Astral Projection for the Modern Man
Written by Max Vos, Illustrated by Jovana Lazović - October 2nd, 2020
I am in my body, and I am the only one who knows what that feels like.
For some reason, this has taken me a while to realise. As a transgender person, you’d think it’s one of the few things you have to accept about your existence before you go ahead and get top surgery. But, up until I was lying on the surgical bed, falling asleep, I had this itch in my head asking me if I’d regret it. I suppose nervousness under the knife is only natural. Despite binding my chest for years, despite never feeling that it was flat enough, despite feeling like living in my body was a form of constant cosmic humiliation, and despite wanting to be perceived as the man I am by everyone around me, doubt had still anchored itself. I knew I had dysphoria, I knew I felt better when people referred to me by he/him pronouns and when they used my name, but there was always this part of me asking if I was reallytransgender. I know a lot of people like me get the same irrational self-doubt.
Before my surgery in November last year – a “bilateral breast reduction with free nipple grafting” – I used to wish that I could lose my breasts in some terrible medical scenario that would take the choice away from me. In high school, before I knew I was queer at all, I sometimes wore a one-piece swimsuit under my uniform, and marvelled at the way it flattened my chest. This was also around the time I finally cut my hair short, and even though it curled up because it had been pulled taut into the same unassuming bun for the last five years of my life, it felt more correct. I could also vividly imagine myself turning invisible and falling to dust – that brought me comfort, and I realise now that in these and many other ways, I was looking for relief from my body. When I woke up after surgery, I felt fully-formed, crystallised and defined. I had plenty of bruising and swelling, and the skin on my chest was tender and sore, but I could breathe. I felt whole. When I saw my short hair, and then my chest unbandaged for the first time, my scars and my new shape, it was like I was gazing into a perfectly flat mirror for the first time after being lost in a funhouse for my entire life.
A few years prior to my surgery, I’d tell my therapist about the trouble I’d been having coming out to my family. I’d tell her that I found it frustrating. I didn’t want to come out when I did; I wasn’t ready but it happened anyway, because of an argument. One of the lines my family still feeds me today is that they don’t want to “lie to me” by gendering me correctly when they don’t believe me. “Lying to you wouldn’t be fair to either of us.” This infuriated me, but I had trouble articulating exactly why it felt so wrong, besides the patronising tone.
I feel like I’ve always had an issue with asserting boundaries. Alongside a lot of people raised to be a woman, I was taught – indirectly, subconsciously – that my happiness and autonomy was secondary to the happiness and autonomy of others. I’m a people pleaser, but I can’t tell if it’s the result of nature or nurture. I once got robbed of €100 in Barcelona, and I spent the rest of the day wondering if they deserved my holiday money more than I did.
I’d tell my therapist that I felt like my view of my gender was more valid than my family’s view of it. I can’t remember clearly how, but we came to the conclusion that their feelings were just as valid as mine. To them, they had lost a daughter, and to me, I had been their son all along. I struggled with how I was supposed to equate them. It felt unjust, but I forced myself to stomach it.
I still live at home for want of a job that pays enough to leave. Part of living at home – and, I’m sure, part of living with anyone – is compromise; to survive, I have to utilise my deeply-ingrained people-pleasing instincts. I don’t have a similarly strong instinct to please and protect myself. I never stood up for myself when misgendered or deadnamed, and I still don’t, for my own safety and some form of peace.
I remember once asking my family to use my name. My father said no, “I don’t feel like it”. When my family tells me that they don’t want to lie to me, I want to tell them that they’re not. My sister writes my name on birthday cards, but we both understand it’s a gesture included in my birthday presents – for a short time, we can both pretend she knows I’m her brother. When they say they don’t want to lie, what they’re really telling me is that I have to wait for them to believe me. I’m forced to be patient, to push myself into an immateriality where I don’t belong, and where I don’t deserve to be, and to leave my body behind.
But I realised that irrational part of me that had been asking me if I was really, truthfully, fully and wholly transgender, wasn’t part of me at all. It didn’t grow from within me, I’d absorbed it from somewhere else. Almost everywhere else. Like a chrysanthemum in dye-infused water, I’d integrated it into my structure. Or perhaps, more like a tree netted in vines, it had cloaked me. For the first two-thirds of my life, I thought I was a woman because I was told I was a woman. Is it really so strange that sediment of that thought wasn’t rinsed yet? Especially when it was constantly returned to me, like an unwanted belonging, by the people I live with? “Sorry, you dropped this. Here, have it back. Pick it up.”
I know they might say the same thing about how they feel: “We thought you were a girl, we loved you as our daughter and sister, we can’t let go of that so quickly.” I have been hearing this for almost three years now. I’m faced with an impossible task – having to prove to them, beyond all reasonable doubt, that I am transgender. Dysphoria was not enough. Surgery was not enough. My happiness was not enough. No evidence I can provide seems to be sufficient. Maybe nothing will be enough.
But I am tired of being made to feel like I do not belong in my body, and that it does not belong to me.
I am in my body, and I am the only one who knows what that feels like.
"I realised that irrational part of me that had been asking me if I was really, truthfully, fully and wholly transgender, wasn’t part of me at all. It didn’t grow from within me, I’d absorbed it from somewhere else."
- Max Vos