PTSD doesn’t make it hard to know if I’m trans. It makes it harder to let myself transition.

In the early years of this blog, I wrote about healing as it’s defined for rape/sexual abuse survivors.

Any aspect of queerness has a complicated relationship with sexual violence, because it’s such a go-to, easy narrative for homophobic and transphobic people. It makes for a nice just-so story that the only reason you could “deviate” is if something sexually violent happened to you to make you that way. The very act of being queer, is, in a lot of bigots eyes, proof positive that you were sexually abused or raped.

My frustration though, is mostly with what this says about traumatized people, about us sexual abuse survivors, because often fellow queer people allow these assumptions to stand: yes, they agree, a sexually abused person should probably get all their issues worked out before they dare to make a single decision regarding queerness, just to ensure that it’s not just the trauma talking. Queerness is only allowed to exist if it is pure, true, a biology of self that no amount of nurture or life experiences could influence, and well, what is sexual violence if not the ultimate life experience, mucking up the truth of the individual?

Anyone who follows me on twitter knows that I have ever intention on going on testosterone soon. And the more that I try and work through all the things I feel like I emotionally need to work through first, the more I’m frustrated that this is the only narrative survivors ever get.

We are both so profoundly damaged that no decision about our body or sexuality could ever be real, and yet, because no one can truly grasp what that would say about us, our healing is treated as small and simple. I’ve literally seen other trans people say that if you’re a child sexual abuse survivor, you should really get that all sorted out first, maybe like 5, 6 sessions of therapy? That’ll just…fix you right up?

Accepting that trauma might have long lasting effects would, by this logic, require believing that survivors can never be autonomous, that we should remain in a childlike stasis forever before risking a mistake of thinking we’re queer when we’re not. So instead, sexual abuse is both capable of profoundly altering your ability to think clearly about your body and sexuality and also you just need a few quick sessions of therapy to get that Trauma Crud off of you, so that you can think clearly.

People tell stories about us. They assume that it must be that queerness offers some kind of emotional escape. I know there are different stories for amab trans survivors, but these are the narratives I’m most familiar with: that gay relationships are easier, and we hide from our straightness in them to escape confronting the trauma. That being trans is because we felt so powerless, we want the All Mighty Testosterone to make us strong. Make us manly enough to feel safe.

What people don’t understand is that the just-so narratives people create about survivors in relation to queerness were never narratives about us, as survivors. They were narratives about all of queerness. Transphobes and homophobes are not telling stories about why a trauma survivor would believe they are gay or trans: they’re telling stories about why they believe being gay and trans exists at all.

But these narratives get so easily spun, so easily believed, sounding so right about who we are as survivors that there’s no place for understanding that someone who experienced sexual violence can also be queer. There’s so many stories about why we might think we’re queer when we’re not, with the idea that queerness is some kind of repression or escape from trauma, that the idea that queer survivors might have complicated relationships to their queerness while still being queer is never considered at all. Being in a queer relationship isn’t an escape from trauma, and neither is being trans. These things are harder.

So instead, I want to draw this discussion out better, I want to remove it from those just-so stories, because survivors are more than a few cheap metaphors, and I want to talk about at least what I’m dealing with with regard to PTSD and going on hormones.

For me, as an afab trans person who was sexually abused by my father & brothers, here’s some of what’s rough on the PTSD:

-Bodily control. Hormones are unpredictable. We can generalize what they do, but not how your body will take to them. It’s second puberty, if you remember what it was like to go through the first one, you can gauge why a second one would be rough on a survivor. First puberty was horrifying both because of trauma and because of dysphoria, but just because this one will relieve the latter doesn’t mean it isn’t hard and scary on the former.

-I might look more like the very people who hurt me. This is one of the main reasons I get frustrated by people who think survivors go on hormones to escape the effects of trauma. Hormones don’t just masculinize your face, they masculinize the very same features you share with the men in your family. And since a lot of us were abused by those men, it’s far easier to let the PTSD restrict you from going on hormones. I might look in the mirror and see the ghost of my father or my brothers on my face, how is that not hard on the trauma?

-I have to talk about my body in ways that induce both dysphoria and traumatic feelings. It’s not actually pleasant on the PTSD to google things related to hormones and sexual health, and think about every inch of your skin and what will happen to it. The PTSD would rather I dissociate from my body all the time, and here I am, forcing myself to confront the very things it tells me to run from.

