Take the Red Pill Neo..
If you’re not aware.. The Matrix is very much a trans allegory hidden within a hugely popular Hollywood and awesome film. Both of the creators are trans women (though they weren’t publicly known so at the time of creation). I’m not going to rehash the endless discussions of why this is so but if you want to find out more, you’re on the Internet, you can spend days reading about it within a few clicks, but for an easy win, spend a little bit of time watching Lily Wachowski talk about it here.
One of the fascinating things which hugely resonates with me is the idea of Residual Self Image, the brief outline of this idea is that you have a mental image of yourself which is quite resistant to change and persists despite what you see in the mirror or recordings of yourself.
This is something that we all suffer with, especially when it comes to eating disorders but for trans folk it’s even more pertinent as our physical images tends to change a lot more over the course of transition than typical cis folk go through and we struggle to adjust our internal mappings. We spend a lot of time, energy and money adjusting everything about us just so we can align more closely to how we feel but often the brain doesn’t quite catch up with things.
On the day of my second anniversary of starting HRT, which is I refer to as my biHRTday (I wish I came up with this term as I love a bad pun), I shared the following photo montage with a few of my friends on my instagram profile. It was honestly a difficult photo to share as I find it hard to be reminded as to where I started as it’s a complicated mental leap for me to adjust to. I’ve very much tried to ignore him for the past few years as he is really no longer me but as time passes I’m realising that there needs to be some kind of integration of him back into me.
The top left photo is before I started any kind of medical transition and the bottom left is after 1 year and the bottom right is relatively recently, 2 years in. It’s not all from HRT, some of the changes are down to eating better and some are down to minor aesthetics such as fillers and fantastic brow work from my amazing beautician Sam.
Where residual self image comes into it, however, is that my mental image is still quite often the top left picture and it is really difficult to see myself as the woman in the bottom right photo. When I get compliments from people they are very difficult to accept because sometimes it’s very difficult to not believe the TERFs that I’m just a “bloke in a dress”. I’m literally, very much not, my body has changed hugely due to having largely zero testosterone and very female levels of oestrogen for two years and when I stop and examine just how things have changed, I do actually feel like that woman, much more of the time. I shared this link previously and it talks about what changes typically occur when you go through a second puberty and I’ve experienced most of them which is hugely cool when you consider that it’s just down to a change in hormones.
On the opposite side of compliments are the feelings I get when somebody misgenders me, intentionally or otherwise. Take the following example: I was in a coffee shop waiting in the queue, I was dressed in chunky heels, leggings, pretty much as I look in the bottom right picture but with my hair down because I was feeling a teeny bit fancy. The person at the counter spoke to the person behind me and he, quite rightly, redirected them to me as being first in the queue. How he did this, however was baffling because he said
“Oh, it’s not me, this gentleman is ahead of me”
I’m genuinely unsure how I was misgendered here, I’m pretty sure there were enough clues in my attire and appearance for him to code me as a woman and I don’t think that there are many gentlemen who look like me. I spoke to him directly and said “I think you mean lady” and he spluttered an apology and looked sheepish and refused to catch my glance again.
The problem is that these negative interactions feed that naysaying voice in my head that says I am, as above, just a bloke in a dress. I feel that I’ve gone through some growth because the last time this happened I went home and cried for two days about it, this time I was just annoyed by it. I unfortunately cannot control how others refer to me and I hope as time progresses these tedious interactions will decrease.
In an ideal world, I’d not require any external validation and I’d love to be at the point, emotionally, when I don’t need any but honestly, I am not. Trans folk tend to need a lot of validation from other people because we’ve spent large amounts of our lives being told that we’re one gender and it’s a heck of a lot to undo without some assistance from our beautiful support networks. We tend to post a lot of selfies of ourselves not because we are vain but because we very much need assistance in remapping this residual self image.
This feeds nicely into my recent learnings from reading Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy
Self Love and Non-Monogamy
As you might have understood from my previous blog posts, transition is a lot, it’s very difficult for it to not be all encompassing and fill every single waking thought. As I slowly get to a point when the day-to-day of my transition is understood, the million changes-of-name are complete and I largely can just exist without needing to work out how I achieve something monumentally new. My brain has now has space to consider my need and yearning for romantic connection with awesome humans.
I have always been monogamous because, well, that’s what people do, well, mostly. There were always tales of “swingers” where I used to live with pampas grasses outside of suburban houses but I never really thought too much about it. I’ve never acted in a way which could be considered as non-monogamous, i’ve never cheated on a partner or even dated multiple people even briefly, which appears to be a common thing actually.
Consensual Non-Monogamy (which includes Polyamory) is fairly common in the queer community, I feel, largely, because once you’ve stepped outside of one societal normal, such as deciding to love who the hell you fancy rather than being expected to date somebody from the opposite end of your binary (or even, in my case, refusing to stay within that binary you were assigned to at birth), other societal expectations are a little easier to bend or flat out ignore.
There’s a really interesting podcast episode that I listened to which talked about Relationship Anarchy and one of the things that they explained was that, it’s pretty weird, when you think about it, to expect one person to fulfil all of your needs. Why do you need to do that, really, why not have multiple nourishing and beautiful connections? Love is not a finite resource that can only be given to one person, you can, and probably should, find love and connection with multiple people (as long as it is consensual and your partners are aware). There’s huge benefits in doing so. It’s mind blowing to realise that you’re no longer restricted to finding that one single person who can fulfil all of your physical and emotional needs.
Obviously, there’s a lot of mental wrangling that you need to go through with regards to understanding your own jealousy, attachment and why you feel insecure about partners being with other people but I’m finding this exercise hugely satisfying and, so far, exciting to go through. I always thought I was, perhaps, a jealous person at points but really I’ve started to realise that I’ve just been insecure for various reasons, a large one being to do with being a closeted transgender woman who considered herself to be disgusting.
The book cover a lot of how we form attachments with people and the theory is named, obviously, Attachment Theory. It talks about how childhood attachments with parents dictate how we form relationships with adults. Childhood attachment style does not dictate how you will always attach as an adult and it’s apparently possible to change your attachment style. It’s probably required reading for everybody, whether you want to form monogamous or polyamorous connections as it’s hugely thought provoking, an interesting theory and it triggers a lot of self reflection (which is rarely a bad thing).
One of the techniques detailed in the book talks about how you form attachments, especially, with yourself, it sounds strange but bear with me.
The model which describes how you should form connections with others is called HEARTS and this stands for:
Here - be present with your partner
Expressed delight - show your partner that you enjoy being with them
Attunement - demonstrate to your partner that you understand and connect to them
Rituals and Routines - have routines to allow you and your partner to feel secure in your relationship
Turning Towards after Conflict - talk about the inevitable conflict that will occur in relationships in an adult and mature way
Secure Attachment with Self - find a way to meet your own needs without necessarily only relying upon your partner to provide happiness
The idea is that you can apply this model to yourself and enable you to really start to love yourself which makes your relationships with others stronger and makes you generally happier as an individual. You should spend the time and introspect about how you actually express delight in your own achievements, remind yourself what you have achieved and understand why you feel jealousy and how you approach conflict. It’s obviously hugely easier to never do these things and move from day to day without introspection but I really believe that we owe it to others to grow and learn.
Tying this back again into the beautiful trans trope of us finally being butterflies who have spent a long time as caterpillars..
Thanks for taking the time to read this, thoughts and comments are always welcome
Love
Kat
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