taking up space

Recently a friend posted about taking up space. About the conscious decision to take up space as a woman, to not make herself small for the convenience of men. 

I've been thinking about that a lot. How many ways I make myself small. How I learned from a young age not to take up space. It's been a message not only for how I take up space in the world in regards to men, but also my mother made it very clear that she didn't have the emotional capacity for me to take up space with wants or needs. 

Key things I learned about (not) taking up space when I  was growing up:
    1. Don't be an inconvenience.
    2. Don't make other people uncomfortable with your Truth. 
    3. Don't have needs (no matter how bad things are).
    4. Don't ask for help (no matter how bad things are).

Something that has been really sitting heavy with me is how we aren't allowed to take up space as victims/survivors. How many times have we heard "protective" men boast about how the will k*ll anyone if they ever sexually assaulted one of their loved ones, but when the latest headline of one their stans SAing someone comes out they just brush it off as "no big deal" or some how do the mental gymnastics to make it the victims fault. And these same fellas wonder why victims don't report, or report sooner. 

If we tell our story we are shamed, if we don't report we are shamed, if we wait too long we are shamed, if we disclose we are shamed. And Gods forbid if women disclose about abuse by a famous person, it's always "she's just trying to get money (and/or fame)".We can never win. No one wants to hear it. Shame on us for telling our stories, shame on us for not tell sooner.

I think about how there is shame and stigma associated with being a victim of sexual abuse/assault, but not so much with the offenders (case in point: a man credibly accused of sexual assault multiple times, including by multiple Epstein survivors still managed to get elected president). 

What would it be like instead of victims carrying the shame, the actual predators carried the shame? What if we got to take up space as victims/survivors? I know I tell a lot of hair-raising stories in my blogs, and social media, but I don't tell the "bad" shit- the shit that has had me in therapy for over 30 years, the shit that keeps me awake at night, that crawls under my skin (although my last post published since starting this post starts to delve a little deeper into that particular pit of snakes). What if ALL of me got to take up space, even those horrible things that have made me try to make myself small so no one will ever know, so no one will notice me and do those things to me again?

***Although I'm only publishing this today, the meat of this blog has been in my head for a couple weeks. The combination of my friends "taking up space blog" along with my wife telling me about Virginia Roberts Giuffre's memoir really got me thinking about how we (victims of SA) are supposed to keep quite, keep the secret, protect the men, protect the peace, protect the reputation of the family/institution/church/etc, and in doing so make ourselves so small that our soul eats itself. The fact that our truth and experience is continually dismissed, and denied- the recent memes say it so well: "The fact that people need a dead man's files to believe to believe thousands of women tells you what you need to know about whose voices they value". 

We talk about the statistics of how many victims there are of SA, but we don't talk about how many predators there are. We talk about how women can stop attack, but not about how men can stop being sexual predators. Discussions of consent get turned into jokes. And at the end of the day, it's always the victims fault for being vulnerable, for being pretty, for being too "masculine" (thus challenging his fragile sense of masculinity), for being drunk, for being at the wrong place, for not fighting hard enough, for smiling, for not smiling, for being nice, for being a bitch, for saying the "wrong" thing, for not saying "no" the right way, for not reporting, for reporting, for waiting to report...for existing. And if everything is your fault because you simply exist, then you better make yourself small, but even that doesn't protect you.

What a mighty revolution it would be if so many of us told our truth unabashedly that the tables turned and the predators, and the rape-apologists were forced to carry the shame, and the predators actually faced appropriate consequences?

I'm giving this little scrapper full permission to take up space unabashedly.

Old memories, old terror, new realization (TW: vague discussion of SA)

Last Thursday I was getting a massage and this memory popped into my head as my therapist was working on my chest: When I was 17 I had this job for part of the summer as a fencer. It was just me and this other guy who co-owned the company. The draw where we were doing this fencing job had an an old, abandoned white, Colonial style house, complete with columns slowly being swallowed up by trees, and vivid green prairie grass. Was again I was drawn into musing about just how odd it was to see that style of house in juxtaposition to "out in the middle of nowhere", nowhere-rural-Grassy Butte, ND. And I was thinking about that house, and how I'd wanted to go inside and see what it looked like (and my disappointment that I never did) when this other memory from that place popped up. 

Joe, my boss, and I were taking our lunch break. I was ready to get back to work, but he pointed out that he was the boss and we didn't have to rush back to work, and in fact he wanted to lie down for a bit. So we were lying in the midsummer sun on the pile of loose, dark brown soil piled up next to the trench it had come from. Just me and Joe, miles from another human. Joe, over 20 years my senior. Joe, stroking my back, then asking if I wanted to make out. 

