Today’s second reblog is an essay by Dr. Aoife Hart: transwoman, devout Catholic, and feminist scholar… which, needless to say, is a rather unique and not always very comfortable niche to fill in today’s world. Though a Christian now, I had the mercy of being raised in secular surroundings in my dysfunctional, dysphoric “boyhood,” so the inevitable bullying of the school sissy was at least not coloured by religious self-righteousness, and though I knew myself to be abnormal, at least I was not encouraged to internalise guilt over that fact. Nevertheless, I can relate all too easily to so much of this moving account.
For an essay that starts on a very theoretical, philosophical note, I was holding back the tears by the end, though not all of them were sad tears…
“You and me are real people, operating in a real world. We are not figments of each other’s imagination. I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme
This is a story that I never told to anyone in full before . . . about the I who was before I.
By the age of ten, as far as combatting my increasingly agitated whirl of gender dysphoria, my rhetorical options were down to two: hide or lie.
I had already demonstrated prodigious talent for both.
View original post 2,862 more words
