Month: March 2021

Trans Wisdom: You Define Your Identity

YOUR IDENTITY IS YOUR OWN

In the first post in the Trans Wisdom series, I talked about how the bodies of trans people don’t determine their gender identities (or any other aspects of their identity) which means that is true for everyone. It is your choice to allow your body to inform your identity in whatever way makes sense to you. You have control over your own identity.

This is not only true for your relationship to your body. This is also true with respect to the roles you identify with in your life, your career and interests, your family history, your culture and race, your sexuality and sexual orientation, and your personal experiences. No matter how other people use this information to label you, interact with you, or connect with you, YOU are the only one who gets to decide how these inform who you are.

You also get to decide the balance of the different aspects of your identity. Is your role in your family the most important part of your identity, followed by your career, and then your culture and race? Or is how your career impacts who you are most important, followed by your personal experiences, and then your gender? Identity is like a 3D pie chart with blurry, overlapping lines between the sections and some sections that influence the whole thing but are only forefront a small part of the time.

Or maybe it’s more like a cloud, more ephemeral, and shifting over time.

IDENTITY CHANGES OVER TIME

Trans people go through a huge identity shift when they discover that their discomfort in their life has been related to gender. This can happen at any age but the longer they have lived as their gender they were assigned at birth, the larger the shift. Regardless, looking back over their life, they can say that their identity clearly has changed over time. In fact, this is true for most queer people.

Funnily enough, this is actually true for everyone. Anyone who has become a parent has experienced this shift in identity. Anyone who has changed careers, entered a committed relationship, experienced a health crisis, or lived through a global pandemic has experienced a shift in identity. Even something as simple as turning 18, learning how to drive, entering high school, or moving away from home cause a shift in our identity. We may not be aware of it at the time or feel like we have control over it but our identities shift as we adapt to new life circumstances.

You may not being able control the circumstances that influence these changes in your identity but you do have control over HOW your identity changes. How quickly do you adapt to the new circumstance? Is it a positive change or a negative one? Does it eclipse all other aspects of your identity, even for a short time, or simply become another component of who you are? Is this an aspect of yourself you will keep hidden or share openly with others?

If our identities change over time, why are sexual orientation and gender seen as constants? They are simply components of our identities and therefore are influenced by our experiences and circumstances just like anything else. I think everyone should feel free to explore their sexuality and gender at any point in their life and as often as they choose. Even if you conclude that nothing has changed, you may decide you feel like expressing some aspect of yourself differently or that it influences other aspects of your identity in a new way.

IDENTITIES ARE COMPLEX AND INTERSECTIONAL

As you can see from what I’ve said so far, and probably know from personal experience, no one is made up of only one component of their identity. And no aspect of our identities are the same for any two people because they are all influenced by every other part of who we are.

When someone is coming out as trans, they get the same reactions and get asked the same questions over and over. Because, historically, trans people have had to hide their identities and mainstream society is only just now becoming aware of this identity and experience, the story that gets told about trans people is a monolith. Anyone who doesn’t fit that story is either not recognized as being trans or labeled as an exception.

If every aspect of identity is variable between individuals, why do we assume that someone’s experience is the same as our own or the same as that one other person we know with that identity when they identify in a similar way? If our identities are complex and intersectional, so are everyone else’s. It takes time, patience, and open communication to learn where our experiences overlap and where they differ. Being open to this type of communication allows for authentic bonding over the similarities and learning and growing from the differences.

IDENTITIES ARE NOT CATEGORIES

In some settings (such as medical and legal forms) we have to check off boxes that relate to our identities. These boxes are for the sake of information gathering, not to be used as a guideline of how to interact with someone.

As a medical professional who has to read patients’ charts and then interact with those individuals, the image you get of a person from their chart is never accurate. It tells you nothing about their personality, attitudes, or cultural experiences. And a medical chart holds a ton of information. So why do we feel like we can judge someone based on their appearance? Or the awareness that they identify as trans? Or their identity as a man or woman?

No identity is a monolith. No identity should be treated as a category or a box. Masculinity, femininity, and androgyny belong to everyone. No two people’s experiences of parenthood are the same (though some will have more in common than others).

