channeling rage through love and transition
After all these years I still have so much anger within me. I thought that by this point everything that happened leading up to now would feel so small and inconsequential, yet feels more poignant now than ever before. I feel so much sadness within me for the girl who was. I think back at Ava and tears well. I wish I could pick her up and show her the man I am now. I have had so many people insinuate that my childhood and sexual trauma are the sole reasons for my transition; I often wonder myself if that was the reason I needed to change my gender. Did the years of enduring Phil’s (I refuse to call him my father anymore) verbal and physical beatings turn me into a man?
I’ll never forget the second to last time I saw Phil, the last time I went to my childhood home, and I could hear him fucking his girlfriend and afterward walked by my room naked and looked me in the eyes, a disgusting show of repulsive male sexuality that I wish I could carve from my mind. Was it the first boyfriend that I had sex with who covered my mouth and finished inside me when I was begging him to stop and crying from pain, was it that that turned me into a man? When I tried to push him off me he pinned my arms back to immobilize me, and when I sat shivering and hollow he told me he “couldn’t stop”. Was it when my next boyfriend shared my nudes with the entire school and the police called my mom? Mind you, I dated him for two years after this incident. Was it when my friend invited me over to his house and slipped something into my drink and I couldn’t remember that entire day when I knew I had been sober and then he told the entire school we had sex? I’ll never forget when my best friend called me incredulous asking if I had slept with him, and was the first person that told me I had probably been drugged. I was so used to blaming myself I didn’t even initially comprehend that the sole purpose that he had invited me over that day was to rape me without me even knowing. Was it when I was 16-17 and selling sexual content online to adults? Was it when I was in college and the guy I was with loved to fuck me so hard I’d bleed? Was it when that same guy tried to touch and fuck me in front of all of his friends, not once or twice, but MULTIPLE times? And what was so broken within me that I began to seek out exploitative situations?
By the time the pandemic started and we were all forced to move out of our college, I immediately dropped out. At this point my mom had left Phil so I had nowhere to live. While I didn’t know it yet, my aunt, my closest family member and one of my best friends, would take her own life. This was the lowest year of my life. I was alone, broke, homeless, and so fucking angry. I felt like God had just taken a shit on me. I felt stripped of my identity, my femininity felt so raped and empty. It doesn’t fucking matter who I was and what happened to me and what I look like when my entire world had been destroyed. While I had gone my whole life going through phases of looking either masculine or feminine, femininity had become to feel so incredibly alien to me. I would dress up in lingerie, take provocative pictures, do my makeup, flirt with men and women and try to be the woman I felt I was supposed to be. When I looked at myself and saw a woman I felt repulsed and full of shame. I remember when the last male partner I had broke up with me, his reasoning being that “he never really got to know me, that he felt like I was trying to be someone different than who I really was.” He couldn’t have been more right but the truth of his words hurt me so deeply. I was sobbing on the phone asking him to take me back, and looking back now I’m so glad he did not. Pretty much immediately after that I admitted to myself how I felt inside about being perceived as feminine and my transition began.
The more masculine I looked and the more people called me a man the more whole I felt, like the entirety of my identity was emerging. I began to feel like a person again in the world, someone actually living and breathing. I could start to look in the mirror and see ME instead of this charade of a person staring back at me. While my physical confidence increased, I couldn’t stop thinking, and still do, as to whether or not my trauma was what spurred my transition. If I hadn’t been raped by men over and over, would my natural femininity feel so wrong, or did it genuinely not really exist in the first place? I wonder if I felt like I had to unconsciously strip myself of being a woman because of what I had to go through and the strength that I needed to continue, that I needed to eliminate my “unnecessary emotions” and become numb to the world, hardened and so very full of testosterone-fueled rage. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t get a sick sense of satisfaction from posting my pictures of my post-transition body to my social media for all of the hyper-straight men that fucked me to see and freak out internally about. I loved seeing them block me the more I transitioned, it felt like the ultimate fuck you to all the men that had raped me. This feeling was double sided though, it left me with an awfully bitter feeling that these men were still able to control my emotions after all this time. While I never doubted my transition, I doubted whether I would’ve gone down this path without the years of male manipulation and abuse. I lived my life through the anger and impulsivity I had absorbed, and still do.
After all the reflection, I’m always left with a singular thought: that I am as how I was meant to be made. I was meant to live as both a man and woman, I was meant to experience the hardships, the loneliness, and the anger, to be the man I am today. I love my girlfriend, I love my friends, I love my cat, I love my family. I still contain so much rage, but I also contain just as much love. I wasn’t meant to live an easy life and I was meant to share that experience through loving the people and things around me. The acceptance of my fate and destiny isn’t a cop-out, it’s a portrayal of my strength to look back at what I’ve overcome and realize it was all meant to happen for me to be who I am now. I now allow myself to feel that violence that was acted against me for so long without guilt or shame and release it, no longer chained to the men that raped me for so long.
I can kill and strangle them in ways that I never thought I could before, I am the animal that I caged in for so long, and it feels fucking amazing.
