11.19.06--As you probably can tell, I feel a lot better. Hopefully, I will feel well enough to continue with part II later this week
There is an emerging inner spiritual life, but I am very wary of being misunderstood, by both friends and enemies, and since I still feel very weak and subdued, I prefer to keep this to myself for now. But that is OK, because there is plenty to write about, even with that on hold. I am strongly centered, not because of the drugs I have been forced to take, but because I am now off of them. All of the craziness I was experiencing before was caused by a desperate need to escape the drugs. I think it also helps that my mom lived with me for two weeks. We don’t have much in common, but I always am much more centered and productive when I live with someone else. I don’t like living alone, at all—so much so that I would prefer to live with an incompatible roommate, rather than alone. But that is not an option right now, so I have to struggle to hold onto the centeredness. despite the very real loneliness that I feel right now.
Still, there is good news. I am happy because I am losing a little bit of weight—in all the wrong places, but I’ll take it! I’m happy too, because whatever is going on with me hormonally seems to be back on its normal course (before TPTB started experimenting with drugs on me). My last period was the 20th and around the 11th and 12th, I experienced the “PMS bloat.” Since my period is normally on a 3 week cycle, this was right on time. The problem has been that for the past year and a half, this bloat lasts for days and even weeks at a time, and while it lasts, I am miserable. I retain fluid, my digestion practically stops, I become more susceptible to gaining lasting weight, and the bloat makes me look pregnant. But yesterday I woke up with the “PMS” symptoms and bloat gone. I even had a little bit of spotty underwear this morning, and a couple days later my period finally came. I will miss my periods when they leave me for good. They are the foundation of my identity as a woman, which brings me to another sensitive topic that I have been avoiding—the recent revelation that I am a “true hermaphrodite,” or intersexed. I was pretty upset at first, but now I am dealing with it just fine in my mind, but it is so hard to put it in writing, partly because it is so complicated.
I don’t feel like a freak of nature, but quite honestly I am. Outwardly, including genitally, I have all the component pieces of a woman, but chromosomally I am male, and I have testicles inside my abdominal cavity. As usual, nobody told me. I had to figure it out on my own. I am so tired of this. I long for someone to talk to, truthfully, on the real. I’m so tired of being lied to. But that is not where I am at today, so I have to
struggle to be honest and real and truthful, on my own, and on paper, not just in my head.
The revelation must have been an even bigger shock to the “religious right” element (most notably the Spiritual Life Institute and Opus Dei), of the triad which comprises TPTB. After all, they are the ones who initially impugned my psychological health, not from any true desire for holistic healing on my behalf, but merely because they won’t accept my homosexual orientation as natural or healthy. That is their stupidity and shortcoming, and I no longer have any desire to even dialogue with them, but I wish I could have seen their faces when they learned. I think I would have laughed until I cried. And I would have cried, because of the years of injustice and suffering I have endured at their hands while they try to shock me into conversion to their constricted model of normality. I was in jail (I spent six months there) when they first gave me the House, Person, Tree test.
My guard was totally on high alert around the woman who administered the test. My intuition told me not to trust her or the process at all, but I complied fully. When the psych got all excited over the naked pictures of the Person (man and woman), I knew I had to investigate it further myself when I could, even though it was months later. I learned from my investigation that Person pictures are usually drawn with clothes, and that females drawn with jewelry were usually drawn by men seeking transgender operations into females; i.e., men who felt like they were really women, and who wanted to become women. I had drawn my female with lots of jewelry. At the time I realized that I was a little bit deviant from the norm, but surely, I thought, anyone who really knew me, would know that my psychological makeup was much more evidently within the norm than deviant. But for all that I have shared more information about myself to the religious right, both through the SLI and through counseling with DeBlassie, it’s clear to me those people never knew me at all. They only saw me through a filter of what they wanted me to be, and I spent too many years of my life, hating myself and trying to warp myself intotheir idealized picture of what a female should be. And then, irony of ironies, I’m not a female at all! Of course, I drew the picture like a man who feels himself to be really a woman, because fundamentally that is exactly what I am!
