Slivers

Grinding Glass: Minimization, trauma responses, and emotional self-harm

This article is dedicated to my friend, Sapphire, in the hope that, someday, you’ll be able to show everyone the woman I’ve gotten to know over the last couple of years.

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I made a terrible mistake early in my transition. It could’ve cost me everything.

The early August evening is cool and close and dim; normally a time I love, when the world goes quiet and things slow down. Not tonight. I know I’m a woman now, and it terrifies me more than anything else has ever terrified me. Worse, I know I need to transition. Need. I won’t admit to myself that it’s a need, because needing it, despite how desperately I find myself catapulting into transition, has a whole array of terrifying consequences that I won’t be able to control. Being out of control, after three decades of holding on to who I am and how I’m allowed to be, is something I can’t even consider right now.

The panic attacks are back. Not as bad as they were when I was deep in my gender crisis, but still bad. I can’t stop thinking about how people are going to think about me. Whether my colleagues at work will care about what’s in my mind anymore, or just what’s in my skirts.

B— pulls me close, holding me from behind as we cuddle on our couch. The lights are out. Shadows, cast of starlight and liquid moon and night, are all either of us can see.

The specter of the real fear, the deepest fear, the thing my soul screams that I can’t live without stirs in my gut. That she will leave me. Who would ever blame her? This isn’t what she signed up for—the thought chases itself in circles in my mind.

“Whether you’re Zac or Zoe, I’ll love you just the same,” she said just days ago, and it changed my life. I press closer to her, fighting tears. Words are easy, though. I have a doctorate in words. Life is much, much harder, and this is not what she signed up for in life, or in her marriage. Who would blame her?

I’m certain nobody will ever see me for the woman I am inside. I know what the science says. Hormonal transition is less effective when you get older—never mind that metabolisms slow down with age and that none of these studies follow people for more than a year or so. Couldn’t possibly be that things are just slower with age.

And if I will forever be the hideous monstrosity that the dysphoria I refuse to acknowledge says I’ll always be, why would she want to stay?

This isn’t what she signed up for, this isn’t what she signed up for, this isn’t what she signed up for—

“This isn’t what you signed up for,” I say, and the words are out of my mouth before I know I’m going to say them. B— is quiet, sensing there’s more. I’m a sucker for her silences. I can’t hold back, and the rest spills out. “I can deal with anything else. People hating me, losing my job, anything, but I can’t do this without you,” I say. “I want to transition so bad, but it’s not what you signed up for.”

Then I say something horrible, self-annihilating, unfair, evil.

“If you ask me to, I’ll stop. Any time. You get to veto this if you want to.”

B— doesn’t say anything. She just pulls me tighter, tighter, until it feels like our bodies will merge into one, like from the old Greek myths.

Stress responses, trauma responses

One of the normal things your body—every body—does on the regular is experience stress. It’s something your body evolved to expect, and it’s got whole systems to handle that stress, and turn it into something productive and ready to help you survive. This is called the stress response cycle, and pretty much every living thing, from plants to fish to people, has it.

In a nutshell, when you bump into something, from a problem as minor as feeling hungry to a crisis as deadly as seeing a hungry tiger, your body releases a series of chemicals that starts a neuronal and physiological chain reaction that gets your body ready to meet that stressor. Most of the time, it’s minor—you go make a sandwich—and the chemicals that triggered that chain reaction get flushed away promptly. Big stuff, like our tiger, triggers one of the most important defense mechanisms our body has for its survival: the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response, which some argue should be expanded to include flopping (physical collapse—literally, playing dead) and/or flooding (emotional collapse—literally, being flooded with emotions and completely swept away).

The aim of the F’s is to get you somewhere where you can survive an overwhelming threat, like the tiger. The chemical chain that floods your body pricks up your central nervous system and helps you make that split-second decision of which of the F’s to pick that’s most likely to save your life. For example, if you fawn—beg for mercy—that tiger probably isn’t going to respond the way you’re hoping.

