Member-only story
TRANSGENDER RIGHTS
The Lexicon of The Liminal:
My Debt to the Transgender Women Who Helped Me Find a Way to Survive
In 1985, I moved to New York City to attend college.
By the time I got there, I had lived through a childhood so disastrous that I disconnected from the neck down. It was the only way I could survive.
I grew up not owning my body. In fact, I was dissociated from it for a very, very long time.
I didn’t want to be a woman because I was ashamed of being a woman. Women, as I saw in my growing-up house — were beaten and humiliated and controlled. My body was a source of shame to me.
While I questioned, over and over again, the status of women in my birth culture, I never questioned the assignment of sex which appears on my birth certificate. Female.
But I was liminal in other ways.
I was a few months shy of my 18th birthday when I got to New York.
I was born in the US to immigrant parents. I did not fit into my birth culture. I did not fit into my family. I did not fit into the outside culture, despite the usual public-service-announcement-guidance-counselor-bullsh*t-assurances that I did.