I have the body of a woman, I look like a woman, and I have been socialized as a woman, but really I am not a woman, nor am I really a man. That is the hardest part of the discovery---that I belong to this little tiny minority of humanity called intersexed, and yet so much of what I know and predicate about the human condition is based on a binary dualism of sex and gender that I completely elude. I am both male and female by physiological determinants—and yet I am neither. I was not accorded masculine privilege by my culture, but neither do I think that I have what most females have to help them compensate for their traditionally subordinate position in society—namely, the ability to be a mother. I have the physical wherewithal to be a mother. I just don’t want to be one. I’ve always told people, quite truthfully, “I don’t want to be a mother; I want to be a father.
However, it is in the realm of the psychological that I feel most at a loss for understanding. I always knew that the object of my childish oedipal attraction was my mother. I thought that was why I was lesbian. Now I have to say that from a psycho-sexual perspective, I’m a “straight” male. And let me not forget all the Jungian books I have read on the feminine. As a young woman I had to read books on the female psyche — I didn’t have an inner psychic template to guide me. No wonder why I am a “double anima” picking up projections from both men and women. No wonder why I feel so drained, frustrated, and angry when men insist on projecting onto me (and I got to say men are much worse at projection than women, especially celibates). I don’t have the psychic receptivity to accept and nurture their projections, not because of any immaturity or negativity on my part, but because essentially my primordial psyche is masculine.
Or is it? I think it is. I say that because in my dreams, my self that appears as a young child is always a boy. Then there was the dream I had as a teenager. In it, I saw a teenage male (naked, with full genitalia, and he was “hung”), and in my dream I saw how it was possible for him to get pregnant (it was complicated and involved props). But when I woke up, I knew in my gut that now I could get pregnant, even though I had been menstruating for about 3 years at the time of the dream. It was the memory of the dream that enabled me to accept my hermaphroditic reality when my psychic intuition told me the truth. All of my years of dream interpretation, and everything is all screwed up now. What is animus? What is anima? What is self? (that is, in my dreams; in my waking life I know who I am).
First of all, I am intersexed—my sexuality, and quite probably my psyche fall in an indeterminate third category between, and yet incorporating both male and female, of which very little is known or understood. I don’t know that I will come to understand it in my lifetime, but I can hope that my writing will help myself and otherselucidate more fully this third state.
I do know that my gender is completely and unequivocally female, most of all because that is the way I experience my body. When you menstruate monthly, or as has happened with me, bi-weekly, it’s kind of difficult to maintain that you are male. One of Ursula Leguin’s novels is about a world made up of intersexed true hermaphrodites. The characters have the capacity to be either sex, and can literally choose and change their sex at will, so that for instance, they could be mother of one child and father of another. I wish I had had that option available to me. For I think I would have liked to experience at least part of my life as the male gender. Maybe that is because growing up female in a misogynistic home and patriarchal culture was so hateful to me, but I think part of me longs to be masculine, just as part of me longs to be feminine. I think, despite my difficulties, I made the right choice to adapt my self-identity as much as possible to my somatic and socially given realities.
I choose to be a lesbian. Psychically, maybe I am a straight male, but just like I choose to be female, in accordance with my body and social dictum, so do I choose to be sexually oriented to other women in accordance with my desire and preference. I love the way women feel, the way they smell, and the way they taste. I like the way I feel more feminine inside when I am flirting with, or engaged in a sexual relationship with one. Men never make me feel more feminine inside, even when I’m sex-role playing games with them (which I admit on occasion I do, just because it’s easier to function in society playing social roles than to be completely truthful). The truth is that I don’t feel inferior to men, even though I indulge them and play it that way on occasion, but I do feel that women have a power over me that makes me feel both a little uncomfortable and vindicated at the same time, and that is why I am so attracted by them.
