On 'social, not moral'; gentleness; and singing:

----------

I think that really was it. I just wanted to be gentle and loving. Because I didnt seem like it. 'what other male role models are there? maybe im trying to model christ'

I realised that that was the wrong framework.

"I feel like I scare women. and I really just want to get along with them. Their kinds of friendhip and banter seem so much freer and more meaningful, yet also more simple, joyous. I feel like a wolf among sheep. And to any human I feel like I am completely unendearing."

All my favourite role models, people I met who’d moved me - pointed toward exactly what I wanted to be - S*******, B*******, my mother, E******* ... characters from TV shows. It was always the upbeat, free, socially open ones with this lightness. They were always girls.

I struggled to find the gentleness of behaviour and appearance I was looking for in some hypothetical christ-like ideal male role model because that gentleness I saw was only instantiated in my perception of women.

I was climbing up the wrong tree and got stuck up it.

I wasn't looking for the right set of moral principles, I was looking for the gentleness of typical femininity - not for moral, but social transition. The aura of gentleness I seeked to emulate was not achieved through the acquisition of moral superiority.

i was not wrong that it seemed almost visual, like a glow.

it was visual after all.

physical.

auditory.

It was the human body.

it was women’s bodies - features; motions; mannerisms physical and social; voices.

of course, clothes.

god, maybe one of the earliest signs was that I wished I could sing with the voice of a woman. I liked singing. I remember being happy trying to sing along to Orpheus in Hadestown in that higher, beautiful register he reached. I was happy when it sounded right. It seemed, finally, as proof that what I wanted was possible in some way and I could reach it. I could never really do it consistently though.

I was proud to be called a tenor.

Outraged to learn that even Orphean attempts to reach that more moving range are labelled:

"falsetto"

ha.

What i wanted - as my chasing this exercise proved to me - was beyond even Orpheus.

Any old Orpheus pales next to a PinkPantheress; a Kaneko Ayano; a Casey Lee Williams; an Olivia O.

Oh, what we both have been resigned to.

imagine growing up autistic and religious.

trusting all this shit about god and how it'll all help everyone be happier even though you don't really know how. and even though it seems to actively contradict that; however hard it forced you to try and rationalise nonsense; however embarrassing it was to follow publicly; or how it forced you into stances you were ashamed of; somehow - even though you couldn't understand how - it was best for everyone's happiness. and that's all you really wanted. you just want to be a good person. you just want other people to be happy.

and the whole time its keeping you in this information bubble where you don't actually know how to do that. what happiness even is. you didnt know how it's more distressing stances would lead to happiness, but it made sense everywhere else and has seemed to serve you and everyone you know (another sample biased in its own favour) well so far - it is 'the religion of love'. and you think it really means it. you want it to. yeah, some things don't make any sense, but this jesus we see in the new testament does seem to point in this purer direction. maybe you just don't understand it well enough - have enough faith. why would it lie to you? it's all you know - don't you owe him for this entire world you were born into? "Lord, to whom shall we go?"

-------------------------------------------------------

there were little feelings that bothered you. you didn't really know what would make you happy. why you were so weird and cringy. you had little pinpricks of what felt good. why did they feel good? what were the full “depth and breadth and height” of them? of your soul? You don't question this.

I remember feeling like I was lacking a male role model. How is a man supposed to act? they are so brutish - its true how pervasive toxic masculinity goes. There aren't really boys around that I'd like to emulate. who is the more gentle man? not my father. What is a good man? Who am I supposed to be when I am so different?

You won't even have the framework to question this until you are 24 years old.

Because you already have a simple answer to everything. It's jesus. of course. I don't need to explore myself or my feelings because the conclusion is already written. not only am I wrong to doubt this direction and explore elsewhere - doing so is actively harmful to me and those around me. How crushing to see their brother lose faith. How guilty for leading them astray. stupid. Because little do you know that these feeling *are* pointing to something. which you do not have words for. You do not have a map of where it is or what that place looks like. That alone is not damning. What is, is that the reason you cannot find it, is that all your faith; and prayers; and the church talks you listened to; and the parental advice you obeyed (you are a good, obedient boy, right?); and the attempts to understand these religious principles in the modern day, have provided another map for you. *here* is your happiness! now go, sisyphus!

