Category: Excerpts from An Unremarkable Girl

Dropping Out and the Media

As I leave school behind for good, in March of 2011, I experience a profound increase in my depression. Depression has daunted me since puberty began, situational and chemical, but it swelled up as I cut myself off from the world, from my few friends, and from life itself.

Days and weeks pass by, blending into one another. I stay in bed or I pace around my house. Very occasionally I try to write a short story or work on a novel, but I have no motivation and no drive. Life is grey. 

I lie in bed in the mid-afternoon. This could be any day of any month. I watch videos on Youtube or do laps on the same shows on Netflix. I play computer games, almost always cheating at them because I can’t muster up enough energy to face even the small and meaningless challenges they present. Sometimes I read something from my growing library, but more often than not even books, which I adore, fail to engage me.
 I feel wrong. Wrong about everything. My body disgusts me, my habits disappoint me. In every aspect of my shambling half-life I feel a failure. “Home school”, which is what I claim to be doing, engages me even less than regular school, and knowing that my mother is exhausted and distracted by her own schoolwork I evade most of the assignments.

On occasion I dare to do more research about being transgender, with the same paranoia and care that I take when I occasionally read erotica or watch pornography and masturbate. I feel more ashamed about researching transgender issues than about masturbation, and given that I’m fairly certain I’m violating my own decency by masturbation the amount of guilt and fear I have about the research is almost incommunicable.
 I look at transition timelines, I even go through a photo series of a vagioplasty, the surgery by which a penis can be reconstructed into a vagina. I try to imagine myself as a girl. I have long hair already, but I dress solely in turtlenecks and jeans, not particularly feminine attire.
However, when I consider transition, it is coloured by the depictions of transgender women in the media that I consume, especially since I spend so much of my days doing little else beside watching shows on Netflix.

In Futurama, one of my favourite shows at the time, there is a particular episode which focuses on a gender transition. In “Bend Her” (Season 5 Episode 13), the foul-mouthed alcoholic robot Bender undergoes a sex change in order to pass a gender check after he competes as a “fembot” in the Robot Olympics. After this operation (which involves the severing of his antenna, a clear analogue for robots to human penises), he proceeds to be an exaggerated stereotype of femininity and female behaviour, to the chagrin and disgust of the show’s other female characters. The episode resolves when he is “fixed”, ie returned to masculine forms and behaviours.
I describe this in depth because it is representative of media focusing on transgender women in the 2000s, media which deeply impacted me as an adolescent coming to terms with my gender identity. Bender is not a transwoman in any meaningful sense of the word, he suffers from no confusion about his gender identity. He undergoes transition as part of a con. The changes that occur (including increased emotionality and sensitivity) are played for laughs, and at one point Leela (the most prominent female character) says “Please get out of my gender”. It’s comedy, one might say, but the joke is that it is ridiculous that anyone perceived as male would become female. That’s the punchline. The message I get is transwomen are laughable.

 I’m afraid of being a joke. I’m already a pitiable individual, a depressed 16 year-old reclusive high-school dropout. Pity is bad enough, I tell myself, I don’t need to be laughed at too. I’m afraid. Afraid. Afraid. Under the relatively placid pond scum of lethargy, apathy, and sadness that an outside observer sees I’m a roiling cauldron of fear and panic. I know I’m transgender and it terrifies and disgusts me. I’ll be a joke. I’ll lose my extended family. I’ll be hated. I’ll be ugly. These refrains ring in my ears, a thousand shrieking harpies that only I can hear, the cacophony of loathing, doubt, and terror echoing through the relative silence of my dark, book-lined bedroom.

The Facade – Excerpt From An Unremarkable Girl

This comes from Chapter 2 – “When I Knew”. It is the story of how the real me began to disappear into the male facade that I would wear for more than a decade until I was finally ready to come out. 

When I was in third grade I told a friend at recess about my wish, about wanting to be a girl. She was always a sweet friend, but she looked at me with a side-eyed glance when I revealed my innermost desire.

“That’s weird,” she said, the word “weird” delivered like a shoe stamping on a bug.

There was to be no further discussion of that point. That day I learned that as much as I desired to be a girl, it wasn’t “normal”. It wasn’t “okay”. It was “Weird” with a capital “W.” So I started to push it down. I still admired my female role models, the witches of my early childhood, the Queens of England, the Empresses of Austria and Russia, but I would no longer pretend to be them. I still loved television or films with strong female characters (or even better yet female protagonists), but I was more cautious about emulating them. Being a “boy” and wanting to be a girl was weird.

I began to build a male facade. Though many messages in children’s media and elementary school would tell me “be yourself!”, I knew that to be a polite fiction. “Be yourself” has a big stinking asterisk next to it. “Be yourself; if yourself is a gender-conforming individual who will have the right interests and perform according to societal expectations. Otherwise, be the self we want you to be.”

 I worked hard to build the male facade. I tried to follow my father’s encouragement and participate in sports- because that’s what boys were supposed to do. Unfortunately, I am intrinsically ill-suited to physical activity that requires a great degree of hand-eye coordination and concentration. Playing softball I always took the outfield, and never caught a single ball- I’d be staring off into space while it would land with a thud next to me, snapping out of my daze only when a team-mate called out “Get the ball, stupid!”

As I built this performative male facade, the real me grew more and more disconnected. She shone through in her passion for history, in her love of unusual foods (for an American child) such as mussels and escargot, but she went into hiding whenever the expectations of society demanded the performance of masculinity. The older I got, the more performance was demanded of me. This produced a disconnect between the real me, the girl at the centre, and the performative facade, and the disconnect produced dissociation. I have far fewer memories of my elementary school days than most of my peers, simply because I was putting on the facade so much of the time. When I was performing as male, I wasn’t myself, and since I wasn’t myself I wasn’t forming memories, or at least not the fond memories of childish bliss many people form in their elementary days. I remember most clearly moments of pain or great shame, for they lanced through the facade and pierced the girl within, leaving scars that still twinge when I recall them today.

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