Born in the Wrong Body
How facilitating a gender transition group as a therapist opens me to begin to dive deeper into my own sexual identity wounds.
Late August, 1991 heat blazes through the window bleaching the Huichol Indian tapestry upon the wall behind my therapy desk. An ASU graduate colleague, Jet Reed, had hired me as an individual and group therapist when The Wilkins Group received a million-dollar contract for mental health services in Phoenix, Arizona. .
Our offices are located off Indian School and 44th Street in a twelve-story building, on the eleventh floor with a glass framed elevator overlooking a mini park with a few grassy hills and a large koi pond that reflects in the light as you ride up the elevator.
I have mainly been working with postal workers becoming burned out as the city grows in population and the complexity of delivering snail mail to the public increases. There are a few women who need help with sleeping, calming their nerves and chattering minds as well as people with chronic back pain that persists after repeated surgeries. I also facilitate an ADHD expressive arts group on Saturday mornings.
Jet bounds into my therapy office, her breasts and hips swaying in confident pizzazz.
“Free on Thursday evenings?” she asks.
I nod my head, possibly I am.
“My son has soccer practice every week,” she explains.
“This is a great opportunity for you to develop some expertise in the human sexuality. Who knows, some day you could write a book about it?”
Jet and I met during our ASU Masters of Counseling Program around five years ago. She’s a five-foot bombshell with milky skin, sensual lips, black piercing eyes cloaked in horn-rimmed glasses. She chose the research option and I chose the practicum option, so we mainly saw each other casually in the hallway or during group assemblies.
We’re both single moms except she has two sons. Her youngest is the same age as mine. Both boys love visiting us at the office to ride the glass elevator and visit the koi pond filled with bright orange fish and lily pads.
Jet’s genius mind revels as an officer in her Mensa group, with one single criterion for membership: a score on a standardized IQ test in the highest two percent of the general population. Mensa makes it possible for you to meet people at your intellectual level. How she finds time to date some of the men she meets during game night is a mystery to me.
Jet sits in my work chair. “Yvonne has been covering for me since we moved into these offices. She will fill you in on the details.”
Yvonne began the group five years ago, inviting Jet to facilitate with her after her husband, a psychiatrist, dropped out. Yvonne, a PhD, has a research project with Lonnie Barbach in Human Sexuality and traveling to San Francisco frequently.
Yvonne, a sixty-year-old frumpy clothed hipster, with a crown of red frizzy fro and granny glasses gazes steadily at me.
“It’s important to make sure each person attend all transgender group sessions on a regular basis for no less than two years before a client can schedule a sex change operation.”
I gulp, “What kind of operation?”
Her matter of fact comment leaves me clueless about what the major concerns are for a man choosing to transform his body into a woman’s. Perhaps she assumes Jet has given me more information about this group I’m inheriting. She doesn’t go over any specific considerations, techniques or group dynamics to be aware of. I expect at least a checklist of behaviors, emotional qualities or markers to determine when someone was ready for this life changing operation.
“What are the most important topics to cover during group?” I ask.
“Just get them to share their feelings, talk about their expectations, fears and challenges.”
I rub my forehead and crinkle my chin, hoping for some guidance regarding approaches she’s found helpful, especially how to encourage the group members to address deeper motivations than simply the physical alterations to their bodies.
“If you need more insight, talk to Roberta, the electrologist. She sees most of the men privately for hair removal.” Yvonne seems impatient. “As long as they feel heard and understood, you are doing your job.”
I receive the best coaching about the group members from Roberta, a feisty Hispanic woman with a wiry frame. Her raven black sculpted hair matches her brows and eyes. She speaks like an artist, having been a cosmetologist for twenty years. This specialty in electrolysis for transgender men who desire a sex change has developed over the past ten years, and Roberta has personally worked with many members of the group.
“They need this group as their supportive lifeboat to traverse the troubling emotional waves of expressing desires, emotionally developing and physically evolving into the feminine butterflies they were destined to become.”
I can hear the caring concern in her voice.
“These delicate creatures confide in me. I have grown to care deeply about some of the group members and they depend upon this group to cope with the tendency to hide and isolate their bodies and their feelings,” Roberta explains.
She fills me in about Tom from Yuma: “He’s in the process of scheduling his operation in Canada after only a year of therapy.”
Roberta emphasizes there are no exceptions to the two-year mandatory therapy requirement. “I think he’s scheduling it in Canada because they only require a year of therapy there.”
I call Tom to talk with him about it, but he doesn’t return my phone calls. Tom works as an engineer for the state of Arizona as a tech specialist in Yuma. Phoenix was a five-hour drive and hindered consistent attendance. He’s barely shown up once a month last year according to Yvonne’s records.
We meet every Thursday evening for two hours in the back room of Roberta’s electrolysis clinic located in the seedy western avenues of Phoenix. The men are in various stages of transitioning from a male body to a female body or settling for somewhere in between.
Several of the seven men in my transgender group appear to be certain they’re born in the wrong body, the wrong sex. The other four I sense are at various levels of contentment in the bodies they have.
Drop-ins are initially allowed, some men attend for the first time after receiving an electrolysis treatment. Hair removal is a regular ritual for half the men even though several started taking estrogen on a regular basis which helps their breasts blossom or bud, faces fill out and skin soften. Arm, back, chest and leg hair continue to grow and for some in our group, this seems a constant annoyance.
Michael, Tom and Stan are determined to have a sex change operation according to their paperwork files. They’re committed to reach the mandatory two-year group or individual therapy requirement before scheduling their operations.
Five men show up for our initial group meeting. Gene, the married postal worker, Ed, with a bi-polar diagnosis, Michael, Stan and Gary, all three attended regularly. Tom, from Yuma, determined to have his operation after a year of therapy, was not one of them.
I suggest everyone close their eyes and follow their breath coming in through their nose and going out through their mouth. My voice guides the men into a deeper place inside. The suggested is focus on accepting and appreciating the body they are in, the genitals they have right now, inviting them to feel beauty in every part of their body.
As we drop down in this deeper place inside, what bubbles to the surface of my inner awareness was how I can begin to heal my own body image challenges. I see myself as I was at eighteen in undergraduate college. All I wore was earth tones, baggy flannel plaid shirts with corduroy jeans. I felt self-conscious about my body, not comfortable with young men’s attraction. After being whistled at when walking from the swimming pool back to my dorm, I decided to cover my body up.
As the men continued their inner visualization, it rose in me about my father’s disappointment that I, as his first born was not a boy. He never actually said anything about my body. It was how he acted and spoke to my mother and about women on television.
When I was around seven or eight, I recall I wanted to be in the living room with my grandfather, uncles and my Dad. I stand and share something aloud to the four men in our family and Grandpa says, “Why don’t you go into the kitchen with your sister and Granny?”
I can still feel the pain in my heart of disappointment and hurt that obviously Gramps doesn’t value me as a girl nor is he interested in what I have to say.
Gene works as a postman, currently content to wear a blue uniform during the day and stockings, wig, and skirt by nightfall. Dressed in an attractive skirt, textured tights and two inch heels, he was the first to share. He shares with the group s/he frequents several bars in the neighborhood.
Gene’s face lights up when he describes when last week a man offers to buy ‘her’ a drink and ask ‘her’ to dance. This appears to be the most important goal for he/she to be attractive to a man and seen as a woman.
“My mother dressed me in silk stockings and slips since I can remember,” s/he smiles.
I ask, “How old do you think you were?” I ask.
“About five or six. I loved how soft the fabric felt on my thighs. The stockings slid smoothly up my legs.”
“Did she call you a different name or pretend you were a girl?”
“No, I liked how soft my skin felt and it made my mother happy to see me enjoying her dressing me.”
Ed has a bipolar diagnosis. “His mother was just like him,” Roberta confides in me. He rarely speaks during the group or afterwards. His eyes fixate on mine from the start of the group until the end. Gary’s quiet too, but he always takes his turn to talk about his concerns and fears about being alone.
“I want the operation so I can finally have a relationship with someone.” Gary comments.
Ed retorts, “And exactly how is a sex operation going to help you do that?”
“Well, I can’t have a relationship with a man until I can be accepted as the woman.”
This was the most heated dialogue we have had in group so far and I am wondering if I should intervene.
Gene sums it up by saying, “You have to accept yourself as a woman before anyone else will.”
Tom from Yuma comes in late tonight and appears to be more an observer of the group rather than a participant. He’s dressed in a stylish wood tweed women’s suit with dark stockings and black patent leather heels. His hair looks like he had just come from a high fashion salon.
Tom crosses his legs either one way or the other for most of the session. His hands drape over his knees, displaying his long fingers with manicured red enamel press on nails. His facial expression soberly serious yet difficult for me to discern his/her emotional state.
I ask him if he has anything to contribute to our current topic and he simply shakes his head “no”. Tom only speaks that evening to Michael and Stan.
During evenings like this one, I wonder how much progress we are really making as a group. I know the therapeutic benefit of having a circle to share such things and be heard and held by the group.
I continue to wish for the group to progress to sharing deeper feelings and concerns about their self acceptance and sexual identity. In a group setting, it’s more challenging for me to discern what each person needs from me individually.
