Dysphoria Isn’t New
By: Arabelle J.
Tags: Adolescence, Mental Health, LGBTQ, Dysphoria, Transgender

This story starts with a girl. Stacy’s long, black hair hung straight down — impossibly far — to her waist. It was the biggest thing about her. She’d smile and twist it over an ear when she answered the phone, or when she stood up to walk across the small waiting room.

I watched the way she walked, the way she kept her balance in heels, the way she sat down in a skirt.

She probably thought I had one of those crushes twelve-year-old boys get on women just out of college, but it wasn’t that.

I was studying her, because:

I wanted to be a girl. I wanted to be just like Stacy.

When you're transgender, you can hide from everyone-except yourself. Photo Credit: Photo by DANNY G on Unsplash

That’s what brought me to that small waiting room in the therapist's office, filled with white noise machines that made sounds like the crowds cheering on Bo Jackson or Roger Clemens or Daryl Strawberry in the baseball games I still had time to watch on TV in those days.

The Saving Solace of Imagination

I would close my eyes in that waiting room. I’d pretend I sat in the stands — in the bleached denim miniskirts the girls wore then. In a tee-shirt cut short and tight in the sleeves so my bra wouldn’t show. With my long, dark hair clipped back in a banana clip, blowing in the breeze trailing in across the bleachers.

Everyone would just see me and see a girl, in the stands, like all the other girls there.

But, then, Stacy, with the real, long, dark hair would call my boy-name. It was my turn to see the therapist. I’d die inside, open my eyes, and see the jailyard-blue uniform pants I’d worn that day to school. I’d stand up, walk past the real girl and into Kevin’s office.

I’d catch a glimmer of her bare, smooth leg as she shut the door.

“Are You Still Cross-Dressing?”

“So, how have you been since last time?” Kevin the therapist would ask, eyes cast downward onto his clipboard, reading last week’s notes so he could remember who I was.

Even I didn’t know who I was.

My doctor had sent me to Kevin when my pants starting falling off my waist, even with the belt tightened. The anxiety attacks had melted 20 pounds off my 140-lb. frame. I talked myself out of suicide a few times a month.

But, I didn’t tell anyone that. Not even Kevin the therapist.

“Are you still cross-dressing?”

I’d shake my head because no words would come without tears and sobs.

The DSM in the school library — the bible these therapists used to distinguish the mentally ill from the sane — had anxiety, crossdressing, and transsexualism all listed as mental disorders.

The crazy, sobbing people on Phil Donahue or Sally Jessy Raphael had disorders like those.

So did criminals in jail.

I was two, maybe three, sentences away from being sent to a mental institution, the ones with the white, soft walls. You could spend the rest of your life in one of those.

Kevin’s Tests

During our visits, Kevin would lean back in his pleated khaki pants and cross his legs across the knees, the way men did, not women. He’d rub his bald head. And squint at me, like he was going to say, “Chin up, Chief, you’ll hit the next pitch.”

But I wanted to be the girl in the stands.

He just ran his tests.

This went on for weeks. By that time, I could twirl the hair in my wig the way Stacy twirled hers between her fingers when I was the day’s last appointment. I could cross my legs like she did when she had pushed back from her desk, phone cradled against her shoulder.

But, I’d be a ‘fag’ if anyone ever saw me do any of these things, even if I was good at them. And ‘fags’ got beat up. Bad.

“Tell me what word comes to your mind when you hear the word, 'barn.'” “Cat.” “Girl.” Kevin asked, eyes on his notes, pen in hand, ready to record my delusions.

I told him. His pen scratched across a fresh sheet of white paper.

On the day after Stacy wore a dark skirt with sheer black nylons, he moved onto ink blot diagrams.

“Tell me what you see on this card.”

I told him.

More scribbling.

“This one.”

I told him again.

He nodded.

“You Have an Addiction to Shame.”

Then, on the day I perfected mimicking the way Stacy’s voice rose at the end of her sentences, Kevin pulled a big packet of papers out of his desk drawer, the paper ribbons still attached where they had pulled them through his dot-matrix printer.

“You’re a very intelligent young man,” he started. My mind shut down, and pulled me away to wonderous experiences like slumber parties and make-up experiments, and shopping at the mall that I imagined all girls-allowed-to-be-girls got to do.

“But, you’re lazy,” he continued, pulling me back into my lonely world of baggy pants and polo shirts. “You kind of gave up at the end of each test.”

I nodded. I did… give up.

My imagination allowed me to escape dysphoria, for a while. Photo by JR Korpa on Unsplash

“Do you think, maybe…” Kevin started. I listened because I knew I had to.

“Do you think maybe, you’re not addicted to women’s clothes at all, but you’re, maybe, addicted to shame? The shame that you think comes with a boy wearing girl’s clothes?”

That night, I took a long shower — like the ones I took when I wanted to be alone, when I needed to be Stacy, or just someone else. To be free from this war that raged every moment between my mind and my body.

I closed my eyes and clutched a bottle of sleeping pills, hard until my fingers hurt. I leaned against the cold tile of the wall and tried to convince myself — again — not to swallow every single pill so I wouldn’t be mentally ill and addicted to shame anymore.

That night, I didn’t practice anything I had seen Stacy do or say that day. I shuddered at the gulf between who I was and how the world saw me. I felt as if I had already fallen into that gulf, spinning and spinning, living only until the moment I crashed upon land again.

Only fifteen years later would I first hear the words dysphoria and transgender. I almost didn’t make it.