So, say you flee from the tiger, which is definitely the right choice. You get home, slam and bar the door, and the tiger prowls around outside. It still wants to eat you, but you’re safe behind your tall walls and stout door. You laugh, cry, eat some food, and slowly the stress chemicals are flushed out of your body as that life-or-death stress is resolved. Eventually, the tiger leaves, looking for an easier dinner.

But what if you picked wrong, in that split-second moment? Say, you froze, and the tiger prowls closer and closer, and the only reason you survived is that another person happened by with weapons and managed to fight the tiger off for you. That moment begins to calcify in your brain, becoming a traumatic stress response, the wrong choice seared down in neon lights so you never make it again.

Or, even worse, imagine you did everything right. You ran, got home, barred the door… and the tiger never went away. It just kept prowling outside, forever, growling and charging against the door from time to time.

With you trapped.

Forever.

The stress chemicals never really drain, and as they sit there in the tissues of your body, they begin to do terrible damage. Your body literally begins to tear itself apart as it keeps itself at high alert indefinitely. If you’re lucky, the result of this is burnout, which is a combined flop/flood collapse. If you’re unlucky, it becomes cPTSD.

Often, though? It becomes both.

And, yes, as you’ve probably guessed, in this example we’re not really talking about a tiger. We’re talking about the lifelong, incessant push to exterminate transness—trans people, really—that each trans person in the West has to live with from the day we’re born. That tiger, always outside our door, perhaps prowling the hallways of our very home, wearing the skin of our mother, our father, our siblings, our friends, our spouses, ceaselessly hunting for that part of us that can never run (where can we possibly run to that’s safe when everybody, everywhere is that tiger?), that can never fight (how can we win, fighting against everyone we know?), that will be exterminated if it is caught freezing.

So we fawn.

The fawn response is a response which is almost uniquely built to respond to threats from other people. When you fawn, you sublimate your own needs into the needs and desires of the social, human threat that you’re facing. By appeasing them, you make the threat that they pose go away.

When we’re trans, though, there’s only one way that the threat we perceive will go away: if we stop being trans.

Which is impossible.

So that tiger—the social danger that we face as children from those incalculably more powerful than we are—never stops threatening us, and the seeds that will grow into complex trauma are sown and watered well.

The smallest possible space

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

A trans person either realizes they’re trans later in life or is finally no longer able to repress that part of themselves. They tenderly come out to the people closest to them. To their delight, their family doesn’t abandon them instantly, doesn’t reject them, doesn’t throw them out. They even say that they support the trans person in their transition! Miracle of miracles!

Only… only, the trans person’s new name is just so hard to remember.

Only… only, it’s just so hard to get used to their new pronouns.

Only… only, the idea of the trans person getting surgery or hormones is just so much to process right now.

Does it really all have to happen now?

Does it have to happen so fast?

Can’t you just be a feminine man, or a masculine woman?

Haven’t you thought of grandma, our family finances, and how this all will affect the family dog?

Are you sure you’re trans? You never showed any signs, after all.

Why don’t we just put this all off a bit, until you’re sure?

And since we put it off, why not put it off forever?

And at every step along the way, the trans person negotiates, appeases, trying to keep these relationships alive until suddenly, terribly, they realize the truth: no amount of fawning will ever make these “supportive” people actually support you.

Because they were the tiger all along, eating the trans person one bite at a time while whispering in their ear that they were being so, so very kind for not killing them outright.

The result of complex trauma based on extended fawning is something called minimization/magnification, in which the traumatized person shrinks themselves, their needs, the impacts of all of the terrible things that’ve happened to them. They shrink themselves and every need they’ve ever felt to the smallest possible space.

Ideally? They shrink themselves right out of existence.

Meanwhile, they magnify the importance of the wants and opinions of the people around them, exaggerating their magnitude and impact. Concerns and desires are made more important than needs, and another’s fleeting pleasure more important than your lasting comfort.

