The Problem With Pride - On The Connection Between My Trauma & Gender Dysphoria

This is going to be a controversial post, but it is my truth, and that fact alone validates what I am going to say here.

I grew up poor in a split home. My father was an addict and a dealer and life at mums was problematic. I moved out of home at 16 to live off charity and government handouts, and it feels like I have been running ever since.

My memory sucks. When I think back, I see emptiness interspersed with sporadic bursts of intense emotionality: discomfort, embarrassment, and pain. I don’t know exactly what happened to me, but I know it was not good.

I suffer from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (c-ptsd), a condition that occurs when someone is repeatedly exposed to trauma over a prolonged period. People with c-ptsd suffer a myriad of different symptomology that is often misdiagnosed as other conditions. In my case, a slew of terrible therapists labeled me with depression, anxiety, BPD, ASD, ADHD, and bi-polar. The list goes on.

The reason I am sharing this, is that it directly relates to my experiences with gender identity. I believe that a lot of my confusion, inner conflict, and shifting gender identity is a direct result of the trauma I faced growing up.

I struggle to have any pride in myself, or to connect to other people with similar experiences of gender as me, because whilst in some ways I have ‘always felt this way’, I also must acknowledge that my memory has been riddled with the impact of trauma.

From a very early age I started to feel different from everyone else. Like an outsider looking in, like an alien anthropologist attempting to understand the ways of human children. I would watch them and wonder how they could just pretend like everything was okay. I knew that it wasn’t, I knew that the world was dangerous and that there are real things to fear lurking close by.

I also knew that whilst I had the body of a boy, now a man, at least some of the time it felt completely wrong. I would drift between from being totally grounded in my burgeoning masculinity to wildly confused, wishing that was in fact a woman. I would look at the females in my class with a jealousy that could never be satiated. I wanted my body to be their body. It didn’t seem fair.

There was no one to talk too. Back then there wasn’t even words to describe what I was feeling. I felt completely alone and isolated within my mind, and with home life being so terrible, the only strategy I could use to survive was to dissociate.

Dissociation is a coping strategy that we all use to manage stressful situations; our brains purposely forget the worst of the trauma to allow itself to persevere. For me, that coping strategy went on hyperdrive. I drifted into a state of unreality often, and in response to most all stressful events.

Life felt like fiction.

I resonated hard with movies like Fight Club, The Matrix, American Beauty, and the Truman Show, and with the psychedelic philosophies of the likes of Allen Watts and Ram Dass. Daylight hours were spent dreaming and nights felt more real than reality.

My dreams. They were the only times when I felt both safe and whole. In my dreams I could be a woman. In my dreams my body always felt like it belonged to me. As my gender shifted, so did my dream body.

In my waking life I would often self-harm, just to feel connected to my body. Or I would force myself to vomit, in an impossibly attempt to transform my body into something that it could never become. Then the next day I would feel ‘normal’ again and wonder why I had cut myself and couldn’t fathom the desire to vomit up my next meal.

I got myself through high school and then through university in this manner, choosing to study psychology as a way to learn more about myself. And learn I did.

My favorite topic was abnormal psychology, which covered the various aberrations that can afflict the human mind. It was here that I first discovered the concept of gender identity issues and its relation to dissociative identity disorder.

Finally, I had found something that spoke to what I was feeling internally – unfortunately of course, this didn’t come in the form of a loving mentor figure talking me through the confusion of my inner work, but rather from an unresponsive textbook that was suggesting that what I was feeling was an aberration, likely derived from early childhood trauma.

The pieces all matched up.

I had been a victim of sexual trauma, I was exposed to danger regularly, I had used dissociation to survive, and didn’t always feel like a single solid whole person. Perhaps my issues are a direct result of the trauma I faced.

This is why I have a problem with pride.

Not for anyone else, but for me.

I have had countless conversations with people of all genders, sexualities, and experiences. I have heard their stories and have nothing but pride for them and their bravery when they choose to embody their truth.

But when I turn and face myself, I struggle to feel more than shame.

I cannot shake the fact that, were it not for the trauma, I would not be having these problems. And problems they are. Mentally and physically I often feel disconnected. My body feels like it doesn’t belong and my mind believes itself to be a fiction.