All the while your shoulders straining. if this mountain has a top - if heaven is there - you feel no closer. you feel your shoulders growing under that strain. You want people to feel comfortable around you. safe and loved and knowing that you are gentle. some ineffable christ-like aura. You look in the mirror and wonder why you only see violence. Maybe if you keep pushing that boulder.

-------------------------------------------------------

It is not entirely true that you could not name that place.

You had seen them before. knew, by dictionary definition, what it was. There was someone like that in a group of friends who you'd spoken to once. Your dad told you not to hang out with those friends. You were resentful of that. it was obviously beyond ignorant. it was hateful in a way completely against the foundations of my understanding of your own religion. But it wasn't more than that to you. you thought they were strange, but didn't see the harm. I don't think I really spoke to someone like that until university. In that sense, in truth, I did have a name for where those feeling pointed to. I knew it's name. But I did not know its sweet landscape. If I knew someone. If I was told. If I had it explained to me. If someone sat me down and explained this simple thesis.

I. Know. I would have understood. and I would have recognised its landscapes written in my own self, deeper than gospel. If someone just told me - if somehow I knew to look, I know I would have felt its familiar face. i would have already felt in my own self the familiar curves and traces of its rocks and streams. lakes and cliffs and ridges. her soft pastures. her forests deep and warm. I know because that is what happened as soon as they were described to me.

But the map in my hand had no interest in descriptions of those valleys and streams - those people and writings - aside from the singular and unexpounded label of 'sin'. Instead, it told me that such happiness was up that fucking mountain.

I didn't know about HRT. I didn't know about voice training. I hadn't considered the concept of social transitioning. That the outward differences categorizing boy from girl were smaller than society and religion claimed. That in places, with effort, that undefinable barrier could be crossed, in a way meaningful to yourself and your peers. That this could be truer to yourself than staying on the side you were born into.

I didn't know how real these feelings were; or that this conceptualisation was the best explanation for my own; or that there was an answer to them that I needed. I didnt know the freedom I had, as a human being, to explore and seize my own happiness. I didn't really know anyone who was going through this. That this territory has been explored and marked and written so much about. They were kept from me. and I from them.

-------------------------------------------------------

I remember at around 16. There was this kid in the year above in school. she was into computers, like me. at the time, she looked and sounded, to me, like a boy. like me. everyone including herself called her a boy. as far as anyone was concerned that's what she was. she had a boy's name. And then one day she didn't anymore. I remember wanting to message her about something. It was confusing, trying to find her profile. was this it? it had a new name - Z. And I was confused why. was this some fun username trend? why a girl's name? just internet things I guess. I didn't need details, not really my business.

"Hi, is this A? blah blah blah blah..."

I had not heard of someone changing their name in the context in which she meant it, or the concept of deadnames. she corrected me and I think I just dropped the conversation in confusion. something to the effect of:

"actually I go by Z now" "oh, cool"

fuck. me. If I'd had an ounce of fucking curiosty.

-------------------------------------------------------

If you had offered me that classic hypothetical of 'the button' back then, I am certain I would have pushed it. I cannot say for certain, but I have a vague recollection of seeing memes about that kind of thing online and thinking 'of course, who wouldn't?' and nothing more of it. it was a silly, joke concept.

I think it was in part because of that voice that this was something I wasn't supposed to look into. Or that I was told that I already knew what lie there. perhaps moreso that, than a lack of curiosity.

