Fish Food For Thought

I think the trapped in the wrong body meme leads to the Jerry Springer like sayings I was born a man or born male etc. I never ever felt that myself I simply felt mixed right out of the gate. For whatever reason my first memories weren’t of associating with the world as being male only being perceived as such by forces outside my control. That is probably why I am one of the ones that hold a medical view to all this and resent putting Trans anything in front of woman. I have always identified as female first so why shouldn’t I identify as woman first before trans anything? One of the hardest things I’ve personally struggled with is knowing that I will never be 100% female but now I see Transgender as attacking the one thing that I can be which is 100% legally female. That is one of the other things that help to make me the outspoken critic of Transgender that I am. Some of you will get this but many of you might not regardless of my Trans status I was never 100% male either so I very much resent being associated with a listed birth sex. It really burns me that I can take the steps to become legally as I identify as female yet the LGBT and supporters of the use of Transgender have no problems taking that away from me by lobbying to have me labelled Transgender for life. At some point I’d like to be able to move beyond all this or atleast have the option if I so choose. I also believe that just because someone is born same sex attracted or sex and gender diverse does not mean they should have to be associated with the LGBT or its politics they are in fact two very different things.

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Hi Janet. Yours is a post I pretty much wish I had written. Different perspective, same sentiment.

I should tell you I strongly dislike the term “transgender,” as it sounds so clinical. And don’t get me started on “gender dysphoria” … or “gender identity disorder.” (If homosexuality is no longer considered a “disorder.” why is our situation still viewed as one? How are we going to get past perceived stigmas when we’re perceived to have a “disorder”?)

And to that effect, I’ve never felt “trapped in my own body,” either, probably for different reasons than you. Maybe it’s because of my Gemini-variety twin-spiritedness. (It’s no accident Bugs Bunny was one of my role models growing up …) I’ve always felt equal parts of both genders growing up — my love of cars and sports, my unrequited longing to be pretty and take ballet and do things with the girls. If anything, my uneasiness manifested itself more in feeling like a general overall misfit because I didn’t fit into anyone’s world very neatly — and, by the same turn, no one fit neatly into mine, either.

I’ve never felt the need for the surgery, as I still like girls (though now it would be one of either sex). But as someone who came out and started her wild gender trip in her late 40s, I can tell you that, save for needing to drop a lifetime of weight, I’ve never felt more comfortable in my own body. Just being who I truly am at last has taken a lot of stress out of my life — and made me a healthier person physically. After I told one of my dearest friends, a former newspaper colleague I worked with 20 years ago, she told me, “The one thing I’ve always thought of you was ‘never comfortable in his own skin.’”

My entrapment, if you’d call it that, was more psychological, if anything — dealing (or not) with a world that still sees things as binary.

In all, I’m glad of who and what I am. I’m glad I’ve had the chance to see and live life from both genders and take the best elements of both. It’s been a unique trip. It hasn’t been a “disorder” — it’s been a gift.

I don’t watch a lot of TV, and as a lifelong newspaper journalist, I’d probably have a lot less patience with TV people than you seen to have. Keep it up, Janet, and keep educating the Hodas of the world. There are always going to be teaching moments.

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Thank you, thank you, thank you! I have never been “trapped in the wrong body” and want to scream every time I hear the phrase. If someone chooses to describe their own journey that way, fine. But having that convenient phrase slapped on all trans people is frustrating and limiting. I did just fine in my pre-transition body, and I’m doing just fine in my transitioned body.

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the idea of “trapped in the wrong body”, like a lot of things used to talk about being trans*, probably sounded good the first few times the basic concept of transness was explained to someone else. as you put it, Janet, “convenient, lazy”….but then it got really easy to blow out of proportion dramatically in a way that trivializes what we’re dealing with.

what i suppose i’m curious about is how we frame this to people who don’t understand, who’ve never met another trans person…or at least haven’t knowingly met another trans person. people hold and cling to their gender as very innate in many cases and the “trapped” ideal gets it through their head, just in a really flawed and dramatic manner. media controls how people perceive us, and this is why we get so unhappy when media plays to stereotypes or ridicule of trans women, but how do we counter-spin the media? because this is a healthy start, don’t get me wrong, but half the time when explaining my past to someone i’ve “invited in” (i really like that phrase, Janet) i get about 6000 questions about why i don’t look like those trans women you see on television.

