the otherized

long past crying game

Look. I know this is a precarious topic to breach but I see no clear way around it. Everywhere you look these days on the news and on the net the hyperbolic fear and fury about trans folk is at defcon stupid. As ever I shall acknowledge that I am a straight white dude and move on to more useful business. First to remind everyone the Crying Game came out in 1992 aka three decades ago. If you wonder what else happened in ‘92, kind of a lot. The Rodney King verdict and subsequent LA riots happened. Bill Clinton happened. The end of apartheid in South Africa happened. Independence for Croatia and Lithuania and a half dozen other slav and soviet states happened. It was very much the before times. The Crying Game caused a medium ripple in the zeitgeist for less than a month and you would have thought that everyone who was going to freak out about being bamboozled by a girl with a dick had done so already and got it out of their system. I sometimes feel like those eleven years on the psych unit sometimes clocking sixty hours a week, practically living there, was akin to being tucked away for a decade in one of those biospheres the government has hidden out in the desert badlands so they can practice taking over Mars or whatever, then emerging to find the world upside down and spinning backward crazy fast. 

I understand why. And I totally don’t. I can do both at once and so can the rest of us. I reckon we as a species have got to be able to hold onto two or more conflicting points of view at one time and give them each a fair shake or die trying. The only reason I have any insight of value is that I came to know roughly two dozen trans folk as they passed through the psych ward, which brings up several critical points. First is the hard cool fact that being trans does not mean you’re crazy. Next being that the trans patients fell into three groups. Some of them were trans. Some were gay and confused. Or coming out from religious backgrounds where it was paradoxically more dangerous to be gay than trans. And some of them were delusional. I mean yeah. It was a psych hospital. Not to mention we are the most highly medicated country on earth with a pathological yen for self-diagnosis on the fly. To clarify. By now it feels like common knowledge that gay and lesbian people are born that way. Likewise trans. Some are born with an array of unusual chromosomal combinations beyond XX and XY, and various intersexual physical anomalies that are rare but exist nonetheless. Even point five percent of eight billion is forty million people. Though I do think you might want to sort out your fledgling teen sexuality and who you want to sleep with before you start modifying your body. Especially if you don’t have excruciating gender dysphoria. If you don’t wake up every day dying in that skin you currently live in. And finally I suspect that most of the trans hysteria comes from people who have never met a trans person in the real world. Or they have, but didn’t know it. Which is kind of the point. Trans people have been walking breathing living fucking and dying among us for decades. For centuries really but let’s not make anyone’s head explode. And for all those long years the trans folk among us were definitely using public restrooms, presumably whichever one felt most appropriate and comfortable for them, and the most safe. 

The interesting and confounding thing about Jaye in the Crying Game, she was too convincing. She passed too well, if that makes sense. I don’t know by the way what sort of pronouns Jaye uses now and it’s not that I don’t care, it’s irrelevant. I have a hand grenade of an essay coming about the pronoun dilemma and how we’re inadvertently creating a whole generation of kids who think of themselves in third person, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The reason it’s irrelevant is that in 1992 and in the world of that movie specifically, Jaye was totally a chick. And so much so that every straight dude in the audience with a pulse had a crush on her by the end of the second act. And surely a few lesbians but I always suspected they are better at spotting the glitches. Jaye was phenomenal in that role. I totally fell for her just as hard and fast as Stephen Rea. Maybe the no nonsense Thai idiom ladyboy was a word the rest of us ought to have borrowed rather than look down our noses at as a lazy primitive third world slur. Maybe in this conversation I’m the retard. I should back up here, to the business of who is crazy and who is not. 

The thing about being trans and being crazy is simple. Like the general population as a whole, a measurable percentage of trans people suffer from depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and worse. They may have alcohol and drug problems and eating disorders. Because they are well, you know. Humans. And some people who are trans are wrestling gender dysphoria, body dysmorphia, suicidal ideation, all of the above. And rather like any teenage gay kid who got abducted over summer break to go pray away the gay at some christian nazi conversion camp, merely existing as trans in society is very fucking hard. It sometimes breaks people, shatters their emotional core. The never ending propaganda pushing the notion that all trans teens are one misgendering away from suicide is perhaps overblown. I never found the trans population to be more fragile or more suicidal by definition than any other high risk group. And some of them were tough as nails. Kinda have got to be thick skinned at very least, growing up queer in the south. But surely I’m not the only one to think hey maybe let’s lay off the endless suicide talk, or at least stop drumming that into adolescent skulls. Basic behavioral logic. Take any group of impressionable or emotionally unstable people and tell them fifty times a day that four out of five of them will maybe probably do very bad unthinkable thing X, some of them will start thinking more and more about thing X. Daydreaming about it. Teenagers as a species ought to be in the DSM-V just for being teenagers. I feel like none of this should be news to anyone but somehow it is. Though I would stress that above all the nonbinary white noise gender dysphoria is a very real and nightmarish thing. If you accept that it’s possible to be born into wrong body and then spend any amount of time deep in imagining how that might feel, you’ll get it. Or stop and contemplate the sub genre of horror films called body horror. Likewise autogynephelia is real and well documented but a no less valid reason to be trans.

