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

Purchased from 123rf.com

Sly Speaks + Fat Friday + Friday Flashback: Diet Culture Rhetoric Is Not Poetry

This poignant gem was originally published on 17 January 2010 on my now-retired poetry blog.

life It would be far easier to diet if I didn't like food.

This, apparently, was the entire-ass poem.

A year later, I would finally take the long-needed step of ditching diet culture for good.

That is a terrible statement, let alone being a terrible poem. 

It isn't even a poem, it's a blurb. A very stupid and brainwashed blurb. It's a tweet that shouldn't have been tweeted. It is a lot of things, none of them good. A poem it is not. 

The Chili Bean Tanka is a better poem, and it is not a good poem. In fact, it is close to Vogon poetry in its poetic injustice.

It goes a little bit something like this.

I ate the chili

between the beans and the spice

digestive horror

beneath the cover of night

noxious eruptions take place

As I mentioned previously, I struggled over the holidays. My abusive partner ED (Eating Disorder) reared his ugly head and I relapsed into my old restrictive eating and self-loathing patterns. Which, by the way, never made me thin, they just fucked my metabolism over and made me hate myself even more. 

However, reading this micro-poem that should not be, I could see where I'd been myopic in my criticism of a poet whose book I reviewed recently. I gave the book overall high praise, but I stated that her "poem" which read as follows, and I quote:

love ends but calories are forever

was not so much a poem as unfortunate diet culture rhetoric, and I wouldn't want to read it as a tweet, let alone in a book of poetry.

Given the unseemly evidence above, that critique was hypocritical of me.

However, there is a lesson to be learned.

Next time you think publishing a pithy pearl of poignant perspicacity such as this...

Go to the kitchen and grab yourself a snack. Or at least have something to drink. Your blood sugar may be low because if you think that's worth publishing, you obviously haven't been thinking clearly. Step out for a breath of air and clear your head of the Diet Culture nonsense. You've obviously bitten off more of it than you can chew.

That being said, Words Written in the Dark is, overall, a thoughtful and thought-provoking volume of modern poetry, and I recommend it highly.

Fat and Ornery

Image copyright Open Clipart Vectors

Ornery Literary Services

Sly and Snarky

Image copyright juliahenze @123rf.com