You Are Your Own Jailer

Trans fear and the prison of the mind

I stumbled into my house at 12:30 in the morning, five days after my second top surgery. Every last one of the 2000 improbable cubic centimeters of implant I’d hoped for had been crammed into my sore and stretched breasts. I’d been traveling for almost twelve hours of layover and bad weather as I’d fled Ft. Lauderdale and a historic storm. My bed awaited, and I longed for it—but when I pushed the door of my bedroom open and stripped off clothes heavy with travel sweat, I turned to the oversized full-length mirror that hangs next to my bed.

And I saw, for the first time, my complete body, all at once.

I wept and giggled with hysterical joy. Finally, finally, I was complete.

Eventually, I settled into bed, clutching my wonderful breasts, ready to sleep for an era—and a rogue thought flitted across my mind. How will people react when they see you? Your students? Your family?

You can’t take them off. Ever.

The panic was overwhelming. I sunk into a swirl of terror, certain that this was the line I’d crossed, the one step too far, that would make everyone everywhere turn on me. The line I’d been afraid of crossing from the very beginning of my transition. Sleep… didn’t happen, to any meaningful degree.

The next evening, I went to a local board gaming meet-up that I hadn’t been to in months. I was terrified of peoples’ reactions, but I had to know. I had to know what my new reality was. I greeted a couple of queer and trans friends cautiously. Things were all right so far.

Then there was a hand on my shoulder as an old friend, a cisgender, straight woman who I’d been close with for years, a professional lady about as far off from the queer community as you could get while still having a queer kid. I turned to her, this little wisp of a woman, my heart seizing and my enormous breasts in plain view.

“Hi, Zoe!” she said, before I could squeak a word out. “Oh my gosh, your boobs look so good on you!”

I melted.

The fear of ourselves

Fear really only exists in two situations. Sure, there are a few fuzzy edge cases where they bleed together, but overwhelmingly, there’s just the two categories.

1. Immediate, existential, there’s-a-hungry-tiger-in-front-of-you, fight-or-flight life-preserving terror.

2. Fear of what we want the most deeply. Fear that the consequences of getting or having these things will mean exile, danger, death at the hands of other people.

I can hear the objections to that second category already. No, those fears are rational! Anti-trans violence is real! There are limits to what The Cis will tolerate. Not individual cis people, but Cis People At Large.

That, dear friend, is my exact point.

I have a friend who’s on the very precipice of coming out. She needs to, desperately, by her own admission. But—she’s quick to say—she’s in a public-facing job where her public image plays an important role in her ability to do that job. She needs to manage the coming-out process as press campaign, a meticulously-planned and executed unfolding, so that she can control and influence the reactions of the people she needs to work with. To keep them from reacting badly, so she can continue to do her job as best she can—and, on the flipside, to keep her career from swerving into the ditch. To be perceived as polished and professional.

Every one of those fears is rational. Every one of them. And each of them traces back to the thing she wants so dearly: to be seen as herself, to live as herself. To be a woman publicly.

So small a thing, so simple. Coming out. “This is who I am.”

And that doesn’t have anything to do with any of her job duties.

The prison of the mind

In the ‘60’s, there was a French philosopher named Michel Foucault who ended up being really influential. He was one of the people who gave birth to deconstructive postmodernism, and has been very widely influential. One of his most important ideas, and the one we need to look at very carefully now, is called the panopticon, originally proposed in the 1700’s by Jeremy Bentham. The basic idea is this: imagine a circular prison. all of the cells are open on the inside, and in the middle is a huge tower, sided with one-way mirrors. Every prisoner knows that there are guards in that tower, and they could be watching any individual prisoner at any time.

Because you could be under observation at any given time, you don’t know if you are under active observation at any given time. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention—the penalties for acting outside of the arbitrary rules are harsh. Brutal, even. Savage.

What would you do, if you were a prisoner?

Bentham’s original idea in proposing the panopticon was to create a prison where order could be maintained by a smaller number of jailers, by growing a fear of constant observation and punishment in every prisoner. Foucault took that idea and developed it greatly, because in the end, the idea isn’t to police prisoners with a smaller number of jailers, as Bentham had originally thought. No, it’s much, much more insidious than that.

The idea is to make every last prisoner their own jailer.

You see, as the study of policing has progressed, we’ve learned that the punishment for a crime is basically irrelevant to the people who break the law. The severity of a sentence, it turns out, is almost completely ineffective as a deterrent. No, what deters crime is a person’s belief that they will be caught if they break the law.

