I’m going to tell you a story that my parents told me and my sister. I’m not telling it to brag. I don’t know whether or not it’s true. I hope it’s not true. I’m telling this story so that you can understand some of what I grew up with.
Supposedly, when all three of us were tiny, right after or possibly right before my brother was born, my parents were eating with the two or three of us at a patio restaurant. Some well-meaning older couple came up to my parents and said something insane about their children, as total strangers will. They told my parents that we were beautiful–so beautiful, in fact, that they hoped there was some way (other than us?) that they could preserve their genetic material so that our incredible cherubic gorgeousness wouldn’t be lost to posterity.
No, really. To their credit, my parents always told it as this nutty thing these weird people said to them, but you could tell they were a little pleased that their children had been chosen to represent the cream of the human genome in the event of a nuclear apocalypse. They recounted this compliment just like all the other compliments. And so these people, who may or may not have actually existed, took the skinny little blond girl and created a monster: I grew up believing that I was/could be/should be beautiful.
The truly shameful thing is, I don’t think this experience is too far removed in its priorities, if not in its verdict, from what most young women experience growing up.
The last time I wrote about eating disorders, I was praised for not making Naomi Wolf’s occasionally clumsy connections between anorexics and, well, all women. I hope I’m not about to commit that sin here. I’m going to talk about eating-disordered mindsets in a way that seems to confuse people who have not had eating disorders themselves. If any of this is opaque, please let me know in comments, and I’ll be happy to confuse you some more.
Eating disorders are permanent deferred gratification: the eating-disorder sufferer chooses an irrational, unfeasible goal. As the disease escalates, the goal moves like the horizon. No sufferer has ever reached a point of satisfaction with their body, no matter how much they manage to alter it. Satisfaction is never possible. So an eating disorder is defined by this continual struggle to reach an unattainable condition.
An eating disorder is also characterized by obsessive maintanence. An eating-disorder sufferer believes that the condition they are in is extremely precarious. Generally, particularly as their body becomes more and more strained, they’re right; a starving or exhausted body will fight starvation as hard as it possibly can, and use whatever nourishment you give it as efficiently as it can. A sufferer is terrified of backsliding.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? This is precisely how women are taught to relate to their bodies. They are told that they must both struggle towards something inherently unattainable and preserve something inherently perishable. It doesn’t matter who or what they actually are, let alone what they want. They are their “beauty,” and “beauty” is defined as narrowly and starkly as it was that afternoon. To the extent that they are not “beautiful,” they are worthless.
I grew up believing that I had to be a pretty girl and that I had to stay a pretty girl. I feared those two interfering strangers, and all the ones that came after them, more than God.
One common anti-trans feminist argument against transition is that people think they have to do it because they need to be more normal, more acceptable. On an intellectual level, I can accept that this is true of some people. It has nothing to do with how I thought of all my potential bodies. So far as I was concerned, transition meant ceasing to be a beautiful girl: giving up everything that made me valuable and acceptable. It was suicide, the biggest mistake possible. I swear, as this stubbly, bulky may-un with the hairy belly and the deepening voice contemplated surgery, a little voice inside me was saying, But what if you’re not a pretty pretty princess anymore?
Transsexual bodies are coded as grotesque, hideous, mutilated. Ugly. Transmale bodies in particular are coded as coarse, fat, inadequate, pathetic. Desire for a transsexual is a nasty fetish. Sleeping with a transsexual is an act of charity. A transsexual him- or herself is a dirty joke incarnate. Opting into that condition meant tearing out all of the fear that trapped me for the years that preceded coming out. You’ll be a freak and no one will love you. No more seniors wanting cheek swabs.