Gender as a special type of transgenerational trauma

 Whereas the term 'sex' unequivocally refers to an individual's biological sex, i.e. their body's physical properties which pertain to the function of reproduction, the term 'gender' [1] has changed or assumed different meanings over the past centuries. Originally referring to a group of people or things which share a certain trait, it came to mean the same as 'biological sex' around the early 15th century as a way to differentiate it from the physical act of procreation that had become associated with the term 'sex' by that time.

The currently common meaning of 'gender' to mean 'social role' in the feminist sense dates to the early 1960s. This claims the existence of distinct masculine and feminine attributes that would define an individual as being part of either a masculine ('male') or feminine ('female') role in society, seeking to define the identity of a person's ego in only those perceived qualities.


Here I would like to postulate that this definition, and the perception of 'masculine' and 'feminine' properties to make up the ego of an individual, is indicative of transgenerational trauma [2]. Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that the very notion of such properties does not hold up to scientific scrutiny [3], with studies showing the brains of volunteers to display a mosaic of properties, with no distinct sets of properties that would indicate a propensity towards either a 'male' or 'female' pattern. Effectively, neither the presence nor absence of specific hormones or chromosomes appear to have any effect on the development and final functionality of the human brain.

While for animals as well as insects, their biological sex has a significant impact on their expected role in courtship rituals, an important distinction to be drawn here is that of instinct and behaviour versus reason and intelligence. No matter how enlightened a species may be, the basic courtship rituals and the instincts that drive them are still present. This underlies much of human societies, with in particular societies founded on Abrahamic religious foundations only relatively recently accepting that women are in fact individuals with the right to self-determination.


The societal patterns that have been sustained over the millennia as a result of these base rituals persist to this day, as do the traumas that accompany them. Despite there being no scientific evidence to support any dimorphism between human brains, it's still held as common knowledge that men and women are 'different'. Along with the feministic pseudo-scientific 'gender' theorem we can see this supposed difference being used as justification by some for segregation, or discrimination ('affirmative action', 'gender quota'), with no backing scientific evidence that would justify this.

Other ways that this societal trauma appears is in the form of individuals crossing those perceived masculine and feminine societal roles, either dressing up in a way that is generally perceived to be only acceptable for individuals in the other role. More extreme is the appearance of individuals who feel that they cannot live with the reproductive organs with which they have been born ('gender dysphoria', or GD) and must have these organs surgically removed. Here a considerable overlap with Body Identity Disorder (BID)[4] seems to exist [5]. Similarly to cases of non-neurological BID, individuals diagnosed with GD can grow out of the disorder, go through with surgery and end up regretting it ('detransition') [6], or find that the surgery did not alleviate the effects of the psychological disorder.


In the comparison with BID and GD one can see a pattern of trauma appear. For non-neurological (i.e. no deficiencies found within the brain) BID, there appears to be often some kind of impressive experience, often in the childhood of the person. This can be something shocking, such as seeing someone with an amputated limb. For GD the trauma appears to overlap significantly with transgenerational trauma.

Even before a child is conceived, the parents and their environment will hold certain beliefs about what is right and proper for a child, depending on the biological sex it is born with. This continues with the birth of the child, their clothes they receive, the toys they play with and the other children they see and how their environment expects them to play with others. At each stage along their development, they grow up in an environment in which their behaviour and preferences are cultured, promoted, punished and promoted until they are deemed 'appropriate'.

Here the parents and the environment are often unaware of their own actions, or would be at a loss to explain why they feel it is 'correct'. This is in many ways similar to the behaviour seen by the victims of childhood abuse, some of whom who will go on to inflict similar abuse to their own children. The distinction here is that this transgenerational trauma about societal roles or in its current nomenclature 'gender' isn't something that affects just some unfortunate families. This level of trauma affects entire societies and nations, generation after generation.


This also helps to explain to some extent the attitude towards intersex individuals. Falling outside the convenient boundaries of a binary sex, they either suffer early mutilation (intersex genital mutilation) to force them to conform, or will suffer the trauma of dealing with a society which is too traumatised to be able to accept that its concepts of masculinity and femininity are not only beside the point, but also comprehensively, scientifically incorrect.

To heal from this trauma, societies will first have to learn to accept the reality and scope of this trauma before they can begin to let go of fictional narratives. This would be a long, arduous process. If this concerned a singular patient, a psychiatrist would seek to slowly ease the patient out of their delusions and circular reasoning, so that they might see and grasp the reality. To do that with entire societies is however a whole different level.


Maya


[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma
[3] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/your-brain-doesnt-care-what-genitals.html
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3326051/
[5] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269697839_Body_integrity_identity_disorder_and_Gender_Dysphoria_A_pilot_study_to_investigate_similarities_and_differences
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detransition

Getting back into that 'career' thing after recovering from PTSD

 This is not an easy post for me to write. Even as I am grateful for the progress that I'm making in recovering from decades of trauma and the associated post-traumatic stress disorder, it's hard not to find myself painfully aware of how the world around me has seemingly moved ahead without me. Instead of neatly and mostly happily bouncing my way through the education system and ending up in some job from which I'd work my way up to a bright career, I more or less fell off the grid as I fell into depression, followed by a string of traumatic events which put my continued existence strongly in question.

To make a long story short, I seem to have managed to make it out of the other side more or less in one piece, courtesy of primarily the efforts of people who I am very grateful for not giving up on me. Yet as the darkness of depression recedes and my PTSD no longer controls me, it's equally painfully obvious that the reason why people rush into a career is so that they can acquire that which most crucially sustains life itself: money.

I'm grateful that I have found some freelance work mostly writing articles for sites and publications, but diversification seems like a good thing. For example something to do with my experience as a senior-level software developer. Call it an artefact of my cosy relationship with computers while growing up, but software development in particular is something which is practically an integral part of my being, much like the ability to read and write. Basically, that means that I like it a lot.


I was supposed to have landed a software development contract for a big international company at the beginning of this year, but as the pandemic did its thing, that lead dried up, like so many others. Finding new leads and following up on them is still something that I have to work on, just like the whole 'networking' thing. It's no use if you might be a great fit for a lot of remote software jobs out there, but neither side is aware of the other.

In that regard I guess that my string of published books on mostly C++ and embedded development is a good kind of advertisement, along with the projects which I have published on my GitHub account [1]. Yet it's still a struggle to generate and handle leads, even if others do their best to find a few for me. I guess it's mostly due to the vestiges of PTSD that still trouble me, slowing me down and making even simple tasks more demanding than they would be for anyone without such a psychological burden.

Some of these projects which I started have gathered a lot of feedback already, especially NymphCast [2], even as the amount of work there is still astounding, especially for what is still a definite hobby project. While I did recently go back to fix a regression with playback and add a host of new features, it did impress on me again the need to balance hobbies with work. Hobbies are for relaxation and fun learning, while work is what you do first and foremost for money to survive.

While I have seen some open source projects grow to the point where they can have an actual business plan, or keep growing through the power of donations, aiming for such a thing seems roughly as practical and realistic as trying to become rich by inventing the Next Big Thing and patenting it.

What seems more realistic at this point is the development of my Nodate embedded framework project [3], as I can directly use it as the foundation of articles on embedded development. That level of synergy is extremely helpful.


In summary, at this point I'm still scraping by as a freelancer, doing odd jobs, but I would definitely like something bigger and more permanent. I think it would be helpful for my recovery by having something steady and predictable. I think that what I have put out in public in terms of publications and projects should leave a favourable impression. Enough that I should have more self-confidence, perhaps.

Time to chase more leads like an overly excited kitten chasing yarn and see what comes up at the end of them, I guess :)


Maya


[1] https://github.com/MayaPosch
[2] https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphCast
[3] https://github.com/MayaPosch/Nodate

Childhood abuse and the eternal expectation of compassionless punishment

 A few days ago, I was suddenly reminded of a dream which I have had a few times by now over the past decades. Each time it is essentially the same dream: I find myself at what seems like a party or gathering, with people sitting around a number of round tables, busy chatting, drinking and amusing themselves. Meanwhile I wander between those tables, feeling invisible as I at the same time deal with the knowledge that I'm a condemned person. That tomorrow my execution will take place and that this is my last day alive. Invisible. Ignored. Irrelevant.

Until I was reminded of those dreams again, I had not been able to place them, or make sense why I would have that same dream over and over. Then it hit me that I could connect my feelings and experiences in those dreams with the feelings that often crop up when I'm dealing with strong negative emotions, usually as part of a negative or stressful event. Feelings of feeling worthless, defective, disgusting, revolting, deserving of punishment and so much worse.

