Peter Pan Syndrome + Trauma = Gender Medicine for Females

A response to the following post from Eliza Mondegreen's Substack post about E. Page's interview in Esquire Magazine.

 https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/i-could-not-picture-myself-as-a-woman

"I could not picture myself as a woman aging."

The title suggests a degree of Peter Pan syndrome as well as untreated trauma and psychological issues. E. Page discusses panic attacks and eating disorders. Somehow, the cure for these issues is a mastectomy and cross-sex hormones to emulate the appearance of a male. E. Page does not look so much like an adult male as an androgynous adolescent. 

Androgynous adolescent is the goal appearance of many females with restrictive eating disorders (anorexia.) 

I was 32 years old when I was sexually assaulted in 1997. At that time, the En Vogue treatment was to prescribe drugs (SSRIs and benzodiazepines.) Not one doctor listened to me when I told them that I had been sexually assaulted. Their goal was to shut me up.

I experienced panic attacks approximately every 20 minutes from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep. Did I consider suicide? Hell yeah I did. It wasn't only the doctors that didn't listen to me either. My own family members told me that I had "gotten over it" when I was sexually assaulted fourteen years previously and I'd get over it again. I never mentioned it again.

I do not respond well to psych meds. SSRIs make me manic and psychotic, two things that I am usually not. I have paradoxical reactions to benzos. Valium is the only one that doesn't trigger rebound panic attacks, and it makes me thick as a brick. These drugs are not a solution to trauma.

After a year of struggling with no help whatsoever, one day the panic attacks stopped. I gave thanks to whatever powers there may be. I have no intention of arguing whether or not such powers exist. That really isn't the point. 

I wonder if my sexual assault happened now if I wouldn't have been pushed in the direction of transition even though I never expressed a belief that I was male or a desire to be male. I had a deep-seated hatred of my body that was there before the assault and was exacerbated after the assault. I was fully aware that what happened to me happened because I was female. Not because I "Identify as" female, but because I am objectively, biologically female. 

Never mind that I have never wanted to be male (other than when I was menstruating, a hell that I endured once a month for 40 years, and even then my proclamation that I wished I could turn into Guy rather than Sly was mostly a joke.) I genuinely wonder if the Gender Idealogues wouldn't have used the behaviors and distress of a trauma sufferer to push me down the path to transition and I wonder just how many trans-identified females are also suffering from PTSD.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Stock image by Julia Henze

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