queerness

Happy, Capable, Aggressively Okay

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For someone who has always dated men, I have fallen in love with a lot of women over the years. Of course, I didn’t recognize it as love at the time. I was a practically ancient twenty-two before I was sure of my queerness, because I was laughably out of touch with my own feelings. The archetypal queer story line, the one where you know it since kindergarten and come out all at once in a supreme act of courage, never fit me.

I came out slowly, haphazardly, often forgetting whom I’d told and whom I hadn’t. There were no secret girlfriends or covert confessions. There was no formal announcement, no awkward family meeting, no mess. People were either supportive or apathetic, given I had always been with men and it didn’t feel relevant to them. And because there was no closet narrative to speak of, I never quite owned my own bisexuality. It wasn’t hard-won, it didn’t oppress me in any meaningful way, so it felt like I’d cheated, somehow. That’s probably why I hardly ever talk about it; it doesn’t feel entirely real or entirely mine.

Recently, I’ve been thinking more about why it took me so long to realize that I was attracted to women in the same way as men. Some of it was the power of repetition. I always assumed I was straight, “straight as an arrow” as I used to put it, so when I experienced intense feelings for a woman, I imagined all women felt that way about their friends. Spoiler alert, younger self: No they do not.

But the more significant reason for my deep denial is related to my disabilities. When you grow up with needs society deems “special,” it’s hard not to resent your own body. Everything you are told about yourself as a disabled person is dusted with subtle (and not-so-subtle) messages about independence. At home, at school, at work and just about everywhere, you are served the paradox: You are dependent, and you should never depend on anyone. You are not as capable as others, and you should be as capable as everyone else. You are not okay, and you must always be okay.

Early on in my journey as a visibly disabled person, I learned to minimize and ignore my needs. I was the kid who wouldn’t ask to go to the washroom because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, leading to inevitable and embarrassing consequences. I found it difficult to ask for food when I was hungry. If I got lost, I had trouble asking for directions. I made myself small, believing on some primal level that my needs were bad and wrong.

As I got older and better able to meet my basic needs independently, I learned to ask for help related to blindness, chronic pain, or mental health. I understood that interdependence was the only way I’d be a functional human being, so I mastered that uncomfortable art and gritted my teeth through the asking.

But I was more sure than ever that needing things was bad and wrong, so I sidelined my non-disability-related needs instead. I allowed myself to be bullied. I refused to share my struggles with most people, even those willing to help. When asked how I was doing, I was adamantly, aggressively okay. In that way, I made myself even smaller.

What does this have to do with queerness? If you’ll excuse some gender generalization, everything.

See, I was almost always able to convince men of my strength. If I told them I was just fine, even with ample evidence to the contrary, they usually believed me. Women, on the other hand, seemed to see right through my hard-shelled deception. Many men have cared for and nurtured me over the years, some of them perceptive enough to notice when I was trying to be a hero. But the women I kept falling for—elder siblings, motherly types, people used to looking after others—were the ones who could not, would not be fooled, maybe because they’d used all my tricks to hide their own pain. They were the ones referring me to crisis teams and buying me groceries because they knew damn well I was hungry and dangerously not-okay. They were the ones trying hard to save me from myself, doggedly asking the hard questions, at times offering help in ways that made me feel overwhelmed and resentful.

One of my crushes was so persistent I accused her of being a Mother Teresa type, which, far from deterring her as I’d hoped, seemed to embolden her. (I’m very good at making people go away when I fear they might actually get to the heart of who I am. She would not be fooled and she would not be turned away.)

All of this was hidden from me because of my afore-mentioned denial skills. It’s only in the past few weeks that I’ve realized I am not an open book with the vast majority of people in my life. Friends and relatives have complained that they can never get anything out of me. I tend to redirect conversations back to the other person if things get too serious. Part of me is still fiercely guarded, and I was the last to know about it. I tend to pull back when I sense someone is starting to understand me a little too well, and the moments in which I do overshare happen because I am so closed-up the rest of the time.

Lately, I’ve been sidelining my emotional needs less. I’ve been reminding myself that those who love me are pleased when I share my burdens and hurt when I don’t. I should not shy away from love’s vulnerable imperative. I should receive it as the counterintuitive, subversive gift that it is.