Seeing those two things side by side and seeing how they fit together also allowed me to connect them with the details of the traumas which I have suffered over the past years, starting with the presumed childhood abuse at around age five which seems to have started all of this. Although part of me still struggles to accept that I truly did suffer childhood abuse, the circumstantial evidence is just too overwhelming. That just leaves the frustration that I cannot remember many details of what exactly happened to me, or who was involved.


While reading up on the topic of childhood abuse and the far-ranging emotional, neurological and social consequences that this has on the lives of victims, I came across a lengthy but excellent article by Beverly Engel over at Psychology Today [1]. Reading it allowed me put a few more things together. Most of all the visualisation I had of child me still being stuck in the dark room that I can remember, with the child crying and feeling so horrible about everything that had happened before being abandoned by one of the adults responsible in that room.

I described previously how it felt to me like I had found a way to this room with the traumatised child inside it [2][3] and had managed to open the door, leaving the previously dark and cold room instead empty and sunny. This to me seems like a first step towards healing and self-compassion. Instead of leaving the traumatised child part of myself alone in that room, I instead allowed it to become a part of myself again, ending that fragmentation.

As Beverly Engel describes, often the problem with childhood abuse is debilitating shame and guilt. Whatever happened as a child established those patterns, leading to subsequent behaviour that devalues one's own existence, one's body and one's place in society. Due to being unable to feel like anything one does is good enough, combined with any praise feeling far less genuine than the opposite leads to a constant sensation of being invisible or unwanted.


Looking back, I can see how easy it was for me to discard any compassion expressed by others towards me. I was waiting for actions that would show me that those words of compassion were genuine. Amidst cruel and compassionless acts from people like psychologists, doctors, landlords and many others, it only reinforced the feeling of being led to my eventual execution day. Ergo those dreams.

What I also felt in those dreams was a feeling of sadness, but at the same time a sensation of relief that it was almost finally over. That I could be free of... the guilt and shame, I would say. Very similar in a way to those moments between me deciding to take my own life in early 2011 and executing the plan. Reading Beverly Engel's writings and articles by others I can now see those lines running from five year old me to today. As lines of fate or perhaps more accurately doom.


The obvious therapy to heal from childhood abuse is thus compassion. Compassion from others, but also compassion from oneself. I feel that I have taken the first steps with the latter, which should also improve the way that I respond to compassion shown by others towards me. The difficulty for me being that I have to reprogram parts of my brain which have been running the same trauma-born responses for decades now. For me to really feel a connection with others and not merely as an unwanted guest wandering unwanted through a crowd. How do you fix the way one's brain perceives social interactions?

In that respect, it's good for me to practice self-compassion and to be... nice to myself instead of acting like an abusive adult would towards a terrified child. Being non-judgemental is one of the points of self-compassion which are also mentioned. All so that one day I can feel like I'm an actual human being who also has every right to exist and mingle with others, while living their life in this universe.


Maya


[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-compassion-chronicles/201501/healing-the-shame-childhood-abuse-through-self-compassion
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/to-finally-wake-up-from-life-long.html
[3] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/freeing-child-overcoming-childhood.html

A fractured self courtesy of the gender delusion

 The past weeks I have begun to notice something curious in my way of thinking and the way I regard my own behaviour. As awareness and acceptance of my actual, real, physical body grows, so do the thoughts of how it could also move and look. It's a weird thought, that perhaps doesn't make a lot of sense to those who did not get forced into this 'gender' mess that society has concocted.

Basically, I'm free to behave in a way that is considered 'feminine' now. Yet for many years I was supposed to behave in a way considered acceptable for 'men'. Even as my body changed during puberty into that of a woman and my environment got terribly confused trying to place me in the binary system, as I did continue the 'male-approved' hair and clothing style even though my body did not fit that look.

Although I have since found the freedom to find my own look as a woman (because anything goes, pretty much), it's still weird to think about what mannerisms and way of moving and so on truly fit me. What was easy in the beginning enough was the realisation that I was not using my body properly, and possibly damaging it in the process. This included the way I used my vocal tract and how I walked. In both cases I used my body as though it actually was a male body, with a male vocal tract and male pelvis. Suffice it to say that one's body doesn't take kindly to such abuse.

Where things get trickier are the small details. Only when looking at photos and videos of myself did I begin to grasp what it was that others were seeing, and why I was getting so much attention from heterosexual men. Especially in photos of me next to other women, it would suddenly be obvious to me that my build is very feminine, with the shoulders, arms and upper body. That also means that similar ways of moving my body makes more sense, rather than assuming that I have a clunkier, more masculine body, as I had always (falsely) assumed.


During this readjustment process I also find myself loathing the horror show that I was put through by doctors and psychologists on account of perpetuating the gender delusion, and the supposed existence of 'transbinarism' (i.e. 'transsexualism'/'transgenderism'), which itself can only exist if one assumes that a brain is either 'male' or 'female'. Which we know they are not. Nor are bodies, even if the distribution there forms an inverse Bell curve which could give the false impression that physical sex is purely binary.

Minds, however, are as unique as they come, with each its own mosaic. That means that despite society's insistence that there is a way to 'feel' like a woman or a man, there truly is no such thing, and the best you can do is accept your body and work with it. That was the realisation which took me the longest to fully work through, I think, as the string of posts on this topic on my blog attest to.

The result of society's meddling in this process, however, has meant that I was forced to do the equivalent of puzzling a mirror back together using tiny shards, all of them stuffed into a fresh midden. Even if one has little choice but to keep working on puzzling oneself back together, tedious and disgusting.

Who are you after all, but what you are?

Your body, what you were born with, what you grew up with, what you experience and what you live through. Your mind, which experiences through your body's senses, growing and changing with each new experience and thought.


Yet the more I feel myself progressing towards completing the puzzle of self, the more I feel disgusted with the gender delusion. I am free to talk and move my body in any way that works for me. There should be no social pressure to feel inhibited or otherwise restricted in that area. Nor with what bits of fabric, the styling of said bits of fabric, or the colour of these bits of fabric I cover up the shameful parts of my body.

I find it here fascinating to talk with friends of the male persuasion, as we compare notes on what they are allowed to wear and what I am allowed to wear. While as a woman you can easily nick your husband's or boyfriend's knickers, pants, shirts and so on, with people calling this 'cute' or 'tomboyish' behaviour, doing the same the other way around gets you called a 'creep', 'pervert' or something worse, like 'homosexual'.

The same is true for the ways in which one is allowed to walk, sit, move one's hands or otherwise move one's body. What I think I'm feeling at this point is the realisation that those shackles have fallen off my ankles and wrists. That I'm now free to behave and move and talk and do whatever. The way that works for me.


And somehow I feel like a fur farm fox after being rescued who is blinking stupidly at an open cage door and a wide expanse of grass beyond it.


This may take some time.


Maya

PTSD; Binarism; A reality to believe in

All too often life seems to be composed out of a collection of inevitabilities. Society being one of those things, and one's course through them. If one is lucky, one ends up on a boring path. With a standard issue healthy body, standard genetics, standard intelligence and growing up in a standard environment with standard friends, family, education and job prospects. This is a simple life, albeit without many personal challenges and opportunities to grow.

When I look back on my life so far, I really do think it'd be easier and briefer to list the things which were 'standard' for me, because everything else just had to be 'different' for some reason. I guess my appearance is pretty standard. Assuming I keep my clothes on, or at least a swimsuit. Just a normal looking Caucasian woman.


Obviously all of the physical, mental and sexual abuses that occurred since I was a young child are not 'standard issue'. Nor is me being a chimera, a hermaphrodite and intersex. Growing up in a world that worships binarism, growing up believing that one belongs to one part of this binary system, only to find out that one's curious puberty was the result of said chimaeric body, with the female side of the hybrid female/male stem cell lines ultimately asserting itself much stronger.

That's my reality. One of chimaeric bodies. Of the unique nature of the individual mind. The sickening awareness of how indoctrinated people in society are. Their delusions about binarism, with a binary gender, binary sex, of individuals belonging only to one side. That one's body down to one's very brain has to follow one of either pattern. With it the complete annihilation of my existence.


Their reality is not my reality.


They call it post-traumatic stress disorder. What it does is reshape your brain itself. Reform it forever. Change your view of the world so that you'll never feel safe or comfortable again. Try as you might, you're basically an alien trying to integrate into human society. You'll never get all of the nuances, even when your brain doesn't freak out over some perceived threat and starts dragging your mind back into reliving the past with flashbacks which feel more real than reality itself.


The reality I want to believe in is one where it is possible to feel safe. Where every person is treated and regarded as an individual. Not classified by their reproductive organs or convictions about their state in the Binarist system.

Where a person like myself can actually get medical help. Help that's still needed, as the recurrent traumas remind me of. To have it acknowledged that I'm a chimera, that I'm a hermaphrodite, that I do in fact have 'male' and 'female' reproductive organs. Those are things that have happened and which are more or less in my past now. But beyond this? I had to go through so many different channels to just get those things investigated and acknowledged.