…and, yeah, i die a little bit inside, because it’s holding me up to a standard of white/femme/hetero/skinny/able-bodied that i just can’t meet, and it also does remind me why i have all this social invisibility which keeps me safe in many cases, but it also makes me feel like those media images and portrayals are the trans women the media *wants* to validate and not the rest of us who have boring little lives. if we are to change how we are perceived by the media, we must validate the diversity of trans experiences, too, and i think this is a critical part of a larger strategy.

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Ms. Mock is spot on yet again. I would love to see the media focus their energies on stories of hope, success, and renewel. There are plenty of post-transition life journies that should be covered, as well as non-op trans* people who’s voices are made mute by the sexualization of transgender individuals through the alienation of our transitions. The general public is fascinated by our transitions because that is the only part of our journies and lives that is well-documented. I look forward to learning about the actual lives, careers, families of the people I admire.

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Yes, yes and more YES! Thank you for putting this into 1s and 0s on the internet! It’s an idea I’ve had trouble with for a long time and it always felt so slightly off-base. It works well-enough as a way creating a picturesque sense of empathy for cis folks, but it leads to them to make such offensive assumptions sometimes.
People want me to tell them how I hated my body, and the truth is, I didn’t. I never did. It just never felt like it was quite right. More like the builders has mucked up the blueprints and installed the wrong fixtures. Nice fixtures, but not the ones that where meant to be there. A little remod though and things are much better.
But really, I never felt ‘trapped’ or resentful.
My parents where good hippies who did the whole peace and love thing and more or less forgot to teach me to hate my body or be ashamed of it. Or push many heavy gender roles on me either for that matter.
I just felt as if I had somehow been miscast at the audition. I was rehearsing the wrong role and the play just never really worked. A little recasting though and it’s Tonys all around!!
Maybe I’m torturing an entirely new analogy here, but, ummmmmmmm, yeah. Thank you for writing this.

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I like this segment, because, in my world, although I never actually felt like the woman that society had laid out for me, and felt more similar to male roles, or gender neutral roles, and being born and referred to as female, I just kind of took charge of my life, and wished to not be referred to as any one gender, but rather as a concoction of both, while accepting the body I was given and not allowing media or society to influence how I should look or act based on that. Both my parents didn’t lead typical gender roles in my family, which allowed me to be accepted as I am, however, now in my adulthood, my mother continues to try and force more stereotypical female ways of dress and hairstyles on me, which has annoyed me to no end. I have no desire to have surgery to alter my body to look more like that which the environment would identify as male, however, I am willing to alter my own perceptions of myself within this same light, and accept that sometimes I may be referred to as male, and other times as female…. as those are the perceptions of others, and I can’t control how they have been molded. It’s how I see myself, and how I share of myself to others which really counts.

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I’m so glad to have read this. I’m not trans, and I’m definitely guilty of jumping on the “trapped in the wrong body” bandwagon, mostly because I feel that way myself with regards to my blindness, which made me wonder whether my experience had any commonalities with those of trans individuals. I’ve been blind since birth, but feel like I should see, like there are these fragments or parts of me who can see, so when I get lumped into the blind world, I feel like I’m giving up part of myself. I’d even come up with the term “blind dysphoria” to describe my experience, but I’ve been realizing that its harmful to co-opt the trans experience, and though I may resonate with individual people, I can’t make a general statement about how my rleationship to my blindness is similar to a trans persons’s relationship with their body.