Which aspects of your identity do you feel confined by? Do you experience that aspect of your identity a certain way because that is the narrative you have always been told about how you should feel, act, or look? Can you find examples of people that share that same identity but embody or express it in a different way?

Your identity is your own. You get to determine what parts of your life inform your identity. You get to determine the balance of the different aspects of your identity. Your identity shifts over time. You can let those shifts happen based on outside influences, experiences, and circumstances, or be take an active role in deciding how those outside influences with impact your identity. Every aspect of your identity is influenced by all the others creating a complex, intersectional, and unique individual. If this is true for you, it is true for everyone else. No aspect of identity should be considered a monolith, a category, or independent of any other aspect.

Just for fun, try writing a list of the different components of your identity. Now re-order the list from most important to least important (or strongest influence on how you view yourself to least influence on how you view yourself). Are there other components that you remember used to be part of your identity but no longer are? Are there components that you anticipate will be part of your identity in the near future? Try this activity again in a couple weeks, or a month. Has the list or the order changed?

Leave a comment with the results of this activity! I’d love to hear what you learned.

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Trans Wisdom: Our Bodies Don’t Define Us

YOUR BODY DOESN’T DETERMINE YOUR GENDER. YOU DO.

Trans people learn very quickly that their body and all the assumptions that go along with it don’t define their gender. Whether the body they were born into feels wrong or not, their identity is separate.

If this is true for trans people, it is also true for cis people. Maybe you feel at home in your body and the gender you were assigned at birth. But is your experience of your gender based on your genitals? Is it solely made up of your secondary sex characteristics? Or is it more than that? Do you have an innate sense of being the gender you are? What aspects of your personality, behaviours, and presentation are related to your gender?

Once you learn how to think of your gender as more than various parts of your body, you also learn that you can choose how to express your gender. Do you wear the clothes you wear because they align with your gender and make you feel good or because it’s what society expects you to wear? Have you ever tried wearing clothes or jewelry that you think will make you uncomfortable? You never know! You might discover something you like even better than your original presentation.

YOUR BODY DOESN’T DETERMINE YOUR WORTH.

It goes beyond gender. Our bodies also don’t determine our worth. Regardless of your body type, ability, size, colour, or sex, we are all worthy of love and care. Society may not treat us that way, but we have to treat ourselves that way.

Trans people learn this throughout the difficult journey to self-acceptance. As we learn who we are and take steps to communicate it to others, we are faced with uncertainty, confusion, anger, fear, and even violence which are really easy to internalize. If we take steps to change our bodies to align more with our sense of who we are, we learn that though the change may alleviate some dysphoria and make it more comfortable to go about our daily lives, it does not automatically result in an increased sense of self-worth. This is something we have to consciously work on at every stage of our journey (and throughout life).

YOUR ABILITY TO REPRODUCE DOESN’T DEFINE YOUR GENDER.

The reproductive organs you possess and whether or not you are able to reproduce has no bearing on your gender. It may be a component of yourself and your experience that you choose to include as part of your gender identity but this does not mean that is true for everyone with a similar experience.

Trans men and nonbinary people who have uteruses can get pregnant and successfully birth a baby. Cis women who have had hysterectomies are no less women. Trans women who produce sperm are no less women. Cis men who do not produce sperm are no less men.

Your gender (and your worth) is not defined by the ways in which you can or cannot reproduce.

SOCIETY’S PERCEPTIONS DON’T HAVE TO BE YOUR PERCEPTIONS.

Trans people are assigned a gender by almost everyone they encounter. Often, this assumption is either entirely or partially incorrect. Having a trans identity is also perceived as wrong, unheard of, a burden, or inappropriately fascinating. It takes work to unlearn these perceptions and hold onto our own self-concept, even when we feel like no one else around us sees us for who we are.

Are you judged by society in a particular way because of an aspect of your body or appearance? How society perceives you does not have to dictate how you perceive yourself. It’s often hard to identify which perceptions we have internalized and constant work to fight against that perception internally but it is worth it.

SURGERY IS PART OF A PROCESS, NOT AN END GOAL.

