Dawg-Skin.

‘’Remains of Divine’’

"Shouldn't the man who invented the iPhone own his own creation?"

Maturity, for human beings to mature, is the unfolding of genetic potential over time and experience. Our brains are born half-baked and have to be shaped by our environment. For example, I was born with the capacity to learn Cantonese; but as nobody ever spoke Cantonese to me, that capacity went unrealized, so if I want to learn it now, I have to struggle to bring those capabilities to fruition. 

This comes up in my work in mental health, with regards to emotional maturity. Emotional maturity, in large part, is the ability to perceive and understand your own emotional needs; to be able to tell which are valid and important and which are unhelpful or disproportionate; to have a variety of skills, habits, and abilities which will address those needs; and to be able to tell which ways of coping are appropriate for which situation. We teach classes, entire curriculums, on getting in touch with your emotions and mastering your responses to them.

We don’t talk about “sexual maturity” in nearly the same way. “Sexual maturity” gets talked about like… “Congrats, 10-year-old girl! You’ve got your period, which means you’re now a woman capable of bearing a child! You’re sexually mature!” which is SO fucked up.

Proposing “sexual maturity” in a way parallel to “emotional maturity” kind of shakes me to my bones. I can’t imagine going into all the institutions that shaped me when I grew up and saying, “You are neglecting an important part of the development of the children you serve. For them to become healthy and mature adults, they need to be able to understand their sexual needs and desires, or lack thereof; understand how to judge whether a sexual experience is desirable and healthy, or unhealthy or aversive; to be able to recognize lack of desire or attraction, and be able to set boundaries, reject unwanted intimacy, and refuse unwanted sex; to learn a variety of skills, habits, and abilities (like using fantasy, self-stimulation, artistic expression, role-play, or genuine sexual encounter) with which to meet their needs in healthy ways; to care about the autonomy, feelings, and needs of other people with whom they interact; and to be able to tell which ways of meeting their needs are appropriate given the situation and person they are with.”

Or, well, I can imagine. I can imagine getting thrown out of every school, church, community league, and Girl Guide troop I tried it in. “You want us to teach these children WHAT?” Because suggesting that children be taught about something is tantamount to suggesting they be abused, dragged into a foreign world into which they might hopefully never wander otherwise.

I’ve been digging deep into sex and society lately and am so struck, over and over, with how much my culture of origin (Anglo-European, North American, Christian) absolutely valorizes sexual immaturity. In a world where sex is “dirty”, complete ignorance of sex–both in general, and your own sexuality in particular–is seen as “pure”, as “innocent”. As desirable. The very knowledge of your own sexual desires degrades you as a person.

I guess it’s because I am a Christian, I know a lot of current or former Christians, who feel very betrayed by purity culture’s fundamental promise of a beautiful romantic life: You don’t have to become sexually mature to have all your needs met. They will be met for you.

This means that we were promised that if we never thought about sex, never thought about what we wanted or needed, a day in our lives, one day someone would come along who would know for us and make sure all our needs were met. 

I grew up trying to ignore the bitter stories of former Christians who discovered sex and found it really great and left their faith. But what I found–and what a lot of the people I’ve talked to lately found–was that instead, we discovered our faith, our chastity, wasn’t getting us what we’d been promised; instead it made us dry, desiccated, unhappy, unfulfilled, lonely, and full of shame. We didn’t leave the Church for the arms of a willing lover; we left it for a lonely road to a world where we had to shift for ourselves, and we’d been specifically discouraged from ever learning any of the skills that would let us do that. We left it for Tinder profiles and a bunch of matches we didn’t even know what we’d do with, if we ever got them.

Especially for women, and for LGBTQ+ people–and especially for those of us who are both–this legacy of silence, shame, and neglect isn’t just a trauma in the past; it’s an active impediment to the present and future. We’re pressed in on all sides between dating tips to “Be confident! Just be yourself!”, positivity culture that says, “Love your body! Enjoy having sex!”, and purity police hunting down “deviant perverts” whenever we try to express how shameful and frightening sex can be, or try to imagine our way forward with it. Instead we just pick at each other and post memes about “useless lesbians” and don’t rock the boat by questioning how we got here or how we’re getting out.

The one thing I know about shame is that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you feel ashamed, and act like that shame is right, you become even more entrapped in a world of secrecy, silence, and judgment. It’s only when you admit it’s there but deny its legitimacy that you gain any ground.

Elliot Page’s new profile in Time magazine, the first since his coming out as trans in December, is bringing much-needed visibility to the experiences of transmasculine people. In it, the actor opens up about the pain his gender dysphoria had long caused him, and the relief he experienced after deciding to live openly, to undergo masculinizing chest surgery, and to dress in clothes that don’t make him feel, as he puts it, “so unwell.” Page now says, “I was finally able to embrace being transgender, and letting myself fully become who I am.”

Alongside this welcome exposure, however, has come an amplification of harmful messages that are only too familiar to trans men and transmasculine nonbinary people. (Page has not explicitly said where he falls on the binary/nonbinary continuum.) These are messages of infantilization and diminishment, where a grown adult—Page is 34—can be spoken of as though he were an impulsive teenager.

One noxious, illustrative example can be found in an article for the Federalist, which describes Page’s transition in the headline as a “cry for help.” The first paragraph declares: “Elliot Page appears to be the model for rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” For those unfamiliar, ROGD is a proposed but as-yet-unsupported diagnosis, which is believed by its proponents to affect adolescents. The idea, essentially, is that teen girls (discussions almost never use “boys” or trans women) are somehow lured into erroneously (and “rapidly”) identifying as trans by too much transgender acceptance in online culture.

Of course, it should go without saying that a 34-year-old who has experienced dysphoria symptoms since he was 11, as Page relates in the profile, would not be a candidate for this unproven, speculative diagnosis, even if it described a real phenomenon. But “accuracy” is not the point of this piece or of the larger anti-trans rhetoric of which it is just one part. (Indeed, the author himself acknowledges, way down in the text, that Page is an adult who cannot be barred from making his own decisions.) The point is to spin out a bunch of words hand-wringing about the impact of Page’s coming out might have on trans boys (though they’re referred to as teenage girls throughout the piece) in an attempt to discredit transmasculinity writ large.

In these aims, the Federalist article is representative of a particular prejudice that trans men face. Transphobes who discuss trans men almost never refer to us as men at all. They don’t even use the word “women,” which, though it would be insulting and misgendering, would at least show a baseline recognition that we have agency and make our own decisions. Instead, anti-trans activists’ discussions of top surgery or of the effects of testosterone therapy are forever talking about girls, teenage girls, vulnerable girls, young girls, and daughters.