Queer and deviant, abused by therapists
Since my childhood I was severely stigmatized by psychology. I am trying to think what stigmatizing tells me about their culture and my own queerness. In 1975, when I was in preschool, I was labeled “antisocial” and in 1982 I was diagnosed “borderline” and the psychologist hinted that I would later become a rapist. I never did. If you consider prostitution rape, then I have been raped many times, but never been a rapist. This was not an isolated incident: when in the Finnish Parliament the law about transsexual care was under debate, member of the parliament Paula Kokkonen was concerned of having transwomen in the same room than cissexual women for there would be a danger of the former raping the latter ones. Her position in the health care was such that she must have known that there were men and women in the same room in hospital due to overcrowding. So, men do not pose a threat for women, but transwomen do. Transwomen were seen as dangerous, deviant molestors. That is not uncommon. I think it is a derivative of the myth of gays being child-molesters. Some of the conservative talk in the Parliament about gays and transgendered center arond a dystopia of sexual and moral free-for-all. I think when I was transgressing gender lines in youth, I was thought of making all morals collapse. In the same time they revealed that they think morals are artificial and forced upon people. Morals have to be “upheld”.
When I was a young idealist, I studied the Bible a lot and spent years as a Jehovah’s Witless, typo intentional. It is notable how non-Levites were punished for taking the tasks of the Levites: god killed them personally. Indiana Jones is Biblical in the sense that even looking at the Ark was punishable by death unless you were a Levite. The Bible is very hierarchial, woman’s head is man, man’s head is Jesus. The believers believe if you question this hierarchy, Jesus on the top of the hierarchy will fall and everything with him.That is why the Pharisees were so paranoid that they filtered the gnats from their food and never anyone asked, who made the gnats unclean in the first place and who created the appetite of the Pharisee’s food for them. Christianity is schizophrenic where it tells to love a god that does not hesitate to kill people. The Old testament tells people to fear the lord, the New testament tells people to love him. Usually people end up fearing and feeling guilty that they cannot love. According to the book “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion”, if you fear, you cannot become curious and if you cannot be curious, you cannot find truth and if you are not truthful, your love is based on falsehood. When the Christians are unable to love, they cannot find any meaning to their lives. It is usually the religious people that ask the meaning of the life. For the rest of us, it is more or less clear. So in this way, religious people are fearful, because we will collapse their hierarchy and their position within the hierarchy and they are envious, because deep down they sense we have found meaningful, satisfied lives whereas they haven’t. They want to sabotage our happiness, because misery loves company.
The same attitude is with psychology. They wanted to see me within their existing structure. My Bible studies had confirmed me that the Bible could not be true by any imaginable margin. When the Bible ruled the impossible demand of simultaneous love and fear, modern psychology plays on the fear of collapse and insanity. I re-entered the realm of psychology obediently when I started to transition as a transsexual 1997 in the renowned Lapinlahti ward, Helsinki. The chief psychiatrist, Dr. Heikman, had the queen from chess placed by his door. I thought that told everything I wanted to know about his personality. I was fortunate, I never saw him. There were many transsexuals in the gender program and we made jokes about the Lapinlahti staff so they threatened us with a libel suit. After that we spoke of them in anagrams. Even ten years after people in the transgender community come and ask who is “I Varttihuora” (I Quarter Whore) everybody talks about and Veronica Pimenoff’s study, published in German, has one of the jokes translated in it. We were pretty sure that the staff knew nothing about transsexuality. We were advised by the community to “do our homework”. In that time it meant reading all pieces of literature we could get hold of about transsexuals, and none of them described our experience. Serano’s groundbreaking “Whipping Girl” was not yet published. In the internet, almost everything that related to transsexuals was porn. If females are raised in a world with some pornographic imaginery, we are raised with nothing but pornographic imaginery. No wonder many of us became prostitutes.
Prostitution was a quest for sanity in a world that was insane. It was a rebel against moral, acceptable gender norms and the middle class values. The dim-lit alleys and strange bedrooms felt more our home than this hypocritical, middle-class, society that was pretending to tolerate us. The prostitute support center Pro-tukipiste confirmed that transsexual prostitutes usually do well. And why not. For us, prostitution was queer and empowering. It was the first signifier that the values force-fed on us were false.
Even though it was evident that the psychologists did not know anything about gender, I took seriously when they gave a diagnosis of mixed personality disorder with narcissistic, schizotypal and unstable traits. I thought that they made science so that my transsexualism would not influence their assessment of my personality. Was I ever wrong. I read a lot of books about narcissism and mental health. Most notably I read Alexander lowen’s “Narcissism: Denial of True Self”. I found it when I was a house cleaner and I happened to clean customer’s bookshelf and bought it. Customers are paranoid about janitors stealing and perhaps they needed the book. At any rate, I learned, put it simple, that narcissists are crazy people that are pretending to be sane. They do not fear anything more than insanity. With transsexualism the suicides are frequent with people that transition for false reasons. I had been convinced throughout my life that I was crazy, mentally unstable and weird. The one thing I mostly feared of was if I really was.