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You can count me as another voice for the non-”trapped in the wrong body” life story. It was definitely difficult when I was finally sitting down to figure out if I’m trans, realizing that the story that everyone was telling (and in books like True Selves) wasn’t matching with my experiences. It made me doubt whether I was actually trans, because I sure felt like I was. Fortunately, I started to slowly come across other stories of trans women that more closely resembled my own. We need to be telling our alternative stories; the public needs a better understanding, and we need the stories out there so that other questioning trans folk know the diversity of trans experiences.

Philosochick

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I can totally identify w/ this line of thinking….”Why don’t I like it? Because it places me in the role of victim, and to those who take mainstream media depictions as truth I’m seen as a human to be pitied because I’m someone who needs to be saved, rather than a self-determined woman with agency and choice and the ability to define who I am in this society and who I will become in spite of it.” As a former sex worker I completely took control of my own agency….from reading books, online articles and from independent workers and interviewing women face-to-face and making up my do’s and don’ts and had some really wonderful and self-affirming moments and great human connections (mentally speaking) and never once did I feel victimized or de-humanized. Thanks for writing such a well-thought-out piece!

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Hi Janet, I have a question that’s been on my mind for some time – maybe you or one of your readers could help me out? I always wonder about the how to be inclusive of trans people in feminist conversations (I am a cis woman), because so much of feminism is based on the idea of shunning gender essentialism. It’s a little embarrassing for me to ask what seems like a basic question, but how do trans people (or whatever trans people want to answer this, I know it’s different for everyone!) reconcile this part of feminism with their gender experience? I guess the heart of what I’m asking is really tough – what is gender? How does dysmorphia feel if there is no gender essentialism? Or IS there gender essentialism? – but I’ve been puzzling over it with no luck for a while! (And by the way, thank you for a great article!)

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I might be able to speak to what Julia just wrote/asked… I had a friend at the beginning who was very much into feminist theory and studies and who couldn’t understand why I was unable to just be…”differently male” (gender roles are constructed by society, there is no either/or, why don’t you be truly revolutionary and defy societal expectations with the body you have, etc.). She felt that I was “selling out”.

My brain. Not the rest of my body. My brain works SO much better on estrogen. I have been back and I have been forward with this (in regards to hormones/amounts/types and a few set-backs). And all I can say is that whatever you want to call it…whatever I am or I am not…my brain was not wired to go through puberty the way I did. I describe it as lights being turned off….*click*….and it took me until I was 21 to begin to address this.

My role…my dress…how I act or don’t. What I like or don’t. Gay or straight. None of this matters to the physical..biological!…fact that hormone therapy could do for me what I wasn’t able to do on my own. No amount of personal growth, feminist theory, societal rebellion or calming meditation could affect me in the way that I needed.

Yes it does require a lot of personal work. A lot of other therapy and growth and acceptance and self-love. Of understanding that you don’t become male or female…you just become your self. And yes I like the changes that these hormones bring to my body… I ENJOY being able to wear what I like and talk and act and be as I like (that is to my own personal tastes and pleasures). I adore the way my body feels now. I cherish it. I am so thankful for the body I have…in ways I could never experience before.

This would not have been possible in centuries gone past. I am not a victim, nor do I have a mental disorder…but I do need medical help and I am so thankful for the doctors who have helped me and for the knowledge and skills that allow me the pills that make my lights turn on. (And I am also thankful and fortunate to have had my “epiphany” at an early age…and for the resources that we’re becoming available and the privilege I enjoy here in Canada. I know this is not the reality for all and I am sorry for that.)

I was born transgendered. I am female. This is a physical and fundamental fact of my existence…not a role or a theory or a transgressive statement against society. But that is my own truth..my own feelings and I would never claim or define this for anyone else.

-Sara

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I don’t feel “trapped” at all. And fortunately, those in my world don’t view me as such. They see me for what I put out–a heavenly spirit living as I want.

Plain and simple.