Looking back, I think it took increasing effort to do this. This is the exact, conscious way that this mechanism was instantiated in the year or so before I did begin thinking about these things. "hm. I kind of understand this. But it's not something I should look into. I can tell I'm the kind of person who would easily fall into this stuff if I were to entertain it. what is wrong with it? I still do not know. But that line of thinking is the dangerous one. why? i dont know. i dont know. i dont know."

this religion was the only moral framework i was presented as a child. this was the only prior i really had on such matters.

without knowing it, i had essentially been told that my own feelings were dangerous. and they were put on a high shelf.

it is actively keeping you from finding out. This is unique to the more cultish religions. I understood it was possible but I didn't understand how true it was. because of course from your perspective you know everything. I stress. it is one thing to be ignorant. this does not impede learning. it is another to have your environment actively control your exposure to information to prevent you from learning. further, to be programmed to police yourself.

god. remember the first time you learned about the term 'egg'? it was from a fucking shencomix. 24 years old.

[There's this old memory I have from when I was 15 years old. "I am as conscious as I will ever be. I have felt detached from my younger, blurry, developing selves. But don't you forget this. I am as conscious as you are now. Do not look down on me or grow to degrade people of my age."]

Something similar happened when I looked  up the definition after coming across it in that comic. I literally remember. I remember thinking 'ah. I'm going to look back on this and realise that this applied to me. I can see myself looking at me here and realising that at this very moment, I admitted to myself that I matched this description for a phenomenon that, from the outside, I saw as so alien.' and it was kind of funny - not unlike those hypothetical jokes posed virtually. 'haha, yeah ofc that's me lol' but this time it wasn't quite so light hearted. it came directly tied to real information on that unexplored territory. In all honesty, the exact wording is blurrier. But the intent remains obvious - 'my mental framework of myself; this phenomenon; and my religion, will likely be unable to ignore these feelings and ideas much longer'. I immediately tried to forget it.

-------------------------------------------------------

I was the last of my siblings to leave the religion. and did so only after my mother. i depend on this idea that I am autistic to explain a lot of things about myself - why i feel myself to be the least social of my siblings, despite no lack of desire for it; why I don't seem able to connect and incite love in others as I see other do; why I have my particular pattern of obsessions; why everything hurts so much. why i spent my whole life chasing this obvious delusion of religion - "because I just wanted to be a good person. I just wanted everybody to be happy. It made sense. It was my whole world." I tell myself it must have been because I was the 'most autistic' - that I was a confused kid who didn't really understand the world outside of the simple frames I was raised with and thus misapplied my efforts to love - because otherwise, I am simply the most monstrous. The most callous and dismissive of others' pains. the most rigid and unempathetic and uncurious in mind. The most proud and unwilling to change. the most bigotted. the sibling who must have been looking down on all the others as they 'fell away'.

Here is how it looked.

-------------------------------------------------------

I remember even in my own religion, despite the patriarchal structure, some of the more progressive men would publicly theorise men were placed in those roles because we needed the experience more than women because we lacked more than them. that women had this fortitude; this greater ability to love and take real, admirable action in the world. that women had their own alternative to priesthood. I know it's just stereotypes. I know claims like that seem like a ploy to appeal to gender equality only to advance misogyny. I knew that. I was not without critical thinking or the ability to consider these kinds of things. in truth I'm not that cynical though. A lot of people twisted strangely against the same contradictions I did. Truly, it wouldn't have been so hard if the religion were less convincing in it's otherwise apparent singularness toward caring for one another. there are a number who pray for anti-LGBTQ doctrine to be overturned in a flash of 'revelation' (at least in the churches in the south of England). it only makes it all the more bitter. Anyway, this is all to say I agreed with him. It seemed kind of obvious women were just better than 'us'. statistically doing better in education; forming more meaningful friendships between themselves than their counterparts splintered by patriarchy could; "not all men, but always a man"... 

I don't quite know what that line of thinking reveals about me. it feels like an observation that I am simply unlike them. I suppose it also betrays my bitterness about that fact. That comes off as rhetorical. it reads like "haha *hint hint* look at what a tranny I am, wishing I was a woman, thinking they're so much better". It's genuinely kind of gross and stereotyped thinking mixed in with all this religious dogma and its convoluted excuses. It feels more invalidating than anything. I don’t know if this odd jealousy can even be classed as dysphoria.

confusion, shapeless sadness - you know already. Thematically, the above passage really belongs in the section below, but I would like you to understand how these feeling progressed in me as I experienced them. It also sets the confusion and internal conflict with the contradictory teachings of the church which I felt leading up to the below.