My parents were bourgeoisie in the sense described in CrimethInc book “Days of War, Nights of Love”, they were all about how things appear in front of general public. I was the black sheep of the family. However, they felt that they needed to keep contact with me probably because it would seem odd that they did not know about the whereabouts of their offspring if asked. I got a ten year curfew for the whole province of Kuopio so they were eager to keep me at a distance. After I transitioned, I often thought why I felt suicidal. Deicide sums my thoughts about it: “I have no problem coping with my life, it is this world that wants me to die”. It really was my family, psychology and Christianity that wanted to kill me, everything that I felt precious and special in my experience. I cut ties with my parents because I could not stand their transphobia that had continued for more than a decade.
I had god gender congruity, my “subconscious sex” – as Serano calls it was in aligment with my gender expression and body. It was like in a cartoon with man, dog and a car, man asking dog: “Now when you have caught it, what are you going to do with it?”. I am a woman, and I had always said that being a woman, and gender congruent is a prerequisite for finding my self and growing up. I was almost 40. What would happen if I became crazy? Nobody would care about an elderly woman being a little bit disturbed or weird.
My first decision was whether I should trust people or not. Based on my experience with people, nobody would blame me if I didn’t trust people. Then I would be all alone, cynical and cursing, but my life would be safe and I could as well kill myself. The other alternative was more exciting: I trusted people and showed them that they prove their worthiness for me. I might burn my fingers a few times, and I could be abused and become crazy, but I was already willing to take that step. What can I lose. Besides, my belief in Anarchism relied on trusting people. Deacon Jaakko Ahvenainen said people should have some hope in their lives and how can you have a hope if you did not believe in people.
Hierarchies make people subservient. That is problematic for traditionally sexist males, when their natural inclination for “a man does and a man answer about his doings” freedom is castrated and they are made subservient to welfare-control state, so they made up a lie that all people are prone to be evil and wicked so that the control and hierarchy are actually needed because they lack courage in standing up this society and the courage of being labeled weird and insane. That is why narcissism is more common in males.
Determination in transwomen is scorned by some American self-appointed feminists. It is seen as leftover from mythical “male privilege”, which I just criticized in last chapter. On the other hand, if we are disempowered sissies, we are seen as conforming to traditional woman’s roles. Arguments should be falsifiable. During transitioning we are encouraged to be sissies so we convince the gatekeepers. There is a so-called “real-life test”, which has nothing to do with real life. During that time we are encouraged for traditional female presentation, despite of our natural inclinations which could be androgynous or bigendered. I heard about a transman that was a transvestite and thought he was cool. I tried male clothes on and let facial hair grow a little, but I did not enjoy it. I had reached a my gender limit.
My gender expression is dictated by Helsinki weather and my mode of transportation, which is bicycle. Therefore I appear androgynous, which has lead to confusion. I’ve had a female and a male homosexual having a crush on me. At first I thought the moment was embarrassing, but now I think that is cool, I can serve as a medium for other people’s self exploration by just being my normal self.
The more I shatter image of transsexual normativity, the more I am silenced. The media concentrates on women who currently undergo transition, so they can underline that the birth-record gender holds some validity whereas the real female gender is artificial and has to be maintained by different medical and cosmetic operations whom they are only happy to explain in the minutest detail. Therefore they promote the idea of the naturalness of birth gender. They are neither interested in transwomen pre-transition experience of desperately trying to pass as male nor us that have lived loing life after transitioning. Especially they do not want to hear that we are questioning and playing with gender whilst we do not question or “regret” our transitioning in any way.
When I had taken the risk of trusting people, I met a depressive woman who kept her own blog. She was recommended a self-help book “Reinventing your life” by Jeffrey Young, Ph.D. and Janet Klosko, Ph.D. I noticed that I had been following the pieces of advice in the book throughout my life. I try to stretch my experiences where they feel uncomfortable and analyze why I feel like I feel. I was in the woods camping at the night alone and I woke up in the middle of the night and heard sounds of birds and other animal life. Even though I recognized the sounds and knew they were harmless, I felt intense fear and anxiety. I analyzed it afterwards. Without being masochistic I feel that I grow by experiencing things that cause me discomfort. In the Madventures it was said “comfort breeds fear”. I think also that sharp identities and tight boxes, or lifetraps breed fear. Therefore I am queer, because I want to be open and fearless. My life is too short for being fearful. Besides, it is plain stupid to close people out just because they do not happen to please my current whim. Studying other people’s fears might tell something about my fears.
Psychological diagnoses split people in smaller and smaller groups, tribes and identities. I know many lesbians discovering themselves through therapy. Perhaps they will, someday. It seems so time consuming. Put frankly, when they are looking inwards they have forgotten to look at other people and what joins us. I like the queer nonidentity, it connects, rather than separates, and brings multitudinous stories together.