Trans joy

In addition to being The Sunniest Girl on the Internet™, Mimsy is able to break my heart and reduce me to tears. She does it on a regular basis, but in a good way.

My wife got me a cabbage patch doll as a solstice gift this year. I’m 47 years old. I started bawling as soon as I opened the package. This… is a complicated story.

[…]

I bawled. I held her against my chest and I cried, hard. I think I scared our kids a little bit. My wife gently prompted me to explain the significance of the gift, of the doll. I tried; I failed. And sorry to only say this now, near the end of the story, but I’m not going to be able to explain the full significance here, either.

I couldn’t put her down. Eventually the kids wandered away to do their own teenager things and my wife settled into one end of the couch to read. I leaned up against her and cuddled my doll. I was there for hours, cradling her, shifting her from one baby-holding position to another. I smelled her hair (it smells like yarn). I kissed her forehead.

I named her Elizabeth. I’ve always loved that name, especially because it has so many variants. I strongly suspect that she’ll end up being called Lizbet for short.

Because here’s the thing: when I hold her and I close my eyes, I’m an eight-year-old girl again. If I think about my parent’s house, I’m there. Eight years old and in a yellow play dress I never got to wear. Cradling Elizabeth. Hugging her. Talking to her. Watching television together. I’m an eight-year-old girl again but this time I got what I needed and I wasn’t too afraid to accept it.

A touching (and personally resonant) little story from Tattie, a dearly valued member of my Fediverse parasocial circle:

Even before marriage, I had always had an aversion to buying “stuff”. I always tried to get by with the bare minimum, the cheapest things, the most practical. I never felt I deserved good things, and often I didn't have a good sense of what it was I wanted, exactly.

Speaking to other transfems, it seems it's quite a common experience. Before we start to grow into our true selves, we tend to live small lives, unassuming ones. Self-sacrificing lives. If we can do without, we do without.

I remember in university feeling too guilty to buy name-brand chocolate biscuits, going for the store-brand ones instead. A matter of perhaps twenty pence, but twenty pence which I thought didn’t deserve to be spent on me. I remember living in the cheapest clothes I could find, and wearing them until they were full of holes. Cycling everywhere because getting a bus would be too bougie, apparently.

It wasn’t about needing to save money. It was about self-denial. Self-denial had become a virtue in my mind— I justified it with half-understood stoic philosophy and Buddhism, but even without that philosophical framework I would be doing it.

Why?

Because I had been told I had to live in self-denial. To pretend to all the world that I was a boy, to tamp my feminine nature right down so that nobody would notice, nobody would suspect. And if this was good and right, well, self-denial must in general be good. Otherwise what was I doing this all for?

In their paper “Reducing the Joy Deficit in Sociology: A Study of Transgender Joy,” Shuster and Westbrook look to put a little more joy in the world, by researching not the pains and struggles that come with being trans but the reasons to celebrate who we are. This is much bigger than just trying to put a few glimmers in the way of an oppressed group. As they explain, the “joy deficit” “is particularly troubling, as joy is vital to human well-being. . . . As such, joy is sociologically relevant to fully understanding people’s lived experience.”

Shuster and Westbrook argue that because of this joy deficit, the narrative of the “transgender person in misery” has become unfairly centered as the “normal” narrative of trans existence. According to them, it’s become the dominant way that cisgender people view us, and also the dominant way that we see ourselves. Shuster and Westbrook argue that it’s not only unhelpful, but also just plain false, to paint trans people as fundamentally miserable beings.