The five stages towards accepting one's body

Probably one of the most horrific things that has happened to me over the past years has been the struggle towards understanding and accepting my body. Not surprisingly, perhaps, in light of me being told since I was born that I was a boy, then a teenage boy, young adult male, male-to-female transsexual, oh wait, intersex, oh, totally transgender, no wait, MRI scan says you're a hermaphrodite. Nah, you're definitely male but you want to look like a woman. But you already have the body of a woman. Just the genitals, you know...

Countless years filled with staring at my image in mirrors, loathing, hating, loving, despairing. What should I see? I didn't know. What does my face, my body, any of it look like? Male? Female? Ugly? Pretty? Just regular? Just what?


You're just looking at a pile of mirror shards, with each shard reflecting a different 'me'. The person they told me that I was. The person others told me that I actually am. The inklings of a new 'me'. Maybe the real me is in there? Perhaps. How would you even be able to tell?


Even in all of that, there never was any doubt in my mind that my mind is me. That I feel like myself. What I went through in 2005 was to realise that I had been wearing a mask all those years. The mask that the lie of me having male physiology had created. Because my environment believed it. Because I had had no choice but to believe it. I mean, just look at those genitals.

Two years later I found out that I have even more genitals than just those 'male' ones. MRI scans are amazing, allowing one to take a gander inside one's own body. So now I really was a hermaphrodite. Likely a twin-in-one, because two embryos got a bit too cosy while in my mother's uterus. Pretty amazing. It gives me a good feeling to think about it like that. My body is pretty amazing in that regard.


But I must conform. I must choose between the binary sides. There's no other choice. Just imagine the peace it'd give after having that ugly male part removed. Only... it's still a part of me. It's still a part of my body. Why would I remove part of my body like that? Something that has actual uses, like being able to stand up peeing and not contracting urinary tract infections every other week? I'm not mad.

So... I'm keeping all of it. That's pretty cool, actually.


Maybe it's a bit like one of those Zen Buddhist Enlightenment trips. Or just the cheap version from The Matrix. There is no spoon.

There never was 'gender'. That was the great delusion. What I struggled against wasn't my mind fighting with my body about what my body should really look like. That was just society's horrific influence trying to poison my mind, turning it against me. Against my body. Make me sad and unhappy without me ever finding out that I was feeling sad because I had betrayed myself and my body along with it.

I'm not 'male' or 'female'. Outside of a purely biological sense those terms are completely meaningless. One cannot feel like a 'male' or 'female', because none of that has any meaning. What one can do is get used to one's own body. Learn to accept it. Love it. Understand it. Take care of it. It is all you truly have in this life, after all.


So much in society is about masks. Trying to take on different identities with clothing, make-up, body modifications including alterations to or removal of genitals, with tattoos and piercings. By adopting behaviours like smoking, using drugs or marijuana. They're all masks. None of that is real. None of it really changes anything. There is no spoon.

You're still 'you' inside. No matter what you do to your body.


There are many body configurations which I could have ended up with. I could have gone along with those friendly specialists and I'd have a nice 'transsexual' mark in my medical file, I'd have had GRS surgery and all that. And it would have backfired horribly. Because then my body would have continued its puberty regardless, and the horrible truth would have begun to dawn on me. That I didn't listen to my body. That the mutilation from this GRS can never be undone. That I'd forever have to live with this horror that I had inflicted upon myself.

To me, the biggest obstacle towards learning to accept my own body was to see the concept of 'gender' for the lie it is. That the brain is the same no matter which chromosomes one has. All we can be is ourselves, and the only reason why you grow up hating your body is because your environment tells you to.

Here the irony is probably that as a 'boy' I was bullied constantly throughout my school period, was never considered to be attractive and generally considered myself to be a failure in terms of looks. Dropping the mask, and suddenly I'm this very attractive woman who gets whistled at on the streets and gets a fair amount of attention from both men and women. If it didn't make me feel at least a little bit happy inside I would probably cry at this. I'm still only human, after all.

Society is also shallow like that.


As for me, I'm still getting used to this body of mine that I have only recently begun to realise truly exists. And it's a pretty cool body. It has a few flaws, but that adds to its character. I could never hate it, because it does its best. I'm lucky to have a body like this.

And it's all mine. Forever.


Maya