Many trans people undergo one or more surgeries in their effort to align their body with their identity. Often, when they are looking forward to the upcoming surgery, they have the perception that once they have the surgery, everything will be better. They fall into a mode of waiting for the surgery and build high expectations of the positive impact of the results.

No matter what the surgery is, it is always a difficult experience. There is pain and healing. There are often activity restrictions and limitations, sometimes for months afterwards. Sometimes there are complications. And regardless of the outcome, it does not automatically change their self worth or self confidence. If they are lucky, there is a decrease in dysphoria but often, over time, the dysphoria will shift to another area of their body, or they will become more aware of the dysphoria once the other source has been relieved.

Trans people learn the hard way that surgery is part of the process, not an end goal. Whether you are undergoing surgery for cancer treatment, weight loss, pain relief, or transition, it is never the only component of the process and often isn’t even the component that makes the biggest difference. If there is something going on in your life that is big enough to require surgery, it is definitely big enough to have emotional components and other milestones that come before and after surgery. Try to keep it all in perspective while you work towards or recover from surgery. Don’t leave ‘the rest’, whatever that is, until after surgery. Work on everything else while you wait for surgery. You’ll be glad you did.

What are your experiences around how your body does or does not inform your gender or other aspects of your identity? What societal perceptions have you worked hard to unlearn? Leave a comment below with your story!

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How Dysphoria Contributes to Burnout and What You Can Do About It

WHAT IS BURNOUT?

I have struggled with cycles of burnout for many years now. For a long time I felt like I was making it up, or being lazy, or finding an excuse to avoid the mundane but challenging parts of everyday life. Very little of what I was feeling matched the symptoms of depression but that was the closest I felt like I could come. Until I heard about burnout.

When I’m in a state of burnout, the thought that keeps going through my mind is ‘I just don’t care’. I know I should, and usually do, but I can’t muster up the emotional energy to engage with almost all aspects of life. This is not me. In this state, I don’t feel like myself. And because I don’t have the energy to care, it is very hard to make myself do the things that will help me get out of the state of burnout.

I feel numb, heavy, and drawn to escapism. It feels like the world is happening around me and I’m just going through the motions. I don’t keep up with house chores, I eat less and more poorly, I socialize less, I exercise less (usually not at all), I am often late, and my productivity at work decreases.

If this sounds like you or someone you know, I highly recommend the book ‘Burnout’ by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Not all of it resonated with me but the parts that did have been very helpful by giving me language to discuss my experiences of burnout with others, different ways of thinking about and noticing how I’m functioning, and practical strategies to prevent and recover from burnout.

HOW DYSPHORIA CONTRIBUTES TO BURNOUT

I have found that dysphoria is a large contributor to my burnout. There are three reasons for this:

  1. It takes a lot of mental effort to ignore the buzz of dysphoria in order to focus on what I’m supposed to be doing. It takes mental effort to check in with myself, identify what aspects of dysphoria I’m feeling, and use appropriate management strategies. It takes mental effort to identify and avoid situations that trigger my dysphoria (as much as possible). And it takes mental effort to reframe the dysphoria or fight it’s effects by using positive self talk and affirmation. So yah, lots of mental effort.
  2. Dysphoria is constant. It goes up and down depending on the day, my emotional state, my physical state, who I’m around, and what situation I’m in, but even at it’s lowest it’s still there. So lots of constant mental effort.
  3. Generally, there is a lack of understanding from others about what dysphoria is and how it affects me (or how it can affect people). The situations where my dysphoria is triggered the most and which are unavoidable are also the situations where I’m surrounded by and interacting with people who do not understand dysphoria. So lots of constant mental effort that is invisible to or misunderstood by the people around me.

