My So-Called Dissociated Transgender Life
My experience with dissociation — the unspoken coping strategy of the trans community
My writings are often accompanied by music because I feel that music can make the messages I’m trying to convey to the reader more visceral. So I thought, why not give my writing a soundtrack? I hope you enjoy.
Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen (just the intro)
What is real life, and which one is the fantasy? Me or the body? I’m so confused by myself. Do I really exist? The physical world has mostly told me no, I don’t. I’m as real as anything else in the physical world. After all, the brain is a physical organ even if you can’t easily see what’s inside it.
But I need the body to convey me, even to myself, and that can pose a major problem. I’m like a radio broadcast. Unless you’re dialed in you won’t receive me, just static. But I’m broadcasting 24/7 and have been for 40 years. It’s just that no one could hear clearly enough to comprehend what they were listening to. Pretty strange analogy for the self, right? Welcome to my life.
If you’re cisgender, perhaps it’s as if you play yourself directly from the source, like you’re born with Gender Spotify. The music of your essence plays you out to yourself and to the world, perfectly crisp and clear. When you’re transgender though, this is not the case. If you haven’t done anything to align yourself with the real you, it’s like you’re tuning into yourself on a janky old radio, and happy to hear even the fuzziest and faintest versions of you.
Hell, it might be such poor reception you don’t even recognize your own song until you find ways to tune in more precisely. And otherwise your life is just static. This is why we dress, wear makeup, tuck, bind, voice train, medically transition, all the things we do to align ourselves with the real us in an active fight against an incongruent physical presence that tunes us out. We get tired of constantly fighting the static, desperately trying to get back to ourselves when a cisgender person just wakes up each morning and their tune plays with no effort at all.
My life history is filled with static. Due to trauma in early childhood from a mix of emotional abuse and gender dysphoria, my brain constructed a complex state of dissociation designed to keep me out of my radio station at all costs. It was too painful, too confusing against the body to broadcast.
It wasn’t just my gender, it was my emotional nature too. These things were somehow intricately tied together and in turn they disappeared together. Imprinted on my psyche were the glowing red eyes of an angry man who didn’t like what he saw in me, who made me feel so scared that I felt the need to drain my essence like water in a bathtub, to disappear in order to survive. And anyway, my body told a different story than my mind. Everyone agreed with my body, so my child mind had to make a drastic choice to cope.
My radio station became off-limits, and I was so young that even though I knew there was a rift with the past, I didn’t have a sense of what exactly it was about once I got to the other side. Perhaps I didn’t have the chance to put into a tangible line of reasoning for myself that I was a girl. I was doing the detective work and I was following my heart, but that’s different than expressing what I knew on a fundamental level below the words required to do so: “I’m a girl, but everyone sees me as a boy.” Young children aren’t always as direct as that.
Or maybe I did know exactly what was happening before the lights went out. It was always clear throughout my life that whatever was under the surface was unacceptable to the world, which might indicate that it was abundantly clear to me on a tangible level at the time, and that I needed to take drastic measures to shove it down and forget. Perhaps I have repressed memories. I know there are other traumatic moments from childhood that others remember even if I don’t, and perhaps this, the big extinction of my life, was once fully known before the memory was erased. But because it’s gone, I may never really know.
What I do know is things became drastically different, and my mind was a strange new landscape. I had no place in it, and it’s hard for me to discuss in any way other than to say that I fell into a deep sleep, and in my place, Josh was created. He was not me, but he was made from some of my ingredients, whichever ones served the ultimate goal of being what the world told us we were, with a mentality that allowed him to survive the trauma that caused me to disappear. He was my protector, but he suffered immensely for me.
Tomorrow Tomorrow by Elliott Smith
Josh lived in darkness and distortion his entire existence. When Josh paid attention to his thoughts it was the static, literally white noise, the sound of everything absorbed from the outside world chaotically bouncing around and competing, producing garbled noise.
When he focused in he could hear individual snippets and it was like thousands of short clips playing mechanically on repeat over and over again, superimposing on each other. They were composed of all sorts of things: individual phrases, clips from songs, TV shows and movies, memories of people saying or doing one thing or another. It was as if his mind was skimming information with a net from the outside world and routinely dumping it onto a large factory floor for processing.