I hadnt been to church for a while. not an intentional absence - I was just a bit depressed. It didnt make me happy. I simply lost the energy for it. Maybe a moral failing if we consider it from the perspective that at the time I believed myself to be doing wrong. but I was simply caring less about that. I also had a friend from philosophy with whom I had entered into debate on the subject of religion. I still claimed to be mormon. i cant remember the exact debate and i dont care to try. I dont think it matters. what matters is that I finally had someone calling out what I already knew was wrong, and simply giving it the moral weight which I had been conditioned so strongly to ignore. to bury my head in the sand like a scared child. This was real exposure to an external perspective that I had never had before.

Looking back, holy fuck. thank you.

I admitted I was wrong, but I didn't really believe what I was saying. When asked by others, I'd say I wasn't mormon. mostly for shame. I'm sorry that this aspect of my change of heart was not more climactic - it's really probably what got the ball rolling and permitted me to take action on the ideas below, though it is little more than simply growing tired. In part, this feels somewhat validating to my fervour-as-autism hypothesis. Once that deep-wired fixation stopped, and this need to adhere to structure weaned at least here (for whatever reason I'll never know) I was simply free to do what I wanted, rather than perpetually, existentially constrained.

It's funny though. Because I truly believed in a loving god, it made it easier leaving. we were told that he would not give us a burden greater than we could bear. I believed that even if I left the religion, he would understand my reasoning. This was a non-dogmatic god. a simpler one more like the one I understood as a child.

There was also this verse about 'exercising a particle of faith' - conducting an 'experiment upon the word' of god. it is pointed to as the basis of faith, and interested me immensely in recent years because it is actually an empirical one. [An odd contradiction of "lean not unto thine own understanding" - here, the very conception of faith is proposed as one based on agency under evidence, that the religion should be chosen in the first place because you tested and validated it and chose it yourself, not because you were told to believe it]. I had gone out with missionaries preaching that if you read these things and prayed to know if it was true, it would be confirmed to you. and every further step taken into the religion would bring about the happiness you sought, evidencing that this was the path to happiness. and yet - this empirical experiment did not work for me. but here I still was, taking as many steps into the religion as I could to try and get anything back from it.

two pieces of scripture I considered increasingly central: 1) '...to love god… and to love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets'. 2) we see elsewhere repeatedly in these books that the main and only real way to love god is to love those around us. Together, it means that all principles and commandments of the religion all are essentially to the end of loving each other and ourselves, both on earth now and afterward. They are meant to have an empirical basis in human happiness, and be better tools for achieving it than those we might derive ourselves. and yet, I was miserable. It was the conception that even though I agreed with the purpose, it's proposed plan for getting there - this map - did not hold up to its own imperative of basing your belief in the empirical direction of happiness.

it's so silly. when I eventually truly did what it suggested - an experiment upon the word, I would be lead elsewhere entirely. And for the first time - with learned confidence in my own reasoning, and my newly liberated god - I was free to follow it.

I said before that I could only leave the religion because of my loss of seeming neurological hyperfixation and rigidity. In truth, somehow, miraculously, these conclusions and abstractions permitted me to leave the religion because it told me to. In a sense, I never had to leave it at all.

And that’s probably really why I could do so with just a little push. It really was astounding. Disquietening. Even now. Written in its deepest and most broad-reaching principles, there was somehow an escape hatch - allowing me to leave with only that centre of love that I so valued in it. I don’t like to entertain much what would have happened if it were not for this accident.

------------------------------

I didn't really like my clothes. I was jealous women got so much variety.