Anyway back to the psych ward and how the bathroom question is handled in that extraordinarily unsafe space. The answer is complicated. The policy on the hardcore crazy unit was that if you still had a working male apparatus, you were placed in a protected single occupant room on the male hall. Because the penis is a weapon. There were two halls, male and female. There was no trans hall. And even if there were, it would be likewise divided. Because the primary metric by which we organized and divided the patient population as a whole was not male and female but predator and prey. The exact terms were sharks and seals. I don’t know, maybe wolves and sheep was taken. The sad and scary fact is that sexual predators run rampant on psych units everywhere on earth. Likewise sexual assault victims are ever present, and psych staff are as hypervigilant about that fact as they can be. All or nearly all of the female patients and half or two thirds of the male patients had been raped at some point in their lives. Some of them while in jail and some of them in hospitals such as mine, which haunts me more than I can possibly say.

However if Jaye’s character had arrived on my unit and all the single high risk rooms were taken, I would have put her on the female hall rather than the male. Because dick or no dick, she would without a doubt be raped on the male hall unless staff were guarding her round the clock. And what with being a psych patient, if Jaye’s character was a little manic or hypersexual and had a habit of flirting or flashing other patients and trying to wander off or evade staff, well. She would very much be in danger. The staff cannot be everywhere at once. Also because that character was primarily interested in fucking men, not women, at least in the context of that movie. Likewise, the fact that she passed as female so easily, Jaye and her private parts were less likely to freak out or prey upon her fellow patients on the female hall. Because when making such life or death decisions, the most urgent metric was boiled down to who is this patient most likely to be raped by, and who does this patient want to fuck. Because look. The other unfortunate fact to consider here is that not all psych patients are trustworthy, regardless of gender or sexuality. I know, shocker. The fat elephant fact in the room is that some psych patients are delusional. And a great many of them are psychotic. Meaning what. Meaning we also had patients who declared themselves the son of Elvis. At least a dozen were Jesus. A lot of them were secret agents. I had a handful who swore they were legit vampires. And so on.

Anyway one of our jobs as psych staff was deciphering who was who. If a patient came in and looked exactly like a hulking disheveled and possibly dangerous definitely psychotic white guy with a long history of arrests and mental health priors and ID saying his name was Bob, but insisted his name was Jennifer, we placed him on the male hallway and not in a solo room. All of his medical paperwork would say Bob. Most of the staff would call him Jennifer but sometimes they wouldn’t simply because it wasn’t his legal name and he didn’t remotely present as female. The human brain is wired to recognize patterns. Looks like duck and so on. If Bob insisted he was Batman, and asked to be called Bruce, then yeah I would probably call him Bruce, provided he was well versed in DC comic lore. One thing you learn quickly in psych is that arguing with patients about their concrete delusions is pointless and counterproductive. As long as it isn’t going to kill them. The patient who was obsessed with the idea that he could purify his soul by drinking bleach for instance. Otherwise you roll with delusion. Meanwhile, if a femme trans man who was neither delusional nor dangerous but still legally female asked to be moved to the male hall, that request would likely be denied. Because he would be an immediate target for assault on the male hallway. Like throwing chum into the water. And the hospital business model is generally more about avoiding lawsuits than social injustice. It sounds inconsistent and cruel and yeah maybe it is but the real world is like that.

Keep in mind it was 2013 or so when patients like Bob started showing up. All of the doctors I worked with at the time held to the notion that gender dysphoria was necessary for transition and its occurrence was extremely rare, and that no patient should be approved for hormone therapy or reassignment surgery unless rigorously designated not crazy. Not delusional, not psychotic. The trouble with that of course is that those words themselves are not universally defined. Psychology is a soft science. Meanwhile the science on all things trans is well, fluid. Where we have gone sideways and possibly very wrong with this whole business is that some states began doing reassignment surgery on minors, while others did not, and people started to get squirrelly about that, for not necessarily transphobic reasons primarily to do with age of consent. Next we made the grave mistake of suddenly just taking everyone’s word for it without a second thought. If a man with a history of rape and assault can go to prison and out of blue sky declare himself trans and swap his pronouns and move to the female wing just because uhhh social progress, and then fuck around and get another prisoner pregnant, well then the system is broken beyond recognition. As for drag queen story hour I would remind people that we have been terrorizing kids with clowns and giant bunnies for a long long time. If you don’t like clowns or drag queens or grown men in bunny suits, don’t go to the show. My sprawling more complicated theory is that all the fearmongering will become messily and perhaps inextricably tangled with abortion rights, the push to normalize pedophiles, the age of consent, and what it means to make adult decisions. And who then is the adult.

peace.

postscript. This subject is thorny, I know. I’m not an expert. I’m just a guy with a photographic memory and thousands of hours experience in the actual world of psych. And my purpose here is not to solve or further aggravate any existing right left political debates, rather to tell the world exactly what it’s like to be a psych patient in America and maybe untangle how and why the mental health apocalypse is coming and what to do about it. Questions comments feedback please share. And please be civilized. And yes I do know it’s called gender affirmation but my view of that fuzzy euphemism is that it’s about as useful as words like unhoused. And yeah again, I have plenty to say in coming posts about the maddening softcore rebranding of homelessness.