In many ways I feel like an FGM victim. Although my vagina wasn't mutilated by doctors, I was born without even the small hole that'd allow fluids to drain. Instead my abdomen had to become a sanitary pad, while I apparently am denied even the option of intercourse, painful as it may be. Trying to get the reconstructive surgery to have anything done here at all has led to nothing for over a decade and counting. Instead I'm reminded over and over by doctors that I do not belong in their reality. I'm just a disorder, a freak, a rare disease. Something that isn't their problem.


What is my reality?


Having my mind regularly torn apart by another PTSD episode? Struggling to make ends meet every month? Dream of finishing my autobiography one day and this solving all my problems? Keep telling myself that life is worth living? Drift away from my body into a less painful version of reality?


Recently, in an online group I was hanging out in, a guy told about us about this one tenant who had lived in a flat his parents owned. When he and his mother went to check up on a tenant who was behind on her rent, they found out that she had committed suicide. Weeks earlier. He'd never forget the sight and smells in the bathroom where she had OD'ed on some pills. She was only in her early twenties.

We found ourselves wondering about what her life must have been like for things to end in such a gruesome fashion. It was a poor area of the city, so likely to do with poverty, crime and drug use. People who find themselves captured by a reality that's too bleak to face sober, until one day they either escape from it, or have the bleakness forever capture their heart.


Reality. Dreams. Wishing. Trauma. Pain. Life. Longing.


Much like butterflies we all wish to fly around freely. But some of us are captured. Trapped under glass. Pinned to bits of cork with cruel needles through our bodies. Prey for hungry predators.

Unless you're on the boring path, who is going to tell you how to play the game?


Maya

Self-motivation while adrift on an ocean

The fun thing about being adrift in the middle of an ocean are the many options that are visible, with each direction offering new and thrilling adventures and outcomes. The not so fun thing is that one's vessel has no propulsion and thus one is left to awkwardly paddle around with some scrap wood that one found in the bottom of the boat. It doesn't really matter what one direction one picks, as the wind and ocean currents will determine what direction one heads into anyway.

Sometimes that's the feeling I get with my life. I can see all the beautiful vistas that I could have reached, but there's always that combination of unfortunate circumstances, lack of motivation and crippling depression from post-traumatic stress disorder that end up clobbering any attempt at improving my life. It's pretty futile to get frustrated with ocean currents and the current wind direction.


When I try and take a look at exactly why the propulsion of my vessel is not functioning, I can obviously tell that the effects of youth trauma and subsequent traumas have done most of the damage. How do you work up self-motivation when your sense of self-esteem is constantly being attacked and drained by past and present reminders of one's failures and of being a worthless excuse of a human being. Combined with too many expectations from others heaped on top of that as well, perhaps, on account of always being the 'smart kid', due to a preference for reading, learning languages and the sciences, and so on.

When you end up sabotaging everything you try to do, because a lack of self-confidence makes you falter. When even small successes look meaningless next to the many failures and things promised and yet left unfinished... at some point you'll just find yourself adrift.


Of course there are many things which I can do. Or could do. I'm not dumb. I can learn what needs learning. I can make what needs making. Or I could, if I can figure out this lump of darkness that's inside of me, like a black hole. When you find yourself trying to motivate yourself to do something important for an entire day, but you just cannot bring yourself to do it, because... it doesn't feel right yet. That's just another failure that makes it again easier to fail the next time you try something.

And yet if you force yourself to do what needs doing, tearing through this resistance, it does not feel right either. It feels as if you're hurting yourself in the process by not understanding the source of this resistance. This bleakness and lack of purpose. Because that's ultimately what is is about.


The thing with depression born from trauma is that it isn't something that is easily addressed or treated. Sure, you can try to nuke it with medication, like anti-depressants, but the effect there is limited. It's after all caused by unprocessed trauma, which causes the brain to constantly injure itself as it goes through each subsequent retraumatisation and flashback event. The only proper long-term therapy there is to address the trauma.

Over the course of this year, I have managed to reintegrate the child personality which represented the childhood trauma back into my psyche, allowing me to finally make progress with examining and dealing with the trauma. This while also using it to understand and learn to deal with the subsequent traumatisation events, including bullying, physical violence, psychological and sexual abuse.

Blaming oneself is a horrible thing. Yet the assignment of blame yelled at me when I was a young child has been seared into my brain. It seems to have sensitised me to the acceptance of blame, no matter whether it was true or not. Slowly the sense of control got wrestled away from me. Over what was true or not. The ability to trust in others. The erasure of the physical, medical facts about my body. The erasure of my identity and my sense of self.

By the time I tried to commit suicide, I had come to accept that there was nowhere that I could go, nowhere that would accept me. Nothing that I could do or change. That's why the decision to take my own life had such a positive impact on me, because it was the first time in a very long time that I was fully in control of my life and myself.


That things had escalated that far was rather tragic.


During the years following that failed suicide attempt, I have tried to rebuild my life. Not surprisingly, I fell into the same traps as before, finding myself robbed of control by the medical and legal systems, and once again suffering psychological and physical abuse by those who sought to take advantage of my overly compliant attitude on account of having no self-esteem.

So what changed about that recently? Most of all getting to know a few friends who helped me through a number of harrowing situations. Without them I do not think that I would be typing this right now. Yet it's only a good start. Regaining control is hard. Dealing with trauma is harder. And I have to do both.


The coming time this means working on myself, figuring out more about these traumas and how to disarm parts of them. Regaining self-esteem as I work on my career. As a freelancer you do need to have some self-esteem, after all. Yet I would not at all mind a few more helping hands here, as I try to find more freelance work, or perhaps something more permanent.

The thing about being adrift after all is that you're pretty flexible about solid options that appear. One would be mad to refuse a new engine, or a tow by another vessel, simply because you have set your sights on transforming your vessel into a gold-plated and diamond-encrusted yacht through the power of wishful thinking.

I feel that part of regaining self-esteem is to learn to accept that others may see something of worth in me, much as I can see the worth in others. This also means that both giving and accepting help are essential parts of overcoming trauma.


Maya

Be brave

The feeling of loss. Of having lost something that was, or something that never will be. The feeling of one's mind succumbing to the intense feeling of grief, leaving no place for other feelings or thoughts to exist any more.

Sometimes one comes across a story, or a piece of music that will trigger something deep inside. Some kernel of grief, that when triggered will violently blossom into this blood-red tree that cries tears of crimson as it tears through your mind.

Quite recently one such story was that of the video game 'Gris'. It's a story about loss. About accepting it. About learning to deal with the fear and anger and pain and grief, and the countless other conflicting emotions and feelings that turn the world into a meaningless black-and-white caricature of pointlessness.

While listening to the soundtrack to 'Gris', it's easy to re-experience those intense feelings of the story's main character, but also that what it provokes inside of my own mind. The confrontation with the grief and pain in one's life, which one tries to keep hidden. Even if it will ultimately destroy oneself. You have to find it, understand it. Deal with it. Return colour to the world.


It's often hard to admit to sources of grief. One does not want to be seen as weak, or societal prejudices may lead one to believe that certain feelings and traumas are invalid.

Lately, while I'm working on my autobiography I find that I am finally beginning to put things together in my mind. All the good things. All the not so good things. All the bad things. All the things that I wish had never happened to me. All the things that I regret. To inspect and feel every single fracture in the mirror's reflection. To pick up and put back the shards that had fallen out of the mirror. To suck on the cuts in my fingers from picking up those shards.


So much of our lives happen because things around us happen, and before we know it, we get swept up, along and away, to be changed forever. Some experience an easy ride, while others end up in rapids or find themselves smashed against rocks.

I'm still trying to figure out what happened to me. Was I truly abused as a young child? It doesn't feel like something one can make up like that, not when the grief, pain and anger seem to originate at that point. Not when others around me noticed the dramatic shift in young me's behaviour as I withdrew into myself. Maybe I am afraid that if I accept this abuse as a fact, that it will make me lose the last bits of what I had always thought to be a rather okay childhood. I don't want to submit my life to be just an endless struggle against early childhood trauma. To lose the parts that were good and fine, just like that.

Yet at the same time, it seems like a necessary step to accept this. To acknowledge the grief. To acknowledge the pain and anger. To accept the gaps in the mirror and the wounds in my psyche that have never really healed. To accept that I was, that I am, that part of me will always be that scared, hurt child who is terrified of adults and of doing anything wrong because then someone will yell at me and it will feel so bad.


How does one accept that one's life started with trauma and has been lived in the shade of it for so long?

How can one pretend to be a functioning adult while dealing with psyche-shattering introspections?

How does one add the other, later traumas to this picture?


