Dear Laura, part 1
The Dear Detransitioners series continues
First, an introduction to what we’re doing here
I recently announced my new book project intended to help survivors of gender malpractice (SOGM) and have been spreading the word on detrans Twitter. Several SOGM have reached out to take me up on my offer: free correspondence, aimed to be mutually beneficial. My hope is to find the most helpful words of wisdom, expressions of empathy, and thought-provoking questions that I might be able to offer people who have suffered in the unique ways that SOGM have. Out of the responses I write to participants, I hope to gather material that will be refined into the book, tentatively titled “The Detransition Survival Guide.” Along the way, I’ll share raw correspondence on this blog.
This correspondence is neither medical advice, nor a substitute for therapy. I strongly encourage all SOGM to seek therapy, yet I understand that many have felt harmed and betrayed by therapists. The first step in providing competent care for SOGM is to understand their resistance to therapy and the many reasons they have not to trust or place any hope in the hands of so-called professionals. Among my topmost career goals are to restore integrity to our profession and build a more competent care community for SOGM. I’m happy to help find and vet trustworthy therapists who share our concerns and are competent to work with this unique population.
I have each participant sign a contract to clarify our expectations and agreements. In the contract, they specify what name they would like to go by — their real name, a pseudonym, or initials, for instance. Laura Becker has chosen to use her full name publicly. In the near future, you will see more correspondence with Laura, as well as several other SOGM.
Laura’s message
Okay, this isn't small, but this is something I contend with on a daily basis that I'm actively still hurting over and processing. Due to my mastectomy, my body is no longer intact, and therefore doesn't sexually signal me as a woman, which, after spending most of my life as a tomboy and androynously masculine with no interest in feminine expression, I have come to not only accept my female body for its beauty and feminine attributes, but actively enjoy and take pride in my femininity, and feel comfortable sexually signaling as a woman. I am a 25 year old heterosexual, hopeless romantic woman who greatly desires traditional marriage, and eventually having children, but I have a lot of attachment anxiety, and trauma from childhood, and beyond, which impacts mt ability to connect easily with others. My relationships with men have been terrible, and I have never felt beautiful, sexy, or desirable until recently doing a lot of self-care and healing work. I do present as feminine and attractive now, but I feel I could use all the help I can get when it comes to the unfortunately disparite ratio of suitable female partners to suitable male partners in the dating market; it is skewed so that there are far more educated and high-quality single women looking for long-term mates, than there are males, so there is more competition between women for male attention, and it's causing a societal mating and loneliness crisis. At least I'm not the only woman in this situation, but my point is that it's challenging to find a mate for someone like me (sensitive, eccentric, intellectual, old soul, with various trauma and CPTSD), it's a nail in the coffin in my mind that I don't have breasts or feel whole in my body because it's already difficult enough to attract suitable male partners, and I feel shame that I disfigured and made life harder for myself in the sexual signaling front, along with the sexual and reproductive issues which come down the line within romantic and passion relationships. I know things are immensely complex with attraction, and there's a lot of other worthwile things about me, but I feel I pointlessly lowered my worth sexually and physically, and it's just one more flaw that makes it harder to live with myself and have healthy self-regard.
I hope this will suffice for an anecdote. Feel free to quote this.
Thanks,
Laura
Dear Laura
Dear Laura,
I hear grief: over your lost breasts, and the other permanent alterations to your physical form, certainly. But also over what now feels in retrospect like a lost opportunity to learn to love yourself as a feminine woman, in your 20’s and beyond. To love your sexuality, sensuality; your hips, belly, breasts; your capacity for motherhood and nurturance and mutual, healthy vulnerability in the many forms it takes within a loving family.
It seems here there is such a complex challenge: to properly grieve what is truly lost, yet not grieve preemptively that which has not died.
Your breasts are gone. Perhaps it could be said that a part of your womanhood has been taken along with them. But not all.
When you had breasts, you did not cherish them. You had not yet learned to embrace this part of you that is at once so delicate and vulnerable, and yet also so public, front-and-center. Is it any wonder that so many young women like you have wished to be rid of their breasts when the world takes notice of them so quickly, immediately projecting its own desires and narratives and attributions onto a part of you that takes years to grow into, to own, to embody?
Now you grieve for the lost opportunity to learn to cherish, embrace, nurture, and protect this life-giving part of you. This part that feels, and yearns, and feeds. It’s not fair. The world made such a fuss about your breasts, about breasts in general, that your breasts were laden with meaning before you could allow them to show you their own meaning. Before you could learn to dance with them.
What meanings did the world, media, family, significant others, etc., project onto your breasts, or breasts in general?