Humans need the “trapped in the wrong body” theory because the average person’s intellect does not invite a larger scope of the bigger picture. With so many egos focusing on what defines them, they forget what defines us as a whole. And that us being spirits in the eyes of a greater being sharing/trading different experiences.

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I decided to take a different approach to this issue. I sense that all of the discussion above is heartfelt. Yet, the question implied is, why can’t everyone just understand me for who I think I am?

It seems to me that for most people the whole mixture of genders issue is not the first thing on their plate when they wake up in the morning. The categories they acquired during their growing-up period through adulthood to the present are as natural as the way in which you sense yourselves. Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow points out that the human mind is divided into two systems. The System 1 part of our minds operate automatically, quickly, and with little or no effort or voluntary control. It finds and develops answers quickly. System 2 is the analytical portion of our minds which are often associated with our subjective experiences. System 2 wants to slow down and think about it, but System 1 gives such quick and neat answers that System 2 often easily adopts System 1′s rationale and gives in to these quick answers; also because System 2 is lazy. Obviously my description is woefully short, but having said that, it is likely to be an uphill battle to transform human thinking about genders. We have seen this throughout the gay rights issue. What I see in the response to Janet Mock’s article is plethora of approaches being taken by individuals who seek individualized definition. So far, the conceptual scheme of our society(s) has not yet fully awakened to this plight. So, Hoda defines a problem, tries to use words currently in play, without making up a new set of words, and tries to make it simple. That’s so the System 1 part of the mind can tackle the incoming data. Of course, this is all in a proverbial sense, before one has had a cup of coffee.

So, how should the question relating to the gender be asked? One way is to ask, How can humans relate to differences from the norm? Or, How do humans define differences from the duality of male-female? There seems to be a push-pull effect. On one side, the club, tribe, clan, pride, herd, and society have their view and reactions to differentness. Understanding this differentness requires a whole lotta coffee early in the morning. Thus, it is up to the players, sympathizers, critics, and judges to continually make their case. So, with reference to the TV program and article….fire Hoda and laud the program…or is it the other way around? System 2 has not yet enough information. More coffee, please!

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I really appreciate the insistence on finding more accurate words to describe who we are / who we are becoming / what we’re doing. I have never resonated with The Narratives of “coming out”, “trapped in the wrong body” and others (“FTM”), still I was using them to make sense to my surroundings as a young queer who was trying to self define.

When we choose to not use the prevalent mantra to describe ourselves, we’re creating more possibilities for each other and folks sharing our journeys. … especially as “elder” trans folks for those who are just beginning their journeys to self determination – regardless of their or our age, regardless of where they come to in their own journeys. As you just created more possibilities for me – thank you!

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At a point in time I also described my experience as being trapped in the wrong body. But I found that as I matured and understood myself better, I was able to better articulate my feelings and conceptualize my reality under truer terms.

“Born in the wrong body” is a generic phrase consistently applied to the trans* experience, and has (unfortunately) become so popular that it is ingrained into our culture and accepted as the universal experience for all of the trans* community.

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Me, I don’t hate my body, it’s not the wrong one. I’d like it to be different, just like any other human being on the planet can want something different about their body. I just need a little fix here and there, and I’m good to go. My body is fine. Just needs a little tweaking.
I even like most of the plumbing it came with. And just like there are people who like multiple shower heads, I like multiple plumbing options. That’s all there is to it.

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Brilliant – thank you so much for blogging on this subject. We have lived in the framework of the Western medical model far too long, and notions of “trapped in the wrong body” and diagnoses of “Gender Identity Disorder” have genuinely undermined trans civil rights by convincing both ourselves and society at large that there is something inherently wrong with us, that we are victims to be pathologized. Personally, I have never experienced myself being the wrong body. My body is still the same body, I have simply modified it to find congruency in my life, and there are many ways people can make bodily modifications to align their mind, body and spirit.

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I also cringe when journalists ask about ones birth name, or when a transwoman says “my mom always wanted a girl”.

