Three (Who have I been all along?)

My User ID on WhatsApp is Aru Shan. On every website where a legal name is not required (technically or socially), my registered name is Aru Shan. I even have a mail ID especially with the name because that is my preferred name. No, cut that. It IS my name. No one gets to deem my name as “preferred.” My pronouns are not “preferred.” They are mandatory. Is it not wrong that cis-gender people get to be comfortable in their stereotypical binary names and trans folks suffer because some stuck-up ignorant fools still call trans folks by their legal or dead names instead of their real names? (Legal procedures take a lot of time and courage. One should not keep calling someone by their legal name when the concerned person has another name they want to go by.) Shouldn’t trans folks get to call shots on what they want to be called?

I grew up telling myself that I were a boy. I told everyone around me that I were a boy. I faced extreme difficulties making girl-friends and was highly active in my friendships with boys. In fact, I was a social pariah amongst the girls in school. And no, I was not always interested in my friends romantically. (I have never befriended someone because I had romantic feelings for them. That sucks because no one gets to partner-zone a person and then sneakily befriend the person for ulterior purposes. Because afterwards, these fools cry about being in ‘friend-zone’ when it was them who used underhanded methods and ‘zoned’ a person first.) I wore stereotypical men clothing at home in my teenage years and was super content in new-ish hand-me-downs from my uncle and grandfather. I also wore men’s clothes half of the time when I went out. All my boy friends told me they didn’t think I fit into the category of ‘girl’ and I felt the same.

Growing up, I never felt enough as a girl. I didn’t fit in and always attributed it to a myriad of things. It was hard because I did not understand what to make of my sudden wishes to dress up feminine, then masculine, and then back to stereotypical feminine. The loop even got equalised in the fact that I had accepting friends who took me as a person rather than my ‘apparent’ gender. If I were a girl to my school, I was also a boy to my best friends. To my family, I was mostly a gender-neutral child before matriculation. With feminine clothing outside the house and masculine clothing inside, I found peace unnoticed even by my own awareness. The problem with not having queer-inclusive education is that children and teens suffer from great social anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, etc. and have no idea what is going wrong with them. The helplessness and frustration might even lead to suicide.

I wish society cared about its queer children. I wish the parents we are asked to worship accepted us as who we are. Instead, parents and relatives seem to cry over the grave of a child they thought they had when children actually expose their true queer nature. The grave is empty because the child they thought to exist never did. A child is born queer and stays queer forever. There is no choice, only shame. Except, of course, in the month of June. That is the month where we hold our heads high, paint our faces rainbow, and no one can stop us. (That’s sarcasm. No one but queer care about the pride month. Of course, businesses intending to capitalise on queer merchandise care too.) Hence, I was very clueless about the hurt inevitably in my path as a college student.

When college reopened, I hoped from it a lot of things. I hoped for happiness. I hoped for freedom. I even hoped to start a campaign against ableism. What I didn’t hope for was an extremely brutal experience with gender dysphoria. I cried every day, couldn’t sleep on time, couldn’t wake up on time, had a bad time trying to cope up with studies, lagged behind in projects, didn’t want to talk to friends, didn’t want to talk to my partner, was repulsed by physical intimacy, turned suicidal, couldn’t recognise myself, etc. In short, my academic, social, and love-life – all three simply drowned in the gutters of gender dysphoria. I found women everywhere around me looking awesome and being comfortable in their bodies. I wanted to feel the same. So, I forced myself to fit in. I tried to clothe like them, put on red lip balm in the mornings, treated men like different creatures, tried to mingle with women as a fellow woman. And it sucked. I felt like a fraud. I was ashamed of not being one of these women who were so comfortable in their own skins. My days were spent packed in a room, trying to hide from anyone and everyone I could avoid. Every single day was a colossal mess and sessions with my psychologist did not help because neither of us factored in gender dysphoria. All the progress we had would somehow come back to the same point all over again. There was no escaping the embarrassment – I wanted to disappear.

Let me make this simpler for cis-gender people to understand. What if people thought you were a gender that you were not the entire time and expected you to dress up and behave in accordance to the norms of the gender they thought you were? What if a man was forced to dress up and act like a woman because he looked a certain way and a woman was forced to dress up and act like a man because she looked a certain way?

That’s what it feels like. Every single second, over and over. When my gender dysphoria gets triggered, flashes of women scatter everywhere in my head and I compare myself to every single one of them – screaming inside and crying outside that it doesn’t work. That I don’t fit in. That I’m not like them, I’m not cis-gender. I look at my breasts and I get repulsed. I look at my vagina and get repulsed. I hate myself and self-harm during the triggers.

I want to stop existing this way, being so vulnerable, but I can’t change my body. I can’t, not even under the best of scenarios. Because I am not an all-day man either. I am genderfluid. (Genderfluid is someone whose gender changes from one gender to other randomly.) However, when not allowed to express the man part of my gender, I start to hate the woman part too. Consent is important in everything, even in being looked at as a certain gender. I never consented to being looked upon as a woman all the time. That is not me. I don’t even want to change my body when I am a man. I only want to be considered a man and treated like one. That is all I want, is that so tough?

I understand that my sex is female. I can’t barge into men’s washrooms or men’s hostels because men also have their privacy – and I am not a binary trans-person. I do understand that. But living with women the whole time, always using women’s washrooms in hostels, eating in an all-women mess every time, along with the tragic fear that every female inherits when faced with an unidentified male make it very difficult for female trans folks to explore and be their gender, partially and wholly.

In this article, I won’t be putting forth any solution to things. For me, this was my first experience with brutal gender dysphoria that continued for months. I had never given much thought on this topic before because it had felt fruitless. How could I understand something I had not gone through? (Well, surprise! Surprise!) I just want someone to read this and know that they are not alone. That dysphoria can get better. That it is okay to not fit in because it’s true that we are not what they take us to be. And that is the result of their assumptions because bodies are not the best judge of gender and it has been already proven in this era. We are okay as ourselves, we are trying our best and we are hanging on. Living in any way is better than dying. Dying takes away all possibilities of a better life where we can be who we are.

June, our pride month, is going on. One day we will be able to keep our heads high 24×365. Till then, hang on. Live.