If you are transgender and/or dysphoric, it can be extremely difficult to understand what I mean by saying that my wanting to transition, and the steps I actually took to masculinize myself and prepare for transition, was a variety of self-harming. Because for many of you– many of us– this is something that feels far better than the alternative, it is something that gives us a sense of the future, something that allows us to remake ourselves in our own image. And the image we have in our minds, at least on our good days, isn’t really a negative one or a destructive one; for us AFAB individuals, it’s just a leaner, flatter, hairier version of ourselves. It is an image of ourselves without fear, without anxiety, without discomfort or suffering on the basis of our cruelly fated bodies.

How could actualizing our better selves possibly be self-harm? Surely, it’s the exact opposite of self-harm; surely, it’s self-affirming and a form of self-preservation. We care enough about ourselves to change the thing that hurts us to something that doesn’t. How dare I say that is a form of self-harm?

Listen.

I.

Self-injury is historically a female-dominated affliction.

I am sure those of you who are trans and assigned female probably recoiled from that fact.

I did, too.

Who wants to be the hysterical woman taking out her rages on her own body? Who wants to be the attention-seeking bitch? No one. Not even the women who do it– in fact, most self-injury is conducted in clandestine shame.

I kept my cuts under my jeans, denim rubbing freshly scabbed skin raw. Blurry pictures needled into my skin over hours of nighttime pain crept out from the corners of my underwear, along with pink scars and straggly hairs. I can remember the soft burn of words cut into my thighs, a childhood memory like a skinned knee. On certain days there were pins, pins, pins, in haphazard lines tunneling through my legs, sometimes left there until they wept and oozed. On the worst days the pins came out the bad way, slashed out of my skin one blazing layer at a time.

But as consumingly loud as the self-harm was to me, it was also silent as the suffocating blanket of 3 AM night I conducted it in. No one knew. Ok, a few friends knew, fellow cutters who showed me their souvenirs from ragged handmade journeys through their own flesh. They were too sick to care, or maybe just sick enough to get the idea. It ultimately didn’t matter what they saw. They were witnesses, but I don’t think they could see.

II.

Sarah Shaw, in a 2002 paper on historical psychiatric perspectives on women’s self injury, notes that “women may self-injure not only because they feel unable to articulate their experiences, but also when ‘language fails’… [it] is a last attempt to have others take them seriously… [it] may be the only form of communication that adequately speaks to the experience”.

If self-injury is communication, who can it be possibly addressed to when it is (usually) never seen? What sense can we make of a solitary and silent scream?

Self-injury usually begins in adolescence and is most commonly seen in girls and women between the ages of 16 and 25. The teenage girl and the young woman face a battlefield as they proceed through adolescent development. Shaw writes that it is during adolescence that “girls may feel torn between what they think and feel internally and what the external world puts forth as reality”. As girls are inculcated into the rituals of femininity and become old enough to understand and be held responsible for feminine labor and upkeep, they face a tremendous dilemma. At the same time they confront a drive to be seen and heard as authentic beings among their peers, girls find out that “preserving relationships may require capitulation to cultural norms of feminine behavior” and that their own voice as individuals may not be “legitimated in the culture”. Girls’ self-expression and self-knowledge are driven underground by these pressures, forced to spring up from the earth again as “resistive strategies to maintain voice” as they struggle to find authentic means of communicating to others. Girls realize that the identity, the social construction of being a “woman”, is impossibly narrow, and find a way to burst out.

III.

My gender identity and my meager transitional attempts were mostly secretive and silent, too. While my ever-shorter haircut and men’s clothes attracted definite attention, I did not want them to. I wanted to stop appearing as the female sex– the marked sex, the sex emblazoned with breasts and curves like a brand to the forehead– more than I wanted to get validation for appearing male. My body was a siren, a Siren, and I desperately wanted it to shut the fuck up.

But in an inherently social world, among inherently social beings, a vow of silence is its own form of communication.

When I said “no more”, I said it through the medium of my body. I strategically allowed some parts of my body to appear: the hair I had been plucking, trimming, shaving was restored to its unkempt glory. Other parts of my body I erased, spandex gripping my chest tightly, my pants dropped to an absurdly precise spot on my hips, right below the nasty pale worms of twin scars crawling across my pelvic bones. I made sure to untwist my legs while sitting, to unsway my hips while walking, to uncarry my books like a baby. I tried projecting maleness into my form, as if I could infuse myself with it, as if it would emanate from my pores like tick medicine from a dog, repelling female infestation.

