Content warning. May contain spoilers.
gender dysphoria
a short story by Rue Gürcan, English
I admit it – I’m a walking cliché. My shampoo bottle also turned into an Oscar when I was a kid. Like many kids with golden shampoo bottles, I dreamed of becoming an actor. Being on movie-sets, walking on stage, telling stories for a living. And, like many others, I’ll take the cliché even further and say it: theatre was my first love. The stage, the costumes, but especially the fact that, for a little while, I was allowed to be someone else. Someone entirely different. A guy’s annoying sibling. Someone’s best friend. A lover, a boy, a girl and yes, even a tree (and let me tell you, I was a good tree. Sometimes).
On stage, for a moment, I could avoid this teeny tiny feeling that had started creeping up inside of me, bit by bit. Invisible at first. Some sort of cloud that widened inside me. It became a demon that constantly attempted to take over. Not the kind you see in movies – mine wore expectations instead of horns. It mirrored the world’s idea of who I should be, not who I am. Call it dysphoria. Call it the script the world writes for you before you even learn the words. It clenched its claws into my gut, whispered expectations I never agreed to, and waited for me to play along.
How do you acknowledge something invisible? Especially a demon. One that demands immense attention. Makes you feel less and less day by day. Tells you that in order to be happy, you have to embody a stranger every single day of your life. Embodying that demon was the hardest role I played, giving in to its manners, disciplines, and insane expectations. But there was a solution. My Solution. ‘Cause the minute I was allowed to set a foot on stage: Poof. All of it. Its mere existence disappeared. It evaporated on stage. There, I could breathe.
However, we’re talking about a being that existed beyond my control. And, plot twist, it wasn’t as happy about my little solution. Erving Goffmann, famous sociologist, set the thesis that we all play theatre. At all times. Every day, every moment of our lives. We are on stage when we interact, meet our friends, go grocery shopping, or hold our presentations in Uni, and we are backstage when we go home, fall onto our couch and hit the Netflix button. Our clothes are always costumes and there is a fine line between playing a character and understanding who we truly are behind the façade of it all. Finding out who that really is, is the hardest task of them all. I found them in four letters. They mean nothing to most, but everything to me. I have found that to let go of that cloud, that demon, I have to face it. See that I am hiding. Not obliged to play by anyone’s rules. Everyone has their own set of ideas as to what that may look like. For others, it is as simple as a few letters. To me, it was four in particular. They and Them.
No one bat an eyelid when I played a tree and watched Winston and Julia from Orwell’s 1984 secretly meet up to kiss. No one complained when I played a boy on stage and had to smear flour onto my face for ten weeks straight. The moment when I go backstage, though, they suddenly do. I feel it creeping up, bit by bit, the same way the demon did. I do not wish to be front and center. I do not wish to stand on any stage when I simply want to exhale. And yet, piece by piece, I find out that the bits and pieces that make me, me, that manage to allow me to let go of that feeling, is, for many around me, a debate. One they thoroughly discuss in the evening but can easily throw away by night. To them, a mess. Confused. Unusual. A danger. A reason for protest? Now isn’t it silly, that for the world to see me for who I deep down already am, I am forced to put on an act? To live, to breathe and let go of that very same demon.
In a cruel way, I guess dreams do come true. I just didn’t think being myself would require this much rehearsing. But hey, at least I nailed the tree.