After all, the space the person has just made by minimizing themselves needs to be filled by something.

So we fill it with other people.

I still struggle with that myself, if I’m being honest. I cast a wide net for friends and then can’t really let them in because, deep down, I don’t really believe I deserve to have deep, loving connections. Every time I become close with someone, there’s this ticking sense at the back of my mind that it’s only a matter of time before they decide to exit my life. Usually, after three to five years’ time, they’re done with me. So… I try to help them. To make myself valuable to them. To push back that tick-tick-ticking clock as long as I can.

One of my deeper fears is that Stained Glass Woman as a whole is that same trauma response writ large.

I know it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, in many ways—if I can’t let people in, why would they stay?—but that trauma-memory is so deep in me, the emotional learning I took from it so fundamental to my every belief structure that it’s like trying to swim through concrete. I learned young that nobody would ever want me and, right wrong or indifferent, I’ve come to believe it wholeheartedly.

A million tiny shards of glass

Minimization is everywhere in the trans community, because minimizing our transness and everything associated with it is the closest we can ever come to not being trans. Scroll through trans Mastodon, look at /r/asktransgender, or go to any other trans place and you’ll see someone asking how to hide their transition, talking about going stealth, that transition is hopeless because the trans person will never look the way they want—the list goes on. Small things too, like joking a little too often and a little too seriously about our “flaws.” Not wanting to dominate a conversation (that’s about you, naturally). The terror of taking up space, of being not trans enough.

Of not being enough at all.

When we internalize supremacy culture, when we make our own existence contingent on the tolerance of those around us, when we subordinate our very lives to the opinions and judgments of those around us, we are continuing that lifelong fawn reflex that we’ve tried to use to protect ourselves. We yet again minimize our needs and our hurts so that we can lie to ourselves that we are, finally, free. All the while, we’ve only traded one way of shrinking ourselves for another.

These countless slivers of emotional self-harm are the tools we use to continue to inflict the trauma we’ve become so used to upon ourselves. Trauma we come to believe we deserve.

Trauma we're afraid to live without.

Each little twinge as we slide another sliver of glass into our soul is small enough that we can pretend it doesn’t hurt, holding still in between so we’re not sliced to ribbons by the damage we’ve already done to ourselves. And then we wonder why we still hurt so badly.

That, right there, is the crux of the problem.

Because there’s only one other way to eliminate a trans person’s transness—and I think that that grim statistic has received more than enough attention, thank you very much, so I will only note here that it is an ending that comes from magnifying other peoples’ disapproval until it completely overwhelms your very right to exist.

Nobody deserves that.

Enough

You may not have heard this before, so I want to say it plainly:

You are enough, just as you are. Yes, you. You, the person who’s reading this right now.

No, you don’t need to pick yourself apart or apologize for your feelings. I don’t want you to, either.

You deserve to have the things, the life, the body, the family that will bring you joy just because they bring you joy.

You deserve to be heard. To feel your joys and your pains with all your heart, and just as publicly as you want to feel them. To take up space in our community. In every community you’re a part of.

You are enough.

You can stop hurting yourself.

Letting go of the urge to minimize, to emotionally self-harm, is no easier than taking the leap of faith into transition. After all, it was the only tool you had to survive, in a very literal sense. Letting go of your death-grip on the only defense mechanism you ever had is as scary as it gets, but it’s a knife with no handle. The only way you can hold on to it is to cut ever more deeply into yourself.

Any trauma has to stop before you can heal from it—but that means you need to stop hurting yourself too.

And you don’t deserve to hurt forever. Nobody does.

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Other articles in the Grinding Glass series:

• Shattered, a new model for understanding gender dysphoria.

• Growing Up Broken, an examination of how trans trauma forms.

• Complex Trauma Disorder? I hardly knew her!, which helps you walk through the process of accepting a complex trauma diagnosis.