Gender Dysphoria

----AUTHOR'S NOTE JANUARY 29, 2023: I look forward to revisiting this topic in the future, so maybe this essay can be a resource or a time capsule item, but please know that it was specifically created by the person I was in 2014, and even she wasn't anywhere near award-winning levels of rifling through one's own mental Rolodex or researching for her writing. Thanks for your time!---- 

          I’ve been learning more about gender and sexuality in the last few years and I have to say that I’m fascinated by a lot of it. As you know, gender is a complicated thing, so I've made a conscious effort to seek out the information. It started in my teens with an article in some girly magazine (Girls' Life? er...), interviewing a couple of gender-transitioning individuals and their parents, of which I now only remember a photo of Samantha, a trans woman, and her dad’s statement that he was supportive, and just last year, I turned to an episode of Our America with Lisa Ling on the OWN Network. I love that show, and in that particular episode, two adults, one of them middle-aged, were undergoing transitions, and I got to see how, in the one case, there was a woman who had lived in a man’s body for over four decades, married, and raised two sons, each of whom were in their teens or twenties when one of their parents started to build an identity that she could truly be herself in.

           There was an episode of the canceled romantic drama Emily Owens, M.D. wherein a fictional couple brought their infant son Jake to the hospital to be checked out and ended up receiving the diagnosis with a social worker present because Jake was an “intersex child”, with male sex organs externally, and female sex organs internally, which did upset their father for a while, but he wrapped up that storyline beautifully by deciding to hold off on gender assignment surgery until his child eventually would identify themselves, and said to his wife, “We’ve gotta give him a new name then; something neutral, so that if he identifies girl, it’ll still work”. Including that in the show was smart and rather realistic even if Emily Owens, M.D. wasn't fantastic.

          Also, I read an interview once with the lead singer of one of my favorite bands, Against Me!, who went public with her transgender struggles in May 2012. I'm surprised that I listened to the incredibly revealing lyrics in "The Ocean" ("If I could have chosen, I would've been born a woman") and didn't figure out that something was deeply different going on within Grace (then Tom Gabel). I laugh at myself now for thinking that was just creativity. In the aforementioned interview, Grace's wife, the talented artist Heather Hannoura, talked about her history of only having relationships with men, and in comparison, she was deeply in love with Laura Jane Grace, more than willing to make the relationship work through the changes. It was so interesting to read that she said, “…in regard to my own sexuality and ideas about gender…it's all more fluid than how society presents it”.

       I have been getting a better idea of what life is like for someone born in the wrong body because of course my own life is the only one I understand best. I don’t know what made me come out of the womb so comfortable with my chromosomes and reproductive system and sexual orientation. For a little while when I was younger,  I thought it’d be nice if I had larger, rounder eyes and skinny legs, but that doesn’t compare to living every day deeply uncomfortable. I imagine that for someone who’s male on the inside and physically female, boobs must feel like they’re deceptive, alien attachments to one’s body. It’s quite the thought. My self-identification has been so simple that grasping the truth in other people’s stories really helps me become a more informed, compassionate person.

Because gender is a personal and complicated thing, I love that there are people like the individuals on Our America and Chaz Bono and Laura Jane Grace, providing us with real examples of gender dysphoria and the transitioning process. Since we're all human, we are, in a way, all in this together. Right?