What meanings do you now wish you could attribute to your own breasts, had these other meanings not gotten in the way?
How do you let go of what is truly gone without overgeneralizing the loss and missing out on parts of you that are still very much alive, and here with you, longing to be embraced?
What parts of you are still here? How do you currently feel and experience your femininity, or your womanhood, in your body?
Where in your body is it safe to be vulnerable? To be feminine? To feel and receive pleasure?
Do you ever dance? If so, can you access music and movements that help you reconnect with your feminine sensuality, such as serpentine rhythms that make your hips sway? If not, what’s stopping you?
What are your thoughts and feelings about breast “reconstruction” (implants)?
Now on to your thoughts and feelings about partnership. Again, there is the question of how to acknowledge and properly grieve what’s truly been lost, or what hardships you are truly facing, without catastrophizing or overgeneralizing.
You are right. Who is anyone to tell you otherwise? It is fair to say that the loss of your breasts, and perhaps too some other changes to your body, will make dating harder. I can imagine it’s hard for you to speak openly about this, as with other things, because the natural tendency others have when faced with someone else’s pain is to try to make it better. People are going to want to reassure you that you are lovable and desirable. And they’re right. But so are you, for the most part. You’re trying to take an honest, sober, rational look at how human mating operates. Yes, in general, heterosexual men like breasts.
A “nail in the coffin,” though, might be a bridge too far. I can certainly understand how it seems that way; at times, you feel hopeless about ever finding a match. You have a long list of self-criticisms about what makes you ineligible as a dating partner. On that list are many insecurities, some accurately gauged, others overblown by your inner critic. But let’s give your inner critic credit for what she’s trying to do here, however poorly: self-scrutinize for the sake of improvement and, ultimately, hard-earned success. Isn’t that the case?
The inner critic is always trying to help us out. It’s just that sometimes the help gets drowned out by all the harsh and hurtful words. Some people will try to tell you that you should fight back against your inner critic. But I’m not so sure that’s the best approach. When you and your inner critic are in a dysfunctional relationship, you’ll never get anywhere by shouting at each other. Instead, you might try negotiating using techniques from Nonviolent Communication. The book Your Resonant Self, by Sarah Peyton, the guest of my very first ever podcast episode, is a great resource for learning this kind of inner dialogue. Or check out her accompanying workbook.
It seems to me like your inner critic really wants you to be successful in life and love. In that desire, she’s actually quite dovetailed with the rest of you. It seems like all parts of you are on board with that idea. It’s just that right now, in your estimation, you’ve all but obliterated your chances at success, and so you’re coping with a lot of shame, scolding, and punishment from this stern inner parent who’s wagging her finger about how you should have known better.
But how about you two start with agreement? Yes, we both want the same things: success, love, family. Yes, we’re both pretty scared, frustrated, angry, and upset about all the things that seem to stand in the way of what feel like impossible goals at the moment.
Okay. At least that’s a starting point. Is the temperature starting to cool down a bit?
Now, how about this. Can you two agree — Laura and her Inner Critic (might you perhaps want to give the IC a name?) — with me on this one point: you only need one person?
Is that correct? You want a loving, long-term, monogamous relationship, right? I’m not saying you won’t kiss any frogs in the process, or even that you won’t get your heart broken by someone you were sure was “the one.” But if your ultimate goal is marriage, isn’t it enough if there is just one person on the whole planet that’s a match for you, as long as you two are somehow able to find one another?
One total weirdo? Absolute goofball? Complete conundrum, anachronistic anomaly of a human being who is far from perfect and yet somehow perfect for you?
And supposing that there is one person out there for you, if a messenger from God (however you conceive Him/Her/It) were to tell you that you won’t meet Mr. Right for another 5 years, would you be able to live with that? How about 10?
I might be speaking from personal experience a little. Or a lot. I wanted a healthy, loving relationship more than anything, yet I spent years going down one dead-end maze after another. Meanwhile, in my career, I was helping others through devastating breakups and resuscitating marriages from the brink of divorce. The final stretch before finding my person was pretty grueling. I prayed about it, in my own way. Every now and then, I’d get this inner message telling me to hang on — that my person was on the way, but going through a divorce, and just needed a bit more time. I started getting visions of a part of town I rarely visited. I started thinking I wanted kids around, but not my own.
I finally met my person a year after his divorce, through what feels like an act of divine fate that introduced us to each other. He wouldn’t have been ready any sooner. He lived in the part of town I kept seeing in my mind’s eye. He has two kids.