I do not know. The world around me doesn't really seem to care whether I make it or not. All I can do is make my way through level after level of this game, as I try to avoid the monsters and the darkness. To gather courage and bravely keep working my way up towards the stars.


Maya

The difference between being a victim and feeling like one

When one first becomes a victim of trauma as a child, it's hard to remember a life 'before'. Thus one doesn't know how much the trauma has changed one's course in life. We are after all the product of our memories and experiences, which consequently form our expectations and goals in life. It is through the contact with others that we may learn that we have in fact undergone a traumatic transformation. All too often this is due to behaviour on the side of the traumatised person that can be termed 'dysfunctional', as it is counter-productive for them and can cause major social and career issues. The way we seek out and respond to social interactions is after all determined by our personality, which is that which our memories and experiences formed.

Being a victim is easy. After all, there are no special requirements. There can be some expectations of one, such as providing sufficient resistance ('putting up a fight'), or by showing the appropriate restraint and acceptable social behaviour on one's side prior to the traumatic event(s). For childhood trauma it's even easier. After all, isn't the very definition of a child a person who is dependent on adults for their very livelihood, which by definition requires an almost naive level of trust?


By becoming aware of the trauma which one has suffered and the impact it has had on one's life, one is offered a choice. Either one can choose to ignore it and continue as before, or one can form a new personality role: that of the therapist/loving parent. While the former choice is very likely to end poorly, the latter choice is not without issues either. It requires one to slowly abandon the feeling of being a victim and to build up a personality which is not inextricably linked with the role of being a victim.

Are you a victim or a person?

In the therapist/loving parent role, one tries to understand one's own actions (the traumatised child's) and feelings in the context of the trauma that had been suffered. Exploring this trauma in a controlled, safe setting is paramount to better learn and understand it. Together, the traumatised child and therapist/loving parent can experience these memories and associated feelings, with the latter able to add a new level of context and comprehension to just what has happened, and why it should be left in the past.

The traumatised child's behavioural patterns are unmistakable in one's daily thoughts, feelings and actions. The original single or repeated act of violence may have disrupted the child's world so much that all they could do was to patch over these memories with equally strong emotions, seeking coping mechanisms to deal with the psychological and mental stresses that this causes. A simple feeling of discomfort over time grows into a feeling of continuous apprehension and fear. The act of being physically touched may end up evoking strong feelings of revulsion.


If there is one thing which I have learned over the past decades, it is that it is extremely easy to not be aware of being a victim, and also very easy to live that victim role to the fullest extent. Not questioning one's own dysfunctional behaviour, nor being aware of anything that may have happened in the past.

I mean, sure, the roughly fifteen years that I spent dealing with the ignorance and unwillingness of the medical system were by no means fun, to the point where for my psychotherapist at the time it was sufficient to chalk it up as the cause for the PTSD with which he diagnosed me. Yet there was more than just that. The more time passed, the more it became obvious that my struggles in the medical system was more about re-traumatising and re-victimisation. I could after all remember dysfunctional behaviour from my side years before my mishaps with doctors.

Small details kept bugging me, such as my mother asking at one point whether anyone had abused me when I was a young child, to her recalling how my personality had dramatically changed when I was about five years old, with me no longer accepting any kind of physical contact, caressing or embracing. It all made for an eerie possibility, which allowed me to finally place the continuous feeling of intense sadness and apprehension. This lead to the resurgence of fragments of memories and sensations. All of unspeakable, traumatic things.

The intervening years between that original trauma and today have not been kind to me, either. From being bullied at school for years, to my parents divorcing, to my struggles as an intersex person in the medical system, to repeatedly suffering physical, psychological and sexual abuse, to having my money and belongings stolen, I had every reason to feel like a victim. Because I am one.


Yet the thing which therapist me has been able to convince traumatised child me of is that one can never live a normal, happy life if one cannot let go of the feeling of being a victim. This letting go involves drawing a line between 'then' and 'now'. The trauma of the past has to be seen as a contamination that if left unchecked will corrupt one's life for now and forever. Since this happens by the generating of new, corrupted memories through one's actions and responses, one must make sure that all of these actions and responses are untainted by the trauma(s).

Feeling apprehensive about something when you know it's harmless? Just do it. Work towards those small leaps of faith (or fate), where one trusts reason over emotions and feelings. Listen to the anxious voice in the back of your mind telling you that you can still get out of something, that you can still dodge those actions, those responsibilities, those opportunities. You can look at all the seemingly easy excuses the part of your brain corrupted by trauma offers you.

And then ignore all of it.

Because if you give into the trauma, if you accept feeling like a victim, accept being re-traumatised over and over, the trauma will have transformed you from a person into a victim. By living your life as a victim through the lens of the trauma, you give up everything that could have been.


Not living my life through the traumas of the past is very tough. Usually you'd let your subconscious mind wander around, dragging up bits and pieces that form feelings and semi-coherent thoughts that your conscious mind can then take and put into words and actions. Yet the same subconscious mind is the very same that has been the most corrupted by the trauma, and thus it is unreliable. Every single thing that my conscious mind gets handed by my subconscious mind has to be checked, re-checked and validated for being free of the taint of trauma.

Anything that feels defeatist, or helpless, or needlessly negative, or otherwise 'smells' wrong is discarded and replaced with a conscious thought as my conscious mind has to steer my feelings to remain untainted as well. It's a constant struggle to remain on top, yet it is a necessary one.


Theoretically, by remaining on top of this process, one can finally draw that line between 'then' and 'now', with it becoming easier as the last tainted memories are pushed away into the past by new, untainted memories and experiences.

Even if the feeling of trauma remains palpable, the most important thing is that one will have done their utmost to live life as a person, instead of a victim. Because to live one's live as a victim is to have lived no life at all.


Maya

Some monsters really exist

As a child, who doesn't know the instinctive fear of keeping a limb outside of the protective shell of one's duvet or blanket? The thought of a monster existing underneath one's bed, inside the closet or elsewhere in one's room is almost like an essential part of everyone's childhood. For most it is something which we look back on more as a cherished memory, along with other silliness that we did or believed in as a child.

Some children are not so lucky, however. They find that some monsters are real, as they suffer various forms of physical, psychological or even sexual abuse at the hands of older children or adults. Instead of 'growing out of it', the constant confirmation makes them ever more anxious and aware of the next attack and the next monster. The next beating or humiliation.


As I struggle to find my way through the fuzzy memories of a childhood trauma along with many subsequent traumatic events of psychological, physical and abusive sexual nature, it's becoming ever more obvious to me that not only are the monsters which I once thought to be hiding in the darkness absolutely real, somewhere along the way I have become more and more like those monsters myself.

I guess it is inevitable when I read through the medical literature on post-traumatic stress disorder and related that such things happen. Children who suffered abuse are after all more likely to become abusers themselves, as if the wrongful behaviour has impressed itself so much in the child's brain that it is the first thing that jumps to mind when a similar situation presents itself. Even if the roles have been reversed.


Whatever this adult man and others did to me when I was about five years old involved a lot of yelling and accusations at the end, leaving me shocked and terrified alone in a dark room. I still hate yelling and accusations. I hope that it's not something which I subconsciously do to others anyway. Just like how being touched by others in any way still makes me feel terrified, as it brings back those old memories of being violated. I don't want to yell. I don't want to accuse. I don't want to do anything to others without it being okay.

I can still feel the dark monsters lurking inside my mind, yearning to take over. Maybe it's just how the human brain tries to defend itself, by putting aggression against aggression, violence against violence. Or just by running away and avoiding any kind of confrontation and conflict.

When the bullies during primary school and beyond encircled me with yelling and insults, or tried to cut me off while I was cycling home, or punched me in the gut and laughed as I buckled over in agony, or spit into my face... I never fought back. I just took it as they say on the chin and tried to ignore it. That is, until the dark monster took over.

During primary school I ended up beating up the leader of the gang of bullies after many months of them bullying me. At least that's what his mother told my mother, and the bullying also mostly ceased after that. I do however not recall anything of it. When this former bully ended up becoming a friend, I accepted that too. What it did teach me was that sometimes violence is okay. Which is how I ended up slapping this bully during HS across the face after yet another bullying session. When the teacher confronted the two of us about it, I apologised to the bully. And that group of bullies were friendly ever after.


When to be friendly? When to be aggressive or even hostile? When to yell or remain calm? They're things one is supposed to learn along with other social skills as one grows up. As I found myself mostly hiding from the world ever since I was five, most of my knowledge came from books, and I found myself enamoured of a pacifist attitude. Always be friendly, always be helpful, never raise your voice or act hostile. Neither words nor stones will break my spirit.