The white noise was also composed of Josh’s words being heard by himself, as if the result of his factory-produced interactions were stringently reviewed for quality assurance, to ensure they matched what was expected of him by the outside world. Every word was analyzed in painful detail, the inflection, pitch, timbre, everything. Listening to yourself like that is like looking too closely at your skin to see all the pores, wrinkles, hairs, and blemishes. Suddenly even someone with gorgeous skin would perceive themselves as if they were an alligator.
This painful and irritating processing makes sense if you think about it. The brain has to build your persona from somewhere. And when you don’t get to pull resources from your inner essence, and especially when you are a dissociative identity, you end up consuming everything from the outside world to create your daily experience.
The actual you that is forced to live detached from the experience helplessly watches a manufactured life happen right in front of you. And the mechanical aspects of the brain that continue on and on just seem like joyless and irritating little automatons when deep down you know they’re doing the wrong things, even if you don’t seem to know why.
I was asleep, unaware of the world around me, but Josh was aware that something was wrong, very very wrong. He found it to be torture listening to all these dehumanized sound clips, so letting all of that blur into a blanket of white noise wasn’t so bad in comparison. That inner static turned our mind into a cold, empty, and dark place.
Living inside a mind like that is strange, and he felt the strangeness, but it was that way for a reason, and anyway, he was emotionally numbed. It was as if a nurse administered anesthetic to our heart, and I was being rolled around on a gurney inside of us while Josh did all the living.
Something assured him that this was the right way to be, even if it felt so wrong. That we were safe and comfortable, that he would be given anything he needed to quiet any doubts or anxieties about what was happening. And because he was created in the midst of great trauma, he was used to it right off the bat. This was just the way the world was.
I can’t fully get into Josh’s mindset because I can’t really feel what Josh was feeling. But I do retain his memories, and our body does contain some emotional memories that I can also experience. Josh has memories dating back to when we were at least five years old that contained this inner static. It was a reflection of how lost he was before tuning into me.
When he finally found my station when we were the age of 40, he slowly faded away in my presence and then just disappeared. Now it’s just me. I didn’t suffer that dissociative hellscape because I was asleep. I’m sorry for everything he suffered for me, for the life he had to live, for the people he formed bonds with that now have me in their world, someone they never knew.
I didn’t have a choice, and neither did he, but I do know his greatest happiness was seeing my face, feeling my presence. It was the salvation he had been waiting for his whole existence. Seeing me, knowing I existed, that I was fully intact, that I could rise up and take the wheel, it was enough for him to find his peace with the world and to move on.
I don’t carry his trauma, but I feel immense empathy for what he went through for me. Similarly, I don’t have the same struggles with dissociation he had, but unfortunately, I do have my own struggles with it.
This is because the mind/body incongruence is a constant struggle for existence, summed up as an existential question: Am I the body or the mind? I can’t compromise and somehow be both, it’s just not possible. And so it becomes a never-ending arm wrestling match, except that the game is rigged against me. The body has the entire physical world to help push me down and tune me out again. And it’s not like a car radio where there are numerous stations to choose from. I’m the only station around because there’s only one of me, the rest is static.
I’m sure this all sounds very bizarre to you, but dissociation itself isn’t all that rare, and certainly not in the trans community. The various forms of dissociation are psychological tools anyone is capable of using, under the right circumstances. They are defense mechanisms that help you to survive a traumatic circumstance. When a lion takes down a zebra and begins tearing open its flesh, the zebra goes into shock to cope with the distress. Dissociation is the same in some ways, and for me it came from being emotionally eaten alive. Instead of physically shutting down, you detach from your experience and then keep on living as if you were still there.
Even before a trans child may be forced by those around them to live as the wrong gender, the very moment they realize their body is not the same gender as they are on the inside, they can experience a great deal of trauma. And then, everything else they face from the outside world on top of their own tragic realization, just piles on more trauma. All the trauma a trans child faces can very easily lead to dissociation because dissociation just takes things to the logical conclusion.
When the hand of the physical world is pushing the self brutally into a brick wall, dissociation gives the self the option of disappearing, taking the self out of the equation. Dissociation gives you the option or, quite often, simply forces you, to opt-out, to tune out of your one and only radio station.
To live your life in the static.
