Are our bodies just the bones, skin, muscles, tendons, veins, etc.? Or is there more there?
This argument comes up in a lot of anti-trans media I’ve read. The idea that sex is immutable, and that gender is a system imposed upon women to uphold a sexist society. All that matters for classification is genitalia. Yet the way our society is built is upon expectations of those genitalia. If you think about all the times that things are coded male or female and replace the terms male and female with penis and vagina it comes across as even more ridiculous.
So many counterexamples of our bodies being different than the sex assigned to them by doctors exist that any argument about who is what always comes down to “I just know.” That’s why I don’t argue trans existence is because if you’re main opposition is just “I just know.” It doesn’t matter what I say.
Recently I started reading a book about trauma called the Body Keeps the Score. If that’s true then my body is more than just the 5’10” and 195 lbs that people see. It’s more than the hormones I produce that gave me a certain set of secondary sexual characteristics or the ones I inject that change those characteristics into something else.
My body was built on a foundation of Czech, and Irish heritage. It was given a last name, the pronunciation of which throws some people off and a first name I’d rather forget. Born to a man who assembles air compressors and a woman who at the time stayed at home.
It’s a small town that isn’t even technically a town. Summer days spent picking blueberries with cousins, long country bike rides, and nights filled with marital arguments. It’s the summer we spent in Maryland after my mom left my dad that I barely remember and the 9 years afterwards where they pretended to love each other for reasons I still don’t understand.
My body is every single time I heard the phrase or a variation of “you’re a boy and boys don’t do that.” It’s every time my mom called me different or a challenge or unreasonable.
It’s academic success. A 4th grade geography bee victory and math test races with classmates.
My body is all these things. It’s all the times I pretended to raise my teddy bear as a baby only to later engage in a bitter pro wrestling rivalry with it later.
When I was 12 was when I first felt the dark clouds moving in. Puberty was coming on and it was very uncomfortable as it is for everyone. My 12-year-old summer involved my parents getting divorced and me discovering what it felt like to wear a dress without anyone telling me I couldn’t. The feeling of being home was a secret that I had to carry for years. My body is all the stress that that caused me, an enlarged amygdala where fear gets turned into monsters and a smaller hippocampus that struggles with storing memories.
Undiagnosed depression doesn’t come in in a way that makes people take notice. I tried very hard to make others take notice. I withdrew from things I used to like doing. I ate and ate and ate until I had gained about 50 lbs over a single summer. I got this idea from one of those daytime talk shows. The one day my grandpa pulled me aside to talk I was scared but also hopeful that someone else saw any of this.
I still remember his words that day, “your mother is very worried about you. Please stop gaining weight.” My body is all the missed messages.
It’s high school graduation and being the first to go to college. A relationship that showed me I was lovable and the heartbreak that happened when it was over.
An economic recession, and multiple moves from Texas back to Michigan to North Dakota, Colorado, Nevada, and then back to Colorado, before settling down in Chicago. By this time, I was working in environmental conservation, a physically tough but very emotionally rewarding career.
My body is all the sunsets I was paid in as well as the injuries. A ruptured disc, spinal stenosis, arthritic joints, multiple concussions, bone bruises, a torn ligament in my left wrist, various sprains, and strains. Some of them earned on the job, others from my daily life. A foot drop reminds me of the 2 years I hobbled because of sciatica. Sometimes I couldn’t even stand without an intense burning pain in my right leg, I’m only 34 years old.
It’s the abusive marriage I was in. The times I was told that no one would stay with me and that I would never be able to survive on my own. The time I had a knife thrown in my direction. All the days my ex would say “if I could I would beat the shit out of you.” It’s the words she told me the day we filed for divorce, “I hope you die in the street.” And then the 5 months I spent without stable housing. Some nights I slept in a car parked at an overlook that saw over Denver, imagining what it would be like to have a house filled with love. Other times I stayed in a motel with cockroaches and all. I squatted with a roommate who was using our “rent money” to buy meth. There were multiple times I had to leave within 24 hours or have the cops called on me. Throughout this I worked as best I could, putting on a smiling face and cutting down trees as I didn’t always know where I was going to sleep.
My body is transition. Hormones, new clothes, and family estrangement. It’s the times I’ve been threatened with violence for doing things like walking down the street, using the restroom, trying to get a job, and so on. It’s the 3 times I’ve been robbed since I’ve been in Chicago and the indifference of the police who are supposed to protect me. It’s a society that has determined that anything bad that happens to me is my fault for acting on my dysphoria. I’m reminded of that every day.
It’s the feeling of being home, finding community, and seeing unconditional love. My body today is built on all these things. Tragedies and triumphs. Weight loss. Comedic performances. The law school scholarship that I’m still proud of even if I never go back. My body has been through all these things and these things have been through it. The muscle and emotional memories we make, the spaces we inhabit, are just as much a part of us as my brown hair and brown eyes are a part of me.
Our bodies aren’t just empty vessels. They’re with us the whole time. Mine was built a little differently but it’s sturdy, strong, and storm tested. Most of all it’s mine and I get to decide what it looks like, how it’s gendered and who gets to see it.
Thank you.