The big tests for that attitude came first in the form of the supremely unhelpful attitude from medical personnel along with psychologists when it came to even acknowledging the fact that I have in fact an intersex body and a pretty unique type of intersex at that. To spend over a decade facing adults who feel qualified to demolish every single part of your self-image, sense of reality and ego in general, it makes you question a lot of things.

Another test came in the form of this woman who wormed her way into my life, using my offer to help her fix her laptop issues to make herself a part of my life, to the point where she somehow ended up being present at some job interviews that I did at the time. She convinced me that her parents were practically evil criminals and that I should help her escape from there. That ended up with us sharing the same apartment for months, and somehow she had made me believe that I loved her and that we were a couple.

I don't think it is normal for even couples if one of them ends up randomly staring at the other while the latter is taking a shower, or to only spend days watching TV and chatting online. She'd also tell me in a loud voice that everything that I liked or thought funny or interesting was stupid and uninteresting before going on a tirade about how stupid humans really are and how much better people like herself are.

She'd also force me to spend watching late-night TV with her so that I'd appear sleep-deprived at work every day and often had to force myself to stay awake during the day. In that state she got me to accompany her all around, to fulfil all her whims and essentially make me into her slave and property. This all came crashing down during another tirade from her towards me, which had me barricading myself in the bedroom while she was on the phone with my mother, telling my mom how bad things were going with me, but that she'd take care of it, no worries.

If one ever needs to know what it feels like to be part of a Stephen King story, there you got it. Think Misery, only with less cutting off of body parts.


After decades of finding monsters where one least expects them, it's not easy to go back to pretending that the world is safe again. Not with those monsters giggling to each other in the dark corners of one's mind, ready to pounce the moment I drop my guard. There has to be a way to deal with this situation beyond being eternally terrified, however.

I have found at this point that I hate feeling terrified, as well as all other feelings akin to it. There has to be nothing more pleasant than feeling safe and secure, being so at ease that you can just drop your guard and not worry for a while. As things are, I consider it a good day when I didn't feel completely unhappy or terrified that day. With monsters literally lurking right around the corner, one has to celebrate the little things in life, after all.


This should be the part where one wakes up, with a parent sitting on the edge of your bed to tell you that it is all okay, that monsters aren't real.


Maya

One doesn't simply grow up to become an adult

Each of us is the product of our past. Every part of our childhood, teenage years and the years afterwards have left their mark on us, whether positive or negative. Our personalities have been shaped by these experiences, and the way that we responded to them back then. As a result, much of our behaviour as adults is the result of these earlier years. This shows us both why these years are so important, and also why it is so hard to change one's personality and behaviour afterwards.

Recently, a friend pointed me towards schema therapy [1], which is a form of integrative psychotherapy, aimed at addressing and treating personality disorders which result from such issues in one's past. The concept is that by reflecting on one's past and analysing one's current personality traits and behaviour, one can link the two, deducing the kind of deficit or traumas in one's past that led to these personality disorders.

Schema therapy uses the concept of 'modes', to group certain states of mind, differentiating between 'child' and 'parent' modes. The child mode is hereby essentially about one's own behaviour, whereas the parent mode is about how one judges one's own behaviour. Every adult human has a child and parent mode, which allows a healthy human being to switch between the responsible state of being an adult (healthy adult) with the carefree state of a healthy child during which the person can relax and have fun. The latter being crucial to avoiding burnout and other effects of stress.


Sometimes when reading stories or playing certain video games which have the themes of growing up into adulthood I can feel this understanding of what is involved in this process of growing up and learning to deal with not only oneself, but also others and society. It also makes me painfully aware of this child that found itself too afraid of contact with others because of childhood abuse to do anything but hide, read books and lose itself in the world of science and technology. A child whose emotional state of maturity is consequently wholly insufficient to match the demands of adulthood.

There are hints of 'healthy child' and 'healthy adult' in my behaviour, but what strongly resonates with me is the 'Vulnerable Child' mode, with the 'Detached Protector' as dysfunctional coping mechanism. Dysfunctional adult mode is the 'Punitive Parent'. Essentially this means a personality with at its core a child that tries its best, but finds itself falling short by the standards of its parent mode, with reprimands and other (perceived) signs of negativity or indifference from both the parent mode and one's environment triggering the dysfunctional coping mechanism.

"Detached Protector is based in escape. Patients in Detached Protector schema mode withdraw, dissociate, alienate, or hide in some way. This may be triggered by numerous stress factors or feelings of being overwhelmed. When a patient with insufficient skills is in a situation involving excessive demands, it can trigger a Detached Protector response mode. Stated simply, patients become numb in order to protect themselves from the harm or stress of what they fear is to come, or to protect themselves from fear of the unknown in general."

While obviously one cannot travel back into time to undo the events and choices that led to such a personality disorder, being aware of it is the first step towards being able to address it. For myself, the struggle to understand myself and my environment has been something with which I have dealt for most of my life. The perceived rejection by my environment, the sense of not living up to anyone's standards, as well as my difficulties with social interactions and relationships, all of it is making my life today so much harder than it should be.

One cannot just decide to become a healthy, functional adult. Most of the responsibility there lies with one's environment as one grows up, with especially the way one was treated and taught during the early formative years having laid the foundations of one's personality and sense of self.


One day I hope to find a way to become a better parent to myself, to the child that still finds itself trapped in this dark room, with the abuse and accusations still fresh in its mind.


Maya


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_therapy

Childhood abuse and the fear of becoming an adult

After one has become aware of the realisation that one's childhood wasn't was as trouble-free and happy as one may have assumed, it is this realisation that provides the mirror in which one can finally reflect on one's life so far. Especially the troubles one had and possibly still has, such as the trouble to blend in with other adults.

Thinking about it, one wonders just what it is that makes one so different. I mean, sure, one's past has been rather traumatic, and nobody expects someone who has been afflicted with PTSD to lead a perfectly normal life. Yet this is more than just trauma like that which a war veteran or a victim of violent crime might have. They can actually remember a life in which things were more or less normal, before the traumatic event.


Part of the reflection process when coming to terms with childhood abuse is the acknowledgement that the monologue which one kept repeating when tasked to think about one's childhood, along with some choice memories that would fit with a carefree childhood alibi, that all of this was just part of protecting oneself from the truth. That in reality, nothing about one's childhood was happy or carefree. At least not until the thing happened that apparently shattered one's mind at a young age.

When my mother described to me the drastic change that I underwent very suddenly around the age of five years old, transforming from a happy, carefree child into a withdrawn child who rejected any form of physical contact... it is now that I can look back on the years between now and then, and see that little has changed. I made this coping mechanism part of my new 'self', and I still am that traumatised child.

It isn't just physical touch that I find repulsive or terrifying to this day, though it is the most obvious sign. Whatever it was that adults did to me at that young age, it appears to have instilled such a strong and fundamental sense of repulsion and fear of anything to do with 'adults' that trying to grasp the full scope of it is impossible.


I think that adults as a whole have made a pretty miserable society, in which nobody can agree on anything, where help is often nowhere to be found and the wealthy freely exploit the less wealthy. I can see that an individual's life has little value in society and that for all but the wealthy it is merely an exercise in self-exploitation at the behest of others until one's last breath. The lucky ones will not have to deal with being exploited as well.

I cannot forgive the adults who made me feel this way. Who took away most of my childhood and ruined my life in so many ways. I just wish that I could remember more than these half-remembered glimpses and sensations of intense terror and panic. Who it was, and why.


I don't feel like I am a complete human being at this point. Having been emotionally and psychologically withdrawn for so many years obviously didn't help. It's only recently that I am beginning to regain a sense of self, and discovering that truly a lot of time has passed since I was that five year old kid.

Yet it is with absolute terror that I find that my view of society and this world isn't changing along with it.


Everything about society is terrifying, unforgiving, cold, harsh, unhealthy, deceiving and delusional. The only escapes that I can see are those where one can flee into the realm of logic and reason, like that of science and technology, or into innocent fun like that of cutesy video games. I feel that intellectually there is a lot in this world that I can and would love to learn and understand. I can see that there's a lot of beauty and a true sense of wonder, yet this too lies beyond the realm of human society. Human society only faces inwards and only concerns itself with humans and laws and regulations and conflicts between humans. It stumbles around blindly.

For the past decades, the realm of science and technology has been where I have been hiding, mentally. Here there are none of the requirements of human society. Only the willingness and capacity to be curious and learn.


What terrifies me about becoming an 'adult'? Part of it is simply the terror of becoming like all of the adults who have harmed and hurt me over the years. The mere thought of accepting any part of what they are and stand for is truly repulsive. It feels as though I would somehow approve of their actions towards me, by becoming more like them.

