Freya-Onions-report

“In the mid-teenage years she said that she didn’t understand her gender, but she noted that she was following a lot of female celebrities and kind of precariously living her life through them.”

I received my clinic letter from my endocrinologist as a word document on the day Liz Truss resigned as Prime Minister. Colleagues chatted excitedly about the news of the resignation as October rains crashed on the roof of the office— which was a trendily restored warehouse in Shoreditch, replete with potted plants, incense and bearded men. 

I opened the file on my laptop, pretending it was work, and quickly read through its contents hoping no one would decide to glance over my shoulder to see this digital symbol of my vulnerability, this receipt of my patient-hood. The first thing to jump out at me was this sentence, quoted in full above:

kind of precariously living her life through them.

It was a humorous slip-up: obviously the word I had actually used was vicariously. Both have very different meanings, but I could see where the mix-up might’ve come from. It made me think of the popular narrative of gender dysphoria, which to many has become the paradigmatic way of understanding trans existence, as itself a kind of ‘mix-up’ narrative. ‘Born in the wrong body’, and all that. I never felt like this idea of substitution applied to me. I never felt like I was, somewhere down the line, in that regional hospital, as the millennium loomed on the horizon, swapped for the wrong baby. In fact, I have a tendency to justify all aspects of my life as being correct and unchangeable. But such is the nature of a ‘dysphoric’ adolescence: it invites a paranoid and frantic activity of justification to keep itself going. I am a boy. Things just are this way.

But this mix-up in particular felt revealing. Indeed, the vicarious life I had made for myself, and my ability to justify my life as a man required so much work behind the scenes. From the age of 10 or so I had spent hundreds of hours watching interviews, rewatching movies, obsessing over a series of female celebrities to whom I believed myself to be attracted, like a good boy. They made me feel okay- clean even- divorced from the male body that stretched and putrified as I aged. 

I thought about how this mix-up might’ve occurred: did he just mishear me? did his secretary mistype the message as he dictated it back to me over the video call? Did he just not know the word; did he think I myself was mistaken; was ‘vicarious‘ from a diction sufficiently distant from the medical vernacular to which he is accustomed to be registered as nothing more than a detached signifier: a meaningless utterance of syllables open to his own interpretation? Stupid patient, making up words she doesn’t even understand. Whatever happened, ‘precariously’ is what I got, and there it was, typed up and saved in a word document. And I know I will never locate the place at which this substitution occurred, just as I will never know when I realised, or even became, trans. 

The thing with ‘precariously’ is it rather tritely encapsulates how unsustainable my charade of a male life was. Man: lover of women, infatuator. While I thought I could’ve gone on forever, living through and loving women, who got to do it all without me, I realise now, just as my doctor has, that this was a dangerous way of life. 

It was precarious: and some time during my first year of university, at the height of my personal satisfaction, and personal growth, in my first relationship, I fell off. 

The fall had a catalyst: I, finally, had a girlfriend, who was and is amazing, and quickly realised that I could not love her. I coveted her, mythologised her, and in the same motion receded. You see, this relationship was the first time I had ever felt like I had been put in a male position in my life. All those years my love for female idols hadn’t been from a man. If anything, it felt like a sapphic love… and I had been totally entranced by stories of lesbian relationships in a way gay ones have never done for me. 

But I’m not a lesbian, and I don’t think I’m attracted to women at all really. It was a mix-up, and that was how I lived. 

The ‘precarious’ slip, was, it turned out, just one of this letter’s many oddities. Beyond its bizarre segues, inconsistencies and mixed-up untruths, the report was generally alienating in a way the psychologist report I had received a month prior was not:

She has a Master’s in English Literature from Cambridge. 

In the family history she has carcinoma of the breast in her paternal grandmother and her younger brother is bisexual. There is nothing else of note. 

I cannot, in fact, collect my MA from Cambridge for another year or so, 3 years after matriculation, though I did complete an MA at UCL, which is mentioned several times in the rest of the letter’s body.

These mix-ups were less interesting. But I liked ‘precariously’ because it captured the sense of physical danger I was sheltering myself from: having to come out to family, being visibly trans, being open to public scrutiny, public hatred, and unemployability. 

In the months leading up to these two medical consultations, and the reports that followed them, I had written and submitted my Master’s Thesis. The paper, which I wrote over the summer of 2022 was about contemporary trans poetry and the way that trans poets continually have to deal with the medical and diagnostic criteria which to many constitute the reality of trans existence in the first place. The diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’ and the panoply of reports are what I couched in the suitably academic jargon of ‘medico-textual apparatus’ to represent the textual material into which trans people must embark to recover their own agency as writers. This analysis was inspired by the arguments of feminist poet-critics Rachel Blau-DuPlessis and Kathleen Fraser, who saw their own poetry as an excursion into the patriarchal material of lyric poetry. If this interests you, and you don’t mind slogging through 40+ pages of painfully laboured academic prose, you can read the essay here. 

Nowadays dysphoria itself is being interrogated as a figment of the twentieth century medical imagination, full of inconsistencies and overly simplistic reductions.

While, unlike the paperwork I received from my psychologist a month prior, this was labelled ‘Clinic Letter’, there was a noticeable overlap between the content of the letter with the former, itself titled ‘Freya-Onions-report’. It is this report that gives this website, and my upcoming collection of theory-poetry, its name.