Images, Bodies, Memories

A comment, elsewhere, got me started thinking at length about self-image. I suppose you could say that this is what this blog is named after—the fact that I rarely, if ever, see myself when I look in a mirror; I see a familiar person, someone who "plays me on TV", actually. Except the "TV" is the waking world, and the casting really sucked.

Anyhow, I've been reflecting [hah; at my punniest when not even trying] on my feelings of detachment from the images of myself which I see in photographs. Something struck me—the pictures from my earliest childhood, after my memories began to crystallize, but only barely, don't suffer from this. The little boygirl I see in them is me. I remember the tableaux, I remember watching the camera, I remember the feel of my body, I was there. And I remember looking as I do in the photographs. That's not somebody else, standing where I stood.

What was it that took this from me? Yes, I'm trans. Yes, my brain has structures conditioned prenatally to be part of a female body. Never mind any of that. What I want to know is "what can I remember of this loss? What did it feel like?"

There are some curious sides to this. So, the pictures I've been contemplating most are a pair of me at 2½ years, snuggling with my favorite blanket. I've another picture taken at approximately the same time, showing me in our garden wearing a straw hat borrowed from my mother. I remember the blanket pictures being taken, and I do not remember the hat picture being taken. But I do remember the hat. And what I remember most strongly about the hat is this: it was gendered.

Certainly I didn't have that term for it, but the idea is quite precisely that. The hat was my mother's. It was a woman's hat. I liked it: it felt comfortable, in a way most clothing did not. But I knew, somehow, that getting to wear it out in the yard, there, was a special treat, not something to take for granted, because it was girl clothing, and I wore boy clothing. I regretted this, I remember that much, but there's no pain. And this is the same me I can recall being, there in the blanket pictures. I may have understood gendering of identities, but I'm still authentic, then; I'm still just me, and haven't yet been carved-up.

When did my face stop being mine?

I can remember, in kindergarten, I was terrified by a fairy tale story assigned to us for reading homework. In the tale, a savage dragon was terrorizing a kingdom, and a pair of knights and a squire of sorts had been tasked with eliminating the threat. The knights sought-out a powerful wizard for aid against the magical beast, and the wizard helpfully provided them with a potion that would transform them into dragons—operating, I suppose, on the theory that anything less would be unable to best the beast in combat. Unfortunately, the enchantment made dragons of them in mind, as well, and they joined the first dragon in harassing the populace. And that's all I can tell you of the story, as I could not bring myself to read any more. Something terrified me about the thought of losing oneself—losing one's sense of self—inside an unfamiliar body.

It was early in the school year, so I cannot have been much past my fifth birthday. This is the first memory I have of being insecure about my own identity. I know I puzzled over earlier photographs of myself, that year and the next few, and watched my face in the mirror as I changed expressions, trying to figure out just what this person—whom I seemed to be—looked like. I recall wondering what, and where, I was—where was my self? I wondered if there was a point somewhere inside my head, a tiny spot in my brain, that was "me", that looked-out through the eyes in my face, that controlled my limbs and fingers and mouth. I think the only given was that "I" was not this body which housed me. I was something different from it, somehow. I don't know if that's a normal perspective for a five-year-old. I sort of doubt it.

I'm presently stymied by lack of images. I have an album from birth to three years of age, but nothing else until nine—by which point there's only an awkward boy in the photographs, my erstwhile stand-in. My parents are moving, this month, but when they've settled and unpacked, I need to dig further and collect more images to consider.

Somewhere between two and five, perhaps later, something fell apart. Something in my head drew away from my form, rejecting it. I want to know what it felt like. I want to know what happened to Rachel. What did it feel like to be broken apart? Did it hurt? Did I even notice, at the time? Was there a trauma that shook me and forced me to examine things that were too delicate to withstand scrutiny? Did I just notice, one day, that something didn't feel right?

I want to know.

adolescence I (journal entry)

An entry from my personal journal …

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This has been percolating for some time.

My adolescent sexuality was … strange.

I think it was shortly after having sex ed. classes in 6^th-grade and deciding to experiment with my developing genitalia (I mean, they said it was supposed to be pleasurable …) that I discovered that transformation was an erotic idea for me. I can’t recall which came first — the idea of changing sex being erotic or the idea of changing form being erotic. Actually, no, that’s not right: I’m pretty sure it was the idea of transformation itself, independent from sexuality or gender being involved in the transformation; transforming into a woman was simply doubly erotic, I supposed at the time because the female body itself was a turn-on (I’ve always been pretty solidly gynephilic).

