Welcome to #TransTuesday! This week we’re covering something that plagues so many trans people for so long, and can be so incredibly painful. And even when we transition, we don’t know for sure if it’ll get any better: PHOTOS AND REFLECTIONS.
For many trans folks, photos and reflections don’t show us representations of ourselves. We can intellectually recognize that the person we see is us, because we’re taught that’s what we look like and therefore that is us. But we don’t see ourselves as our true selves.
So what do we see? It’s difficult to put into words, especially since it’s going to vary for every trans person. For some of us we may see a distorted version of ourselves, or ourselves buried under a horrible mask and pain. For some of us we may see a complete stranger that we have no connection to, or that actively repulses us (this was the case for me). If you need more on that, see the Trans Tuesday on GENDER DYSPHORIA.
It feels like we need an entirely new branch of language to better convey some of these complicated trans topics, 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 videogame you love. In this metaphor, your life is the game, but you can only ever control the one character you hate.
You’re technically in control, you’re moving and interacting with the world, but it’s as a person who is not you, doesn’t feel like you or look like you, and may even be the antithesis of you. And the world reacts and responds to you as that person, not as the you sitting on the couch covered in chip crumbs (listen I don’t know how you play videogames, I’m just giving you the genuine Tilly Experience here).
You can take a screenshot of something you enjoyed in the game, and when you look at it later, you see… that character you hate who isn’t you. You know it was you controlling your avatar in 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. I… suspect this is not a huge leap for most of us, because PHEW there are some questionable folks out there.
But now imagine that all your interactions on social media, through email, through Zoom calls, through EVERYTHING… you were forced to post under that horrible person’s username and avatar.
Even if you behave entirely differently than the person you’re thinking of, people still respond to you as if you were that other person, and punish you for not being who they want or expect you to be. 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.
Clunky Metaphor 3: have you ever seen baby photos of yourself? Do you remember being a baby?
No.
People tell you that baby was you and you have to believe them, even though it does not seem to be you, as you know yourself. Now imagine all of your photos give you that feeling. And not just photos, but every time you look in the mirror! Pass a shiny window. Look in the surface of a swimming pool.
It’s your life.
It’s every second of every day.
My whole life pre-transition, I thought I just hated photos of myself because I wasn’t photogenic. Buuuuut my present photos disprove THAT, don’t they? HEYOOO. I love the way I look now, and I can be happy about it! Trans people go our whole lives never seeing ourselves and hating the way we look.
If and when that changes, that is to be celebrated. Taking and posting so many selfies, as so many trans people do, isn’t vanity. It’s making up for a LIFETIME of never seeing ourselves at all. It’s trans joy incarnate.
But anyway, imagine 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 time you look at them will bring a whole mess of sadness. Because that wasn’t you.
The defense I subconsciously invented for this was pulling a weirdo face in almost all photos I was in, pre-transition. 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.
To be clear, I had no idea why I almost always did that, but looking back now I can clearly see that that’s the reason behind it.
I always thought it was just because I’m a fairly goofy person (if you’ve read Trans Tuesdays for any length of time or follow me on social media, you have likely figured that out long ago).
I sing nonsense songs to my wife Susan 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.
Does that make sense? Before I transitioned, my lovely Stepmom, who I reconnected with a long ways back and talked a bit about in the Trans Tuesday on PARENTS WHO WILL NEVER KNOW THE REAL YOU (my dad), loved seeing photos of me and Susan on social media.
But she once asked why I was always making a weird face in them. I honestly didn’t know at the time.
It wasn’t until I started untangling the knot of discovering I’m trans that I really understood the why of it.
I’m not going to post any of my old photos with weirdo faces in them. They used to give me dysphoria, but don’t anymore, which is something we’ll talk about next week in PHOTOS 2.
But I kept a photo from my wedding on my dresser, and let me tell you about it.
My wife and I are at our table at the reception shortly after the ceremony. Susan’s 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 fake smile because smiling for photos is what you’re supposed to do, especially when you’re happy (and I was! But I was also miserable, thanks dysphoria).
You can see that photo of me in the Trans Tuesday on A TRANS RE-WEDDING, when my wife and I redid our wedding with the real me, and it was the best day of my life.
I don’t know what other people see when they look at that photo, but here’s what jumps out at me. Even the best day of my life to that point was marred by dysphoria and photos I hate, where I see a human who is not me but I was forced to pretend to be. And it hurt me so much to have to do that.
And there’s nothing I can do about it. Getting to replace that photo with one from our re-wedding is legit one of (many) big reasons I wanted to redo our wedding in the first place. I shouldn’t have to see a celebration of our love and feel like it also rips my heart in two.
I should also mention that The Matrix film franchise, especially the first and fourth movies, deal extensively with reflections and the way they impact trans people, and are used in the trans allegory that’s the entire point of those movies to say some really important things.
For more on that, check out my book BEGIN TRANSMISSION: THE TRANS ALLEGORIES OF THE MATRIX.
You can also see the Trans Tuesday series on THE TRANS ALLEGORY OF BARBIE and THE TRANS ALLEGORY OF SILO S1, and THE TRANS ALLEGORY OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE’S “NERVOUS MAN IN A FOUR DOLLAR ROOM” for even more on the complexities of trans people and our reflections.
I wanna leave you with one more related example about photos and reflections, that actually isn’t about a photo or a reflection… except it is. Lemme explain!
You may have seen over the years that Susan and I have had art of ourselves done by different comic artists we’ve worked with, to use on our writing website, our newsletter, business cards, etc. Our present one is by Ezekiel Strange (the comic we’re working on together is so amazing and fun, you’re gonna love it). And I love this art a whole lot. Doesn’t hurt that we’re in our re-wedding dresses in it, either!
Now here’s the one we used for years before my transition, done by the also amazing Penelope Gaylord. She’s a fabulous artist and this is in no way any fault of hers, but… look at the “me” in this image. Do you see what I see?
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 (as much as I could be outside of my dysphoria, anyway), that’s how I felt about myself. About IMAGES of myself, be they photos or mirrors or even cute adorable art made by a friend. It’s so sad that that’s what felt “right” at the time.
Dysphoria was always there, it’s always been with me, manifesting in millions of little ways. Until I figured it out and said oh hell no, I gotta fix this. And so I transitioned, and lo, it actually fixed itself!
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. Because my selfies are fire.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com