None of my needs is bad or wrong. No disabled person’s needs are bad or wrong. We should be teaching disabled kids to speak up loudly when they’re hungry, thirsty, lost, scared, or in need of a washroom. We should be encouraging disabled people to welcome, not apologize for, their very human, very normal needs. We should assure them that interdependence is positive and necessary, that they need not pay for their “special” needs by pretending to be aggressively okay. We should remind them of their legitimacy as healthy human beings with emotional and spiritual needs, and we should drown out the drumbeat of shame society forces them to march to each day. They’ll get plenty of that shaming from people who don’t love them the way we love them. Contrary to popular belief, hearing these narratives from loved ones is not less painful than hearing them from strangers, nor are these messages particularly helpful.

Listen, friend who is reading this and thinking, “I see what you’re saying, but…”

I am not telling you to abandon advocacy, independence and self-reliance. One of my greatest personal treasures is my ability to take good care of myself when I must. I am only telling you that you cannot make up for your disability by refusing to lean on the world in any other way. You can’t, and you shouldn’t. And when you meet someone who sees right through you, and wants to take care of you anyway, try letting them, because nondisabled people lean all the time. We just don’t call it “accommodation” when they do. Mostly, we call it love.

Whether you know it or not, friend, your refusal to lean as others lean is costing you. One day, you will be in great, undeniable need. One day, you will come to the end of yourself, of what you can do, and you will have to reach out. Take it from someone who knows: It’ll be a lot easier if you practice.

Guest Post by Elise Johnston: Smart People, Silly Questions, and Knowing What We Cannot See

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Most blind people who have spent any time dealing with medical professionals have learned to expect some very bizarre questions. Experienced practitioners can sometimes seem disconcertingly ill-informed as soon as disability is involved. Trained as we are to place vision at the centre of the human experience, it’s not all that surprising that even the experts think blind people can’t, say, live a normal life, or experience romantic attraction, or independently express their own identity.

Elise Johnston, a prodigiously talented trans writer who has been blind from an early age, has graciously agreed to share her own experience with the “smart people, silly questions” phenomenon. I hope her story will make you laugh and, more importantly, get you thinking about how and why medical professionals–the ones authorized to make life-changing decisions for us–assume that people without sight are people without understanding.

“So,” the psychiatrist asks you, in a delicate, hushed voice, “as a blind person, how can you be transgender?”

Pause. Breathe. Collect thoughts. Ignore impulse to scream like tea kettle.

You know how you’re sitting on this couch, petting the psychiatrist’s snuffling Boston terrier and telling your heart, “No, it’s not a good idea to jump out of mouth. That won’t bode well for getting the letter of recommendation for gender affirmation surgery. That’s the reason for being here, remember?” You know about this, right?

And you know weird questions might be coming because this dude just gives off that vibe. Also, you’re blind, and blindness makes smart people say stupid things.

But compared to able-bodied cisgender dudes with the power to make or break the lives of desperate patients, what the hell do you really know, right? Right?

“Wait,” says Meagan, reading the first draft of this blog post, “I doubt all of my readers know this gender jargon.”

Fine. I’ll explain.

[Trigger warning: special rainbow snowflake words and concepts follow. Hang on to your pearls.]

Gender

First of all, take the equipment out of the picture. That’s biological sex, not gender.

Okay, so find some new parents and watch how they treat their baby. Blue balloons or pink? Barbies or trucks? Ballet or soccer practice? “She’ll break hearts” or “he’ll go places?” That’s gender. Sure, there are beautiful exceptions to the binary, but that’s the general pattern, the pattern of gender as we know it.

Lest there be lingering confusion, gender is not about who you’re attracted to (or not attracted to), and has no specific relationship to sexual orientation. So forget about sex. That’s what I’ve done most of my life. Which leads us nicely to…

Dysphoria

Imagine you step in a rain puddle and soak your socks. And you’re not allowed to change your socks for the rest of your life. And every time you go somewhere, you step in a new puddle and soak your socks again.

Now imagine that your sock is your body and the puddle is your family, friends, teachers, employers, neighbours, everybody. They’re always drenching you in cold wetness. They can do this by calling you a name that doesn’t fit or using a pronoun that doesn’t fit.

If you don’t have an imagination—let’s face it, so many of us don’t—ask everyone in your life to use the opposite pronouns when talking about you and call you a name that’s not traditionally associated with your gender. Feels weird, right?

This weirdness is called misgendering, and the feeling of constant intense discomfort is called dysphoria.