In spite of the multiple times adult men had made advances, or just tried to assault me I was naïve. I thought I was safe with Joe, I thought he was a nice guy.

Cue terror. My "go to" when I'm terrified is to freeze. And freeze I did, pretending to be asleep.

The interesting thing about this particular memory popping up on this day is that earlier in the day I had been seeing my (mental health) therapist. We've been grinding through an old memory for a few months now in which, after trying to redirect another man 20+ years my senior (coincidentally, this man is the person who got me the fencing job with Joe) from assaulting me, and failing I eventually froze. That particular day in therapy I was lamenting about how there is a part of me that continually goes into freeze-mode when its a sexual assault situation, whereas if someone just tried to fight me I'd go full-on scrapper-mode, and so I feel like a failure, like I failed myself whenever I froze. 

Back to my moment of terror, "freezing" seemed to work that time. Maybe he felt me tense when he asked, maybe he knew I was faking sleep; regardless he didn't ask again, he didn't force the issue (or force himself on me). I was lucky that time. Lucky enough that I didn't have to dedicate months or years of therapy to Joe. Lucky that it was a memory that I hadn't thought about in years. Lucky, that this adult man who decided to ask a 17 year old to make out decided to respect my boundary.

Looking back I think "holy shit, that could have gone SOOOO bad". However; seventeen year old me thought he was one of the "good" ones because he stopped...but how fucking "good" was he? we were out in the middle of nowhere, I was 17, he was old enough to be my father, and he had to fucking sexualize me. And because nothing happened, I was lucky.

Over the weekend I started having really intense anxiety, and I was perseverating on all the things I potentially had said wrong the previous day. And as I was dialoguing with myself about why the hell I was feeling so life-and-death terrified about these different interactions the puzzle piece clicked into place. When I was a kid I was unsafe, period. There were no adults in my life keeping my safe, and so I took on the full responsibility for keeping myself safe, and if I failed to do so, it WAS my fault. There were so many encounters in which I wasn't as lucky as I was with Joe, encounters where I was not saying/doing the right thing to stop a man from assaulting me-thus it was my fault. In addition to the list of men, there were so many times that I physically (let alone emotionally) wasn't safe with my sister. Times my mother was completely unhinged either "because" I'd said the wrong thing or I took on the responsibility for not saying or doing the right thing to keep her from a psychotic break or an overdose of pills. Of course feeling like I've said the "wrong" thing makes me feel absolutely terrified.

Now, perhaps with a little luck, now that I've made that connection my nervous system will chill the hell out a little when it comes to thinking I'm going to die if I say the wrong thing. And, at least one time, freezing seemed to save me.

Top Surgery Anniversary

Today is the 1 year anniversary of my top surgery. 

I couldn't have gotten here without all of the support I had. From my wife, from my community, friends, chosen family, oh-and my therapist. I really don't know what to say beyond that. It takes a village, and I got a village. 

I remember in my first semester of German class one of my classmates saying how she had dreamed in German. I took 3 semesters of German, but I never dreamed in German. My dreams are weird; when I dream about people I know they rarely look (or act) like they do in awake-world. Even when I dream of my own meat sack, it's not necessarily a 1:1 awake-to-dream match, but interestingly, a few months after my top surgery I started to have an awareness that my dream body was breast-less. It IS my body, and even my psyche knows it. 

When I look at pictures prior to my surgery, that body is foreign to me. I remember the shame, embarrassment, discomfort of those days, but when I see those photos I know that that is NOT my body, THIS is MY body. Since my surgery I have had several people comment that I seem more "myself" since surgery. Yes. I have returned. 

Perhaps I'll have more cohesive thoughts later. But for now, yeah, I finally get to inhabit a body that feels like...home.

Holding Grief

 It's funny, I've been talking with some of my patients about grief- about how it's not just about losing a person or pet to death, but also the loss of a home, independence, the ability to do the things we used to do due to declines of our body and/or senses. Funny because I'm having a lot of grief about my body.

My last post was about starting the process of tattoo removal so I can have my pecs tattooed with something more appropriate for where I am in my gender-journey. I had my first session, and my left pec has had terrible edema. To the point it looked like I was growing a breast back. I've been doing lymph massage, using compression, and taking some supplements but the edema is still pretty pronounced. And it brought up some huge emotions for me. Fear that after these 2 surgeries that were painful AF, that left me in a brain fog for months, that cost weeks of work, and weeks of strength training, that the surgeries would be undone. 

When I spoke, via his nurse, to my surgeon I felt pretty dismissed. Like this had nothing to do with the surgery. And this isn't the first time I've felt dismissed, and not heard by my surgeon. Case in point when we had our preop I corrected him about where my areas of dysphoria were, and when he was marking me up and spending so much time on the area that was NOT on my dysphoria area, I stopped him and stated "I don't really care about that area, my big concern is 'here'" and indicated the area. And guess what I woke up to? Not being listened to, not being heard. And that right there has been a huge source of grief that has had me in a tail spin since my last surgery. The part of my body that caused almost as much dysphoria as my chest did, was little more than an after thought for him when he did my surgery. And I was very fortunate in that my insurance covers torso masculization, but it was still $5000 out of pocket, and again the pain, and the effects on my brain. Not worth the calories as Pru would say, or not worth the pain and suffering in this case. I grieve for not being heard, and I grieve for the body I expected to wake up to, but didn't because I wasn't heard.

During that surgery I also had scar revision done on my top surgery scars, as well as him cleaning out the pockets where I'd had seromas (pockets of fluid) after my top surgery. Although the seromas were drained (3 seperate times), I was left with thickening under my pecs that took away from the definition of my pecs (which I have been working very hard to develop), and because of the roundness gave a bit of a "breast" shape to my pecs. Now that edema has settled into that same area on the left, and I don't know if it's going to go away or not...I'm in this place of "was it all for nothing?" Will my chest go back to what I've worked so hard for, and been through so much to create?

And going back to the whole "not being a listened to/heard"- oof, there are a lot of layers of trauma there. Not layers I will get into tonight, but know they are there, and this isn't just about my surgeon not hearing me when I said "here".

Another layer of grief goes back to the loss of the body I had before I took Buspar. I was strong, I was in pretty good shape (never "thin" and that's ok, but strong). Granted I had gained some weight like many of us during the early pandemic shut-down, but things got bad after Buspar. I gained about 20 pounds in the first couple months on it, then after I stopped it (to prevent myself from suiciding- oh yeah, there was another dr who was not listening when I was saying, "this is making shit worse", and I had to be the one to say "I can't take this anymore or I am going to die") my brain chemistry was so fucked up I could barely get out of bed for a year. Literally. And the weight packed on, and I barely moved. Even going upstairs to our bedroom I had to pull myself up on the rail because I was so out of shape. I've worked my ass off, struggled with injuries and disordered eating, but I've lost a lot of that weight, but the what has remained has been over in the areas that were already dysphoric areas for me, and now even more so because of the excess weight there that I can't seem to get rid of. And those areas are a reminder of how bad it got for me, and how, once again a doctor didn't listen to me when I said "I need help". 

A thought occurred to me this morning. What would it be like to let other people help me hold my grief?

I'm tired (TW)

 An article from the Huffington Post came across my feed this morning about a female massage therapist who stopped seeing male clients after having had a male client ejaculate during a session. She spoke of feeling violated- how he turned a non-sexual encounter into a sexual encounter without her consent. It brought me back to an incident many years back in my own practice. 

Something that I heard over and over during massage school was that it was "normal" for men to get erections during massage, and that it was our duty not to make a big deal about it UNLESS they tried to touch us or asked us to touch their genitals. Granted, there was constant discussion about it being inappropriate for us to have relationships with our clients, and yet when one of our classmates spoke about how he thought it wasn't a big deal to get on the table and have sex with a client "if they were into it" there was never any reprimand or consequences. And when he continually fucked with peoples' boundaries, his behavior wasn't taken seriously, and the women around him were made to feel like they were someone the ones with the problem. And there was never discussions about when an erection was more than just a "natural response"...essentially, as long as they didn't touch us, if there was a problem it was us (the female massage therapist). 

As for my own disconcerting experience... several years ago I had a client who had had an erection during the massage, and I ignored it (as I was taught) along with the light moaning (maybe he was just moaning because the massage felt good in an appropriate way??? right???), but he didn't try to touch me, he didn't say anything inappropriate to me, so as per what I was taught, this was "natural" and if I was having an issue, *I* was the problem. After he had dressed I returned to the room to take his payment, and give the obligatory post-massage hug that we were taught to give all of our clients. But this time, the hug felt sinister from the start- the much taller, much older man cupped my head (eek!) and pulled me up against his body, holding me firmly as he shuddered, convulsed and groaned. And this from a man who had been telling me with great pride how he had recently become a deacon in his church.

For years I questioned the experience. Did he really ejaculate? I mean, I don't have a lot of experience with men, maybe I misread what was happening? Surely, it must be my perception that was wrong, right? But I know in my bones I was not wrong about what happened, but I had been trained from an early age as someone born in a female body to discredit my own perception of things, to defer reality to whatever the man said, to not "make a big deal" of what ever horrible thing a man had done. 