I truly don’t know exactly what each man may be experiencing and I continue to encourage deeper self-acceptance and self-love. I feel like a broken record at times with the exercises and phrases I use during the group therapy.
My background and foundational counseling training has been with counseling principles of Carl Rogers, Adlerian family therapy and Gestalt therapy as well as Group Dynamics with cutting edge leaders who both taught through weekend encounters and experiential groups in my counseling education practitioner program.
This transgender group challenges me to step into applying what I have integrated so far as an educator and counselor. I feel open to explore how I can facilitate this group maintaining authenticity and integrity.
The overall tone of the group continues to be quietly somber. Sharing any true emotions feels tentative at best. Half the men are still married but rarely bring up how the transition process impacts their relationships with their spouses. The sense I have as their therapist is that the majority considers their spouses as roommates rather than life partners.
When I ask how a wife was coping with a particular person’s transformation, I usually receive the standard, “She never says much about it. We let each other live our own lives.”
I continue to encourage each member of the group to think in terms of relationship needs when the topic would go to the main intent being to have another man accept he/her as a woman and treat her in this way.
The topic of sexuality and how relating as a woman with another man would be and feel was one we rarely addressed. I ardently feel that I am not succeeding in facilitating a deeper therapeutic process to touch deeper emotions, assumptions and fears.
The consensus of the group continues to be primarily about each group member’s personal appearance and what needs to be changed physically. Several men share about their frustration concerning hair removal, how painful and time consuming it can be, as well as expensive. The estrogen seems to help one man, however another complains of how depressed and moody he feels on the hormones.
My attempts to address his/her emotions and how hormonal imbalances can evoke more sensitivity and vulnerability that can rise to the surface appear to fall on deaf ears. It’s easier for the men to focus on the physical aspects and tendency as men, to leave their emotions out of their endeavors.
After facilitating the group for eight months, Ed brings in a brochure that shows the graphic surgical procedures of dissecting a penis into a vagina. I wince when I see the mutilated organ.
Michael comments, “They use some of the tissue of the glans to form a clitoris, but sensation is not guaranteed and the success rate for orgasmic responsiveness is only fifty percent. “
My stomach flutters and I feel like I am going to faint. I glance down at several of the brochure detailed photos of how the penal shaft being reconstructed into a vagina. The tentative potential for satisfying sex appears to me to be unlikely.
My emotional reaction continues to deepen around this evolution of surgical mutilation of a magnificent organ with a risky promise of pleasure or satisfaction from a reconstructed glans to a clitoris. I am unable to stop seeing the graphic image of this level of genital surgery and rush to the bathroom, sitting there for a while, running water in the sink.
Roberta pulls me aside when I come into her office before our subsequent group session.
“Ed attempted to commit suicide. He probably won’t volunteer anything.”
I grimace, “Gene said he called and talked with him about it.”
“Thank you for letting me know.” Roberta sighs and leaves for the night.
Tonight no one is volunteering to go first. I guide the men in a visualization of seeing themselves as their ideal self.
“How tall are you?”, “What are you wearing?”, “Who are you with?”
“What are you doing or planning to do?”
The rest of my feeling visualization prompts continue.
“Are you feeling more feminine or masculine?
Why or why not?
What are you feeling the most happy about?
What are you able to be, express or experience that you weren’t able to before you became your ideal self?”
Gene shares first, “I am surprised to find out that my ideal self is pretty much who I am right now.” I encourage Gene to continue.
“I still look more masculine, but my mannerisms and demeanor are all very feminine and I feel more feminine than masculine.” He sighs and continues.
“I’m okay with my masculine hairy body than before we did this exercise.
Gary sees himself as a tall blonde. He’s about five foot six and has carrot red hair with freckles to match,
“I feel more like my sister than myself.”
S/he smiles. “I can see the tops of most men’s heads and this makes me feel more powerful as a taller woman.”
Fred, a new person to our group passed on sharing what he visualized for himself.
“Did you find the exercise helpful?” I ask. Fred nods and smiles.
“Do you ever feel you were born in the wrong body” Fred asks me.
I reply, “During the holidays, I sometimes wish I was in a male body so I could sit in the living room with my Grandfather and Father and feel included in their conversation instead of feeling invisible.”
We close the group after almost five minutes of silence.
Tom has not attended group again for three weeks in a row. I have been calling him with no reply to my messages.
“Has anyone heard anything from Tom?” I ask. Everyone shakes their heads no.
Gene hands me an envelope he whispers to me that Roberta left it for me.
