Freya-Onions-report

The dance floor was pretty quiet for the first hour. We’d gotten up from our table a few times, drinks in hand, ready to merge with other revellers, but found the lack of busyness made the whole thing feel a little too awkward, a little too premature. 

So we sat for a while longer at our table, drinking pints of lager. It was me, my flatmate Oliver, and his friend from work, Millie- we were out on a Friday night in Peckham as Oliver’s last night of drinking before going sober in preparation for his surgery. We’d decided to try John The Unicorn, a LGBT bar on Rye Lane, owing to it being a short walking distance from our flat in north Peckham. It’s an okay venue, we found out, and it’s pretty surreal to be in a place like that on Rye Lane. 

Unsurprisingly, when the bar opened back in 2016, it was vandalised, with anti-gentrification graffiti plastered over its front windows. Which, yeah, I agree with, though looking at the scale of gentrification in other areas of Rye lane, John The Unicorn doesn’t look so bad. At least it’s not a boba tea shop. I tend to boycott these gentrified places, but we thought this one was worth a try, and at least it was an established place that’s been there for 8 years and wasn’t just some new flashy thing. 

Anyway, now that I’ve aired some of my anxieties about being a contributor to the ongoing gentrification of South London, I’ll get back to the story. 

By around midnight we were pretty pissed, and the dance floor had filled up with a mix of several groups of people. It was a really fun, community vibe – the fact that we were dancing like this in a place that was not central London meant everyone there was connected by a kind of geographic proximity you rarely get in London. We chatted with several people there while dancing, and a lot of them were pretty local. 

I was dancing next to Oliver when a cis girl, probably around my age, approached me, smiling, saying, ‘how tall are you!’. 
‘Uhhh like 6.1 I think? 6 or 6.1?’
‘That’s nothing! I’m like 6.3 baby!’ She responded, clearly a bit drunk like me. And she was right, she was very tall, taller than me anyway. She was clearly very happy to speak with me, just as I was with her, and went on to talk about her experiences, sorta shouting in my ear over the music. 

She described how she had, much of her life,  struggled with her height, how it’d made her feel different to other women, how it’d made her have to learn so much about proportions, what to wear, to make her tallness less isolating. But her tone was enthusiastic, and I was happy to confirm and agree with everything she said.

We exchanged numbers on WhatsApp and talked about the areas where we live. I introduced her to Oliver and said we’ve got to do something together. She clearly had a group of friends with her, who were also from South London, and it felt like a good chance to meet new people.

Then, abruptly, at 1, the music faded away, and the bar closed. We said our goodbyes and Oliver and I wandered up Rye Lane to get some wings. 

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As I discussed in my previous post, I had a rough few months this spring and early summer. While the initial cause of this difficultly was not dysphoria related, it certainly brought my dysphoria into an emphasis that I hadn’t felt for a long time- since my early days of hormones anyway. 

It made a lot of the mental work I’d done, a lot of the ways in which I’d felt stable and satisfied with my body and the way I looked, had suddenly disappeared, and I had fallen back into the clutches of the kind of writhing, soul wrenching dysphoria most trans people know all too well. 

Looking back, I can see how that it was a crisis of self worth. Over the course of the spring I came to take such a low view of myself. Since then, I guess what’s changed is that I’ve accepted that it is worth doing the mental work to get better and stronger about this. So that, when bad things happen to me again, as they inevitably will do, I don’t take an unnecessary spiral into hopelessness. 

This post is in some ways a successor to Reading 4, which, by a long way, feels like the piece of writing that I’ve done that has personally helped me the most. It was something of a turning point in this blog itself, in that it was the one where I started to take the decidedly confessional slant that I have in that and subsequent posts. It was there that I was sorta like, well, it’s all on the table. 

