altered states
untethered minds and truthful experiences
In my freezer there is a box of mango Del Monte ice-lollies. The problem with these lollies is that on the day they were purchased I was in a hurry, and so I left them in their carrier bag on the kitchen floor, along with the rest of my groceries. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, but the week I bought them it was still a little cool outside, which meant that our underfloor heating was on. This fact didn’t occur to me until a few weeks later, when I retrieved a lolly from the freezer and found it in a sad, deformed state. It had melted in its packet, concealing the wooden stick and somehow separating the mango juice and water. I decided the only thing to be done was to get a bowl and spoon and poke at it until it became a slushy, mangoey pile of mush. It tasted ok! But it wasn’t the same.
Yesterday I watched a video of a woman who had filmed her body before and during pregnancy, documenting in minute detail the ways in which having a child had altered her ‘thighs, hips and arms’. In the pre-pregnancy video she seemed excited, elated almost, at the change her body was about to go through. But by the time she filmed the second video she said she ‘didn’t know why she was doing this’ as she felt ‘just awful’. I appreciated her honesty. And the fact it didn’t end with the usual declaration that she would ‘get her body back’ once the baby arrives. There’s a term for women whose bodies appear to do this with ease, the ‘snap-back’, it’s called. Ping.
Around my house there are some very tangible signs that having a baby irrevocably altered my body and mind. For instance, on the shelf in my kitchen there is an old biscuit-tin that we now use to store medicine. In there are packets of sertraline, diazepam and zopiclone that I acquired as my mind became untethered from my body in the weeks following childbirth. These days I only take the sertraline, but the other two remain, just in case. Seeing them each morning, especially as I approach the birth of my second child, feels ominous. There have been many occasions when I’ve hovered over the tin and contemplated throwing them away. But what would that achieve? The paraphernalia of my psychosis could be dispensed with, I suppose, but not the fact that it happened.
Sometimes I wonder if adherents of the gender-critical movement are having a similar thought process to me. (Bear with me on this …). I don’t deny that many of these women are fearful for their safety around men because of past experiences. But what I do struggle to understand is how excluding transgender women from female spaces has become the go-to solution for gender-based violence. Male violence is a complex, structural reality of our society, and typically does not occur when transgender-women are in female-only spaces. The ‘solution’ which these women seek is not only impractical and disproportionate, but more importantly, will not magically make them ‘safe’ from the harms they profess to be so worried about.
If we were to follow their argument through to its logical conclusion (gender critical people love ‘logical conclusions’,) then why would we stop with transgender women in female only spaces? Why not push for an even greater segregation of men and women within our society so that women can feel ‘safe’?
The truthful answer to this question is that excluding transgender-women is a symbolic quick-fix which is more easily achieved than actually confronting the complexities that underpin male-on-female violence. There will always be a small chance that women may experience male violence, in the same way that there is a small chance I could suffer another bout of post-partum psychosis. Throwing away my medicine, or stigmatising transgender women (who comprise 0.1% of the population,) is not going to prevent that from happening.
We are all shaped and transformed by our experiences. It’s an obvious enough statement. And yet we still seek to deny this reality in any number of ways. We create worlds in which we feel ‘safe’, or ‘better’, which often involve other people having to play along in some elaborate performance. If I’d experienced my psychosis twenty years ago, then perhaps my family might have struggled to acknowledge it. Maybe it would have been dismissed as a bad case of the baby blues and that would have been that. Nothing to see here, folks.
Of course, TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) argue that it is the transgender community that is engaged in a performance, forcing us all to ‘deny’ the realities of biology. But when I speak to trans men and women about their lives, I encounter people who are profoundly aware of their biological reality, and do not seek to deny it. What they do rightly deny is the notion that they are somehow less-than because their biology does not mirror their gender identity. Rather than being fantasists, these are people who have a very tangible grip on reality, and are making choices about their lives as a consequence of reckoning with it.
Seeing only the worst in other people, and in ourselves, is no way to live. When we embrace our altered states instead of running away from them, we open ourselves up to other truths: that it is possible to live a happy life even after we have suffered. That people, most people(!) are good. And that the real antidote to our deepest fears is not fear-mongering, but a commitment to living courageously on a day-to-day basis, in spite of the things that have happened to us.
It’s been hot today. The skin on my bump feels itchy as I sweat and try to find a comfortable position to write. I notice that my mind is not going to the dark places it would have done two years ago. But this isn’t because I’ve been able to turn back the clock and return to the state I was before I gave birth. That ship has sailed. Perhaps it’s something to do with accepting the person I actually am right now, instead of chasing after a version of my self that no longer exists.
Recommendation Corner: Transformation Edition
Read: Matrescence: On the metamorphosis of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood by Lucy Jones
‘Times of transformation, whatever they might be, are opportunities to find new connectedness; to choose and consolidate the things that matter; to bring repressed selves out of the shadows into the light; to forgive; to grow layers of nacre, of resilience, of acceptance.’
Read: This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Remembering and Forgetting by Octavia Bright
A tenderly written memoir reflecting on Octavia’s journey with alcoholism and the declining health of her father. I’ve previously written about Octavia’s book in more detail here.
Read: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
‘I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honour, but honesty.’
I have bought multiple copies of this book and always end up lending them to people, as it’s an utterly brilliant exploration of so many things: motherhood, gender-reassignment, feminism and love. Nelson’s mind is simultaneously expansive and incisive.
N.B I receive a small commission from Bookshop.org for books purchased via these links.
As ever - thank you for reading!
Well put. I was thinking some of these things as I watched the Leaders Debate last night in BBC.