memorial → May 5th
It must have been 4 years ago, sometime that winter after I had moved back out on my own and come back to college. I was watching a BBC documentary about Intersexed individuals. I had seen it before, sometime back in ’01. Back then, I didn’t know who I was, just a sophomore living off campus at a major university who happened to prefer watching TLC for background noise.
That’s why everything fell apart. In ’01, I recognized the problems these people were talking about. I had started digging into my own medical records and was barred at every turn. “No, you don’t need to see those first 5 years. Sure, they the first 5 are about as tall as the last 15, but you don’t need to worry. It’s just medical words, nothing you haven’t been told.” Which, in case you didn’t know, if slang for “Of course we are lying to you, and you’ll damn well like it and shut up.”
I pushed harder that summer, and got the truth. Everyone who knows me knows how many sugeries I went through. Everyone I grew up with knew I wore my scars like battle wounds, proud of each one. No one around me knew the truth. I can still count on a single hand the people outside my family who know that I was born so messed up they just picked to assign me as female.
So, watching this first documtary in ’01 made me push harder and got me the truth. It cost me several more years; dropping out of school, getting my brain back together for the newer me, and then pushing my way back into achedmeia. Completely worth it.
So, winter of, I guess it must have been ’05, I watched the special again. I caught the line that haunts me, still. David Reimer said something to the extent of “If it takes someone walking out into a field and killing them self to make people, doctors, notice, then I will.”
I was stunned. I was in tears.
When I was handed a copy of Colapinto’s As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as A Girl, I put the book on a shelf and refused to read it. “I know how this ends.” I was assured that, in ’02 or ’03, David was still alive and happily living as a man. I shrugged, and repeated “I still know how this has to end.”
When he said that, in a documtary about his, and others, lives, I knew.
I crossed my fingers, I hoped and nearly prayed I was wrong. But it ended with a ‘In Memoriam’ screen listing that he had killed himself May 4th 2004.
I wept.
I left an instant message to my parents saying, to the effect “Fuck you and the entire medical establishment.” and turned off my computers. I put on some headphones, and slept on the sofa. Truth is, every year on the 4th of May, I still do about the same thing. Not from some strange ritual, but because it seems the best time to evaluate my situation as well.
I know, it sounds morbid to suggest the thought as “Would my death further help those who continue to go through this?” but there it is. Growing up, between genders, I had the opposite thought of “Would my death finally make them all think of me as the person I am, not the gender they want me to be?” But, I was convinced they would leave a female name on my tombstone and figured that if they were going to spit on my memory that way, I was better off here doing my damdest to set the rest of the world straight (in a very queer way).
And I still am.