My dysphoria is your fault

like a bad Taylor Swift song

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This post was written a while ago. It’s been sitting in my draft folder, lurking. Waiting. The time references will seem out of date reading it now, but they were pertinent then. What was I waiting for? Maybe I hoped something would improve. Did it? Will it? *sigh*

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Medium well, just the way I like them.

It’s impossible to go through all of this—the harmful laws being created and voted on, damaging executive orders, erasure of trans data, removal of civil rights—and not feel it viscerally. But it is not just the physical sensations we contend with as these harms mount and grow; it is the psychological toll it takes. Sit awhile. Let me tell you what mine feels like.

My oldest son recently went to a friend’s birthday party. It was an overnight thing… An early spring bonfire, roasting marshmallows, playing glow-in-the-dark frisbee, candy and more candy and cupcakes and more candy. So much fun. And the kids invited are all great humans (I would say “little,” but they are nearly as tall as I am, so…). I dropped him off at the grandmother’s house (out in the woods, a very long way from any town or city, surrounded by acres of trees). She seemed nice in a Fleetwood Mac kind of way. Her sons—the birthday boy’s uncles—stared hard at me, like they were slowly figuring out who what I am.

“You’re his dad?” one of them said.

I hyper-fixated on his tone, his choice of words. Was he accusing me of something? Was I a joke?

My insecurities, dressed as dysphoria, walked up right in that moment. I felt short. Too short. I felt like the wrong shape to be a dad. Was my voice low enough? Did I stutter? Yeah, I do that when I’m afraid. Or the words just get stuck and don’t make it out of my throat.

And out here in the woods, far, far away from cell phone cameras and accountability, with acres of forest surrounding us, the kind of place where nobody ever finds your body in all that space… No really, my mind went there. I was outnumbered. I felt clocked. My brain went through the full exercise of what would happen to me if the mood turned. Sam Nordquist, a trans man, was murdered by five people in the state of New York early this year, so please don’t try to tell me it’s a stretch of my imagination to think it could happen to me.

When trans people talk about dysphoria it is often the features we see, the sensations of our bodies that don’t fit how we know we should feel. Have you ever wondered why this plagues us so? Why it keeps us from sleeping at night? Why we worry over so many little details in the mirror? Yes, it is largely internal, frequently about our own perceptions of ourselves. But it is also the very real threat of violence hovering nearby. I don’t stand taller in public spaces because I think being short is bad—I do it so that I’m not noticed as easily, so that I won’t be targeted, so that I can maybe avoid harm for another day.

My dysphoria exists largely because society tells me it should.

We were all rescued by the birthday boy’s mom, a nice person I’ve had plenty of conversations with before. And really, she saved the entire event for my kid. I was very close to telling him he could not stay.

Six months ago, that whole moment would not have happened in the same way. I might have felt dysphoria, I might have endured some uncomfortable stares, but I would not have felt fear over the very real possibility of myself or my kid being harmed by someone. I would not have come home and dealt with anxiety for hours. I would not have felt compelled to make a plan for the kids for moments like this, for what to do if someone asks about their “dad” or questions them about me “being different.”

And what should that plan entail? Should I go stealth and hide in plain sight? Closet myself? Throw away the pride flags, ditch my pronoun t-shirts, eliminate all of my queer vocabulary? Should I tell my children to lie and insist that I am cis?

Should I teach my children to feel shame over who I am?

Or should I teach them to fear those who will not tolerate me?

I am a fool to believe that the other children in school with my kids will all be kind and peaceful. The truth has already shown up on our doorstep. One child told my youngest that trump and musk will come for a kid in their class who is openly nonbinary/genderfluid. He said more than what I’m alluding here, but you can draw your own conclusions. These are 9-year-olds.

March 31^st will be Transgender Day of Visibility, if it hasn’t been outlawed by executive order by the time we get to the end of the month. Will I be safe showing up as myself on that day? Will my kids still have any sense of pride in who they are and who we are as a family?

Or will fear win out?

I have not yet figured out what to tell my children. I don’t know how to ask them to lie, nor do I know how to ask them to be proud in the face of real danger. And if they were at a birthday party at your kid’s house, you might never know the complexity of all those emotions they are hiding behind polite smiles and pockets full of candy, behind fingers sticky from smores, behind smiles coated in frosting.

Your trans friend,

Robin