So I just don’t get it. My brain is wired, running, has for as long as I can remember been working consistently and regularly. Short of learning new things, dealing with what life has to throw at me, and betraying me periodically due to a mood disorder it is pretty constant. Nice, reliable, easy to understand and use, garden variety female brain.
I enjoy wielding pen and page to weave, into tangible form, everything from feelings to experiences and a spectrum of life between. I know I have a limitation when it comes to communicating with men, it has been, easily a defining aspect of Gender Dysphoria for me to live with. I am however working on it, and have recently made significant advances in being able to talk to men.
Women, ah yes, my sisters near and far, a fairer, smarter sex. Now women I’ve never had any problem talking with. We speak a common dialect; a common language and words, phrases, tone, inflection and context have a common understanding and meaning. We have been accused of using too many words to describe identicle concepts, and of intentionally obfuscating things that should otherwise be perfectly obvious. Ironically these accusations are almost always made by Men seeking to control those they do not understand. So rather than ask, and try to learn, they claim we are speaking a different language.
It certainly seems that way much of the time, because men use words we do, but suddenly they don’t mean what they did. They use identicle words, the same way, to cover so many different topics that I am never quite sure what they are talking about. When I ask questions, and attempt to understand, I’m either dismissed or they make a noise designed to end our conversation. Start talking about feelings, and suddenly it becomes a matter of open hostility and a refusal to talk about things because “You’d never understand!”
So you may be wondering why I’m restating something so obvious? This has been a standard of communications between men and women since our earliest days. Much has been said about differences between our brains and theirs, highlighting structural and chemical differences between male and female brains. Obviously Gender Dysphoria leaves us more torn between two worlds than others might be, while we LOOK like one side of the species, our brains are wired in an opposite fashion. Gender Dysphoria is a medical condition which has a profound impact on some lives, and in my own case is a life and death matter.
For nearly forty years I have been trying to find some kind of balance, some means to deal with this incongruity to no avail. For me, there is transition and GRS, a means of reshaping my body to fit my mind it houses, and ease much discord. Once this journey of mine is complete, I will finally look, and communicate like one half of our species. It will be obvious to everyone visually and aurally, and my thoughts are coming from a person who will be, in sync.
Great, that will make my life dramatically easier, and no different all at once. I’ll still need someone to translate for me periodically, and several people I’m close to can do this fairly easily. These people scare me! My Sister and Sister-in-law both to some degree have a unique and frightening ability to easily shift from one side of the “gender spectrum” to the other. They can understand both, and quite often translate between them. Wow, awesome, more power to them! I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t envious, because quite honestly I am. How different my life would have been, could have been, with this interesting gift.
It comes however with a price tag that to me is even higher than that of Gender Dysphoria! There are times with both of these women when I will suddenly completely lose any ability to speak with them. They slip across this “gender divide” and get stuck in Men’s country for a while and no longer have an ability to understand me or any interest in trying. For all practical purposes they “become” for a time, without warning or any apparent trigger, Men. This change is frightening, for me terrifying because quite suddenly this woman I know no longer is. I lose any ability to speak to them, understand them or communicate in any measurable fashion. Here I thought Gender Dysphoria was hard to deal with!!!
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