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Throughout the years of pubescent development, my mother spewed words that had a profoundly devastating impact throughout my young life. Her words sculpted my mind. They led me down a road of self-destruction.
They are what plagued my mind. My desire to become another and to alter my body through medical treatment stemmed from words my mother led me to believe that I was.
At the time I sought transition I had no idea what it was that caused me to feel the way I did about my body, I saw ‘gender dysphoria’ and to me it made sense, it explained what I was feeling. Transition was a means to alleviate the discomfort that I felt with my body.
It is an easy assumption to make that one is experiencing ‘gender dysphoria’: the feeling of immense discomfort in one’s body can easily be assumed to be the experience of dysphoria. To me, it is quite complex.
It is important to ponder where this feeling is coming from, discover the root causes.
What has happened in your life for you to feel immense discomfort with your body? To feel overwhelmingly distraught by the thought and sight of your body? Why seek to medically and surgically alter your body? What is driving that desire?
At the time I sought medical transition, I had no idea of the root causes of my distress. Nor did I know the driving forces. Childhood trauma led me to seek a path of medical and surgical treatment.
The immense all-consuming discomfort I felt throughout my pubescent years followed me to adulthood and is what initiated a desire for escape from my body and life.
The distress I felt with my body worsened the further I progressed with transition.
I became further and further fixated on the appearance of my body.
It started with thoughts of my breasts that consumed my entire being. The feeling of disgust overwhelmed me and from the age of 14 I longed for them to be removed.
That desire was granted and at the age of 20, I had them surgically removed.
That was the beginning of an unravelling of deeply rooted disdain.
After each surgery, my depression worsened, and I became fixated on other aspects of my body.
The desire for further surgery arose and because I was fixating on aspects of my body that were inherently female, I understood my desire for surgery to be the fix for my being in the wrong body. That these parts of me were never meant to be.
The distress, fixation and overwhelming desire for surgery never eased. The feeling of being whole that I had longed for never came.
I came to understand the root causes of my distress and deep desire for escape through therapy.
I learnt that the body I sought so desperately was to rid myself of any memory of the trauma that I had endured as a child. I didn’t know that at the time that I sought the path of medical treatment.
