The difference is, I'm a trans man. The surgery I was praying about was my mastectomy, something that my Evangelical grandparents would probably call a mutilation of the body God gave me, or something like that. So why pray to God for that to work out well for me? I struggled with that a lot in the days before surgery.
I haven't always been of the belief that being transsexual is a medical condition - it's very much against the popular opinion, for reasons I can no longer really fathom. The popular idea is that it's an "identity", though what exactly an identity identified only by its own name is, I couldn't tell you. Nevertheless, over the past year and a half, I have started to change my view on the subject. The reason being that I actually have the means to medically transition now, and I understand better what that means, and why it's so important to me. Dysphoria (the state of disconnect from your physical body because of the brain being wired to subconsciously perceive the body it inhabits as the opposite sex. This differs from taking on the gender roles of the opposite gender, or "genderbending", it's a medical thing with a medical cause. I'd reconciled this with my feminist self, my "feminine" self, with a society that says "no, it can't possibly be a medical condition because it's bad or wrong to have one". I hadn't, until going back to church, thought about it in a spiritual context. But now that I think about it more, my transmedicalist beliefs tie in really well with my tentative return to Christianity.
A God that I want to believe in wouldn't create a person whose brain was washed with testosterone in utero, causing their sensory-motor cortices to scream "no, you shouldn't have breasts, you shouldn't have a vagina, what are those doing there?" and then say "You're not allowed to seek the medical treatment that will give you peace from your mental anguish". A God that I want to believe in would be happy that humans created the technology to help themselves - God helps those who help themselves, right? I like to take that to mean that we as a society should help ourselves, work to create better ways of taking care of and loving each other. And individually, we should do the same, work to better love ourselves and love others, find people who love us and support us, and learn how to live, instead of just surviving. To me, that statement is less a Horatio Alger reading of the bible, but a love-thy-neighbor commandment. Love your neighbor as yourself, and find neighbors who will love you back. I deserve neighbors who love me for my depressive, anxious, traumatized, queer, transsexual self. And I deserve a God who will accept those things in me as well. Because God knows, none of those things make it easy to love myself.
God gave me the ability to live well and better love myself and others through transitioning, in the same way that God gave me the skills and circumstances I needed to get through college (almost), so that I could do my best to help the world through my work, in the same way that God gave me the skills to listen to my friends and care for them and learn to acknowledge my mistakes and the ways in which I hurt others and learn from them, in the same way that God has given me all of the skills and circumstances and good luck and opportunities to grow that I have been blessed with in my life.
God gave me this mastectomy, and I am thankful for the blessing of peace of mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment