Comrade Hermit vs The Tranny Whisperer

Me and therapy have a long, storied and generally cantankerous relationship. I've been in and out of therapy my whole life and hated most of my therapists. Part of the reason behind this is a lifelong knee-jerk aversion to anything vaguely resembling authority. But mostly, I think it's the fact that I've never really chosen therapy. It was always chosen for me or pushed on me for one reason or another. That is until very recently.

After spending over half a decade in self-imposed exile do to a series of crippling nervous breakdowns, I've finally come to terms with my various mental ailments as well as my complicated gender identity which I've come to see as one of the primary impediments to fully embracing mental health. For most of my life I've suffered under the delusion that my biological gender defined me. This disconnection with my true self has fostered a mentality in which I simply didn't value myself because "myself" was largely a performance, like therapy, fostered for the benefit of everyone but me.

Since coming out as queer I've adopted a number of labels to describe my identity; non-binary, genderqueer, transfluid, gender fluid, bearded lady, undecided, free agency, all of which describe a complicated identity which is blanketed in shifting layers of both masculinity and femininity that all fall under the wide tent of trans. I've taken great pride in the new found sense of community I've found in this tribe. It's given me a deep sense of empowerment that I've been searching for my whole life. But that doesn't make me feel any less confused by the fact that I feel too feminine to be male even when I have beard.

My favorite ID is bearded bull-dyke with a dick and not just because it's the funnest one to say but because it's the most accurate. I'm not pretty or girly in any traditional kind of way but it feels far more natural to describe myself as butch than male. The agoraphobia doesn't exactly help either. For a person pathologically terrified of change, what could be more terrifying than having a gender like a kaleidoscope, constantly shifting and swirling and changing color and shape. So for the first time in my life I went searching for a shrink for me and no one else. I ended up getting way more than I bargained for.

I was recommended a therapist by my psychiatrist of nearly twenty years, whom I was told was an expert in the field of gender identity. Her name is Khytam Dawood, she teaches at Penn State but I was more impressed by the fact that she got her PHD from Northwestern, the alma mater of my favorite record producer, Steve Albini, of In Utero fame. After discovering that she didn't take my crappy medicaid insurance, I spent a couple of months searching high and low for anyone who knew anything about gender who accepts medicaid in Centre County. But I kept going back to Dr. Dawood, who my transman bestie, back in England, and I took to calling the Tranny Whisperer do to her elusiveness, impeccable credentials and Jedi sounding name. I ultimately decided to fork up the two-hundred-plus bucks in disability the state gives me to live off of and made an appointment to see the Tranny Whisperer.

The appointment started out fine, great even. She seemed kind, accommodating and even held a lot of the same political positions as me; pro-Palestine, antiwar, etc. Things didn't get uncomfortable until the subject of gender came up, which only happened after she came across the fact that I was having trouble with gender dysphoria in her notes. She confidently thought out loud that that was clearly a typo given my less than feminine presentation without even asking me about it. After politely correcting her I was treated to a decidedly gentle barrage of passive aggressive micro-agressions that left me feeling confused and woozy. My feelings of isolation and disconnection didn't seem to matter to her. She only seemed to be interested in my sexuality. By the time the session was over my head was spinning. She diagnosed me with something called autogynophilia. The word sounded dated but familiar and made me somewhat uncomfortable but I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was or where I had come into contact with it.

I tried to shake off my feelings of unease and chocked them up to my issues with social anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. I told myself I was worrying over nothing. I even told myself that I would convince her I really was a woman trapped in a mans body during the next appointment. But over the next 48 hours my sense of unease only grew thicker.

When I finally looked up the word autogynophilia I was shocked and appalled to learn that this woman who I liked and trusted had reduced my gender identity to a sexual perversion that was one half of a transphobic theory known as Blanchard's transsexualism typology. A ripe piece of junk science that divides trans people into two forms of mental derangement based largely on our sexual appetites. Lezbo's like me are paraphilic fetishists in the same wheelhouse as necrophiles and horse fuckers while the rest were simply "homosexual transsexuals" who mutilate themselves in order to snag hetero-males and trick them into fucking them. I was beyond shocked to learn that someone as intelligent and well educated as Dr. Dawood could buy into something so childishly reductionist and over simplistic. But as I dug deeper it only got worse.