More specifically, I think Reading 4 has been the most important for me because the questions it raises about the difficulties I have with my own body are unresolved, or at least still ongoing, in a way that the issues raised in my other Readings are not. Reading 7, for example, the one about how I realised I was trans, felt like it put to rest a lot of those ideas, tying them up with a nice bow. For now at least, that all made sense. 

But Reading 4 is, amongst other things, about what I struggle with the most, my body, how I view it, and how it’s a struggle that is brought into greater relief other difficulties. As I’ve learned more recently, as far as I’ve come over the last few years, that dysphoria is so easily made worse by other things in my life, making me less able to cope, or stay positive.

This encounter with the 6ft 3 woman was around the time I was coming off the back end of my crisis, or, at least, around the time that I was becoming aware that I had been in the midst of a crisis. Even if it was still ongoing, I was beginning to see its contours and causes. 

It really gave me a newfound perspective, that conversation. Especially, because of how excited she was to speak to me, another woman who, presumably, she figured had similar struggles to the ones she does. 

It made me realise something that I feel I’ve realised several times and then, gradually, forgotten. Which is that everyone has their own struggles, and everyone feels like they’re the only ones experiencing them. Difficulties, especially ones of body and body image, are oftentimes isolating to their core. 

I’ve always sorta liked something about being tall. I like the word, the shape of the word. I’ve never too much minded being a tall girl. It makes my life harder, yes, makes it a lot harder to pass, and will probably take a few years off my life but, I think it has a nice ring to it. For me, it’s always my torso that makes me feel like hell.

It’s hard to describe to cis people (maybe they’ll understand it more than I know) but sometimes it’s like, right, I’m gonna look in the mirror because it can’t be as a bad as I imagine, and then, standing in front of the mirror I am so overwhelmed by self disgust at the shape of my body that I can’t bear it. Like, I am physically, overwhelmingly distressed to my core. I don’t think I can possibly overstate the intensity of this, it’s like, in that moment, I’m about to faint. I stare at the reflection with a scientific eye, overwhelmed by my freakishness, unable to fathom what I did to deserve this. 

That’s sometimes. Other times, I’m like, this is okay, I guess. Others still, I think everything might just be alright. But I avoid mirrors.

Over the spring, I’d started following a few subreddits, namely r/tallgirls and r/bodydysmorphia. I think it’s helped me a lot to be able to see the overlaps between the experiences of cis women who struggle with body image and my own experiences of gender dysphoria. 

I think this is because it divorces gender dysphoria from being a uniquely trans experience and instead forces me to view it as something that, while a reality in itself, necessarily overlaps with other cultural forces that affect cis people as well. Like all cis women are supposed to hate their bodies. That’s part of it. 

I may have a particularly unusual body for a woman, but there are bound to be other women just as weird as me, and yet again others who feel themselves to be just this usually in other ways as well. 

Everyone thinks their own self hatred runs to the rhythm of a kind of inevitable, immutable logic. 

But, for women, that has a lot to do with misogyny and how women are taught to hate their bodies. Unlike some trans women I’ve spoken to, I rarely actually get dysphoric from being around cis women. The sheer variation and diversity of cis women’s body shapes and sizes is an amazing, great thing. Spending time around cis women, more often than not, reminds me how my own body, where it is different, is merely so in degree, not in kind. And that’s a big distinction. Yes, my shoulders are huge, but they’re probably only an or two inch longer on either side. My rib cage is big, but its the same shape as yours. I have a big torso yeah, but I can get bras my band size without much trouble- what of it? I may be an extreme, an outlier, but I am possible, and I am different only by measure, not by something immaterial. And, if all cis women looked like me, I probably wouldn’t feel dysphoric all. This is the way in which dysphoria is socially produced, and not merely a medical phenomena, a mismatch of body and mind. 

This is why transmedicalism runs counter to liberation for all people. It’s like the ‘medical model’ of disability- a thing that, in actuality, only serves to extend the persecution that people face. Whereas, as the much more accurate ‘social model’ of disability argues, physical difference is a natural element of society, and disability is produced by an ableist society unaccommodating of difference. 