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I’m in total agreement with this piece. The “trapped in the wrong body” narrative is not only far too generalized, but possibly too simplistic to capture ANY trans woman’s experience, let alone the less binary folks in the gender galaxy.

However, a part of it still resonates with me, even though I’ve been about a year and a half on hormones and presenting as female for a little over a year.

It’s not that I feel like there’s a female body stuffed away somewhere in here and I just need to find it and everything will be okay, but I still feel like there’s something “wrong” (wrong for me) with the body I have that can’t really be fixed. It doesn’t feel like an idea born of faulty cultural norms (although I recognize that simply “feeling” like it isn’t doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t), but I do feel somewhat “incomplete” and “broken” somehow and I’m not sure what to do about it. I’m a little bit nauseated by the idea that I should simply accept it and love it as it is.

Part of it might be that there are still parts of physical transition I would like to have done (FFS and GRS, in particular), but even then I feel like my body is just shaped wrong. Like having waited until after puberty has twisted me beyond acceptable repair. I don’t cling to any beauty norms and I recognize that women come in innumerable shapes and sizes, and with innumerable kinds of abilities and disabilities, but I feel like I still fall beyond the pale somehow. I’m not sure whether this looks like internalized transphobia or something like that, but it makes my distaste for the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative all the more confusing.

Sorry for the rambling and verbosity, and possibly vanity, but my thoughts about this are so fuzzy and disjointed that this is the best I can summarize them right now. I hope it’s clear what I’m trying to get out.

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Thank you Jane for being so open about your journey and for being a wonderful role model. I am an out activist as well and wrote about this very subject in my blog
http://lovingaqueer.blogspot.com/2012/05/lonely-champion.html

I have many times questioned that if from the moment our mothers are pregnant our society did not insist on pushing us to one side or the other of the binary gender theory and push that gender is all about genitalia then would we and transgendered people ever have a problem with the bodies we were born with. If society gave us the freedom to live who we are inside and did not say there is anything wrong with our bodies and put into boxes and categories according to our body parts we might just be fine if we were loved and respected for who we are inside.

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Thank you so much for writing this piece. It’s conversation like this that really pushes understandings forward.
As someone newly coming into his own transition, I’ve had to battle through a lot of internal transphobia to get to a place of acceptance. The feeling of being “trapped” just felt so wrong to me and the stereotypes of trans narratives were so hard to relate to that I tried to shut it all out.
Thank you for being a leader in the community and for standing up and showing the real complexity of who you are.

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As one of the older (by age) transwomen who struggled for sixty odd years with my very existence in a world that somehow did not make sense, I find the concept of being trapped farcical.
I can understand that those who try to make sense of our situation might use the term to describe how they perceive the condition.
The reality for me, but only in respect to who was in the mirror versus who was in my mind was never one of being trapped. People get trapped in a lift, and I have that fear at times, when the lift does not do what is expected. But my life was never like that, certainly I had many questions as to why I was not like I thought I should be but never was I trapped. I believe if I had ever thought I was trapped I would have lost it many years ago. What my life has been possibly would be more accurately described as disordered, trying to make sense of something different, almost illogical.
In fact as an engineer there was nothing logical about who I was, and how could there be when the mind and body image did not match.
Without the wisdom of today’s research, together with the many stories made available by so many people telling their stories, I could do no more than regard my life as just that, my life, something to put up with but never trapped in.
Since I came to realise my life did not have to be the way it was, that I had the ability to make changes, I have moved forward. An issue for all transgender people is not how they see themselves but one of how others see us, the judgements they make about us and how we allow ourselves to be influenced by them.
Having taken control of who I am, I completed my full transition, my life has become finally logical.

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Thank you so much for your story — and also thank you to those who left comments! I must admit that I have always been confused by the transgender narrative as it is portrayed in the media. The idea of being “trapped” just never gelled with how I understand my own body and seemed incredibly foreign and difficult to understand. That idea (of being trapped) always seemed to me like it reinforced gender roles & perceptions rather than to allowed us to dispel or reinterpret them. I hope that as time goes on we can have more positive dialogue like this!

