19. Lytonya

“I officially began transitioning in early 2014 in a critical theory grad program. It was as it sounds. I was often accused of not being a girl as far back as my early childhood in the 1980’s. My dysphoria was real & lifetime. But when I look back now, with clearer eyes, I see it did not come from me but the world outside. There are too many examples I could give, going back to my toddler years. One example: three years of relentlessly being taunted as “he/she/it” by my whole middle school despite having huge breasts I was ashamed of, long hair, a stereotypical perm & bangs of the early nineties. Maybe it was how the adults reacted? Or how my trying made it worse. I was screamed at for trying to use the restroom, called a rapist. I don’t look like a boy in my school pictures of the time. I wanted to die. That was my life.

Almost all my therapists have suggested I might not be a woman. Even in the Air Force. Things happened, I did stuff, but it was always there & one day I guess I snapped. It was my Theory Of Everything. I wrote my thesis on my experience. I walked thru hell like nothing I had seen in even my childhood. A terrible horrible accident happened to open my eyes and I canceled my surgery a couple months out in 2020, stopped t, and just walked away. This isn’t the place for all the details.

Here are a few basic ontological/epistemological/ethical truths my journey helped me learn/remember in no particular order:

1. To paraphrase and mildly embellish Bjork: don’t let poets, priests, prophets, professors, politicians, prosecutors, police, polemicists, pleaders, or program teleprompter readers, not probers of materiality, pessimists of existentialism, nor practitioners of any sort lie to you.

2. Don’t idolize Diogenes too much.

3. Another Bjork reference: “love is all around you, maybe not in the direction you are staring at, thrust your head around, it’s all around you”

4. You are sacred, you were born sacred; you’re only real job, is to find ways to honor that, your free will most expressed in cultivating or denying it. And, thus, anyone telling you the way to do that is to break parts of you & be put back together by someone else (for a price, there’s always a price) is not your friend.

5. As I tried to teach my child but needed to learn myself: don’t let other people’s lies become your lies or you will implicate yourself in the sins committed against you, then lose yourself & your path. Both can be found again, but not somewhere else & not in a black mirror.

6. Your body is not your disease, your sin is not your incarnation, your suffering is not your authenticity.

7. It’s better to be an exception that proves a rule than one that merely breaks it.

8. Find a safe place or person to say things out loud that make you afraid, so you can see if it’s true. I refused all of these lessons for most of my life.

Especially those farcical 6 years. And then I stopped. It saved my life; I stopped blaming others for my existence; I work now on not seeing myself as a problem for existing.”

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