This Is The Most Exhausting Post I've Wr ...

This Is The Most Exhausting Post I've Written In A While, But I Hope It Helps Someone

Mar 18, 2022


("Metomorphosis", mixed media, by Reddit user Bibly)

I have once again been not-so-gently edged out of an association, and I suspect my gender identity is the problem. I took the training, I started putting in volunteer hours, I was humming along and much-praised and welcomed into the fold.

After a meeting and a series of notes, I got my courage up and asked my handler to please use my proper pronouns.

Things chilled considerably after that, my handling sessions were put on hold, the group kept referring to me as "she/her" - and this week I received notice I was suspended on a technicality. (To be clear: I really did mess up, on this technicality!)

It is past my personal capabilities or willingness to talk about this publicly or name the group, because I suspect what will happen is people will rush in with unsolicited advice, tell me to do this or that or lawyer up or whatever, who knows what people will say. And the thing I need most right now isn't advice, it's just to be able to share my story and to feel absolutely rotten about it all for a little while.

And if I could explain how I feel and if even a few people understood just a little, that would mean something.

A while back - after I was kicked out of another group, several months ago - I went searching in the depths of the night for some kind of comfort and I found this amazing paper: Understanding the emotion of shame in transgender individuals – some insight from Kafka by Prof Simona Giordana. Giordana, Professor of Bioethics at the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy at the University of Manchester, has put together an impressive body of work including several books on transgender rights and the medical ethics of supporting trans children. This Kafka paper of hers (which references both "Metomorphosis" and "The Trial") is pretty amazing and for several days my brain kind of beep-bopped all over the place with it.

Although academic writing is not my strong suit I related to the content more than almost anything else I've read on gender identity.

The paper is rich with so much I am dying to discuss - and if you have the time, I do hope you read it -- but this week's rejection brings me to something I think a lot of people don't understand, something I really want them to understand.

So today I just want to talk about the deep sense of shame I experience every time I am mocked, criticized, left out - or pushed out.

It's two-fold. And it's agonizing.

First there's the humiliation I feel and that anyone will feel when repeatedly excluded, snubbed, laughed at, mocked, or shit-talked (to my face or behind my back). This is something any marginalized or oppressed individual can understand, but that many people do not. For those of us excluded, no matter how many affirmations we say and no matter how sure we are about ourselves (I really, really am sure about my gender identity) - humiliation leaves its mark. As intended.

And then there's what I would call the shame I feel at experiencing society at its worst: what Giordana calls "the shame for the dis-humanity of others."

I've spent the last year watching loved ones I've known for literal decades drop me unceremoniously, wringing their hands and crying over their loss - when all I've required is that they respect my pronouns. I've lost over a hundred years of beloved (I thought) relationships. A hundred years! One friend of the family - I'd known them since age thirteen - blocked me after I posted about top surgery. Another person called me up to ask me to explain things to them again, and chided me for correcting them on my pronouns.

I'm still angry, I'm still hurt, but it's passed that point now. It becomes entirely defeating. (And yet, here I am! Clacking away on this keyboard trying to make sense of it all!)

And I know - I know - it is these individuals' limitations, their smallness, their commitment to bigotry, these are the things responsible for this loss, this rift. Like the protagonist in Kafka's "The Trial", I know I committed no wrong. I still feel stunned, sometimes. I now know how many people loved Me less than they loved Their Idea of Me - and that's a cold, shocking revelation.

But it is also one I am beginning to accept.

So I know these things, but experiencing so much of this secondhand shame - due to the dis-humanity of others - it is bringing me lower every day, and it's so strange to say it like that. I'm (mostly) past the point of anger and I'm at the point of being absolutely humbled (not in a good way), a place of hopelessness.

Secondhand embarrassment doesn't even cover it. It's agonizing.

Giordana's paper describes the end of Kafka's "The Trial", and how the shame outlived even the ignominious death of the body.

I feel that deeply in my bones.

I feel like an alien.

An outsider.

I'm supposed to crawl away and die.

***

Giordana talks about how guilt moves us to reparative action (that's a good thing!) - but shame incites us to disappear.

I've felt the impulse to disappear myself so many times over the last year. It's the scariest experience. It's not scary because I worry for my safety. It's scary that other people can put me in this position, just because they decide to. I didn't do a thing except come out, and speak about my life as if it mattered.

Well it does matter, and that's why I continue to speak about it here.

I'm still here.

You can't make me leave!

I have a host of friends and of course my beloved partner and grown children who support me and have loved me at full capacity; I couldn't ask for better from them. In fact I am so well-cared for and loved by such an important few that I feel guilty, yes guilty that their love isn't enough to keep me off the precipice.

But: it just isn't.

I guess I want a little more. And what I want, isn't too much to ask. In fact my "more" is the most pathetic, crawling little bit of "more" - just to be recognized, not to be laughed at, just to be celebrated - "they/them!" - that's all.

Now I want to be clear that in my braincase I recognize that it would absolutely be okay if I wanted a whole heck of a lot more than just that - but for now, as I approach my one-year anniversary of coming out, I can honestly say that so far that is all I've wanted.

And for a shocking number of people, that was too much.

Experiencing a shift to en masse social exclusion - I really am too exhausted to write out the many forms this takes, day after day - is gutting. It's painful in a way almost impossible to articulate. And I don't know if I should end this piece on this note, but I will say the worst part of all of it is I know I will survive this, and I know I will come to accept that this is The Way It Is. I doubt I'll stop speaking up and asserting myself (I mean, that doesn't sound like me!) but I think those who excluded me really did a job on me. Mad respect for that!

I really do feel like that cockroach, mashed by the boot.

It's just how it is right now.

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