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Thank you, thank you. There’s so much I could say, but I’ll keep it short: maybe the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative is part of why it took me so long to realize I was trans. I’ve never had any intense or constant sense that my body was wrong. I’ve lived with it most of my life without giving it too many second thoughts. When I was very young I had dreams and wished I was born a girl but it certainly didn’t go so far as trapped in the wrong body. I wonder if, the first few times I encountered trans people, I assumed that this was what defined them as trans, and so didn’t see that in many ways they were JUST LIKE ME. I hope I can learn to explain why I find this narrative problematic; I do feel misunderstood when someone thinks that this is my issue. As someone else said, it’s deeper and not analytical, it’s just something I KNOW about myself, and I suppose most people are uncomfortable with such things, need to pin things down…

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My 8 year old daughter hates “trapped in a boy’s body”. She also doesn’t like “a girl on the inside, boy on the outside” or “girl brain/boy body”. She says she is a girl everywhere except for one place (if it only were that simple). We say there are many different ways to be a girl and that she is one way to be a girl, and that there are girls like her out there. It sounds like a defect to say you are one thing on the inside and another on the outside, as if you are an alien.

In the months before the official transition, when I strongly suspected this was going to be my child’s road, I read about you, Janet, and it was extremely helpful. I needed to see a happy successful “mainstream” woman to feel hopeful for my daughter. Thank you for this.

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I honestly believe you are looking too hard for debate, and taking this “trapped in the wrong body” thing too seriously. Some people genuinely feel that way, so you won’t be effective in making it go away. I’ve always felt trapped, and that won’t change just because someone decides they want to remove “trapped in the wrong body” from the Trans lexicon. My consciousness is feminine, I’ve always gravitated towards feminine, my mind is feminine. My body isn’t “me”, and that’s what this crippled society must learn….that we are NOT our body, we are our mind, our consciousness, our spirit. My consciousness, “ME”, whatever “I” am, is trapped in a physical vessel that does not match my consciousness and my TRUE WILL. Trapped in an incorrect vessel lol. But I still accept my self as a whole. I just feel……trapped, that’s all. The problem with most societies is that they see your body as “you”, they don’t see your CONSCIOUSNESS. It’s the vessel they perceive first. I am more than just my body…

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What works for some does not work for others. I actually did feel trapped in the wrong body and do use this term when explaining myself to people. I had to physically change my body to feel “right” it was the best thing I ever did for myself.

As transsexual’s or trans* people we have to understand that our own journey is our own journey and to stop expecting all of us to feel the same way about the “change” .

Janet does amazing work in helping the world to understand what is like to be a transgender person. Thanks for your work.

Buck Angel
Pioneering Filmmaker, Speaker, and Advocate

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LOVE your story … And THANK YOU for pointing out this fact again-and-again! ‘Fish Food” will be a must-read for me! *hugs*

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Excerpted from “Video Tape” by Riki Wilchins
from Read My Lips – copyright 1997 by Firebrand Books: “The problem with transsexual women is not that we are trapped in the wrong bodies. The truth is, that is a fairly trivial affair corrected with doctors and sharp scalpels. The problem is that we are trapped in a society which alternates between hating and ignoring or tolerating and exploiting us and our experience, and more importantly, we are trapped in the wrong minds. We have, too many of us for too long, been trapped in too much self-hate: the hate reflected back at us by others who are unwilling to look at the complexity of our lives, dismiss our femaleness, our femininity, and our sense of gender itself and our erotic choices as merely imitative or simply derivative. Wanting desperately to be accepted, and unable to take on the whole world alone, we have too often listened to these voices that were not our own, and forgotten what Alice Walker says when she declares: “…no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.”

