Liar, you always lie

"An hour wasted just because he wanted attention."

Those were the words my father spoke to my siblings and mother when I was eleven years old. That morning I had awoken with the most awful cramping in my abdomen, which had left me convinced that I was dying. I remember having to literally crawl to the toilet at some point because the pain was so bad that I could not stand or walk any more.

It must have taken about an hour before my parents had found me like that and readied me downstairs to get me to the local doctor. By the time we arrived at the doctor and had waited the obligatory tens of minutes, the pain had already subsided and I could not explain what had happened to either the doctor or my parents.

My father deemed me to be a mere liar who just wanted to get attention. My siblings teased me about it. My mother wasn't pleased.

Every time afterwards that I felt similar pains or even any other pains, I'd do my utmost to ignore it and just wrestle through it. The only thing people did not question me on were the frequent fainting spells, which started around that time as well. Apparently proper fainting isn't easy to do, though nobody seemed interested in learning just why I might be fainting so much. It must have been lack of oxygen, said most people.

When I wasn't an obvious liar, I was just a weird kid with an over-active imagination. I suffered the required amounts of severe bullying during both primary and high school. Only my frequent - weekly during one year - bouts of migraines were taken seriously. I had to stand up for myself and beat up the bullies responsible because nobody else would interfere on my behalf.

Years after I quit school, I finally discovered about my intersex condition, even if I did not put that event at eleven years next to it as a possibly related event.

How does it feel to be ridiculed, called a liar, crazy and delusional for only being honest about how one feels and experiences one's body, for a decade straight?

The most recent incident with this one doctor calling me a liar for pretending to be intersex brought a lot of that back to the surface. It made me realise just in how far doctors - not just in the Netherlands - have called me a liar or otherwise rejected me as speaking falsehoods over the past decade and counting. I honestly do not think doctors are real people at this point.

Dissociation is the sensation of feeling one's own experiences becoming more and more removed from the reality being presented that it is as if you do not truly exist any more as a physical entity. It's one's mind trying to make sense of completely conflicting input.

In this situation I have physicians and psychologists on one side calling me a liar, delusional and more regarding me being intersex. They make up fancy, non-existing terms like autoparagynaecophilia to further underline just how delusional I am, insisting that I must just be transsexual and not quite mentally 'there'.

On the other side there is my body being quite clear about what is and isn't real. I can ignore my body, but the symptoms will still be there. I can pretend the pains and discomfort aren't real, but both will still be there, as they have over the past two decades. I can pretend my body is that of a male, but I cannot deceive my environment, dress sizes or biology.

I am beginning to question whether physicians and psychologists truly exist, whether they aren't merely evil spirits which force themselves into my dreams, twisting them into dark, horrifying nightmares in which my very being and self are torn apart amidst their horrid cackling.

How can one sustain the possibility of the existence of two such completely disparate realities at the same time? How can two opposing truths both be the singular truth?

Maybe (most) physicians and psychologists are in fact lying and deceiving, or just being extremely ignorant and harmful in the process. Maybe this person I am is just a liar, so good at lying, that she doesn't realise herself any more that she has been deceiving herself for two decades and counting.

Do I trust my body? Do I trust doctors?

Who is lying? Is everyone a liar?


Maya