By building a state of constant observation, where everything you do is subject to the scrutiny of others and where privacy more or less doesn’t exist, we can plant the seeds of social control in everyone's mind. Put everyone, walking around on every street, working every job, in their own little prison cell that they carry around with them everywhere they go, constantly monitored by a jailer in the back of their mind, because who knows who’s watching behind this camera or that social media platform.

And so the modern surveillance state was born. Millions of cameras, trillions of hours of footage that nobody watches, because having the cameras, the footage, by itself gets people to act the way you want them to.

Afraid.

A carceral state where everyone is always a prisoner, regardless of whether they’ve committed a crime or not.

Trans fear and the prison of the mind

The basic premise of the panopticon is that breaking the rules will be caught and punished. So, if you are living in the panopticon every minute of every day, and if you fear the consequences of embracing your beating trans heart—as I did, coming home with my new breasts, and as my friend does, as she gets ready to come out—then it means that you believe something which is very uncomfortable for us to admit.

That, on some level, you believe that being trans is a bad thing.

That’s what internalized transphobia is, and each and every one of us has some degree of it, no matter how much we love being trans, no matter how proud we are of our glowing, glorious trans selves. After all, if I didn’t believe that being trans was bad, I wouldn’t expect to be rejected by my friends, family, colleagues, and students. If my friend didn’t believe that being trans was bad, she wouldn’t need to manage her coming-out in the hopes of minimizing or eliminating the reactions she fears. No matter how rational and justified our fear of the consequences of our transitions are, in whole or in part, for us to accept and act on them, we must first accept that underlying premise: that we are breaking the rules, will be observed doing so, and be punished for it.

We are bowing to the jailer the world has placed in our minds.

It’s certainly understandable why we have these fears, these jailers. Even if we set aside our state of constant observation, it’s much harder to find positive examples of trans folks in mass media than it is for us to find negative ones, isn’t it? The whole world seems to tell us that being trans will have us meet a bad end, in one way or another. It’s like systemic racism, in many ways: make a thing omnipresent enough and people will accept it as true and natural. And, like systemic racism, we must push back against it constantly if we are to have any hope of overthrowing it, because it’s not just systems of oppression and the indifference of the majority, but our own, internalized, self-hating prejudice that we must constantly overthrow.

Even from our own community. That’s ultimately what being a transmedicalist/truscum boils down to: accepting bigoted self-hatred as truth. Centering suffering and pain and oppression as the central realities of a transgender life. Submitting to the jailer in your mind.

Freedom

In a world where we are all the subject of the panopticon, where we have all internalized our own oppression, where can any of us possibly find freedom or hope?

Well, first accept a radical premise: you will inevitably be caught. Transition means that you must be genuinely and publicly honest in a way that almost nobody else in the world ever has to be. The panoptic eye will find you.

Then accept another radical premise: while some people will embrace you for being trans and the vast majority won’t care in the least, a few people will hate you for it no matter what you do.

Really think about that for a moment. No matter what you do.

Nothing you can ever do will appease them. Even detransitioning, living in the closet—nothing will ever be enough for these people. The moment you opened your eyes and drew your first breath was a fundamental violation in their eyes, one you can never, ever redeem yourself from. They will hate you until the day you die, and nothing—no compromise, no conciliation, no kindness, no nobility—will ever make any of it better in the least. In panoptic terms, they sentenced you to death for breaking the rules the moment you were born. But if you’ve already drawn the maximum possible penalty from them just by existing, and if hiding is impossible…

You’re free. Completely, utterly free.

Again, really think about it. You can’t make it worse. You can’t make it better. These people? They’ve made their own choices, and one of them is that they chose to hate you. Nothing’s going to stop that hate until and unless they choose to change.

The last radical premise you need to accept in all of this is one you’ve probably already accepted, at least in part, if you’re reading this. If you’ve entered transition, you have to have accepted this. If you’ve had a gender-affirming surgery, you have to have accepted this.

The last radical premise is this: you cannot control any part of your transition.

You can’t change other peoples’ prejudice. Really, the only thing you can do to get them to abandon their prejudice is to exist publicly. You can’t change your needs in transition. You certainly can’t make yourself cisgender.

The one and only thing you have control of in your transition is whether you value other peoples’ opinions of you more highly than you value your own happiness and wholeness. Whether you allow the jailer in your mind to punish you, or whether you oust them.

How much of your self are you willing to compromise to try to gain something you’ll never have? How harshly are you willing to punish yourself for the crime of existing? How long are you going to let yourself suffer in silence?

What’re they going to do? Take away your birthday?

You’re free the moment you decide that you’re free. You have nothing to lose but your shackles.

So, what’s really holding you back?