By Alasia O’brien Taylor
Men, Women, and Beyond the Binary.
What is gender? Is it something we are simply born with or could it be a concept so vast that it’s worth rethinking? Even without doing research there are biological characteristics that do separate men from women at birth. In our culture, gender is defined later in life and separated by a set of social constructs and attributes portrayed as “Male” and “Female”.
These identities are often confused with ideas of what “Femininity” and “Masculinity” is supposed to look like. Over the years of questioning my own gender, I had come to the conclusion that gender is similar to beauty. I believe there are no defining characteristics of beauty; it goes beyond conventional standards that are socially preconceived, which we use to rate and judge ourselves.
Beauty is an expression and expression is infinite.
I know that I am in fact a beautiful young woman by the name of Alasia O’Brien Taylor. I was born with a set of XY chromosomes, rather than the biological female set of XX. That is how essentially all human life starts out before the sex-determination process begins and one of the X’s is selected at random and permanently inactivated, assigning that person with a “male-gendered” body at birth. In normal people words, I’m a transgender female and proud to be so.
I wasn’t always this proud.
Actually, I used to internalize my trauma and who I am so violently, that I had become a literal monster, hellbent on self-destruction. It wasn’t until I began to truly accept myself for who I am, and things for what they are, that I stepped out of darkness. I started loving myself unconditionally for what I really am; a person.
When I was just a kid, I would dress up in girls clothing, play with my barbies, show them off at school, and wear wigs. You know, all the usual shit you hear kids doing who may later question their gender identity – unless they’re just kids being kids. That wasn’t the case with me. My knowledge at that time of what it meant to be transgender, other than the conceptual existence of the term, was close to nothing. The same was true for my family.
At a young age it was assumed I would grow up to be a gay male.
My family accepted me warmly, which is something I’m forever grateful for, especially considering how many LGBTQ people don’t have, or have yet to attain this EXTREMELY affordable luxury. Yet as if being gay wasn’t different enough, I knew with every
Somewhere between ages five and six is the earliest I can remember feeling uncomfortable in my skin. Around age eight was the first time l thought that l was fat and began going to my grandmother and doctor with concerns that l was overweight and that my body didn’t have the correct proportions. This caused my grandmother and several therapists down the line to try and reassure me that I was neither fat or skinny, rather, l was “just right”. It didn’t work.
The first time l held a blade to my skin I was 11 years old.
My childhood home and pretty much everything l had ever owned was destroyed in a drug raid due to my grandmother’s negligence. I don’t blame her but our family has been through hell. It’s been seven years since that event took place and l can barely recall what the inside of the house looked like. The time display on the VCR is permanently stained into my mind from the moment the swat team broke through our doors. It was a sunny Friday morning on May 18th, 2012. l can literally see the bright yellow numbers reading 10:30 AM as I type this. The large guns, my family members looking down the barrels of those guns, the clutter, the chaos, my youth fading away in an instant.
Turning 12 a few short months after the raid, my grandfather passed away. I was on a camping trip in New Hampshire with relatives I’d began staying with. I was hunched over a toilet in the back of an RV wiping the sweat off my forehead after sticking my fingers down my throat. It sounds gross but that’s just the brunt of what I’d begin doing to myself in the following years. The cyclical thoughts of the eating disorder were becoming more prominent and quickly shifting from a faint whisper to alarm bells that I simply couldn’t ignore anymore. The problem was that l didn’t want to. By the time I had turned 14, my self-destructive tendencies were in full swing. I’d been hospitalized twice already since the school year started.
In February 2014 l began my first outpatient treatment program. l stayed about a week and a half before insurance stopped covering my care. l just had to suck it up and deal with my shit on my own. To me, that meant avoiding the actual problem and continuing to deprive my body of nutrients – while my great uncle (the problem) deprived me of my innocence.
My home was no longer a home but fragments of memory and an idea of what a home is supposed to be.
My body was no longer my body but a burden – it didn’t belong to him either. l belonged to no one and nothing – l was both a no one and nothing. I’d lost all sense of self and found a new one in my disease. It gave my life meaning while defying exactly what it means to be alive. Little did l know that’s just what it makes you think.
I already had a purpose and this was a head-dive into the unknown, an attempt to erase the self l had before SHE could be discovered, but I held on. I would question transitioning my gender because of how bad I hated men at the time. I thought it possible l was just refusing to be one, or that I had hated myself so much I wanted to create someone new or some fucked up shit like that I couldn’t understand why I so badly had this pressing need to be female. Then I realized that this is who I have always been but suppressed.
When I was younger and people would refer to me as a girl, and then correct themselves, it felt like they were making a mistake, instead of correcting one. The idea of transitioning was something I couldn’t even fathom. The thought of presenting myself as female and being misgendered was an annihilating thought to my self-esteem. I would force myself not to think about it only to find out later that my eating disorder was the manifestation of exactly what I wanted to be.
My entire life I’ve been chasing ideal body image standards that western society has set for women.
My eating disorder served me the purpose of getting there. It made me look and feel what I saw to be womanly. Not having anyone who understood what I was going through, I had to learn for myself that deteriorating my body to appear conventionally beautiful doesn’t make me a woman. It made me sick and someone who strove for synthetic happiness, which should be common sense, but who said that eating disorders were rational?
35 treatment centres and group homes later here I am: happy, healthy, and a woman.
Transitioning my gender was one of the best things I could’ve done for myself. All this time it felt like I’ve had a plastic bag tied around my head and someone cut me free so I could finally breathe. I have struggled with my eating disorder for the good part of seven years and I’ve been on the precipice of recovery this last year and a half.
It’s been two years since I began my transition and the eating disorder has started to fade. For the first time in my life, I’m actually happy and moving forward. This disorder cast a shadow over everything in my life that was good making me a negative, timid being, but that’s just not who I am anymore. To be truthful, that’s never who I really was. I was hurt and I still am.
There’s not a single day l go without fighting my disordered thoughts and that’s something l may have to deal with for the rest of my life. But as long as I still have a pulse, there’s time to change and grow. I have my transition to thank for that. It saved my life and this is the prospect of freedom.
About the Author
Alasia O’brien Taylor is an activist, makeup artist, and digital creator. Follower her on Instagram: @3lectric.goddess.
March 31st, 2019 is Trans Day of Visibility
This year’s theme is, “Creating Authentic Bodies, Breaking Barriers”. Learn more at the Trans Day of Visibility website and on their Facebook page.
