It's been a while now since the apartment eviction thing came to a crescendo and I found myself moving into a temporary apartment. Not finding a new home during those two months at this apartment, I then had to move my belongings into storage while becoming homeless myself.
I was fortunate enough to have friends help me out during these moves, and for a perfectly nice stranger to offer me a couch to sleep on in a comfortable room. Though the house/apartment search continues week after week with little result, at least I have a bit of respite in the sense of no set deadline when I have to leave an apartment, no legal troubles, and above all no worries about my belongings, even though they're essentially inaccessible.
The freelancer thing seems to be picking up now as well, with one active contract and a few upcoming ones that should secure me financially this year. This would be a very welcome improvement over being jobless and searching for a job as I did last year, as much fun as it was to travel around the world for free.
To have people help me out to ensure that I will not end up sleeping on the street, to help me out with moving multiple times and to assist me with the new home search. Those are things for which I am super-grateful and which makes me feel this weird sense that I can relax at least a little bit.
Slowing down and feeling stress levels reduce is a weird sensation after so many years of stress apparently only increasing. I'm sleeping better, and have recently begun to have processing dreams, as my mind tries to make sense of all that has happened to me over the past decades. It's a lot to dig through, that's for sure.
One big and unexpected mistake I made recently was to accept an invitation to talk at a local pride parade event. Supposedly I'd get to talk about intersex and related. I was however unprepared for what I encountered. First of all the people in this parade themselves. Such an obsession with sexuality that it pretty much blew out my PTSD and I found myself practically incapable of doing the speech.
Then as I stood on the podium I found myself facing a rowdy crowd, with seemingly little interest in listening. Struggling with a poorly configured sound setup, I did an abbreviated version of the speech and left as soon as I reasonably could. To say that I felt uncomfortable was an understatement.
As I was standing in the backstage area, I could hear the people who came after me make various statements about what we intersex people are, want and such. Like us wanting to become part of this 'third sex' thing. Hearing transsexual and such folk make such statements about us intersex people with whom they do not even bother talking, but only using us to further their own agenda and desires was pretty much the final drop.
For days after this event I found myself struggling to make sense of this experience. One thing which it definitely changed was that my discomfort and PTSD triggers related to transsexuality got blown up into full-blown hatred against and disgust with anything LGBT. I found myself forced to admit that LGBT folk truly live in a world divorced from the world intersex people find themselves in.
It's not that one wants to hate, as it's such an unpleasant feeling to experience. Yet it ignited the trauma and struggle to come to terms with me having been forced into this transsexuality thing on many occasions over the past years, as I have written about previously. To be confronted with transsexuality in any shape is so incredibly painful and agonising now as the pain of all those years now lies bare and exposed.
I hate transsexuality. I wish nothing more than for it and all transsexuals to vanish right now. Just so that I can stop feeling this pain. This trauma that those doctors and psychologists caused by lying to me and deceiving me. By stripping away my humanity and reducing me to this shell, without any ability to control my future or decide about my body. Just a nothing, with doctors and psychologists patiently waiting for me to crack, admit to being transsexual and suffer normalisation surgery.
I know the trauma will not go away that easily. I am not sure that I will ever be able to understand why those so-called professionals saw fit to do something so inhumane and cruel to me. Anyone could have seen that I'm intersex, if they had paid any attention.
Part of coming to terms with what has happened to me is by learning to understand the nature of transsexuality. To eliminate this lingering fear that I was wrong after all and they were right about me. Here the medical literature makes it obvious that transsexuality is the most common form of Body Identity Disorder (also known as Body Integrity Identity Disorder), whereby people seek to have healthy parts of their body (surgically) removed, to cope with psychological issues.
This is an important difference from intersex, as with the latter there is no such identity disorder present. Though doctors and psychologists tried their best to cause such feelings and make me want to hate the male genitals or such, I would still never voluntarily want to part with any bit of my body. Thus I have no body identity disorder, and thus I cannot be transsexual.
Yet it still hurts to deal with the topic. Though I know that those doctors and psychologists were completely wrong about my body, I very much doubt that I'll ever learn why they felt this need to torture me and cause such horrific traumas. Is it because the only appropriate way they know to deal with intersex people is to coax them into accepting normalisation surgery? I mean, who could be happy as a physically non-binary person?
It's against this background that I now try to rebuild my life. Even though I am now relearning that there's also a gentler, kinder side to life and people, giving both that knowledge and my past experiences a place inside of me is not going to be easy.
Despite things being easier now than they used to be, it's still going to take a lot more love and kindness to get me fully out of the woods, allowing me to finally put behind the endless nightmare that has been my life for far too long now.
Here's to that kindness and love.
Maya
