Creative Non-Fiction
Obligatory Trans Masculine Gender Dysphoria Post
What did it feel like and why is it helpful for me to share this with you?
CW: suicide (mentioned in passing without details), gender dysphoria
You’re probably asking the same question I asked before submitting this for publication. Why read another dysphoria post?
I’m posting this because I originally wrote most of it before I knew this was a story of gender dysphoria.
I hope reading this helps someone to better see themself. Perhaps it could also help someone to better understand a loved one who is struggling with something like this. It is certainly not the only form that dysphoria can take, but this represents one way that it has manifested for me. Dysphoria varies in form and intensity, and not all trans people experience it.
I had this experience while looking at myself in the mirror at age 14. It happened shortly before my first, thankfully unsuccessful suicide attempt. 21 years later, I realized, or admitted to myself, that I was a man.
It had been 3 days since I’d last slept, when the mirror stopped working right.
I think that’s how long it was. Time stopped working, too, so I’m not exactly sure how long it had really been.
I was looking in the mirror. My face was blank: no eyes, mouth, nose, or hair. They had all slipped under the skin. I couldn’t see where I ended and the wall behind me began. I was blurry around the edges.
What happened next was a lot like the sort of thing I might have experienced as an intense flashback years later. It all felt and looked real. The difference was that I thought I was experiencing all of my futures, instead of my past. I was seeing every possible future simultaneously.
What happened next was a lot like the sort of thing I might have experienced as an intense flashback years later. It all felt and looked real. The difference was that I thought I was experiencing all of my futures, instead of my past.
That was a lie though.
It was just every future I could imagine at that moment in my life. It was every future I might have had as a woman. The futures ranged from feminist fantasies to chauvinist dreams. The stream of consciousness showed every combination of responses to standard societal expectations of this body as it was at that moment. Every future had the same ending. I was suffocating in sticky spider webs that rolled me into a ball on the floor. There was no way for me to become a woman and still breathe at the always early end of it.
Sometimes I had a child. A beautiful, precious child. I never lived to watch them grow. No future was built for that.
Sometimes I was successful, strong, intelligent, and independent, but that never mattered. Nothing I did was enough to want to stay here on this Earth.
I woke up from that collection of futures in a ball on the vinyl floor, having slept for an unknown amount of time, maybe just minutes. I was too afraid to risk trying to sleep again. I stayed awake as long as I physically could.
Now I realize what was missing from my futures.
Every future that I lived that night had me become a woman. I never imagined a future where I might become myself instead. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t myself. I just couldn’t see a complete face in the mirror. Maybe I was looking at the reflection all wrong. I came back from the futures convinced that there was no future. I wish I had known.
I don’t want to become a man, and I don’t just need to become one. I need to be able to look in the mirror and see that I’ve become myself someday.
I need to be able to imagine a future where I will still be able to breathe just fine.
I wish I could have known that there was a reason to stay alive, that it was possible to find myself under all of those layers of skin.
I share this in case it helps one person to know that it is possible to find and become yourself, no matter what you’re seeing in the mirror right now. I want you to know that you’re not alone in having felt this way and that you deserve to be seen exactly as you are inside.
If you would like part of your membership fees to support me at no additional cost to you, sign up here or click on the membership link of your favorite writer to support them!