Transgender vs. Cisgender

Everybody is assigned a gender based on whether they have a penis or a vagina when they’re born. “Let’s just forget about the huge number of people who have neither or a mixture of both,” says the doctor.

If what the doctor says agrees with you on the fundamental existential level, then hurray! You’re cisgender. You can go about your life discovering other interesting challenges to occupy you until death, like deciding how best to troll Meagan’s blog.

If the doctor’s assignment feels entirely, devastatingly mismatched, if you live with permanent feelings of depression and wet-sock misery, then you might be transgender, and wish to pursue transitioning.

Transitioning

This is when a transgender person explores a gender other than the one they were arbitrarily assigned. They might try on their siblings’ clothes, prompting disgust and anger and plenty of parental panic. If they have facial hair, they might burn it off with lasers or electricity. They might pursue gender affirmation surgery to help with dysphoric feelings, and get to deal with gatekeepers like our fine psychiatrist friend.

They may also take estrogen or testosterone. These can cause breast development or lower the pitch of the voice, among other marvelous things. Think puberty.

Back to My Story…

I presented the psychiatrist and his dog with my favourite transformation metaphor, with much solemn throat-clearing:

“When I was a young caterpillar, I despaired of my fuzziness, especially when said fuzziness appeared on my face. I longed to grow breasts—I mean wings—and take to the sky as the butterfly I felt like on my rainbow insides. Life was a tipsy wheelbarrow, full of loneliness and despair, tossed about on a stormy sea, sailing downhill toward Suicide Lake.”

It’s the same story I’ve told my parents, my friends, my therapist, that other psychiatrist, the GP who prescribes my hormones.

Except, then came the curveball, the weird question to end all weird questions. Here it is again, just for effect:

“So, as a blind person, how can you be transgender?” he asked. “Like if you can’t see women, how can you possibly know that you want to be one?”

Oh dear, I thought, I have just boarded the elevator of wrongness, and this elevator music is a symphony of shit. Let’s break it down:

This PhD thinks blind people can’t grasp gender like a sighted person can.

This credentialed, respected, supposedly woke expert thinks one must see woman to know woman.

Anyway, because I have access to someone else’s blog, and words are free, here’s what I told the psychiatrist. Maybe you might identify with some of it, especially if, like me, you don’t tend to base your idea of gender on how people look, invalidating the lives of blind people everywhere.

Firstly, in my world at least, gender isn’t biological. It’s not a matter of body, it’s a matter of brain. Or maybe it’s my gut? Or my heart? My bones?

I’ve been convinced for as long as I can remember that I am a woman, making one of the assumed premises of the psychiatrist’s question invalid: I don’t want to be a woman; I am a woman. What I want is an exterior that matches my interior, and I don’t need sight to be sure of that.

Secondly, my experience of gender is one of relationships, how people treat and mistreat me. Whether I’m included or excluded in activities and spaces – am I invited to the stag or stagette? It’s about my assumed preferences on beverages (wine or beer?), books (YA romances or SF alien porn?), movies (action or chick flicks). It’s about whether I’m expected to feel one way or the other about comedy, music, personal hygiene, hobbies. It’s about the instrument I’m assigned in band class (baritone, because flutes are girly), the birthday presents I receive, the clothes I’m expected to wear. It’s not all about the clothes, though god, it really is all about the clothes.

I do, of course, have dysphoria about my body. Else I wouldn’t be sitting on this couch talking to this psychiatrist, hoping he can unlock the doors of his mind and accept the idea that people without sight are not people without experience.

I am indeed fortunate that my dysphoria isn’t triggered by seeing other women, but it is triggered by lots of other things, like hearing about periods, hugging them and feeling a chest that isn’t flat as a pancake, bumping into hips that aren’t cursed by narrowness, and knowing that those lucky bitches do not have to contend with the cursed crotch bulge.

So yes, on some level, my dysphoria is triggered by intellectual knowledge and not by visual reminders, but unlike certain cisgender dudes with doctorates, I actually use all of my senses around people, and even, on occasion, my brain. In fact, for me, one of the most dysphoric things in my life is my voice.

The Point of it All

The point, thanks for asking, is that whether we’re blind or sighted, our senses of self are bound up in our gender. I’m not sure about everyone else, but I don’t need functional eyeballs to tell me when there’s something out of whack with my sense of self.

But I’m just an anxious, blind transgender lady with two post-secondary degrees and a shit ton of lived experience.

What do I know?