Walk a few minutes in my shoes (then bring them back, please and thank you)
One day, you wake up, exactly as you do. Normally. On a normal weekend like any other. You look at the time, begroan your inability to get back to sleep, and eventually drag yourself up out of bed. Except something’s not quite right, but you’re not quite awake enough to figure out what it is. You feel strangely light and your arm hurts. After looking down, you realize your arm is missing from the shoulder down.
You panic, moving the stump vainly as the rising swell of terror fills your chest. What used to be a part of you—a big part of you, and one that you regularly used to interact with the world with—is gone.
Once the panic goes away and you being to accept the reality of the situation, you realize you’re going to have to make some adjustments. You reach for the toothbrush with your missing limb before stopping yourself. You have to use your teeth to open the cap on the toothpaste. And forget flossing—not that you ever did anyway, probably (but if you did, I’m proud of you!). It will take weeks, or perhaps months or years, for you to adjust the way you intuitively interact with the world—for your internal model of yourself to include this new information. And when you think about the way your body was, the way your body SHOULD be, you feel a pang of sadness and regret. Every time you get the tingly static feeling in your phantom arm, or worse, extreme pain from feeling as if it’s stuck in place, your feelings of anger, bitterness, sadness, and regret grow. What did you do to deserve this pain?
Then, one day, you hear something. There’s a way to grow your arm back using your own cells. Maybe one of your friends is doing it. Maybe you saw it on TV, or the news. It’s a therapy that takes several years, but it brings out the potential in your body. There are some risks, of course, as with anything; primarily, however, the risk comes from a portion of the population that believes that, if you woke up armless, it was God’s doing, and that undergoing the therapy is blasphemous. There are reports of people attacking and killing people who undergo it. Some of your own family members and peers subscribe to this belief. Hell, you yourself might hold this same belief—if you weren’t the one missing an arm and feeling this pain firsthand, that is. If this is the case, you have to overcome a vast amount of cognitive dissonance to realize the treatment as an option, which is a journey in and of itself. You know you couldn’t hide the effects of the therapy from those around you, and eventually the truth would have to come out. But this is your ARM we’re talking about here. Your life would be so much easier with it. You could be whole. You could be yourself.
Eventually, you gather up your courage to talk to your doctor about it. They warn you of the potential dangers. Strokes, infertility, irreversibility. Most require you to see a therapist first—wouldn’t it be possible to just learn how to deal with the phantom pains, the weird sensations, and adjust to life without your arm? Maybe. You’ve tried–you’ve genuinely given it your best shot. But you’re still not happy with how things are. And now, you’ve weighed the risks. You’ve decided that this is what you need, this is what will let you interact with the world how you want to, with how you NEED to. You desire in your heart of hearts to be able to live with both of your arms again.
You start undergoing the process. You take pills every morning and night, and you have to keep them from being seen by those around you. After several months, you feel a small budding from your arm socket. You used to be able to wear normal clothes and hide it from those who would judge you for it, but now you have to wear baggy clothes and hoodies. Every time you want to go out in public, you fear that someone will find out, that someone will follow you, attack you, kill you. You have to keep it secret.
Eventually, it gets to a point where your arm is visible. Somehow, those around you find out, either by accident or you breaking the news on purpose. In either case, your heart beats a million times a minute. You feel the gazes of your loved ones weighing on your soul. Some are shocked, some are appalled, and, thankfully, a few are supportive. But one word of judgment, alienation, or disgust weighs more than paragraphs of support. You eventually are forced to break ties with those who don’t seem willing to try to understand your point of view. That you need it. That you’re not intentionally committing a sin, you’re simply using medicine to make yourself whole again, to get rid of a vast amount of suffering that you’ve had deal with. If only they could experience it themselves, they’d know why you had to do this.
It sucks, it’s painful, and it’s a long process as it grows, but at long last, you get your arm back. You can clap, you can hold together a messy sandwich, you can floss (hooray!), and you no longer have the weird static phantom limb feeling. You can interact with the world how you used to—how you KNOW innately you should be able to. It cost you quite a lot, both financially and socially. You’re probably forever alienated from at least a few of your loved ones, who never gave you the benefit of the doubt or listened to you, but only offered disgust and contempt. You desperately wish you lived in a world where you didn’t have to pay that price, but when you remember the vast amount of pain you’d be in otherwise, you’re grateful you got to walk the path that you did.
If you were able to follow along, congratulations. This is a partial experience of being trans. Of having to deal with the reality of a body that doesn’t match your internal sense of self. Of having to deal with stigma and social pressure and fearing for your safety. If you’re a late realizer like I was, it literally can be like waking up without an arm—after a lifetime of disconnecting from yourself, you suddenly jolt back to consciousness one day and then realize why you spend so much time on a phone, computer, or console instead of in the real world, why you subconsciously avoid mirrors, or why you have to turn to substances: to (barely) cope with the constant existential pain.
Seriously—until the age of 26, I thought anyone who would deign have kids was an ACTUAL real life bastard. Who would bring someone in the world if they were going to suffer this much?! And even once I figured out what was wrong on my end, I was STILL made to suffer greatly to achieve where I am today. Still, no matter how much glass I must walk over, I will strive to make this world a place were no one will have to suffer as I have. I strive to turn every ounce and inch of pain I’ve felt into love. And, hell, I still have a long way to go to balance out two decades of suffering, but life has truly become worth living since I transitioned.
If I can leave you with nothing else, remember this: floss and brush your teeth every day.
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Danielle, Loudly 
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