And here we are. We have multiple politicians and church leaders/ministers warning of the dangers of trans people and queer people, and everyone is all stirred up, yet when these same people (men in power), OVER AND OVER again are the ones arrested for child sexual abuse, and rape no one seems to bat an eyelash, because they're so worried about the  LGBTQ people who are a "danger" to cis women and children as per the crowd that are the actual folks hurting women and children. This is patriarchy. And I'm tired. I'm tired of being villainized as a AFAB person, as a lesbian, and as a non-binary person. I'm tired of carrying the burden of keeping myself safe from dangerous men, and shouldering the blame if I don't succeed. I'm tired of predatory behavior by men being dismissed as "no big deal" or it being me "making a big deal out of nothing." I'm tired of being told it's not ok for me to take up space. I'm just tired.

Advice to my younger self

 This evening I was on an "elder"  Zoom panel for the Transgender Resource Center of NM, and  our audience was trans teens from throughout NM. At one point we were asked what advice we would have for our younger selves. I spoke a bit about knowing your worth, and "screw the haters," but it wasn't until the call ended that I had more concrete thoughts about my advice to my younger self (and current younglings). 

1. Find your tribe. And know that your tribe doesn't have to be queer folk. For example, the Highland Games community is my Tribe. For many years early on, other queer folk were few and far between, but they remain my family, and some of my closest friends are my HG family. Even though I am a Pagan, my Christian brothers and sisters from COGS are some of my closest spiritual family, and again, queer folk are few and far between. And in this is the lesson that we are so much more than one thing; yes I'm a non-binary, butch lesbian, but I'm also an athlete, a judge, a spiritual person, a Gothi, a healer, and advocate, and artist, and so much more. And ALL of those parts of me are important.

2. It's ok to cut people out of your life who are mean, toxic, shaming, unsupportive, demeaning, etc. Even if they are family, even if they have been your best friend (for, like EVER!), and even if they are your therapist. You deserve to surround yourself with people who respect, love, and support you. If they can't do those things they don't deserve your time, or energy. Someone who says they love you while doing things that hurt you are a rot that must be removed before it spreads. I've been re-reading some old journals recently and noticing a pattern of family members saying really hurtful things to me, but I kept letting it go because 1. they were family, 2. I didn't feel like I deserved anything different. It's take a lot of therapy, and a lot of support from true friends, but I'm learning that I deserve better.

3. Queer folk throughout history, and throughout the world were revered as healers, priests/priestesses, and wisdom keepers. We exist in the liminal space, the Holy space of In-Between. We have gifts to bring to this world, we need to let our Light shine, and going back to number 2, we need to surround ourselves with people who don't try to stamp out our Light. Living your Truth, helps others to live in their own Truth, whatever that is. 

Tattoos as gender affirming care

Something I have been wanting to do for  a long time, especially since I had my top surgery is to get my frogs covered. When I got these frogs, they were meaningful to me. The black frog came from the cover of a Ranger Rick magazine that I had carried around for years until I could afford to get it tattooed on. I went to a reputable shop, but the artist did a rather terrible job in rendering the frog including just leaving off several toes that were hidden behind a leaf  that he didn't include in the tattoo, and that I eventually tattooed on myself as best I could during my short tenure as a tattooist. According to Jamie Sams' Medicine Cards, "Frog sings the songs that bring the rains that cleanse the world" or "brings the tears that cleanse the soul."  I loved that message. I think I loved it more when I wasn't able to cry. It's not the message I want to carry over my heart anymore. These days I want my heart covered in protection, and in fierceness. 

The black frog is also a cover up of my first professional tattoo, a tattoo that happened to be a matching tattoo of the one my ex got. It being a rather dysfunctional relationship it felt important to cover it, and when I covered it, it felt like a tendril that had been connecting us was severed. Conversely, years later when we were on friendly terms I visited her and she hooked me up with her tattooist friend who did the other frog.

I had a consult scheduled today about finally getting these tattoos covered. I was filled with joy at the prospect of the coverup, and what I realized is that covering them up is a part of my gender-affirming care. Yes, the images no longer fit where I am, but also the placement and size were all about working around breasts. These are remnants  of chest that no longer serves me. In so many ways these tattoos no longer fit me. I am long past ready for them to be gone.

Unfortunately, I learned at my consultation what I had feared: they will need laser treatment to be adequately covered. Yeah, I could try another artist, but I've done the cover up thing before, and I have old tattoos poking out from the sides, or under. My chest is important to me, and I need to do it write. So, I'm disappointed. I felt like I was almost at the finish line, but now I have to run another race before I get back on track, but I know in the long run I will be happier if I go through the laser process first. Anyone know how I go about making money by selling pictures of my feet or some other low effort means of making extra cash?