Nonfiction by Olivia McNeill
Art by Margaret Xun
“But I do feel strange, almost unearthly. I’ll never get used to being alive. It’s always a mystery. Always startled to find I’ve survived.” (Steinbeck 378)
“So now, here, I give you my own text-body-tissue-hymen-map to touch/be touched-by, in the real. Now, here, I give you this body’s story.” (Eades 175)
I cannot properly tell you about my gendered relationship with the rhetorics of the medical system, because my whole existence has been an attempt to remove myself from them. But I can tell you this: There is a violence that has been understood by my body as it came into itself. This pain confused me greatly, for I liked my strange body and the ways in which it happened to exist in the world it inhabited—the world it inhabits still. But I know very well that when I began to be seen, I began to hurt. I associated this pain with neither the onset of the identification of my ‘deviance’ nor with that purported deviance itself, but with the confluence between the two. I blamed myself just as much as I blamed the systems of identification that surrounded me. Words make worlds, and the rhetoric of what it meant to be ‘healthy,’ to be ‘right,’ to be ‘whole,’ was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Teeth bared, these wor(l)ds smiled at me and demanded, under the guise of care, that I give myself up: “Give yourself over and I will make sure you are okay.” I have been hiding from those wor(l)ds ever since.
To place myself explicitly in relation to these rhetorics has often felt like being forced to yield to a world that is not my own, and where I must—but also paradoxically cannot—exist. That which “allow[s] for the fantasy of knowing…does so at the expense of possibility and of a receptiveness to difference,” and I must choose between being known and being myself (Wiggins 69). It is not really a choice. To put myself in a box has been to assign value to myself within the system, and I knew that that value would be one of violence. I chose to remove myself from the equation all together.
I suppose it is a luxury that I have had the option of hiding myself away; that this vessel of a body, at a distance, might (almost) shield me from the violence that has been built into these wor(l)ds of body politic. There is certainly a privilege to passing. But with this privilege there is also a learned experience of nonexistence. In passing, I learn that, while I am not quite right, I am not wrong enough to occupy space either. I seek acknowledgement, help, safety, and in return am told I am not queer enough, not sick enough, and have not strayed far enough away from normal. I am not in enough pain, or at least not the kind of pain that fits into any diagnosable (and therefore, treatable) category. I have not fit the bill, never fit the bill, have been so hyper-aware that I do not fit into the categories of normal. And, fearful, I have done everything in my power to ensure that the only person who has to know that something is wrong is myself.
There are consequences to this act of non-being: I disappear. I shrink into myself until I am not just ‘normal’ but gone. I have been hiding for so long that I simply have nothing to show. You will not find me in these wor(l)ds of pain, because I remove myself from them entirely. Instead, you find me here, outside of space.
The medical maxim of non-maleficence—‘do no harm’—looks down at me and promises that there will be no pain and that there is nothing to fear. Something in the back of my throat begins to close. I do not believe them. Built into the language of care is a violence, one which is naturalized as a part of the “means and authority” that medical professionals may be assumed to have over what may constitute my healthy body (Chu). In reality, ‘do no harm’ works “to install the medical professional as a little king of someone else’s body,” and then insists that those with a power that I never consented to will take good care of me, while, like a gemstone, I am considered in the rough and cut to size (Chu). Don’t worry, they will lose as little of me as possible in the process. There will be no impurities here.
The rhetorical catch to this system of ‘care’ is “a conception of safety as something that requires losing—or willingly giving up—privacy”: if I want to feel safe, I must first allow myself to be violated (Beauchamp 3). I am told that I am safe, and I will be safe, but know that safety necessitates being subjected to violence over and over again. Safety will only be granted if I allow myself to be known, and in order to be known I must be violated. If I am seen, and do not meet the terms of normal (or, in some perverse way, do not meet the terms of deviance), that safety will be taken away, and I will be violated all the same. The purported necessity of a violent knowing becomes “one mechanism through which gender nonconformity is produced” and upheld without my consent (Beauchamp 15). It is that which claims to save me (from myself) which produces “the very categories and figures of gendered deviance” from which I must be saved (Beauchamp 2). This promise of safety (almost) dismembers me, and yet I cling to it and convince myself that this is living: to be constantly drawn and quartered (they have already castrated me with their eyes) and pulling back against the ropes must be a necessary quality of life. The consequence of existence is to always almost cease to be. Increasingly, I have become exhausted. It gets harder to keep pulling back.
