Body Parts:What Gets Lost When We Change Our Bodies

Detransitioner, Gina Lee reflects on the roots of her transition.

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

The year was 1978 and I was 18. I found myself standing, alone, on a 100 year old bridge connecting two academic buildings. As I waited for the next class to start, I leaned against the balustrade facing the campus grounds, while in my mind I replayed a disturbing dream from a few nights before. It was an odd place to be remembering a bad dream—in public, with students bustling behind me on their way to class. Maybe it wasn’t so odd, though, because the dream itself took place in a school setting, with me standing, alone.

In the dream I was in an empty hallway of a high school I didn’t recognize, with rows of lockers on the right. You could say I stood there, but not really, because I wasn’t in a body. It was still me, but only my consciousness. One of the lockers loomed about five times larger than the rest (even though it was the same size as the others), and seemed to have a consciousness of its own, merged with its contents. It was animated—pulsating—like a beating heart. I avoided looking directly at the locker while I clocked my surroundings. All I could see around me was a reddish muddy color, as if it were a living wall of the unknown, of uncertainty. At the same time, I knew I couldn’t really run away from the locker, because it might be exposed to the world. That was the threat. If anyone saw the contents, I would be exposed, because the locker was pulsating with bloody body parts—my body parts.

My next class had started. I sat down and immediately tried to analyze the dream, as everyone in the room faded around me. “Maybe they symbolized secrets from my childhood,” I wondered. But at that time, I, myself, couldn’t remember what these “bloody” secrets were. One thing is clear, though. It symbolized a form of disembodiment, a disembodiment from myself. After that day, I never thought about the dream again, until now—47 years later.

As I reflect upon my “female-to-male transition” that began in 2010, and ended in 2023, I realize that it was a form of disembodiment. Only this time, it wasn’t a dream. It was reality. I would undergo "bloody" operations removing my breasts, and later my uterus and ovaries. I would be injecting myself with male-level testosterone for 13 years of my life, further altering my body. It would be 13 years of existing in a state of disembodiment, literally and figuratively, because my body no longer was my own, but rather the product of something else…a project of sorts, and all under the guise of “gender-affirming care.”

I suspect, now, though, that this disembodiment was not the cure for “gender dysphoria,” but rather for the secrets my body carried from both childhood and my young adult years, the kind of secrets some women take to their graves. For example, my breasts symbolized all the times boys and men objectified them, like the times in junior high when I was mauled by boys on my way to the bathroom, or the time in high school, when my best friend’s boyfriend passed me in the hallway, while staring at my chest and smiling lasciviously, without looking up at my face even once.

They symbolized the time my best friend and I were crossing the street in a busy intersection, as a high school football team jogged past and one of the players casually reached over and pinched my nipple that showed through my shirt, as he continued his jog.

They symbolized the time I was sitting in the library in high school, while two boys sat next to me, taunting me with sexual innuendos.

They symbolized all the times creepy old men would leer at me, like trolls coming out of the bushes under bridges, or like the time the owner of the public laundromat tried to reach under my shirt, while we were talking face to face, right there in public, or the time when the old uncle tried to grope me in front of the flower stand manned by an acquaintance, and how he defended his uncle when I tried to tell him what happened, saying, "oh he's just an old man, he didn't mean to...," and the countless other times my chest was leered at and objectified by males.

But worse, it would symbolize the acts performed on me by the males in my childhood, even before I ever got breasts. Ultimately, they symbolized the fruition of unwanted vulnerability, and shame—the shame of being female.

I wonder, now, if I thought I could extinguish the shame of being female by cutting off my female body parts. I wonder, now, if, subconsciously, this was meant as a "fuck you" to all my offenders, the males who felt entitled to my body parts, and who now I would punish by removing all these parts that made me female. I realize, now, though, that I did not rid myself of those memories, or those secrets I held. And not one male has suffered as the result of my disembodiment. Instead, I am the one left standing, alone, in front of that bloody locker.

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