WHAT BURNOUT FROM DYSPHORIA FEELS LIKE

For me, certain symptoms of burnout are specific to dysphoria. Three main ones are:

  1. Decreased attention/focus. So much of my attention is taken up by ignoring, managing, avoiding, and fighting the effects of dysphoria that I have less mental space to spend on other things. It is harder to stay on task, perform multiple step activities without getting derailed, maintain momentum on a task, block out distractions, and remember details.
  2. Irritability/easily frustrated. Dysphoria is an internal irritant that is constant and unavoidable. No matter how good I am at managing it, it will never be zero. So I already have a baseline irritation that I am working to ignore. That means that I have less patience for other sources of irritation. Less patience leads to more frustration. The more dysphoria I have, the more easily frustrated and irritable I am.
  3. Physical, mental, and emotional fatigue. The constant mental effort I talked about above is exhausting. The feeling of being misunderstood and invisible and at odds with myself or how people see me is emotionally exhausting. We feel our emotions in our bodies so I end up with a feeling of heaviness and lethargy that means I don’t feel like I have the physical energy to exercise or do any extra tasks (even though that is what would often help me the most).

WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

Over the last few years I have developed a number of different strategies to help manage my burnout. After reading the book I recommended above, I have some more language to explain it and some practical strategies to suggest.

Prevention

Identify the sources of dysphoria for you. Develop strategies to decrease as much of the dysphoria as you can (more posts on this in the Related Posts list below). Where possible, avoid situations that trigger high amounts of dysphoria or repetitive situations that trigger even small amounts of dysphoria (such as getting dressed in a room that doesn’t have a mirror).

As much as possible, make these dysphoria prevention, management, and avoidance strategies automatic. Restructure your environment, schedule, or routine so that you don’t have to spend mental energy on remembering to do things in a different way. The goal is to decrease your baseline mental workload, not increase it.

Protection

In psychology they talk about protective experiences that may be completely unrelated to the harmful experience but help build resilience and emotional capacity or offset or heal some of the negative effects. There are a few protective experiences that I have found to be important in decreasing the burnout caused by dysphoria.

  1. Euphoria. Notice moments of gender euphoria and seek them out. Avoiding dysphoria is helpful to tell you what doesn’t work for you but moving towards euphoria tells you what you should do. Moments of euphoria can pass us by or be overshadowed by dysphoria unless we notice them, focus on them, and celebrate them. In this way, they can be a beacon of light to look forward to and to remember when we feel overwhelmed by dysphoria.
  2. Support. Whether through therapy, social support groups, online groups, friends, or family, support from people who understand what you are experiencing and can give you a sounding board to process and strategize with is important. Your support person/people can also help bring your attention to the symptoms of burnout you are experiencing and provide some external motivation to socialize, exercise, or engage in whatever other activities are necessary for you to recover.
  3. Affirmation. Dysphoria is constantly telling us that something is wrong, that we don’t fit in our body or in society, that we don’t look the way we should, and that maybe we’re making this whole gender identity thing up. Finding sources of affirmation, whether from your support network, from positive social media influences, or a personal journaling, self-talk, or meditation practice can be extremely helpful in offsetting the negative thoughts and feelings associated with dysphoria. The more the affirmation comes from an outside source, the less mental work we have to do to provide the same level of protection and, often, the more likely we are to believe it.
  4. Activities and Interests. Part of burnout, for me anyway, is a lack of interest in things that I would usually enjoy. The frustrating thing is that engaging in things I enjoy makes me feel better. The trick is to find activities and interests that do not trigger any dysphoria. This allows you to engage in your activity or interest with less mental effort so that it doesn’t make the burnout worse which results in a net gain of positive emotion and energy.

Process the Stress

This concept is directly from the book I recommended earlier. The gist is that we experience our emotions in our bodies as a chemical and neurological process. When we are under constant stress (as with dysphoria), our bodies are constantly in ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ mode. Even if we get a burst of euphoria or a period of relief from dysphoria, our bodies still have to complete the chemical reaction or neurological pattern that was triggered by the stress. If we don’t engage in activities that encourage this completion to happen, our bodies remain in the stress state which only gets stronger the next time we experience stress (five minutes later).

So while we can’t necessarily get rid of the stressor (dysphoria) and stop it from triggering a stress response in our bodies, we can do various things to move through the stress response in our bodies, complete it, hit the reset button, so that the responses to this continual stress don’t compound as much. For me, the most useful activities are physical activity of any kind, breathing, affection, positive social engagement, and creativity (writing, painting, and crocheting). With so many options, it is easy to engage in at least one per day, usually more.

