About this post: Investigating your identity? Playing with language that affirms you? Exploring what it means to be trans*? Check out graymatters’ newest blog post on what the trans* journey can look like. Read about psychotherapist Sabrina Sarro’s gender odyssey.
At the beginning of this new year, 2021,
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to participate in the different ways that a body can move to and from different emotional geographic regions. After having navigated so much grief, loss, and heaviness in 2020, I’ve tried to be more intentional about the ways in which I shirk or dodge what more the world wants to rob of me, of my communities. I think of my body and its migratory experiences as a re-claiming in many ways, an exodus of my organs so to speak, departing from one flesh vessel of me back to another.
2020, though certainly rooted for me and many others in deep wells of pain and community suffering, was the year that I started to realize I am a trans* person/am on the trans* spectrum. I’ve identified as non-binary for quite some time, but this was the first year I started to explore where my experiences fit underneath the trans* language spectrum. From early childhood into young adulthood, I always intuitively knew that there was something about my spirit essence and body that never felt congruent, as it was assigned to me. It has taken several years for me to truly sit with decolonizing what exactly this means and has meant for me, how it precisely shows up for me, and how I want to further harness my exploration of it.
The word trans* and the many corresponding words that might fall beneath it are very sacred to me. To me, being trans* is my body always rooted in relocation; is me trapezing the tightrope of imposed gender and debunking it into something that feels like home, or closer to home. Is me in the flux of my sacred energy, my gender play and discovery, my body always “en route” to finding its very first unfiltered and unstained gender and spirit-gender path. I’m happy to share that I’m finally on the calendar for a gender-affirmation surgery consultation. Interrogating the ways in which I have often felt suffocated by my body has felt simultaneously both liberating and frightening. Having to spend time in the mirror, critically tapping into the feeling of the image that I see being reflected back to me, has been heavy.
Being trans* has no set rubric. There is no one way to identify or be trans*. For me, it means not feeling tethered or connected to the gender and the imposed gender meanings assigned to me at birth. It means that I get to explore and re-discover what gender means to me, the ways in which it feels real and the ways in which it often feels like a scam. It means moving away from gender dysphoria, and closer to gender euphoria. For those of you who are playing with language that affirms you or who are further discovering your trans*ness or where you might be on the TGNC*+ spectrum, know that you are not alone. We see you. I see you.
Written by Sabrina Sarro, LMSW, Clinical Psychotherapist and Curriculum Development Specialist at graymatters