You see, I have been in pain for a long time. When they called to tell me that there was a tumor in my brain, I hung up the phone, walked out the front door in my pajamas, and cried. Not because I was scared. I think the fear had been so drawn out that the potential of experiencing more pain had ceased to have much of an impact on me. I spent so long just hoping my body would finally give out, give up, give in. It’s not that I had wanted it to end. I didn’t even want help, not really. I had just wanted to be seen. What I would have given to be afflicted with something that was not my identity.
I sat sobbing on the curb because I was relieved. Finally, there was something actually wrong with me. After all this living, I was wrong enough to be. No longer strung out somewhere in between normal and sick, I could be deserving of space to just breathe. Treating the tumor would not ‘make me better,’ at least not in any complete sense of the word, but thank god they would finally believe me. Finally, there was something to show for my pain.
I am not happy if I tend towards ‘normal’; I am not happy if I tend towards queer. When I am seen, I am hurt (no matter what I am seen as); if I want to not be in pain, I must at some point let myself be seen. My existence is at odds with a rhetorical world which notices pain and “automatically [seeks] out its source in order to alleviate it” instead of understanding that this pain is not “loaded with moral weight,” and a very real fact of “being embodied” (Awkward-Rich 824). My happiness is not dependent on my ability to be free of pain, and I ask for you to see me and realize that I deserve to be recognized both with pain and without. In the end, I do want to be seen, and I understand that if I want to be seen, I must show myself to you. But I will do it on my terms this time.
I am writing this as a statement of being. I forgive myself for hiding, for feeling unable to take up space, and for all the pain I have caused myself. No matter what, I know that I (if anyone) am the little king of this body. I am the king of this fleshy domain, this site of pain and fear and love—and what a strange and messy kingdom it is. Sometimes I wonder if I will spend my whole life wasted on forgiveness, forgiving until I learn how to accept my own apology for being (and I always, almost, already do these days). But I would rather ask myself for forgiveness and live, than simply cease to be. Yes, I choose to exist.
I am here, in this in-between. I occupy space. This body is real and I let you touch me. It “is a precarious ordeal,” and my “contents are unwieldy and unpredictable,” but I exist in relation to you all the same and I consent to the ways in which we must learn to touch each other (Wiggins 57). There is nothing to be but thankful for this dynamic, vibrant, fleshy void I embody, and the life that it lets me live. It is so hard to remove it from all of the pain, caused by both my physical body and the violence of the world it inhabits. Still, I want this existence. I want this queer body, this strange brain, and this (dis)ordered life. I want to look down and notice how my hands are strange and yet so familiar, and I swear to god I will cry because I am alive.
Maybe I will be happy. There is absolutely a chance that I will. There is equally and independently a chance that I will always experience this pain. But I still want this life. After all, “desire and happiness are independent agents”: I do not want my existence under the promise that maybe, someday, I will be better (Chu). I am not a sickness. I have always been this way: perverse and difficult, my insides monstrous, and ghosts tugging at my hair, my skin, reminding me of my alterity. All the ways that I do not fit are the reasons I am alive at all. I insist on autonomy, even though this insistence will only ever do so much. I write myself into this world where I will scream and suffer and be kind above all else. To myself, I am so sorry, and I will never again apologize for being, or for taking up space.
(my) Dear body of mine,
I forgive you. I love you. Thank you.
Works Cited
Awkward-Rich, Cameron. “Trans, Feminism: Or, Reading like a Depressed Transsexual: Winner of the 2017 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 42 no.4, 2017, pp. 819–841. The University of Chicago Press, https://doi.org/10.1086/690914.
Beauchamp, Toby. “Introduction, Suspicious Visibility.” Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices. Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 1–24.
Chu, Andrea L. “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy.” The New York Times, 24 Nov. 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.html.
Eades, Quinn. “Holograms, Hymens, and Horizons: a Transqueer Bodywriting.” Parallax, vol. 25 no. 2, 2019, pp. 174–196, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2019.1607234.
Steinbeck, John. “September 26, Wednesday,” Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. 1969. Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 377–378.
Wiggins, Tobias B. “A Perverse Solution to Misplaced Distress: Trans Subjects and Clinical Disavowal.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1, 1 Feb. 2020, pp. 56–76, https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7914514.