-I don’t like doctors, I don’t like talking about my body with strangers, I don’t like being touched by strangers, I don’t like feeling powerless in the presence of medical staff, or feeling like my body is a thing for things to be done to, and to go on hormones I have to cope with all of those feelings.

The limiting factor here, the thing that PTSD is actually causing is complications related to easily starting hormones. Not convincing me that they are a cheap and easy way to save me from confronting my feels. To be a trans survivor is to have hormones—an already complicated and often scary thing—feel even more difficult, complicated, and terrifying.

We need to disabuse ourselves of the notion there is only traumatized survivor who thinks they’re trans or healed survivor who realizes they’re not, and accept that trans sexual abuse survivors exist, and deserve to talk about the ways that the PTSD interacts with their transness.

It’s not that I don’t think it’s possible for a trauma survivor to be convinced they’re trans/gay/some flavor of queer when they’re not, and I would never dismiss a trauma survivor who said that was something that happened to them. But when that is the only narrative, and our only response to it is just…get some therapy, you’ll figure it out, we don’t allow trans survivors a place to talk about how hard this is. How much work goes into it. And how much we constantly have to live on a balance beam between what is too hard on our PTSD versus how much we can stand our dysphoria.

Let us be free to be both traumatized, and trans. Let us be free to talk about it, to live through it, to share, and commiserate, and find hope and future in each other’s words. And also probably cry. A lot. At least that’s how it’s going for me.

Unnecessary men: on conservative Christian gender roles and the fear of useless masculinity

I was taught that one of the worst things about modern feminism was it’s derision of masculinity. Gloria Steinem’s quote, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” was probably the only thing I knew about feminism from my Christian community. Feminism was damaging because it was incorrectly teaching women that they don’t need a man.

Much of the discussion of gender roles was based on a premise that when men and women are behaving according to their God-given gender roles, then they fit together perfectly. They complement each other, because they each bring something different and unqiue to the relationship, something that the other can’t do.

But these gender roles leave women out in the cold because they rely on making sure women don’t: don’t lead, don’t learn to rely solely on themselves, don’t learn to be able to live alone and independent. These things are risky, because they mean there’s a chance that women would be able to function without a man. And if she can function without a man, if she doesn’t need one, that’s dangerous.

Even the book I just recently finished, “The Unguide to Dating,” while acknowledging that yes, an independent woman doesn’t necessarily need a man goes to great lengths to reassure that yes, she still wants one. But this discussion circulates around ideas of the physical strength of men. “Just because I do many things for myself,” Camerin Courtney writes, “doesn’t mean I wouldn’t gladly step aside and let a man do some of these things for me.”

This idea that a man’s role in a woman’s life is to function as a do-er is more than likely plays a role in the conservative Christian anxiety of women doing for themselves, and therefore making men obsolete. Women have to be reigned in, either by not learning certain skills, or by not performing those that a man can do, so that he still has a role in her life.

But I feel like this fear tells us a lot about masculinity in conservative Christianity. If a woman can fend for herself, and sees no need to acquiesce to a man; if she ceases to make their be a need for masculinity in her life, then the danger lies, not in women and men forming relationships by other means, but in women not bothering with men. Conservative Christianity has to have masculinity be necessary, because if it’s not, why would any woman want it in her life?

That is, I think, what lies at the heart of complementarism and the fear of feminism. In my next post, I plan to write about the ways that conservative Christianity even acknowledges that masculinity is dangerous and intentionally not good. A good man should not enact violence on a woman, but the threat of the violence is always there, waiting. If a woman could live her life without a man’s power and strength, then she might decide she doesn’t want one. And for all the claims that “submission isn’t a dirty word,” there’s is still an anxiety that if women can find ways to lead their lives without ever needing a man, why would she want to submit to one?

As a queer person almost exclusively attracted to women and other non-binary people, I have no men in my life. Absolutely none. And my girlfriend and I have both talked about our attraction to men is first based on whether or not they are traditionally masculine. If they are, that’s a big turn off. I am the feminism that my former faith would find terrifying, because I managed to get around their rules: I found out that I didn’t need a man, and I didn’t want a man, so I have no men in my life. And traditional Christian masculinity relies on the need because it relies on the power that comes from that need.

If women capable of opening jars and lifting furniture makes men useless, if the existence of feminism means that men no longer have a necessary role in the life of women, then conservative Christianity has already admitted that masculinity is fragile, unnecessary, and unappealing, and complementarism about forcing artificially created boundaries to keep women dependent so that masculinity still has a role and power.