‘I mean, just *look* at them.’ I remember looking for what the male version of the goth aesthetic looks like - *cause that classic goth girl look is sooo cool*! 'I found my style! Its a bit unusual for me so I'll have to be brave, but now I just need to find it for men - some male style is out there that might truly speak to me'. My disappointment at the offerings will probably not come as a surprise to you. I remember always feeling like my clothes never fit me well enough. it always looked boxy somehow. poorly fitted. maybe its cause I was short for a guy and so it was easy for loose clothing to be unflattering. I spent a fair bit of money just looking for better fitting clothes. I remember asking a friend to teach me his tailoring skill. And he did. And I remember tailoring the waist of my favourite dress shirt as tight as I reasonably could. why? why did it feel like something was still missing? but it really was better. I remember thinking how beautiful women’s clothes are. And that was one of the first things. I remember thinking how beautiful they are. and even one day thinking how - if I plucked up the courage to throw away the map that professed itself true and traverse the land according to what I saw with my own eyes and heart - that finally, *this* could resolve that problem.

I did not realise until after I had already been on HRT for months that the reason I felt like my clothes were so boxy and why my new ones still didn't look quite right despite being the very same ones that draped so gently on the women I longed to emulate - it was not a problem with the clothes at all.

I had always wondered how they could look so beautiful just in a t-shirt. What's wrong with my t-shirts? will women's t-shirts look better? Will I somehow appear more gentle in those, and better reflect visually how I know my inner self to be? not really.

---------------------------

It was my body.

--------------------------

you fucking idiot of course it was. I already knew that - I started HRT because I knew it would change my face and make my body a little more gentle. less muscular and brutish. But I did not know the extent and limits of these things. I did not realise that my own skeleton had shifted under me. I did not realise just how different we were. How different we became - my shoulders… that fucking boulder.

Stupid. I should have fucking known. Im already on fucking HRT. Ive already fucking came out to EVERYONE. I took my measurements. I guess I didn’t take enough. I measured some things wrong. I waved some things away thinking HRT would compensate, or that they didn’t really matter to me. With my knowledge now - it will not. And I only realised, after diving into this new terrain, my naivety at waving away some of these things - these things *do* matter. “I just want to look like a girl, I don’t necessarily want XYZ”. you idiot. That is precisely what you are seeing when you picture “looking like a girl”. It is load-bearing. You are simply under-researched.

Early on, I didn’t know HRT caused breast growth. What a strange fact. It felt like something god intended for us to find. Some piece of compassion for this seemingly so acutely and categorically god-forsaken people. A miracle. I didn’t realise that now - placed on my now-fused, testosterone-addled frame - they wouldn’t sit quite right anymore.

---------------------------

I didn’t know there was a train to exactly that place I wanted to be. By the time I roused my senses to board, it had already passed me by. I am reminded of Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar and her fig tree.

--------------------------------------

In following that map I was born into, I not only missed out on a decade and a childhood of living in that place I most yearned for - but it made it impossible, in some ways, to ever navigate back there. to ever find my way home - to inhabit a body I truly could have called home. god must have been laughing the entire time.

I love it's happy nursery rhyme sound. And its simple but sweet message.

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do.

I'm half crazy, all for the love of you.

It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage.

But you'll look sweet, upon the seat

of a bicycle built for two."

I know it's a bit silly to read so into it, but it's taken on a special meaning to me.

Because, there is this person I love.

Her name is [---].

I don't really feel like I live up to her. I don't look as nice as her, my voice and manners aren't so gentle as hers.

But I want to take care of her, and help her be who she wants to be. Be happy.

But, I know I won't really be able to. I'm far from perfect. This world feels, not built for us sometimes. Or maybe it's the other way around. Things just, haven't landed to make things easy.

And so, it is not a stylish marriage – the two of us. On our little bicycle built for two.

And so further, I am half-crazy. It is so silly. I can't help but laugh a little at myself. But also, I feel my own earnestness. And it scares me sometimes. Even if I really give myself a hard time about it. A lot. A bit sad and silly. But it's true. It is all for the love of you – [---].