine belonging there, I couldn’t conceive of “girls bible study” including me. I felt lonely, out of place, distant from everyone, and unsure where I fit in. I wasn’t a boy, I knew I wasn’t a boy, but my relationship with being a girl was so fraught, so complicated, I wasn’t sure I fit there either.

My second Christian friend, M, came along a couple of years later. She was also the “right kind” of Christian girl. Someone who could express femininity easily, who loved children, who wanted nothing more than to have a husband and children one day and be the perfect wife.

At this point my friendship with A was strained. And when my friendship with M fell apart, and A soon thereafter, and with it, the rest of my Christian social circle, I could only see that it was me. I wasn’t feminine enough, I wasn’t right enough. In the midst of losing friendships, I remember the day I looked in the mirror and I said, “I will weigh 100 pounds or I will die.” I believe I wrote about this a couple years ago, but I don’t think I addressed the gender component to that statement – I think I was still too afraid to talk about it, and I was already blogging when all of this was happening. But in my head, I knew that if I could just get my body under control, if I could just be smaller, that somehow I would be more right. Maybe then I would be the right kind of woman.

And it worked – sort of. I never knew how to express the discomfort I had with my body, the way it felt like I couldn’t even move in my own skin. How everything felt wrong and off, how I hated my hips, I hated everything between my legs, I felt like I couldn’t breathe,  emotionally curling away from my own skin like I could hide from it. When I got my period at 11, I sobbed, and one particular month I screamed at my mother, “I hate this!” And she said, “well, every woman hates it” and then I sobbed harder, because period meant woman and I didn’t want it. But starving myself meant it nearly disappeared. My hips disappeared. Everything that said “woman” got smaller, and then that meant that I could safely pretend woman. I could dress in the feminine clothes, wear makeup, be sweetness and sugar and girly because now I didn’t care. I was starvation-numbed, I was completely disassociated, I could be what anyone wanted me to be because it didn’t matter anymore.

When I no longer was a Christian and no longer able to sustain starvation, I began putting weight back on, and all those emotions I’d been avoiding and repressing, praying away and begging God to change, came flooding back. I was terrified, I had spent a few years trying to convince myself that if I was just small enough, that would make this body bearable, and yet I couldn’t make that possible. I had to figure out a new way to live.

So am I a woman? This post has been immensely difficult to write (it’s taken close to two years to finish this) because in all honesty, the answer to that question is: I don’t know. Mostly I identify as non-binary, as a pancake (it’s become entirely serious now for me and those around me to use “pancake” as a shorthand for “non-binary” now), but this is one journey I’m still lost on, still terrified to delve too far. Identifying as non-binary has been the only way I can make living in my body even remotely feasible while I can only barely mentally touch on the entire complicated mess that is gender.

But I spent  years trying to destroy myself to be a Captivating woman, to fit into the Patriarchal Christian femininity that was supposedly supposed to be natural for me. I spent years feeling wrong, feeling like perhaps I was even headed to hell because God had created me to be a way that I couldn’t live up to.

And now I’m having to unravel the tangled mess that is the years of repressing myself. Sexuality and gender and body and self have spent a lifetime locked inside me together, wrapped around each other, collecting dust. It’s hard to figure out how to live, to feel comfortable and okay inside your skin when it feels wrong, when you are a survivor, when there are so many confusing aspects to it all. It is even harder when you are also trying to undo a lifetime of having to present a front, of having to be something that you never were, and the message that you could somehow morally fail at gender.