He is tall with brown eyes and a warm smile; I always knew my partner would be. He is every bit as affectionate as I knew I needed in a partner. He loves me in very particular ways that I have always needed to be loved. Ways that I’d found myself over the years asking if they were really too much to ask, because it seemed like others saw my needs as unreasonable or excessive. Nope, not my person. He doesn’t think they’re too much to ask. He thinks I deserve everything I want. He tries hard to give it to me.
Our relationship isn’t perfect — nobody’s is. But it’s damn good, and it’s good enough for us.
But I had to wait until I was 35 to meet him — and I’m a relationship therapist. I did a lot of chasing rabbits, kissing frogs, hanging on, hoping, despairing, praying. Now I know, it was worth the wait. Now I know, I wasn’t crazy to want what I wanted, I was just feeling the void where he was ultimately meant to be.
In my practice, I see a lot of young people struggling in their path to find the right person for them. I try not to overstep my bounds, so I keep a lot of opinions to myself. But I’ve gotten to the point where I feel fairly confident in my inner ability to predict where a given relationship is going. Even if I don’t say a word about it, inwardly I feel I can see pretty clearly whether a patient’s current relationship is going to last and how happy they have the capacity to be with that partner. When they break up — whether it’s weeks, months, or years past the point where I quietly predicted that they would — they’re often devastated, even if it’s plainly obvious that they were incompatible, unhappy or unhealthy together. It takes time to come to sober acceptance about who you are, what you want and need, who other people are, and what they want and need. But the best relationships are built from knowledge and understanding of all those factors as an early starting point.
That might have been a bit of a tangent. Let me reign it in.
I relate to a lot of your struggles with finding love. If I’m reading you right, you have a lot to watch out for. You’re sensitive, raw, vulnerable, lonely; maybe at times you feel embarrassingly needy, or frighteningly impulsive. Perhaps you fall for people too quickly and easily, or idealize them before they’ve earned your trust. All of this puts you in a precarious position — easily hurt, manipulated, or taken advantage of; at risk of entering a state of mental health crisis if something doesn’t go as you’d hoped.
And yet, your instinct to seek love and secure attachment is perfectly correct. The things you want are indeed some of life’s greatest sources of happiness and wellbeing. They’re truly hard to go without. And it wouldn’t at all surprise me to learn that lacks of love, security and stability played large roles in your past regrettable decisions.
Somehow, you have to do something really difficult. You have to get yourself through the next several hours, days, weeks, months, years, or however long it takes before you find that one special weirdo who’s right for you. You have to learn to love yourself, not as a substitute for his love, nor in a way that is based on some self-delusion of fierce, stubborn, independent needlessness. Not to harden yourself, nor to leave yourself so soft that you cannot function. But to give yourself the love, kindness, nurturance, empathy, support, laughter, and friendship that you deserve, as best you can. Give yourself what he would want for you. Build yourself into the person who can love and be loved.
And here’s what else I would advise, though you didn’t bring it up with me. Let go of preconceived notions of what kind of person he’s supposed to be. I saw you tweet something about his Myers-Briggs type, as if that matters. It doesn’t. You’ve also listed some other qualities you think he has, like age and so on. You’re probably just trying to form a clearer vision of this elusive, imaginary person who exists in the ethers somewhere, trying to tune into your weirdo who might be 3,000 miles and 3 years away for all you know. I get that. But don’t fixate on any given criteria. Know what your basic expectations are, and don’t waver from your dedication to keeping your life free of any kind of abuse. Don’t date someone who lies, cheats, steals, abuses, uses drugs, harms his body, sabotages his career, or otherwise fails to take responsibility for his life. Keep listening to Jordan Peterson lectures. But aside from that, be open, and just keep discovering yourself and what you need. Fixating on the idea of dating an ENFP or whatever MBTI you’ve idealized is just an approximation attempting to get closer to the truth. Stay focused on the truth, however nebulous it may be. Perhaps dig into what these criteria signify for you — like feeling safe and at ease around someone, for instance. But don’t get caught up in rigid thinking and specific goals that aren’t actually essential. Just my two cents on that. Take it for what it’s worth.
One more thought. Hardly related to what we’ve covered today, but it came up when I suggested naming your Inner Critic. Parts work may be helpful for you. Have you done any with your therapist? I’m curious about your alter ego, Funk God, and your idealized patriarch, Jordan Peterson. These seem like parts of your inner cast of characters. Do they ever come out in your artistic expressions? Do you play around with them?
I hope this helps. Please let me know your honest reactions to specific things I said as they’ll help me help others too, knowing what to keep, change, or leave out for the book.
Hang in there,
Stephanie