What was I communicating through all of this when my dis-identification from “woman” was my most secret of secrets, something I thought impossible to ever reveal? Yes, my increasing defeminization was all too visible, but the reason behind it could never be…

I know now I was wrestling to gag the Siren, and the battle with her was the thing that I needed to have seen.

IV.

In her paper, Shaw points out that many forms of painful, physically destructive behavior in women are socially sanctioned in the name of beautification. Women regularly “pluck, cinch, inject toxic substances, and have cellulite vacuumed out of their thighs” and this is not considered deviant or pathological. She quotes Andrea Dworkin from her book Woman Hating: “pain is an essential part of the grooming process… no price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation too painful for the woman who would be beautiful”. Women are permitted, even encouraged, to subject themselves to pain and distress if it is done in the name of “western beauty ideals and men’s sexual gratification”. Self-destruction is tolerable so long as it serves the purposes of patriarchy.

What is, then, so unsettling about self-injury as a phenomenon? Why should psychiatrists and pundits tie themselves in disgusted, punitive knots about women causing harm to their bodies, when it’s just the same old fucking thing we’ve done for ages in the name of femininity? Shaw writes:

If acts of self-injury express 'what cannot be known or named in girls’ experience’… is it possible that what is so unsettling about this behavior is that it speaks to a lived reality for many women that the culture would rather deny? If acts of self-injury are girls’ protestations against the pervasive female image of a 'false appearance of being unscathed, smooth-skinned and “plastic”, like dolls’…. and if this 'language of violence’… re-enacts girls’ experiences of relational and cultural violations, perhaps self-injury’s power to disturb lies in the act itself as a symbol of struggle against the dominant cultural story of what it means to be female.

Self-injury is a protest against the cultural shackling and strangling of girls, using the body as a site of resistance. According to patriarchal society, a girl or woman’s own body is the singular valuable thing that she has. Destroying it is a perverse way to give those that have violated her autonomy a huge “fuck you”. Shaw writes that girls and women “come to grasp that what will bring attention to their experiences of violation is the destruction of their bodies in ways that simultaneously re-enact their experiences and transgress cultural norms. Self-injury is a brilliant maneuver in the sense that girls and women turn the cultural and relational objectification of their bodies on its head.” It is a way of shoving the damage others have done to a woman back in their faces, and wresting control– albeit a sick sort of control– back from particular abusers or society at large. Girls and women who self-injure “refuse to relinquish what they experience as true”. They refuse to give up their unique self-knowledge in favor of restrictive, feminizing lies. And unfortunately, the deepest truth that we know under patriarchy is that of our own exploitation. This is what gets carved into our bodies for us– maybe others, but mostly ourselves– to see.

V.

Through my attempts at masculinization I literally harmed myself. Physically, I bound my breasts, and I policed and minimized my eating. In other ways I hurt myself, too: I restricted my natural movements and behaviors, I attempted to amputate my own emotions, I cut myself off from sexual and romantic relationships, I damaged my relationships to other women.

I thought I was becoming more like a man. I thought I was expressing my real self.



But I get it now. The inner truth that I needed others to see wasn’t a male brain, wasn’t a male identity, wasn’t some essential male soul. The truth I needed others to see was that being female in this society fucking hurts. Being a woman wasn’t being a porcelain doll, a silicone sex toy, and I was willing to break the fucking thing– my body as incarnation of all the values of patriarchy– if I had to.

When I wanted to transition, I wanted to alter my body in a way I couldn’t easily take back. It would sew the Siren’s mouth shut. It supposedly nihilated any possibility of anyone continuing to enact sexualization and objectification upon me ever again. It was an eternally echoing message into my future– and according to the current transgender community narrative, also my past– that I was not the proper subject of such treatment. I would endure forever, no matter what I had to do to myself, but also no matter what anyone did to me.

When I say my motivations to transition were self-harm, this is what I mean.

It’s easy to think I care about preserving the doll, that my words are all shouts of “don’t break it! it’s beautiful!” And I think that is what most people mean when they don’t want you to transition. They don’t want you to ruin your palatability to men’s sexual desires. They don’t want you to make yourself unmarked, make it less easy to identify you as someone exploitable. They don’t want you to show them that femininity is so restrictive that someone would rather medically transform their body than comply. They don’t want to know that you know the truth, that any female individual knows the truth. And they don’t want you to hold them responsible for it.

VI.



I don’t give two shits about the doll.

I want you to know you can protest without doing things that hurt.

I want you to know that I see you.

