Welcome to #TransTuesday! Our topic today builds off of last week’s, dysphoria. You’ll find a lot of these are interrelated and much too big and complex to cover in their entirety at once. So today we’re covering: PHOTOS OF US OH GOD.
Remember that I do not speak for all trans people or all trans women. I hope to speak to larger commonalities many of us share, but everything is of course filtered by my own experiences and perspectives, which is all I can offer you.
So! Photos. For many trans folks, photos (and mirrors) do not give us representations of ourselves. We can recognize that the person we see is us, because we’re taught that, but we don’t necessarily see ourselves.
Well then, what do we see? Again, it’s difficult to put into words. It almost feels like we need an entirely new branch of English to better convey these things, because we can only kind of get close with clunky metaphors.
Clunky metaphor 1: For fellow gamers out there, imagine a character that you hate from a game you love (Micah from RDR2 is a great choice, because fuck Micah). Now imagine your life IS the game, but you can ONLY EVER CONTROL MICAH.
You’re in control, you’re moving and interacting with the world, but it’s as a person who is not you, and may even be the antithesis of you. And the world reacts and responds to you as Micah, not as the you sitting on the couch covered in potato chip crumbs (what? How do YOU game??)
You can take a screenshot of something you enjoyed in the game, and when you look at it later, you see Micah. You know it was you controlling that moment, but it’s not YOU in the photo. Does that make sense?
Clunky metaphor 2: Imagine a person you’ve come across on social media that you despise. Now imagine that all your interactions online, through email, even here on this hellsite, you were FORCED to post under that person’s username.
Even if you behaved entirely differently than the person you’re thinking of, people still respond to you as if you were the other person. Even if YOU don’t see yourself as the handle you’re posting under, every single other person in the world does.
Which is not to say you’re a bad person, or see yourself as a bad person (again, the metaphors are clunky). It’s just that the world is interacting with you as if you are someone you most definitely are NOT.
Or, clunky metaphor 3: ever seen baby photos of yourself? Do you REMEMBER being a baby? No. People tell you that was you and you have to believe them, even though it does not seem to be you as you know yourself. But ALL your photos give you that feeling.
It’s your life. It’s every second of every day. Even before you discover you’re transgender. I thought I just hated photos of myself because I wasn’t photogenic (my new photos disprove THAT, ahem ahem ahem 🙂
So you’re at important events, family gatherings, hanging with friends you love, going places you want to remember forever… and you know that if you appear in any of those photos, every look at them will bring a tinge of sadness along with them, because that wasn’t YOU.
The defense I subconsciously invented for this was pulling a weirdo face in almost all photos I’ve been in. How on earth does that help? Well, it distorts my face, which in its own weird way lessened my dysphoria at seeing photos of myself.
But! It’s also because I am a fairly goofy person (as many of my friends may readily tell you). I sing nonsense songs to @susanlbridges all the time. I love the absurd. It’s part of who I am. And so those weird faces allowed me to see a window into the ACTUAL me buried inside.
Again… does that make sense? Fucking English, I tell you. Anyway! My step-Mom loved seeing photos of me and Susan, but once asked why I was always making a weird face in them. I honestly didn’t know at the time. It just felt like the right thing to do, weird as that sounds.
It wasn’t until I started untangling the knot of discovering I was transgender that I really understood the why of it. “Untangling the knot” is something you’re going to see a lot in these posts, by the way.
It’s the best metaphor I’ve found thus far for describing what I went through for years. And, again, it’s so complex I could never make one post about how I found out I’m transgender. So just… keep reading and piece all those together yourself, I guess.
Didn’t think you’d be getting HOMEWORK, did you? Class is in session, my fellow mortals!
I’m not going to post any of my old photos with weirdo faces in them, because as you might already surmise, they exacerbate my dysphoria. But I have a photo from our wedding on my dresser, and let me tell you about it.
We’re at our table at the reception. My lovely wife Susan is in her wedding dress, a smile of pure actual happiness on her face. She’s radiant and glowing.
Next to her is what appears to be a man who looks spectacularly uncomfortable in a tux, putting on a very bad smile because smiling for photos is what you’re supposed to do, especially when you’re happy (and I was!).
I don’t know what other people see when they look at it, but that’s what jumps out at me. Even the best day of my life is marred by this, and there’s nothing I can do about it. But since I’m not going to post any old photos of the old not-me, I’ll leave you with this.
You may have seen recently that we had some art done by the amazing Megan Levens to use on our writing website, business cards, etc. If you missed it, here it is again because I love it dearly.
Now here’s the one we used for years before my transition, done by the also amazing Penelope Gaylord. I want to say she’s GREAT and this is in no way any fault of hers, but… look at the “me” in this image. Do you see it?
In art created FOR us and OF us, looking like old-timey writers, I intentionally asked her to make me look distraught and worried. Why the fuck would I do that?
Because even though I was a generally happy person (outside of my dysphoria, anyway), that’s how I felt about myself. About IMAGES of myself, be they photos or mirrors or cute adorable art by a wonderful friend and artist. So it felt “right” at the time, I guess.
It was always there, it’s always been with me, manifesting in millions of little ways. Until I figured it out and said fuuuuuuuuck that, let’s fix this. And so I’m trying to.
I hope this little window into my soul has helped you better understand what some of the effects of dysphoria can be. If you can imagine how this would make you feel if you had to spend even ten minutes that way, much less your entire life, maybe you now have a better picture.
Speaking of better pictures, let’s end this on a high note.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com