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I will be brief with this due to time that I have, But I can partly agree only. As an editor for print media you were dealing with people that exhibit long attention span. The place where the “wrong body” point is used is generally TV were the attention span is much lower; try around 25 seconds. If they can not get a good idea of what is being said in 25 seconds, you lose them. So, I would say give them something else that is around five seconds to read on air that is better. I can’t think of anything myself, but I haven’t done serious writing for a long time and as sort of out of practice on those skills.

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i wouldn’t be trapped in this body if they hadn’t already done so much surgery and chemistry to me as a child without my consent and then now that i know what’s going on i can’t even access the health care to deal with the pain scarring & dysphoria. they have more control over my hormones and genitals than i do. i was born this way and they made me undergo surgery. what bathroom is the little intersex kid supposed to use? kick me in the gonads two weeks after genital surgery and then don’t listen to me about how bad everyone at school treated me. i is for intersex is for invisible if i had a chance to find out what my body was really like maybe i wouldn’t be as transsexual as i am? but at this point i can’t be bothered to care or differentiate. my body has been modified by chemicals since before i was born and i’ve been under the knife more than once and it will happen again and this time it will be mine. i do not feel like you are erasing our discourse, i feel like we need more ways to get the word out about how strange and double-edged a lot of these tools are. that the more i come out the more hatred and resistance some people seem willing to spew openly. our society’s gender binary is a festering wound and in its pain it carves its lines onto and into us and at least this time i will be the one in charge of where the scars are, and what for

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The hermeneutics of suspicion is becoming the de facto form of analysis for the trans blogosphere–and, to some extent, for good reason. Given how narrative descriptions of gender dysphoria have been turned into hard templates for determining trans worthiness; given how rehashed and reiterated trans tropes get thrown back at us in shorthand mockery (“I’m a penguin born in the wrong body”); given the facile way in which our experiences get reduced to sudoku puzzles that also connect the dots . . . I understand the disdain.

But come on — how old is she? I wish I was that articulate at her age. I think we are now entering a period in trans articulation in which, while respect the vast array of descriptions people have for the countlessness of their life experience, we are also at risk for a reactionary scepticism that disavows, disallows, and finds theoretical fault pretty much any time a trans person opens up their mouths in public. Yes, we have every right to critique and question, but I do wonder if we’re soon to reach the point that we’ll have run out of expressive potential, given a growing anxiety of silencing, erasing, or excluding. I know that, increasingly, the tendency can be to say nothing, rather than to say ‘the wrong thing’, with the threat of community leader blogs and twitter tirades in response.

I sympathise very strongly that some people do not like this metaphor, that it’s been used to prevent people from access to medical treatment. But I also see how others, especially frightened yet determined children, reach for whatever narrative common ground they have in order to speak outward what is an intensely difficult inner state. And although I wasn’t “trapped in the wrong body” — Jan Morris coined this phrase in /Conundrum/ as far back as the 1970s — I certainly was not dwelling in the right one. And I don’t think that makes me theoretically disqualified as ‘current, hip, trans theorist’ on account of my own portfolio of interpretive conclusions.

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Dear Janet, I forgot to mention..Yes I pretty much agree with you on this issue. Also I would love to recieve an email from you. I read your story in Marie Clair 2yrs? ago. I admire you very much. Peace to you.!!!

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When I was away on a boy’s camp ,when I was teenager, the leaders decided to put on stage show ,where we did different acts. One boy asked my dress as as a wowan, in a dress and make up on. I felt much much more comfortable in the woman’s dress than the the boy clothes. We stayed in the dresses until we went to bed. The next morning when when I put my normal clothes on, I knew it was not me.My pensis felt so tight,I ws not in the not in the right clothes because the night before was the real me-a woman.
I always a woman’a nighty to bed, wear woman’s skirt’s because since that night I have been of those trapped in a man’s body. If I could have I would had a sex change and became the real me. Some people that I have not known have thought I said IRuth instead because of my female voice

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