Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

– Megan Devine



I continue reflecting on ways to move forward in a healthy manner. Acknowledging I have things to grieve is not in contradiction with having reconciled with my past. I’m at peace with being trans and I still hurt from the transphobic violence, cisnormative stigma, strained relationships, lost friends, and horizontal hostility thrown at me over the first decades of my life. Resolving dysphoria and internalised transphobia doesn’t heal that stuff. It’s kept on my mind in a few ways, including people suspicious of someone with strained relationships to his parents.

But even when it isn’t brought up by others, several parts of my life were put on hold, limited, often disrupted over a decade. I’ve survived systemic barriers, physical and sexual violence, countless microaggression. There’s no mending relationships lost to transphobia, violence and suicide. The results of all of these can’t be erased from my memory or framed in a positive way. My parents were my “real parents”, those friends were “real friends”, them cutting me out of my life or vice versa, while often the better outcome than otherwise, leaves lingering pain. Those lost to violence and suicide needlessly suffered and as do I following their loss.

None of it was meant to be that way nor made me stronger.

[A]lthough devastation can lead to growth, it often doesn’t. The reality is that it often destroys lives. While so much loss has made me acutely aware and empathetic of the pains of others, it has made me more insular and predisposed to hide. I have a more cynical view of human nature, and a greater impatience with those who are unfamiliar with what loss does to people. Above all, I’ve been left with a pervasive survivor’s guilt that has haunted me all my life. This guilt is really the genesis of my hiding, self-sabotage and brokenness. In short, my pain has never been eradicated, I’ve just learned to channel it into my work with others. I consider it a great privilege to work with others in pain, but to say that my losses somehow had to happen in order for my gifts to grow would be to trample on the memories of all those I lost too young; all those who suffered needlessly, and all those who faced the same trials I did early in life, but who did not make it. I’m simply not going to do that. I’m not going to construct some delusional narrative fallacy for myself so that I can feel better about being alive.

– Tim Lawrence

Some of my former friends are still alive in spite of multiple attempts (both by others and their own.) But sometimes traumatised people only having each other makes it dubious to sustain a relationship. Traumatised people need support but might be in no emotional place to be part of other people’s support while dealing with their own trauma. I realised the more I hung out with certain trans friends, the more we enabled each other’s depression; we became an echo chamber of how horrible things were and bleak the prospect of improvement was. Validation can be healthy, but when it’s all traumatised people have, it can bolster the worse thought patterns including suicidal ideation.

Another thing that can happen is when oppressed people emulate oppressive behaviour, tearing down their own, some times it goes as far as bullying and assaults. It’s the back bone of horizontal hostility.

All that to say, I’ve lost near and dear friends who were once chosen family.

I went to therapy regularly for years, attended some support groups along the way, built up my resilience tools and have kept depression at bay for a while now. As part of that, I’ve left most phalloplasty forums. Because when I tried to discuss things relevant to me, my posts go either unanswered or are seen as opportunities to ask me questions about surgeries themselves. Few engage with what I hope to discuss. Instead, I’m reminded that my experience is less and less relevant. People don’t go through SOC v6 anymore, people going through surgeries now benefit from the lessons surgeons learnt from those that came before them.

It doesn’t feel like I have much to “give back” yet simultaneously it’s a one way “take, take, take.” When I don’t “give” what’s wanted (pictures, experience with surgeons that weren’t operating at the time I had surgeries, experience navigating US private health insurance, etc) I’m left by the group in embittering silence. So I created this blog as part of my efforts to find others who might relate or learn about the experience (however different it may be) of fellow post-dysphoria people.

There’s a lot of “take responsibility” platitudes in the personal development space, and they are largely nonsense. Personal responsibility implies that there’s something to take responsibility for. You don’t take responsibility for being raped or losing your child. You take responsibility for how you choose to live in the wake of the horrors that confront you, but you don’t choose whether you grieve.

This is why all the platitudes and fixes and posturing are so dangerous: in unleashing them upon those we claim to love, we deny them the right to grieve. In so doing, we deny them the right to be human. We steal a bit of their freedom precisely when they’re standing at the intersection of their greatest fragility and despair.

– Tim Lawrence

Reading Tim’s article, and other pieces on grief is allowing me to put words to the hurt that was separate from dysphoria but previously was eclipsed by it. Some people died, some people left me, I had to leave some behind, I was assaulted and there were no sexual assault crisis services for men where I lived, I had to endure multiple offensive and invasive appointments with cisnormative, racist, queerphobic mental health providers to be “approved” for lower surgeries. My life post-surgeries is impacted by everything that came before them. It’s not a clean slate, that’s impossible.

This is part of what nudges me to find other post-dysphoria people. This stuff stops me from definitively saying I’m not trans (anymore) and to keep up the work to maintain resilience. Freed from the dysphoria and depression that used to overwhelm me, I’m in a place to grieve cumulative long standing wounds and figure out how to carry the parts of them that can’t be healed.

Be there. Only be there. Do not leave when you feel uncomfortable or when you feel like you’re not doing anything. In fact, it is when you feel uncomfortable and like you’re not doing anything that you must stay. Because it is in those places—in the shadows of horror we rarely allow ourselves to enter—where the beginnings of healing are found.

– Tim Lawrence

I’ve moved on in some respect, but I want to greet the future whole, and that includes my grief.