Meanwhile, as adolescence progressed, I became progressively more difficult to dress. I’d expended little effort developing a wardrobe to that point, save for a preference against T-shirts, and against anything with a designer’s name or slogan on it¹. When middle school struck, the first thing to change was pants: slacks were out. That much I could tell, and I didn’t care to cross that line. Actually, I’d almost come to that conclusion on my own, a priori, but a couple standard middle school jibes were all it took to ensure that nothing with a crease made it into my standard wardrobe for some long number of years — it's still mostly the case today.

So, my standard article of clothing below the waist became cargo pants. I believe it was around this time that I ceased wearing shorts … I think it had a lot to do with the feeling that I wanted my legs to be athletic and attractive, and they were manifestly not (to me). I was not particularly athletic, period — I was pretty wretched in endurance sports, and not much better at team sports — it was solo or bust, and I didn’t derive enough pleasure from solo sports to make them a priority. Anyhow, I had this notion that my legs were pasty and flabby and hairy — which in retrospect I very much doubt they were, but nonetheless — and I resolved not to wear shorts any longer.

I think I was also very sensitive about “exposing” my body, physically, to the environment. Years of outdoor activity in scouting had inculcated a certain paranoia when it came to underbrush, grasses, trees one might climb, pretty much anything not artificial/manufactured and regularly cleaned that might come into contact with bare skin in such a way that I might not notice. Since I didn’t make a habit of a regular VSE, nor did I care to keep my attention steadily on my legs and feet while walking about outside, it became SOP for me to always wear pants, and wherever others might go barefoot, to retain my socks on my feet. I put a great deal of wear into my socks, this way.

So, throughout my 2 years of middle school, I wore cargo pants or loose, uncreased linen slacks, and a poorly-coordinated selection of polo shirts and turtlenecks. The polo shirts … I think that sort of just fell-out of some things my mother picked for me, and the volume of polo shirts I’d received as hand-me-downs throughout elementary school. The turtlenecks …

I think that might be one of the earlier appearances of body dysmorphia. To me there was an undeniable rightness to something in how they made me feel I appeared; I think it must have been the snug-fitting aspect, the de-emphasis of shoulders, and the smoothness of the arms. I loved the colder months because I didn’t have to bare my arms, which were starting to develop a bit of disturbing hairiness.

It was also during middle school that I began to notice that there were clothing options that I wished to have that weren’t available to boys. I couldn’t wear fluffy, delicate, open-necked sweaters (this was the end of the ’80s). I couldn’t wear cashmere (not without guaranteeing it was the darkest, dullest, most neutral, boring, and masculine style possible, with a minimum of decoration). I loved cashmere. I felt rather cheated that stockings and long gloves were too effeminate to avoid ridicule (at least, to my perception).

I also happened to strike-up a number of friendships with other girls at this time, which I enjoyed primarily for the sense of being taken as an equal — just someone like them. It so happens, I note with some bitterness, that three out of four, it turned-out, had in fact developed crushes on me; two confessed this by mail a year or so later, after moving away; one I learned-about near the end of high school.

This is not to say that I wasn’t myself developing crushes on various girls. Of course, they generally didn’t give me the time of day, but I just figured that was normal, and stuffed it away. Great sense of self-esteem, there. To some degree, I’ll note, the existence of these crushes tended to conflict with — and to obscure — any developing sense of gender-role confusion; I hadn’t really encountered the idea of homosexuality yet, so my attraction to girls was sort of a tangible barrier to thinking about being one.

It would have been so much more helpful if 6^th-grade sex ed. had actually discussed the social and communicative aspects of sexuality and sexual relationships, and had explained that sexual interaction is conceptually possible between any two individuals, regardless of sex, and that — barring actual reproduction — all the same issues of consensuality, hygiene, potential for abuse and exploitation, and emotional involvement apply, regardless. Yaright. Ha. Ha ha.

Oh well. Maybe someday. If it doesn’t gross them out too much (and probably even if it does), I’m pretty sure that’s the talk I’ll be giving to my children.

Anyway, that was middle school. I also began to grow some peach fuzz on my face, which I didn’t much care for, but didn’t really mind since it wasn’t pigmented.

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¹ I was not a fan of commercials as a child, and was convinced that marketing was a quintessentially hostile and aggressive act, competing for the belief and attention of consumers with dissimulation, misdirection, deception, and misinformation. And no, I’ve never voted for Nader.