Does it ever bother you, Amy, that your life doesn’t make any sense?
— The Doctor, The Pandorica Opens.
In the early morning of the 24th of March 2020, I had a dream that seemed to last for less than a minute. In the dream, it was a pleasantly warm summer afternoon in the South of England, and I was sitting at a picnic table in the shade of a hotel or restaurant garden with some of my oldest friends. Everyone was having a good time. As I stood up to greet a new arrival, I realized that, in the dream, I was a woman. I don’t remember how I looked or what I was wearing - I think it was the cliche of a summer dress. I felt relaxed, happy, and confident in a way I never did in my waking life. Once I had walked over to the new arrival and warmly welcomed them, I woke up. As I returned to reality, the feeling remained, as feelings from dreams sometimes do.
But however right things had felt in the dream, I remembered that I wasn’t a woman in real life. My entire life was built on top of this incontrovertible fact. I knew what I was and might not like it, but that was how it was. End of story. And while I supported trans people, of course- I mean, I thought they were great, I was in awe of them. I didn’t understand- or rather, I couldn’t imagine- well, there was definitely nothing- look, there was no way I was trans. It just wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t. Stop it. Just stop. Please stop. Please.
Look, I would have known. And I didn’t because there was nothing to know. OK, you can’t prove a negative, but- hang on, I just remembered something that can prove it! Oh, thank goodness. I can prove it. So, years ago, I took some of those online “Are you transgender?” quizzes, and they all came back negati-
uhhh, wait, what?
When did I do that?
More to the point, if there was nothing to know, why did I do that?
Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.
— William Gibson, Neuromancer.
Starting with a single crack in the perfect machinery of unconscious denial that my mind had constructed to protect me from what it saw as the threat of self-knowledge, I remembered more and more. As a child, I couldn’t understand my feelings, so I put how I felt into animal transformation fantasies. After a teenage friend told me that I only seemed happy when I was playing a female elf in D&D, I should have been able to piece it together. Section 28 and all its cognates ensured that I couldn’t. I spent more than half of my life as the meatpuppet of an internalized transphobia that I didn’t even know I had. I spent three decades feeling unaccountably wrong and alienated and depressed and fake and anxious and like I didn’t matter or even really exist.
Then suddenly, I was real, and reality was all-consuming existential body horror.
With the evidence now on its side, my body could finally name what was wrong with it and express its deep displeasure at the fact, regardless of how I might take it. “Dysphoria just means sadness” doesn’t capture the physical pain of whatever we choose to call it any more than it captures its standing-under-a-waterfall emotional weight. It felt like a demon with a cattle prod. From when I woke up to when I fell asleep at night, it was all I could do to defend myself against it. The more I remembered, the harder that became until, by the third day, I had gone from being terrified that I was trans to being terrified that I might not be. I promised the barely metaphorical demon that I would transition. It left me alone, warning me it would return if I didn’t make good on my promise.
… an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.
[…]
How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyberguerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one’s software was part of the disguise? Exactly like this?
— Nick Land, Machinic Desire/Circuitries.
Three days. With all my resources, I had lasted three days of being consciously aware of my dysphoria. What had felt like a demonic possession was actually an exorcism. The end of lying to myself without even remembering it. The end of being able to.
If you had told me any of this on the 23rd of March 2020, I would not have believed you. It would have been impossible for me to. An increasingly large amount of my brain’s runtime had devoted itself to the process that censored my experience of myself in the world. If you’d told me I was plugged into a computer simulation or that I was a character in my favourite TV show, I would have found that far more convincing. I tried to tell myself that the Censor was trying to protect me. But that’s still a hard ask, even though now that I’m finally a person, I want to be a better person.
If this were fiction, a dream would be beyond cliched to impart knowledge to a character. No competent editor would allow it through. But in real life, when no rational attack vector remains for the truth to exploit, all that remains are the irrational ones. The game theory of denial produces no victories. The truth will, in fact, set you free. It will also terrify and break you. But it will set you free. And then you get to stop pretending that you aren’t a woman. You get to actually exist.