That is the core of it all, I guess. Inside of me, I can still intensely feel the pain and terror of the child. In the way that I react to situations, and the mindsets that I slip into when my post-traumatic stress disorder gets triggered feel as if regressing to this terrified child. Far too often, adults today still manage to hit exactly on those trigger points, where their actions, words and so on can only be interpreted by my mind as being threatening. Threatening in the way that shattered my mind once, years ago.


It makes one wonder whether there truly is a way to deal with, or even give childhood trauma a place.


Maya

Body antagonism

I think it's fair to say that the past decades for me have been a period of growing closer to my body. From having literally no idea what my body even looked like, to getting to know it the way it really is. This period of getting over being estranged from my body has given me a lot of food for thought, also because of the many things which I have seen and experienced during those years.

For me, the reasons for becoming estranged from my body are many. Partially due to childhood abuse and bullying, partially due to my intersex/chimeric condition, the result was that by the time I became aware of this and tried to change it, I had some seriously incorrect ideas about my body. I had been told what my body looked like, and taken that to be the truth, but as I tried to match that up with what I saw in the mirror back in 2005, I both could and couldn't see it.

The thing was that I was projecting what I thought my body and face looked like onto the image which I saw in the mirror. Only through objective measurements, and through the feedback from people who had not known me before that time, was I able to begin adjusting this self-image. This was a time when I was seeing the image which I thought I saw in the mirror literally shifting between the projection and reality. This period taught me that sometimes what I think I'm seeing is in fact not what my eyes are seeing. Question your own perception.


Throughout the following years, I would be taught to dislike and hate my body. The medical and mental health professionals at the gender teams were very clear about me having to hate everything 'masculine' about my body, and to work towards the goal of complete 'feminisation'. Because I wanted to become a woman on account of being 'transgender/transsexual'. The conclusion of my body being that of a man was repeated over and over. I looked like how a male would, was the conclusion based on that. But that's not what I saw. Nor what many others saw.

When I first let my hair grow out during the period that I still thought that I was male, ironically to look 'tougher', this practically immediately caused my environment to stop identifying me as male. Instead I would get asked whether I was a girl or a guy, would get told to leave the male public restroom by cleaning staff, and basically got identified as a woman without ever having tried to be identified as such. After many years of this, I had to quit trying to get my intersex condition diagnosed for a while as I simply had to get my official gender social contract changed from 'male' to 'female' as the constant misidentification and smoothing over of resulting issues was getting to me.

At the same hospital where a specialist diagnosed me with 'autoparagynaecophilia' ('liking to think that one looks like a female, when one is not'), the first remark by a urologist who got called in during an examination was: "She really looks like a girl!" when she saw me. Well, then.


When did I feel the most hostile and antagonistic towards my body? When those 'specialists' and 'professionals' were pushing me to accept conclusions which did not match up with what my own body was telling me. When I felt uncertain about what my body really was and felt frustrated about this. I remember feeling okay with having those butchers cut up my body and 'normalise' it to fit society's views of what a 'woman' looks like. Yet this wasn't my own free choice. One's own free choice is never to have one's body cut up or harmed.

What I hold for true is that any act that results in one's own body getting harmed in some way, whether it's for social or personal reasons, is an act of body antagonism. It says that one's body isn't good enough, that it is imperfect and needs to be 'fixed'. It doesn't matter whether it's a tattoo, piercing, or more invasive body modifications including genital mutilation surgery, all of it is an assault on one's body. It's not an act of love or a caring gesture. It's a declaration of war and the usually permanent alteration of a body without cause.

A caring gesture, or body amity, is to take of one's body. To keep it healthy. To not smoke or use drugs. To not drink alcohol and stay out of the Sun to protect one's skin. To have blemishes taken care of to improve its natural looks. Body amity is to have accepted one's body or being in the process of doing so. It is an essential part in the unification of mind and body.


Thus, body antagonism is the exact opposite of body amity. It is to treat one's body with disrespect. To pollute and harm it. To mark it with graffiti and metal fencing. To rip out parts and replace them with something that is a mockery of what used to be. To override and enforce control. Body antagonism can be born from societal pressures to conform, but also from a variety of mental disorders, or a combination of both.

In the end, body antagonism is the opposite of the unification of body and mind. It is an open declaration of war between one's body and mind, which just happens to be a war which neither side can ever truly hope to win.


I'm glad that my body accepts me. I'm glad that I can accept my body. I want to respect my body, same as it does its utmost to respect me, the mind.


Maya

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

Erasure of intersex identity through enforcing of transsexuality identity

The questions regarding my treatment as an intersex person at the hands of medical and mental health professionals over the past years have been, and still are, a strong motivator in researching exactly what it was that made this group of professionals persistently apply the wrong diagnosis ('transsexuality') even when the medical evidence made it obvious that my body is indeed that of an intersex person. As has become abundantly clear by now with the changes to my body's phenotype (courtesy of a nearly finished puberty), my intersex condition most closely matches that of a true hermaphrodite, in the rare sub-form without ovotestes, but with separate testicular and ovarian tissue.

What was it that made these professionals consistently fail to diagnose this condition, even after two independent medical opinions based on a 2007 MRI scan both confirmed this condition, followed by a 2011 exploratory surgery which again confirmed this intersex condition?


While understanding the true motivations behind their decisions and reasoning will never be truly possible, to me the most worrying aspect is that the underlying motivations can only truly be based on either ignorance or malice. Here ignorance can lead to the subject doing harm while being convinced that they are doing the right thing. Malice on the other hand has the subject well-aware of the fact that their actions are doing harm, but an overriding factor (ego) makes this harm seem irrelevant in light of higher goals.

So then, what reason could one have to so consistently get things wrong? One conceivable reason is that when I first visited a Dutch gender team, in 2005, I had nothing but suspicions, and their knowledge of intersex was limited to the harmful drivel in the WPATH standard and kin [1]. As back then my puberty hadn't really progressed yet into a level where my female phenotype was undeniable, I seemed to not fit into their 'intersex' category ('true hermaphroditism' being quite rare), and thus got put into the 'transsexual' category instead.

This is supported by the subsequent talks with psychologists at that gender team, who all kept pushing me to finally admit that I was a boy who wanted to become a girl, even as I struggled to see myself as anything other than a child at that point in time. Just a child who wanted to understand their body.

Across multiple Dutch gender teams and a number of specialists both in the Netherlands and elsewhere, the same assumptions were made:

• I was biologically male.
• I wanted to become a woman.

The Dutch gender teams had refused to communicate with their (German) colleagues who had judged the first MRI scan. Instead they would come up with contradicting opinions to the original reports, refuting any points that would disprove this assumption of me having a male biology. The results of the 2011 surgery (surgery report & biopsy findings of the testicular tissue) would end up not swaying their opinions either.

The second point was something which I had never expressed. My question to the gender teams and other specialists had been to help me figure out what was going on with my body, as it had become quite apparent to me that it wasn't a male body. Yet for some reason this got ignored. It is very likely that in the end it was cognitive bias on the end of the people who I talked to and who judged over my case that made them incapable of understanding what I was asking of them.

By one psychiatrist especially it was hammered in that I couldn't be intersex, and that if I wanted to get any help, I had to pretend to be transsexual. By that time I was feeling so emotionally worn out that even faking being transsexual seemed like an acceptable alternative to getting answers to all the questions which I still had about my body. Even if looking back I knew it would have been a catastrophically poor choice.


So the cognitive bias, that makes these specialists try to cram everything and everyone into a 'transsexual' category seems to be at fault, then? In the most forgiving, in a 'the road to Hell is paved with good intentions' kind of sense, definitely. While one cannot discount the possibility of malicious intent, it would not have changed the damage that would have been inflicted by a scenario due to sheer ignorance and the blinders of cognitive bias.

This concerns damage that centers mostly around the following:

• Ignoring phenotype: enforcing the illusion of an incorrect phenotype.
• Ignoring intent: assuming desires that are not present, ignoring actual intent.
• Identity erasure: the use of brainwashing to accept the other side's suggestions as their own will.

Feeling in contact with one's body is essential if one wants to be emotionally resilient [2]. By reinforcing the illusion of me having a male phenotype, I became more susceptible to their suggestions as I began to question what my own senses could perceive. By questioning my intent they attempted to coax me towards accepting their suggestions [3]. Ultimately I would have lost my own sense of self, of purpose and direction. Identity erased.

The irony in all of this probably has to be that as part of a transsexuality diagnosis, one gets accosted with accusations about one's gender, when no such thing exists [4]. I wouldn't be able to tell you back then whether I felt more 'male' or 'female' and these days the question seems even more ridiculous to me. All I ever wanted to be was myself, and that hasn't changed. After all, one's brain couldn't care less about one's phenotype or genitals, being all sex-less [5].