I struggle to make male friends, nor do I enjoy traditionally ‘manly’ activities or interests, and I don’t feel like I can partake in traditionally feminine pursuits like a woman, because I am not one.

When I find myself sexually attracted to woman, it is the female part of me that is the one doing feeling those feelings. And when I am having sex, it is hard to stay grounded in my body, for the fear and desire of wanting to drift into hers. For wanting to, more than anything, feel what it would be like to make love as a woman.

I have tried to satiate these feelings with lucid dreaming and drug use, but with limited success. A part of me, always, still knows that I am pretending. And I know that there is nothing I can do to truly feel like a woman.

No matter what I do, I at my core, still will have this body.

My first psychologist suggested that, if I wanted to embrace my feminine side, I should perhaps ‘wear woman’s panties’ and stop working out/training martial arts so much.

He didn’t get it, not int the slightest - somehow the act of cramming my penis into lingerie designed for a vulva wouldn’t quite have the same effect.

He also didn’t get that I trained to feel safe walking the streets. Despite being (from the outside at least) physically imposing and well trained, I didn’t identify with that fact. I remember feeling that every time I passed a man on the street, I would flip to feeling feminine. That part of me feared that he would attack and that I would be defenseless to stop his advances. Another trauma response.

My psychologist also asked if I had considered surgery and hormones to alter my gender.  Once again he didn’t get it.

Not only would this backfire when I inevitably switched back to masculine, but it still wouldn’t feel like truth.

It is here that I feel the need to flag that my feelings feel controversial on this topic, and I am worried about the backlash that I will receive for this next section. But I am going to persist with a caveat and statement, as I want to paint a full picture.

Caveat: I believe that everyone is entitled to do whatever they like to their own body, and that they should peruse whatever course of action needed to best fit in with the world. I do not judge people for believing differently to me, nor will I suggest that they change their course of action.

Statement: these are my feelings, it is what my brain screams at me when I contemplate gender reassignment surgery, I cannot help having these feelings, they are my truth.

Here we go.

I don’t think that I would feel any more like a woman if I got surgery and started taking hormone replacements than I do now. What I feel inside, the female part of me, were she to be real and expressed in this world, would not need surgery or pills to be a female. Her body would have always been that way, and I would be content with it.

Of course, I say this without having gone through the surgery nor taken the hormones, and of course I am currently on medication to treat my crippling anxiety. I am not happy about that fact either.

The point is, my feelings of gender fluidity feel inexorably tied to my trauma, and it is very hard to feel anything positive about that fact, nor does it encourage me to reach out to others about my feelings or experiences.

I don’t know how you will take my above statement. I fear that I will have just alienated myself from the very group that has any chance of understanding me for who and what I am – confusion and all. I fear that the internet mob will come and tell me that my experiences of gender are invalid or that my belief that there is a connection between it and trauma is incorrect.

I fear that by saying that I feel that it could be that way for me, that the mob will assume that I am saying that their issues with gender identity is also caused by trauma.

For the record, I am not saying that at all.

I am also aware of the problem with the very language I am using to express myself here. By calling it an ‘issue’ I may be triggering some people. People who have integrated totally with their gender identity and as such wouldn’t see it as an issue, but rather just another aspect of what makes them, them – kind of like a personality trait or certain hair color.

Once again, this is my problem with pride.

I am someone who should be able to reach out and express themselves in their truth. But because of the inner confusion, shame, and trauma, I don’t know if it is safe to do so.

Now that gender identity is being widely recognised and acknowledged there are words to describe what I am feeling. I have begun to replace the textbook with the real lived experiences of others, and I am starting to heal. I have found a therapist who is helping, and I am implementing self-care routines and other things to come to terms with my own unique truth and understanding of myself and my place in this world. Despite my fears, I have written this piece and I am sharing. All of this is positive and perhaps it is a sign of a growing integration with all the different parts of myself.

That said, I still don’t feel quite right.

So please, if you resonate with anything I have said here, comment or message me. I need to know that I am not alone.

~ Zachary Phillips