One of the tricks to making this as effective as possible for me is to do these activities mindfully. To focus on the calming effect it is having on my body, mind, and emotions. Or, if there was a specific situation that was stressful that I am ruminating on (because my body is still stuck in that stress cycle), I focus on that situation at the beginning of the activity, think through it, feel the emotions that I felt at the time (or didn’t allow myself to feel at the time), and continue the activity until the emotions and the associated physiological response dissipate. The amount of relief this brings in a very short span of time is pretty incredible.

Tl;dr

Burnout sucks and makes us feel numb, exhausted, and irritable. Dysphoria can lead to burnout due to the constant mental effort that is invisible to or misunderstood by the people around us. You can help yourself avoid repeated cycles of burnout by preventing as much dysphoria as possible, protecting yourself against the negative effects of dysphoria, and processing the physiological stress triggered by dysphoria (and any other sources of stress).

I hope this helps you. It is what I needed to hear five years ago. Leave a comment below or send me an email with your thoughts and experiences of burnout. Maybe your experiences are similar to mine and maybe they are very different. Either way, your experiences have value and I would love to hear about them.

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Reflections on Top Surgery, Part 3 : Post Surgery

Gender affirming chest masculinization “top surgery” is one of the major defining moments for trans men. But getting from your existing chest to the one you want to have can be overwhelming from both the information overload and emotional point of view. Having had surgery 3 years ago, I wanted to share my thoughts on surgery in case it may help someone else in the same position. I’ve created a 3 part series on surgery : Pre-surgery, surgery itself, and post- surgery.

This will be mainly from my personal experience as a mostly binary trans man, but could easily be applied to non-binary/GNC people.

If you haven’t read Part 1: Pre-surgery and Part 2: Surgery, start there. To recap: I had a phone consultation with a privately funded top surgeon in Ontario, who gave me a surgery date 6 weeks later. I had my surgery, had my bandages removed, but still had to wear a compressive binder for a couple more weeks.

Initial recovery

Right after the disaster of visiting the clinic for the last time, we went to a nearby mall for some fast food self care. I went into the food court bathroom which was the first public washroom since surgery and I automatically felt 100 times safer. I felt like I belonged. I didn’t feel like an imposter that everyone would automatically clock and tell me that I was in the wrong bathroom. This bathroom euphoria wouldn’t last (more on this in a future post and other bathroom shenanigans here) but for now it was an amazing experience and I couldn’t wait to use another public bathroom!

Our flight home was uneventful. I was nervously waiting for a security officer to ask why I was walking so stiffly, or wonder why I was covered in bandages but nothing happened.

Once home I had another week off before returning to work, but my energy levels did not bounce back as quickly as I had hoped. I ended up taking an additional week off.

In those couple of weeks after surgery I was mostly numb across my whole chest and down my sides. Showering was weird since I could feel the water near my neck and on my belly, but not in between. I was also getting weird prickly sensations across my chest and I would itch but it didn’t help at all. Meaghan Ray said it was my nerves starting to boot back up, so I rubbed a rough cloth across my chest to help my skin remember what sensation was all about and stop freaking out which seemed to help. This technique is called desensitization. Leave a comment or send us an email for more info.

I wore the binder all day and night, and applied polysporin to my incisions and nipples. Slowly they closed up and started healing with more normal skin tones. There was a point in healing where the scabs on my nipples started coming off in small pieces, and since the healed skin underneath was so much lighter, it looked like my nipples had fallen off entirely! It was terrifying until more of the scabs came off and I could see that my nipple was still intact.

Getting back to normal life

When I returned to work after being gone for 3 weeks, people were happy to see me, but for them not much had changed. It was like I had gone for a vacation and come back. It was very frustrating because I had spent a bunch of money to have body parts removed in order to “pass” and meet society’s expectations of what I should look like, but people still couldn’t use the proper pronouns. It felt like I had a big incision and T-rex arms for nothing. My euphoria and confidence slowly drained.

Once I stopped wearing the binder and started feeling the shirt directly against my skin, my confidence began to return. I didn’t care as much about being misgendered because I could feel how flat I was and it was awesome.