And that's it, I guess. Just one more shining example of human intelligence struggling to outperform its own shadow. Cognitive bias and ego getting in the way of providing help and answering questions. Just me at what appears to be the end of that particular medical and mental roller coaster, with nothing gained but PTSD and what feels like most of my life so far tossed away for no good reason.

It almost makes one want to cry.


Maya


[1] http://mayaposch.com/intersex-controversy.php
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-body-anchors-reality.html
[3] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-eternal-war.html
[4] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/gender-is-social-contract-not-part-of.html
[5] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/your-brain-doesnt-care-what-genitals.html

PTSD and accepting the death sentence

Dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been a near life-long challenge for me, even if for most of that time I wasn't aware of having it. The biggest challenge for oneself I would say is to define what PTSD is. Of course one can read up in the literature about how PTSD affects the brain, changing the structure and functioning of entire sections. But that doesn't tell one what it is like to experience it, or how to deal with it.

Is PTSD a threat? No, it's your brain having been remodelled to fit a high-threat environment. Forever. That's why it'll happily send your mind careening from one perceived threat to another, helpfully assisted by a society which has not the faintest inkling of how full of easily-perceived-as-one threats it is. From sudden noises, to poorly communicated messages, to aggressively formulated bureaucratic communications. You're aware of this, and manage to eventually down regulate the resulting 'something is going to try and kill me in a second' reflex. Usually. There are still the jitters that can persist for hours or days.

PTSD basically makes you very poor at dealing with stress and lots of environmental triggers. But that's what it does. Not what it is.


The shape which I feel matches PTSD the closest is that of loss and the associated grieving process. The thing that has been lost is oneself: the 'you' that existed before the trauma, the trauma the death sentence and subsequent execution. As one's self (personality) is built up out of a mosaic of one's memories and experiences, the traumatic event(s) has the result of essentially destroying this mosaic, killing the personality of the person in question.

To deal with PTSD, then, is to work towards accepting this loss. Accept the loss and essentially the death of oneself. Of this previous incarnation.


Though I never got to know the five-year old me before they were killed in the traumatic event that would follow, I do know from things which my mother and others have told me what that child was like. An energetic, open and always cheerful child, who'd be friends with everyone and loved life. I think I would have liked this person. Yet I have to accept that I'll never be that person. This child was killed. I only have the fragmented memories of that child.

I do remember the child and teenager who grew up after this child's death. None of the openness, energy and cheerfulness. Withdrawn, uncertain about others and themselves. Questioning everything about life and the point of being alive in the first place. Then the death of that person over many years, through countless torture and interrogation sessions, physical and sexual abuse. That person is dead now, too.


Accepting these deaths feels right to me. This child and the other person tried their best, but sometimes your best isn't good enough. So you are killed. It's not their fault. It's not my fault. I don't have to feel guilty about their deaths. Though I still feel angry about what happened to them, the only thing that I can do is to try my best to live, learn from their experiences.

Only through acceptance can one move on.


Maya

Adulthood: The grey twilight between hope and suicidal despair

Whenever it is mentioned that someone is 'coming of age', it is usually portrayed as something positive. To grow up, to gain new rights and responsibilities. To have the world open up to them. That's the romantic version at least.

For too many of us it never manages to reach that 90s sitcom levels of endearingness, however. The main feelings that I find myself struggling with at having accomplished reaching adulthood by staying alive, are those of disgust with humanity in general, and a mix of despair and terror as I contemplate my own safety and future.


It should be obvious to anyone who is even mildly sane that humanity as a whole is far from sane. With the widespread beliefs in religions, cults and things like hoarding property, with wanton violence and destruction by the biggest bullies in the playground, all that the adult world is, is a daycare centre's playground without the requisite adult supervision.

Those who rule the playground through might and usually a clout of lackeys are the ones who set the rules, who determine who lives and who dies. Because this isn't just your local daycare centre's playground, no. On this playground the children kill and are killed. Even as no one seems to be able to truly explain why any of it is happening, the playground is a near-constant warzone when it isn't filled with the sound of bickering and suffering.


Normally a child can grow up in relative safety and oblivion from this adult playground. Others are not so lucky. I still cannot remember exactly what was done to me or by who back when I was five years old, but that first introduction to the world of adults has left a lasting impression. I never want to be an adult. Not if it means becoming like those people.

Never truly having been granted the right to exist, with psychologists, doctors and others having made it abundantly clear that I'm also insane and also an abomination with this body of mine and also am imagining everything, it feels like being that kid in PE class who didn't get picked by either team and has to sit it out at the sides. Before getting beaten up after said PE class. For being weird. And wearing glasses. And reading books.


I don't like the world which these so-called 'adults' have made. I note the violence, lack of tolerance and respect, the enforcing of baseless views upon others and so on. It shouldn't feel so dystopian, but at the same time one can only admit that the care-free life with the happy ending is reserved for films and sitcoms. And yet this is the only world that is offered to one.


To me the main question I guess is then whether after more than a decade of surviving the medical system and related, how much do I want to struggle through this adult playground? Carve out my spot and somehow stay safe from the bullies. None of that sounds like particularly fun to me. I can feel my mood swinging between careful optimism and despair. Nothing about it seems particularly easy or fun, yet it's hard for me to tell when something is truly that bad, or when it's my PTSD blending in with reality.

As a veteran of the War of Dehumanisation, I have become maybe allergic to any system that does not acknowledge people as such. Call it bureaucracy, regulations, the law, etc. All of it is an easy shortcut to not have to think about people as living beings with their own feelings and dreams. It were humans who made up rules, nations and bureaucracies. We humans get it wrong more often than that we get it right. That's why it's essential that we are always ready to revisit any rules and systems we created to improve them.

This is sadly also exactly the part where humans fail so badly. Call it cognitive bias or any of those other cute psychological excuses for humans refusing to use this supposed 'human intelligence' for intellectual purposes. In the end the result is that tragically, the average child is more perceptive and fair than the average adult human.


Maya

Changing my Gender Social Contract so that I can wear comfy, colourful clothing

It's sometimes interesting to look back on the past years and note just what changes have made the biggest impacts on my life. Back in 2005, when I first found out about being intersex, I still had a male social contract (male GSC [1]) and was attempting to behave accordingly. Fifteen years later I have switched to a female GSC with as only surgical intervention being the removal of the half-formed testicles.

Even though my body's phenotype is that of a woman, it being stuck in puberty limbo for years, as it tried to sort itself out, has given me the opportunity to really see the pros and cons of both the male and female GSC. One with me as a feminine-looking, but flat-chested 'guy', the other as a regular woman with an ideal figure. What are the most noticeable differences that I experienced in either social role?

I have to admit that it's mostly the clothing, really. While part of me misses being able to go topless during the summer without having to cover up, I also have to admit that there are a dazzling amount of clothing types, styles and colours that are simply unavailable with a male GSC. No skirts, no airy shirts and tops, no showing of tummy in public, no displaying of skin beyond certain acceptable limits. The male GSC is pretty darn harsh when it comes to what is deemed acceptable. In that regard, wearing a bra plus airy top in summer that leaves one's tummy free seems like a small compromise.


I remember clothes shopping back with the male GSC. How boring and limited the selection was. The thrill of finding anything with a colour that wasn't black, dark-blue or grey. Looking at old photos from the 1990s and earlier makes one wonder just what in the heck happened there. Did some religious cleric pronounce a fatwa against colourful clothing worn by men when I wasn't looking?

Since my body is obviously that of a woman, male clothing is comically oversized for me, with even 'S'-sized shirts falling loosely around my body and the smallest commonly available male jeans sliding straight off onto my hips. This caused me a lot of grief back in my male GSC days, as finding clothing that actually fits me was practically impossible back then. Definitely the wrong body type.


Having clothing that fits properly, then. In a wide variety of colours, styles, formats and fabrics. Anything goes. Anything fits. It's one of those little joys in life that are easy to forget next to the other discoveries during those years, such as unlearning the male walking pattern (which had caused massive lower back pains) and unlearning trying to talk like a male (which had practically destroyed my voice). In that sense, switching from the male to the female GSC was akin to regaining my freedom after having been locked away in the wrong social contract for years.

What it has taught me above all is just how silly it is that society has these GSCs to begin with, how it enforces these ever-changing rules about what is and isn't allowed, even to the detriment of the individual involved. By essentially forcing me to dress, talk and walk like a stereotypical male according to this social contract, it deprived me of suitable clothing and it may have damaged my voice and lower spine. It deprived me of my individuality and overrode my very body.


Everyone should be allowed and encouraged from their very first minutes on this Earth to discover who they are and how their body works. Their environment should support them along the way, so that they can be themselves. They should not have a body image or expectations about their body forced upon them. My own experiences show just how much damage can be inflicted when a child is told that they're a 'boy' or a 'girl'. Until the beginning of puberty such differentiation essentially does not exist, after all.

