For a long time now, I’ve been wanting to write something about joy. Joy that is filled with ease and acceptance of self and other – and the strangeness that cultivating this joy and ease should feel like resistance work for many of us.
Specifically, I’m thinking today about trans joy, the joy of living in a body that is in deep and intimate relationship with change. And I’m thinking about that phrase ‘trans joy’ and the fact that when I said it out loud for the first time to a dear friend, they whispered: “Why does that phrase feel … taboo?”
Some months ago, I promised myself I would write this blog post the day before going in for a joyful surgery. So here I am, keeping my promise. Tomorrow, after many delays and obstacles, I’ll go into hospital for top surgery. It feels good to write this short post from this moment - not only as a communication, but also as intention, an energetic joy burst in itself.
Having said that, the impulse to write this is not only to share a feeling of joy. It’s also to describe the shadow that accompanies the joy. To put it into words as a way of acknowledging it. And having acknowledged it, to dispel its power.
The experience of carrying joy and shadow together is a kind of embodied dissonance. It’s the feeling of aligning with one’s own joy when that joy is deemed inappropriate or illegitimate. When we have maps inside us that tell us that the feelings of joy must be hidden, must be wrong. When the narrative of joy is less palatable to a general public than the narrative of suffering.
It all sounds so familiar. I could be writing about any number of social categories of human life that are deemed less worthy right now. In this moment, I am writing about trans joy. But really, I’m just writing about joy. Joy as aligned with movement, breath, reciprocity, and spirit. Joy as the right to be fully alive in oneself, and accepted. And how stupidly rare it feels.
From the moment I first thought about having top surgery, it felt like a thing of joy. It feels like a gift, a treat, a thing that is just for me.* And yet, when I use those words, I am shamed for them, because there is a social contract that says that trans surgeries must be narrated as arising from suffering: if you are suffering enough, you deserve to have the surgery. If you are tuning into the joy of what it will feel like to be more aligned with yourself, then your story is illegitimate and illegible.
In telling you my story I want to be clear that I’m not attempting to speak for others. There are people who feel desperately unhappy, and who would describe surgery as a means of survival – and the language of suffering that they use is real - the suffering is real. But what feels clear to me is that the unhappiness they are describing doesn’t begin inside. It begins with the violence of gendering. It begins with disregard for listening cultures. It begins with the stifling illusion of fixed and binary identities. In other words, the unhappiness is rooted in the stories we tell.
So I swim in the world like I have a right to exist. As if we all had a right to exist, in our bodies, changing, growing, learning, challenging what was and what we thought was fact. I recognise this joy as resistance. And at the same time, I claim it as real.
All for now.
rajni.x.
*I want to be absolutely clear here that I am not denying that trans surgeries are necessary or essential for wellbeing. I know that this language can seem like it renders the surgeries non-essential, and this is absolutely not my intention. They are essential, life-giving, and life-saving. And they could and can be joyful.