I wanted to minimize scarring so I massaged my scars with oil at least once a day for several months. I also didn’t raise my arms above shoulder height for 6+ months which made getting back to working out consistently a struggle. Everyone heals differently so it’s hard to tell if it made any difference but protecting my scars was the thing I had control over and it feels like I did the right thing for me.

Post op Depression

One experience specific to top surgery is having to keep your elbows at your sides for months which limits your use of your arms and therefore your independence. I was a bit angsty with how weak and dependent I was and I am prone to depression so the first couple weeks were a bit rough for me. But having the support of Meaghan Ray and seeing how excited they were for me helped me find that excitement for myself.

Many people experience post-op depression after top surgery. If you google “post op depression” the autofill option for “after top surgery” is only 4 options below. It happens after many surgeries due to some metabolic and physiological reasons as well as having time to yourself while you recover to ponder your life choices. It can especially happen after top surgery or other gender confirmation surgeries because there is usually a long buildup from when you are starting to wonder if you are trans, to finally getting a result in the mirror you are looking for, usually years later. You are looking forward to having the surgery completed, but then there is physical recovery, there is pain, maybe there are complications which feels like it robs you of the excitement you were expecting. And now that the surgery is completed, there is a sense of not having something to look forward to anymore.

Another aspect is that while your brain is telling you what you want, the actual experience of being unconscious for 2 hours and having something removed that you were carrying for 15+ years, makes part of your brain go haywire. Something is suddenly no longer there. And while you were mentally picturing what it would look and feel like, you didn’t know exactly what that would be like. So there is an adjustment period while your brain catches up. And having to wait while your brain straightens itself out makes you doubt that you have made the right decision.

While I definitely experienced all these types of thoughts, they didn’t cause a spiral into depression which I am grateful for.

Where I’m at now, 3 years later

I am still a little self conscious when taking off my shirt around others. 31 years of social training will take a little while to fight against. I have gone swimming in pools and the ocean with no shirt which was empowering. Looking down while showering is great. Doing skin to skin contact on my chest with my newborn kid was thrilling.

Once I did get back to working out and doing other activity, not having the wobble of my chest was amazing. One of the first things I noticed after that wobble was gone was the jiggle from my belly! It was a weird sensation but I quickly adjusted.

Every once in a while after I wake up in the morning my brain will remind me to grab a bra from my dresser, but then I laugh to myself when I go to open the drawer. T-shirts and button up shirts fit so much better now.

There was a point where I was wondering if I wanted a revision for what we affectionately call “the crinkle” in the middle of my chest between my scars. It would be free and the clinic was more than willing to set it up, but when it came time to booking the appointment I never followed through. I had started accepting what my chest looked like, and then grew to love it. It will never be a cis male chest since I am not a cis male, and that is ok.

Having a flat chest has greatly increased my general gender euphoria, and decreased my chest dysphoria down to nearly zero. My social dysphoria was also decreasing as my voice deepened and I grew a scraggly mustache. About 3 months after top surgery when I was healed a decent amount and not struggling with day to day activities I did notice a shift in dysphoria. The very blatant dysphoria of “you have breasts, everyone thinks you’re a girl” was pretty much gone, but my discomfort with my lower area (which I didn’t have much of before surgery) started ramping up to noticeable levels. This is also very common in trans guys – once the seemingly obvious problem gets dealt with, the focus moves to a more personal but just as glaring difference between what you were born with and what you should have.

As trans or GNC people, our dysphoria will likely never go completely away. There will be sudden surprising moments of “I wish my hands were a better size, they completely give me away as trans” or having to explain a different name on a credit application. But hopefully as time goes on, our gender euphoria and comfort with our bodies (surgically altered or not) will increase and those moments of dysphoria will be so much less devastating than they were at the beginning of transition. Having top surgery was life changing for me and provides so much gender euphoria armour against dysphoria frustrations, and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to pursue it.

I hope you found this 3 part series on top surgery helpful! If you are contemplating top surgery and have questions leave them in the comments below, or send an email to letstalkgenderpodcast@gmail.com.

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