Even though me walking and talking the wrong way was more a matter of me imitating what I saw around me, me being told from a young age that I was a boy did make it clear that I was expected to behave like other boys. I should not have felt forced to talk and move in a way that physically hurt me, just like how I should not have felt compelled to wear baggy, drab, ill-fitting clothing, just because society's enforced male GSC says that it is Right and Proper.


Maya


[1] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/gender-is-social-contract-not-part-of.html

Society's attitude towards intersex is a psychological disorder

A few days ago on social media there was a bit of a kerfuffle about biological sex on account of someone apparently having made the statement that people cannot change between (binary) biological sex. The resulting lawsuit and online drama resulted in a number of people with anti-intersex views venting their spleen as well, such as in one particular Twitter post where an individual insisted on using the anti-intersex term 'Disorder of Sex Development' (DSD), also referring to intersex as a 'less accurate term'. This particular post being about discounting intersex as of any relevance in the debate on biological sex as it's a mere fluke.

Suffice it to say that reading such a statement, and the resulting feedback to the response I posted to said statement was quite upsetting. Not only is one's existence discounted as a statistical fluke and one's biological relevance erased, but in addition it is hammered home that one is a tragic sufferer of a medical disorder, so why hasn't a caring surgeon yet 'normalised' all that is so clearly wrong with your genitals and the rest of your body?


Maybe it's just that over a decade of attempts by doctors and psychologists of trying to convince me that I should normalise my body, whether it was by outright denying my intersex condition, or by attempting to convince me that I was the tragic sufferer of gender dysphoria and that I actually really wanted to have them turn me into a beautiful woman, removing those unsightly 'male' bits. This could have made me somewhat sensitive and conceivably slightly traumatised when it comes to this subject.

Over the past years I have learned very well that my body is exquisitely healthy. I have no genetic disorders, no allergies, nothing worrying in my family that could come haunt me later in life. And here I have a bunch of cretins insisting that there is something wrong with my body. Not just those cretins on social media, but those medical 'professionals' equally so. Can I please love my body without their blathering?


This obsession with binarism, of this imaginary division between some illusionary 'male' and female' element in genetics, the human brain and the human phenotype in general is rather worrying. It's a kind of obsession that goes beyond an every day obsession straight into a 'delusional disorder' [1] diagnosis. Those affected persist even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that the brain is unisex, that genetics do not dictate even physical sex (e.g. in the case of CAIS) and that the overall complexity of genetics and the resulting phenotypes make any attempt to categorise it as either 'male' or 'female' is foolhardy at best.

And meanwhile intersex individuals like yours truly feel like they're being hunted down on social media and in society, because one side claims us to be the absolute, One True Proof that somehow legitimises things like transgenderism, while some feminists and others push hard to make it clear that intersex is an aberration, that just proves that binarism is the One True Religion. For the rest of society... intersex is so poorly understood that it seems to be mostly associated with things like pornography and cross-dressing actors in those flicks. Oh, and nobody ever talks with us.


I guess that after years of this, combined with my own experiences in the medical system, along with the sickening awareness that intersex genital mutilation (IGM) of infants is still a daily thing, it's hard to feel like being intersex doesn't somehow dehumanises you. Do I feel invisible? You bet. Do I feel like anyone is free to attack me and others in the most cruel way possible for being intersex without repercussions? Absolutely.

There's no punishment for calling intersex an aberration, a disorder or abnormality. Not the way that other minorities are protected. While society cheers on the binarist conversion of children (because they want it), the non-medical 'normalisation' surgeries (IGM) on intersex infants continue unabated, with nobody caring about their views, opinions, or the large number of them who (oddly enough) later turn out to feel unhappy with the choice that was forced on them by those adults. Because we intersex individuals are apparently less than human and our views, feelings or opinions do not matter.


This most recent confrontation with the traumatic part of being intersex has made me realise just how horribly sick society is. That I can have a body that is healthy and yet I end up being traumatised like this. That a healthy infant can be born, yet only to have it receive genital mutilation before it's old enough to speak its first words. That somehow being born intersex means that society will do its utmost to shame, humiliate, normalise and ostracise you. Just because.

It shouldn't be me who has the therapist to work through these traumas and somehow learn to trust doctors again despite all the abuse that I have suffered. It shouldn't be me, or all those others who are suffering needlessly. So many millions of individuals who could have lived happy, carefree lives, but who got crippled and marked like this, simply because society refuses to acknowledge that it has a problem. Why are we even trying to please the rest of society when all we get is this kind of wanton cruelty in return?


I'd really like that restraining order against this delusional part of humanity at this point. I'm not into that kind of abusive relationship, even if they're still convinced that people like me should be okay with it.


Maya


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusional_disorder

What remains after everything else has been lost

Looking back at the stories which have emotionally affected me the most over the years, I can now see the pattern that connects them. It's a pattern of loss. From anime series like Kanon, Saishuuheiki Kanojo, Noir, Death Parade, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Haibane Renmei, Hotaru no Haka ('Grave of the Fireflies'), Black Lagoon and Knights of Sidonia to a series like Star Trek Voyager, the overarching theme is that of loss, with the struggle to try and overcome it. Sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing.

So then why this strong emotional response with the experiencing and struggle against loss? It seems fairly obvious, I would say. From whatever was done to me when I was five years old and the loss of my childhood, to my struggles to regain a semblance of a normal life, even as I felt more parts of myself stripped away as I finished high school. Then the madness of dealing with the medical system in the context of trying to figure out my body's intersex condition. Which just led to everything I thought I knew about myself and my body questioned, thrown into controversy, with differing professional opinions essentially stripping away the last vestiges of self.


That's what it feels like to lose everything you are. Everything you think, feel, see or are is gone. There's only the absolute uncertainty and the loss of self that comes with it. Even now that I think I am on the way to recovery, reintegrating memories and confronting decades of traumas, there are countless moments when everything just falls apart again around me. Reintegrating the body with a fractured psyche isn't an easy task.

Yet there's something that I have never lost. Even as I took the decision to end my life - now years ago - only me having succeeded at that attempt could have snuffed out this inner flame that is the most essential core of my being. I can visualise it as this bright, yellow flame that pulsates softly with the beating of my heart. Sometimes it's a bit dimmer. Sometimes it moves uncertainly, as if there's a breeze threatening to extinguish it, but it's always been there.

I can close my eyes and slip inside myself, to that perfect darkness, with only this flame inside. To observe it, and with it myself. To observe my own state of being in an objective manner. To reach that point of perfect focus.


It is interesting that seemingly only through such negative experiences can one seem to truly reach this part of oneself, and with it change the way one sees the world. I remember all too well that when I first watched Star Trek Voyager during the 90s when it aired in the Netherlands, I was basically still a child, and I found too many episodes of the series to be rather boring, not getting a lot of it. Watching it a few years ago again, it was a completely different experience. Suddenly I could see and experience the profound sense of loss, frustration, hope and desperate struggle for survival, with almost every episode being this dark descent into despair and madness.

Then this profound sense of loss as Voyager made it back to Earth after all those years of struggling, and feeling this renewed sense of loss as now this family that had formed on the ship over the years would now be ripped apart.


I only started watching anime series after 2000, at which point I already appeared to have developed this sensitivity to loss. It has guided my preferences ever since, with each of those aforementioned series moving through a similar pattern. Some ending on a happy note, others hopeful, others bittersweet, others surrendering to the inevitable.

Now it seems that I can move forward, figuring out the sources of loss, and how to deal with it. Not that this is easy in any way. Much like how the main character in Knights of Sidonia can never truly forgive himself, or forget this one person whom he treasured most, it's more about giving such a strong sense of loss a place, framing the memories attached to it, and reminiscing about it when it's appropriate, without it controlling or even destroying one's life.

This is also where the story in Knights of Sidonia is so tough and recognisable to me, as it is not a clean loss, but something that keeps coming back, haunting one over and over, never allowing it to settle in a comfortable spot in one's memories, but growing new claws every time and rending new bloody gashes in one's psyche. Over and over. Then taking one's own hands and having one strangle the person you loved the most in front of your very eyes.


It's not an easy loss to cope with. It's why maybe the only way that I can fully deal with the losses which I have suffered is by actually getting the medical help needed to fully diagnose and treat my intersex condition, to fully reintegrate that part of me, and to allow me to give those traumas and associated sense of loss a place, instead of having every confrontation with doctors and kin being this new episode of those memories growing new fangs and claws, prior to them tearing into my flesh once again.

In order to heal, one must be given the opportunity to do so. To create this opportunity requires others to make this possible. This is hard in a society where most people are lost flames, unaware of their inner self, unable to reflect and understand the concept of loss. Unable to fully comprehend the unbridled joy that comes with something given freely, with a pure heart. A bright flame.


Maya