The current leader of this little movement that has been near universally rejected by both academia and the trans people that those fucks aim to "treat" is a foul little imbecile by the name of J. Michael Bailey, a professor who single-handedly ruined his reputation with a disgusting transphobic manifesto called The Man Who Would Be Queen. Everything from the snide name of the book to its cover, a photograph of a grotesquely muscular mans leg crammed into a stiletto heeled pump, made it abundantly clear that this crap wasn't literature. It was a goddamn weapon. The Bell curve of gender studies. A pseudo-scientific expose based on the good professor's late night conversations with a handful of uninformed queens at a gay bar, one one of whom he took the time to fuck but none of whom he took the time to inform that they were guinea pigs for his little study.

Like the rest of the members of his deluded little cult, Dr. Bailey is a cissy cunt who knows too much about us trannies to take our opinions into consideration after happy hour. And when the trans community showed our teeth and gnashed back at his mass character assassination, Bailey, naturally, played the part of the victim. The poor rich white cis-breeder at the mercy of the most maligned and ostracized community in the country. Poor baby can't push out a steaming hate-dump without suffering the indignity of the splash back. Like all bigots, he's just another victim of the scourge of political correctness.

And where does the good Doctor Hatefuck teach? None other than Northwestern, where he taught my tranny whisperer, Doctor Dawood everything she knows and she's returned the favor, singing his praises to anyone who'll listen and poisoning a whole new generation of would-be shrinks with his bile at Penn State University. By the time I had found all this shit out, I was well on my way to another nervous breakdown. I felt physically ill. I felt used and objectified. I have never felt more like killing myself. I had taken the unprecedented risk of putting myself out into the total unknown and trusting a stranger only to be told in so many words that I was a monster. I wanted to crawl beneath a rock at the bottom of the ocean and never come out again. The only thing that kept me from falling apart was my anger. My rage. My fury. The fury of a genderfuck woman scorned.

As soon as I stopped crying and yelling, I started trying to get Doctor Dawood on the phone. I wanted to hear it from her. I wanted her to tell me in her words with her mouth that my gender is a fucking mental illness. But like most cowards she dodged me like a fucking bullet. Telling me through her therapist like a hostage negotiator that she couldn't honor me with a simple explanation of her basic philosophy unless I gave her another hundred-and-fifty bucks for another appointment. I said know way. That fucking hack will never see another dime of my money again.

I called Dr. Dawood for another reason. I cried and yelled for another reason. I needed to know if she saw children. The thought of her telling little girls that they're sick just because they had the misfortune of being of being born with the wrong plumbing horrified me. I still haven't gotten an answer to that question and it keeps me up at night. If Khytam Dawood treats children then Khytam Dawood is a child abuser and I will be goddamned if I let that hack lay a claw on my little sisters. No fucking way. Which is the primary reason I wrote this painful post. Kids kill themselves because of people like Khytam Dawood and I need to make sure that the next person who Googles the words Khytam Dawood and Transgender gets an earful from yours truly. I wrote this post to warn people that this woman is a malignant predator violating people with her disgusting half-baked theories. The Tranny Whisperer fucked with the wrong bitch. Now she has to contend with the Tranny Screamer and she will never shut me up.

So what did I learn this week? I learned that Khytam Dawood is a fucking cunt. I usually reserve that word for cis-men who cross me but Khytam is not my fucking sister. Khytam preys on my sisters and she's not the only one. I also learned that when it comes to mental health a queer person quite simply can't trust an outsider. I learned that coming out as trans has made me a stronger person than I've ever been before. I learned that I need to find my tribe. I need to be with my people. And I learned how important the people in my life are to me. If it wasn't for just a handful of friends and family, my unwaveringly supportive Catholic mother, my exiled bestie James and my mentor Angela, just to name a few, reminding me who I am and that I matter, I might have let that stupid twit knock me back down to rock bottom again. They are my shield and I love them more than words can convey.

I honestly don't know where I'm going, dearest motherfuckers, but I know where I've been and I'm never going back again.



Peace, Love and Empathy- CH



Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

* Home By David Byrne & Brian Eno
* Candy Says By The Velvet Underground
* You Oughta Know By Alannis Morrisette
* It's Different For Girls By Of Montreal
* Miss World By Hole
* Creature Comfort By Arcade Fire
* Rape Me By Nirvana
* I Bet On Losing Dogs By Mitski
* Hood By Perfume Genius
* Rockstar By Hole
* Road To Nowhere By Talking Heads
* 333 By Against Me!
* Androgynous By The Replacements