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While reading an article from Professor Alessandra Lemma – a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with much experience in the field of transgender care – I was struck by the term “hospitable home” and felt called to write something about the subject from my own experience.
The term resonated so much because I found it so true. I have always felt like I was looking for a “hospitable home”. A body I could feel at home in, and also a safe house around it as a second shell of protection. And I’ve always felt that, somehow, my doubts about gender had to do with that. That it was a search for (a safe) space, space to breathe, for room to move, and that I would only be able to achieve that in another body.
I transitioned more than two decades ago, and when I visited the gender team at the time, my story fell into the category of “primary transsexuality”, meaning I had felt I was a boy from a very young age. After a standard number of interviews, I was given “green light” without much ado. But now, after all these years, I still cannot say that gender is no longer an “issue” for me, or that I have found my home. The quest lingers on and I believe I’ll only find some peace in trying to make sense of the source of my discomfort. Unlike people who see gender dysphoria as their end diagnosis and transitioning as the solution to their problems (a very tempting idea) I’ve always seen it as a consequence of a greater discomfort, as part of a web of intricately linked causes of suffering.
My medical transition was rough and left me with many complications. By medically transitioning, in the search for a body that is a hospitable home, there’s a chance you could find yourself in an even less hospitable home; a body damaged by surgery, a body forever at the mercy of synthetic hormones, a body that is growing older in ways that are unexpected or undesired, a body that may become just as foreign and unsafe as the one before had been. It is true that I find it comfortable to be looked u