He explains he had the envelope because he’d had his hair lightened on his arms, legs and upper back for the first time.
When I open the note, I do my best not to reveal my concern and surprise. Roberta wrote to me that Tom decided to go to Canada for his surgery six months shy of two years.
His physical recovery went well, however he’s been depressed, despairing when his expectation that his outer appearance would somehow change his inner feelings about himself and now he’s in the Hospital in Yuma for attempted suicide. Tom didn’t cut himself like Ed. He took too many pain killers and called Roberta.
Two suicide attempts in our seven member group over the span of a month. These circumstances confirm by doubts about being the best therapist for these metamorphosing male group members.
My intention of maintaining the sanctity of the male genitalia was becoming more apparent to me. My inner dialogue persists. “Why massacre a perfect penis?” and continues for me for the rest of the evening, after the photos of the prospective surgery had been witnessed by me,
The significance of my strong emotional reaction to the physical surgery triggers me to realize my personal/professional agenda in this group is to support the men to accept the body they have. To support group members to feel this beauty of being in the body they’re born into. And encourage each man to dance and play with multiple dimensions of feminine and masculine expressions, identities, and roles upon a more stable foundation of self acceptance and love.
Reflecting upon the various considerations I had about this level of focus for a transgender group, what bubbles up for me initially is how we all struggle or have at times during our developing bodies, with body image.
I eventually choose to resign as this group’s transgender group facilitator; staying in touch with Roberta, hoping there will be another therapist to replace me. And, I have an insight that perhaps Roberta herself was actually born in a masculine body. We never talked about it, however it would explain her empathic intensity with the men she served as an electrolysis. technician.
Many of us remain lost concerning our sensuality and sexuality, with no map provided in a country that represses natural sensual and sexuality in our nuclear families and at the same time as a cultural norm, uses sexuality to persuade and sell a polarized image imprint in “socially acceptable” advertising, books and movies.
Images are mere suggestions, and as developing imaginative human beings, we are easily susceptible to these subtle and not so subtle suggestions repeated over and over again with an intent to induce a trance state similar to hypnosis about gender identity and how it is socially portrayed through clothing trends, hairstyle, and stance.
Of the men in my gender transition group, at least three of them demonstrated to me that they desired to become a woman in appearance to be loved by their mothers, or rather, they sensed as children their mothers valued the feminine identity over the traditional masculine ones.
Their mothers shared their feminine identity as they had learned to express theirs outwardly (socially acceptable scripts), including being wrapped up in soft clothes, stockings and silk slips, make up, etc.
And, perhaps the internalized belief by their mothers was that to be cared for, held and loved, they needed to become more feminine in their outer appearance since wearing feminine accessories appeared to give their mothers pleasure.
For some young men this objectification can bleed into their desire to be identified as a feminine object. Many people can become lost in a fetish focus upon items, images and objects and become enmeshed with the fetish to replace or substitute their deeper need for intimacy with themselves and another.
How can we feel safe in our skin growing up in this polarized sexual identity? By allowing a wider container or fluid field of creative exploration of both gender aspects of our bodies’ erotic and sexual expression.
An example was when my son was around five, he had two of his girl friends paint is finger and toe nails and he wore a wig and one of their dresses. I held space for his creative play, pretending I didn’t know who he was and spoke to him as one of his girl friend’s. I could sense how he was looking at me, he was curious what my response would be.
He’d been sensitive about many people assuming he was a boy when I didn’t cut his curls until he was around 3 or 4. When someone would comment what a beautiful girl I had, he would bristle and say loudly “I am not a girl, I am a boy!”
I dressed him in jeans and a sweatshirt, hand me downs from friends who’d had boys. My father would call him a girl when he was older when he wore an earring in his ear and grew his hair long in his late teens. He and I did not react, hoping my Father would stop it teasing him. He said at the time he didn’t care what Grandpa had to say.
For me, I encouraged more of an androgynous way of being that was emulated by the Hopi and Navajo cultures we lived in when he was a baby and toddler. We embraced both feminine and masculine ways of being and expressing.
What lies beneath our self-image is imprinting from our parents concerning how they held their own sexuality and inclinations they may have projected onto us as developing children. This is the ‘scripting’ L. Barbach points to in her book For Each Other.
Naturally the conditioning our fathers and mothers had, especially as baby boomers, during a time when the valuing of one gender over another was an embedded polarity in the very fabric of our relationships with our own body, our identity including how we allow ourselves to express our sexuality in ways that ground and empower us.
L. Barbach refers to how impressionable we are as open and porous children into adulthood, susceptible to the power of suggestion through visual cues and images used as markers for ideology mentally encouraged through repetition through the scripts our parents have accepted and believe in as well as our socialization in schools and work settings, not necessarily based upon reality for developing human beings.