My situation certainly isn’t helped by the fact of us living through a period of extreme anti-trans hatred. As much as we try to avoid it, or see its vacuity, we see trans bodies getting vilified and abjected all the time. Many times a day usually. And it still has its effects. I often think that living trans now much feel similar to living as gay or lesbian in the 1980s, but of course I can’t really compare. 

So yeah, I love seeing tall cis women. I think they are so beautiful, and cool, and I look up to them (pun intended). I’m glad if and when I can provide any solace to them the way they have done to me. 

Bizarrely, especially when in the heat of a bout of dysphoria, I’m actually more likely to feel dysphoric around cis men who look like they’d pass so easily. I’m like bro you’d 100% pass after like 2 weeks on oestrogen with a good wig. Why am I like this?

But, I mean, he might well find it difficult enough being a shorter, man with a small frame. With bodies, there is no objective view. As much as we might think we are able to lend a scientific eye to them, we come with so much baggage that it’s difficult to know how others see us, let alone how we should view ourselves. 

There are some women who, from I guess around my age, manage to develop a unshakable sense of their own self worth. I envy them, but they’ve had a lot longer being a woman than I have, and a lot longer to realise the necessity of viewing themselves that way. They know the cruelty of the way the world wants us to see ourselves.

Another turning point was this. I realised the other day: if I saw anyone else be as cruel to anyone else as I am sometimes to myself I would think they were an absolute monster. I would think that they were unforgivable. 

I think part of the issue I had was that I feel like I pass less well in the summer than I do in the winter. It’s easier for me to pass in a long coat where I can hide my frame. When it got summery, and I went out in t shirts it felt a lot more like people were staring at me. And as much as you don’t want it to, you internalise the stares: they affect how you see yourself. 

It felt cruel, because I’m a summer person, and I love summer, but I guess this balances things out, makes winter a bit brighter. 

There are obvious reasons why we become obsessed with passing. Safety, for one. It feels amazing, for once, to not feel like you’re being stared at. Like others see you as normal. But I never had much interest in being normal anyway, I always wanted to and liked being different. It’s only now that I have a woman’s body, and see myself as a woman, that my abnormality feels freakish, not just a little quirk that I’m allowed to have. 

A lot of my frustration comes from my having to not wear certain things for my own safety- because they would make me pass less, or, at least, make it clear enough that I’m trans that they would open me up to public harrassment and violence. But, I guess, in a way, that’s sadly a part of womanhood, having to think about what you wear could affect your own safety. It’s just my lot feels so limited sometimes. 

I need to understand that as distressing as it might be in the moment, I do not view my body in an objective way. No one does. Speaking of, I hope that by the time I’m 30 I don’t have these issues. Or at least they’ll be significantly lessened. I’ll be better at dressing myself at least, I mean I’ve only really had around 3 years of actually having a body- before then it was all shadow and flesh.

Obviously, the goal is for me to actually to see that my body is a woman’s body regardless of what I wear or do to it and one that I need to see as one. I need to love my own body- but that’s a long process. There’s a lot ahead.

In my experience there’s a part in the process of loving somebody where you begin to see everything they do, even their faults, as all a part of their loveliness. I mean, you start to see a beauty in everything they do. And you wish so hard that they could always see what you see, but that it’s so hard to do that. I think about that a lot.

Things come in flashes, which I guess is what I meant in Reading 4. There are flashes of us as we want to be. Society wants us to hate ourselves and our bodies. Everyone thinks they’re uniquely unloveable. It’s all perspective. 

I’m in a good mood finishing this. I’m gonna try spend less time on social media, because doomscrolling certainly didn’t help any of this. But I’m grateful to the people who have gone through all this shit before. I’m grateful for all my friends and those that I love. And I’m grateful for that tall girl for coming and smiling and drunk shouting in my ear. 

15/6/24