Dysphoria: My Beloved Darkness
By: Som Paris
Tags: LGBTQ, Gender Identity, Culture, Transgender, Fear

Dysphoria: My Beloved Darkness

Darkness is the quiet in which we can understand what was hard to hear in the noise of the light. Som Paris Follow Oct 19, 2020 · 6 min read

Photo by David Levêque on Unsplash

I ought to shun darkness. Walk in the light, hegemonic global religions lecture, a message that evolved into the modern religion of self-help. Any emotion other than happiness is to be abhorred, as we seek the grail of constant joy. We certainly shouldn’t listen to those other emotions, let them be, try and understand their place in our emotional eco-system. We certainly shouldn’t seek out the darkness.

A shift has taken place recently in the trans community, as a new movement has sprung up declaring that you don’t need to have dysphoria to be trans. The message is simple: some trans people have dysphoria, others don’t and that is ok. All are trans, all are valid. And you’ll not find any disagreement here. This is no exercise in gatekeeping.

One side note that piqued my interest was how many times — when you dig down into the different narratives — those who talk about dysphoria in their trans experience, and those who do not, often end up describing experiences that are extremely similar, and that the different narratives are born of different emphasis. Not always. There are some truly diverse stories about transness, and that can only add to the wealth of the great trans umbrella alliance.

I would like to play a little, however, in that grey space, where some speak of dysphoria, and some do not. Where many of us are talking about very similar things: some kind of nuisance in our relationship to our bodies, whether we wish to emphasize it strongly or not. Again, if you feel like your way of talking about being trans has nothing to do with what I’m talking about, then that’s fine! I’m not trying to impose anything on anyone. But I’d like the space to peer into the dark side.

In Celtic, pre-christian culture, everything starts with darkness. I live in Galiza, a celtic country, and here, the New Year is about to begin, during the celebrations of magusto, or what most of the world knows as Halloween (Samhain in Ireland).

The year begins just as we truly enter darkness. The year begins with quiet, with rest, after all the frenetic wild activities of the harvests are over. Here in the darkness, we have time to think, to plan, to re-organize. Who do we want to be? What shall we make of the gift before us: a fresh new year?

The day also begins at darkness. When the sun sets, a new day begins, just as it does in the Jewish tradition. Darkness is not something to be feared, not a temptation, not an evil. It is the quiet in which we can understand what was hard to hear in the noise of the light. Yes, the dark night contains wild beasts. But beasts are something we must plan for, and plan around. Not things to be killed off completely, until only humans occupy an artificially lit landscape.

Photo by Rostyslav Savchyn on Unsplash

In Hiyao Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away (spoilers contained in this and next paragraph) ten-year-old Chihiro is befriended by an ambiguous beast whom she calls No-Name. She invites No-Name into the busy bath-house, teaming with customers, monsters and workers of all shapes, sizes and colors. Though Chihiro refuses the conjured-up gold nuggets that No-Name offers her, many of the customers and employees of the bath house do not find themselves so self-restrained, and No-Name soon finds themself to be a popular client, throwing gold around, growing, devouring other people, and soon enough, expanding into a giant of monster that threatens the very existence of the bath house.

When Chihiro manages to calm the situation and lead No-Name out of that intense, stimulating social environment, No-Name shrinks back down and becomes quiet again, meekly accompanying her, as she resolves the remaining conflicts of the film. I view No-Name as a perfect metaphor for my dysphoria.

Before I had an awareness of being trans, there were things about my relationship to my body that I can look back on as clear signs of a quiet, nascent dysphoria. I wanted to get rid of my facial hair and never have it grow back ever again.

Sexually, certain discomforts would appear for periods of time: things I would avoid, barely even realizing I was avoiding anything at all. But when I began to transition, I led what was a quiet discomfort into a raging social situation (the world seeing me as a woman) and those dysphorias grew into a monster that was completely out of control.

They shrouded around me, and I feared I would never be powerful enough to overcome them, even as they reduced me to weeping after doing an innocent physical activity that reminded me that I had a body, a body that I could feel.

“I needed to build more queer tribe around me…”

A fortunate encounter in my life at that point helped me to see that most of the society around me, good people though they may be, had cis-normative views on what the world was made of, and what it meant to be a man or a woman. Not explicitly transphobic people, but un-deconstructed. That was the environment in which I had allowed my dysphoria to grow, until it was larger than me and out of control. She helped me understand that none of us overcome our life problems alone.

Humans are historically and innately tribal, and how our tribe sees us affects us enormously. I needed to build more queer tribe around me. And when I did, my dysphorias shrank back down. The monster turned into a meek companion; it didn’t disappear, but it ceased to control me.

We often quickly split dysphoria into different categories. We talk about physical dysphoria (discomfort with the body), and social dysphoria (the pain of being misgendered, for example). But we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that we are imposing categories on an inherently complex phenomenon.

Body dysphoria goes through the filter of society and gets codified back onto the body, sometimes as a monster. Because, of course, society is still inherently ignorant and un-deconstructed about the existence and equality of trans people. Body dysphoria may not be entirely caused by social dysphoria, but it is surely tainted by it.

And so I sit, in the darkness of the new year, beginning a beautiful contemplation. And I feel the darkness of my dysphoria. It’s a nudge now. It’s not a monster, out of control. It’s my quiet, meek companion that pushes me on, that makes me pause, that reminds me that I am different, and I am beautiful, because I am trans.

Darkness is not my enemy. Dysphoria is not my enemy. Discomfort is not my enemy. It is night that makes the day seem so bright. It is my dysphoria that makes my gender/sex euphoria float so high. The lightness in the clouds, shines weepingly beautiful because of the darkness that frames them.

My only enemy is a society that has not learned that what I am is incredibly special, a society that takes my gentle, nudging discomfort, and turns it into a raging monster. That very society which told me to walk in the light is the problem.

Well, I will walk in the light, and in the darkness too. For there is no part of me that I want to fear or hate.