The message we heard or interpreted for ourselves was, “I am not enough the way I am in my body”.
For myself, as I mentioned earlier, I grew up knowing my father and grandfather valued the masculine over the feminine way of being in a body. I decide around nine or ten that I need to become more masculine to be valued and loved by my Father and the greater patriarchal society, to be accepted in the culture of work and feel my contribution is important and valued.
I definitely didn’t feel enough, nor had the luxury of time to continue work through my inner turmoil about mutilating the human body and remain the group therapist for this transgender group whose goals appear to be to have a sex change operation.
With my schedule, and as a single mother working full time, I wasn’t available to work with any of the men in my group individually. Perhaps I could have found a way to visit Tom in Tuscon, but it felt impossible for me to manage at the time.
I could no longer deny consciously nor unconsciously that it’s not my truth to support such a radical change, that feels in my intuitive knowing, against nature and nature’s principles.
Several of the men express their dismay and disappointment about there being only four months left of the year for their group therapy. After I leave the group, I begin to receive hang up calls with seething silence on the other end.
I choose to leave the Wilkins Group after Jet and I disagree about the appropriateness of me resting my hand on a child’s shoulder during our art therapy and sand tray work on Saturday mornings. A hyperactive boy attending my group, spilled the water and sand and froze in his body.
I place my palm on his shoulder and use a soothing voice to assure him he could clean up without any reprimand from me. Jet walks into the group room as my hand rests on his left shoulder. She’s adamant about no touch. I understand this, and I trust at times, therapeutic nurturing touch can be appropriate.
This transition with my therapeutic work was happening during the same time I began to wake in the early morning with squishing sounds and a trigger memory of june bugs on a screen door. Repressed shadows of trauma memories of my childhood sexual wounding slowly but surely began to bubble and rise to the surface of my consciousness.
The reality of the fluidity of our sensual and sexual natures as evolving human beings is becoming more apparent within the multi dimensional aspects of our gender identity, roles and partnerships. How we view them or tend to transcend or override them continues to change during various times of our lives.
Our erotic aliveness, sensual and sexual energy is the same as our life force energy. This natural way of being sensually fluid in our bodies is innocent and pure beyond any gender identity nor image imposed by an outer world lost in the belief that images or impressions are more real than our innate natural way of being intrinsically woven in the frequency of nature and the Earth we are intimately a part of.
Crone Wisdom thirty-three years later:
My embodied truth now is the importance of boundaries, empathy and integrity in a relationship with ourselves, an intimate partner or a group. In this reality, we can serve each other as “mirrors for each other”.
We mirror for one another what triggers us inside by the other person’s appearance, way of expressing and relating. What turns me off in another, I have on some level denied or judged in myself.
I observe that most of the men in the transgender group were in long marriages and appeared to me to be more comfortable in their masculine bodies. Perhaps this was due to their marriage or long term partnership gave them the foundation and security to have the courage to explore this deeper longing inside.
Perhaps the use of pronouns by later generations has helped ease the big divide with book publishers always use the male pronoun. Many youth in many places have sparked the emphasis for s/he use of pronouns. I don’t feel this is the remedy nor solution to our current dilemma. I appreciate the effort to attempt to free themselves from the traditional stereotype pronouns.
However it is still a polarized way to identify oneself. ‘They/us’ still feels oppositional to me. And, to require others to use these pronouns seems to be missing the point by placing the responsibility on others to acknowledge their nuanced identity.
Ownership of one’s emanation of their essence, be it predominately feminine, masculine, or a blended presence lies within the person expressing a more fluid way to be not just physically or sexually, but on emotional and spiritual dimensions.
This challenges us to the core when we’ve been conditioned to be co-dependent, to hold space for ourselves instead of anticipating or expecting someone else to do so. As a therapist, I have developed and grown to be able to adeptly hold space for my clients.
The biggest challenge for many of us lies in developing this foundational ground by holding space for ourselves. This requires each of us to look inward and feel where there may be wounded parts that haven’t experienced a loving space held for them with our parents or other relationships in our lives.
Trauma recovery opens a gateway for us to experience having space held for us to simply be ourselves. To hold space for ourselves initially and then with our potential friends and intimate partners and in groups in society.
To be able to extend holding space for each other arises from within us when we can see the essence of love shining through people’s eyes and as we continue to heal from the inside, we can become more and more a culture of care, connection and solidarity about what nourishes and nurtures our emotional, physical, mental and spiritual natures within as well as in our shared outer environment.