I Am Safe in My Body
And other lies I tell myself
I am laying on a massage bench in a physiotherapy studio in North London, and the holistic physiotherapist is counting down from seven. She tells me that when she reaches zero, I will be completely relaxed and open to whatever my body wants to tell me and that I will feel bubbles rushing through my arms, which is, according to her, my energetic body waking up. I lay on the bench with blankets over me and a folded blanket across my eyes to ensure I keep them closed, and wait for my body to obey her commands. Despite my doubt, and to my great surprise, it does.
She reaches five, and I feel a pressure building around my elbows that quickly turns into a fizzing sensation trailing down my arms and into my fingers, like someone has opened a bottle of champagne inside me. My fingers twitch with the sensation of bubbles running through them. Four - my shoulders relax down from their chronically tense position and the back of my neck feels longer, the fascia and tendons and muscles stretching themselves out. Three - my breath comes deeply and each inhale expands my whole rib cage as though I’m asleep. Two - I can’t move my hands or feet, which scares then thrills me in a quasi-erotic way. One and then zero - I am immobile, relaxed, and open to suggestion. My physiotherapist is in control.
She tells me to imagine that I am walking through a forest. I imagine a wood from my childhood that my father used to take me to, and the vision is so vivid that I can smell the wild garlic growing amidst the grass. She tells me that under a tree nearby, there is a small box, and in that box, there is a message my body wants me to know. In my mind’s eye, I dutifully walk over and open it. Inside, there is no note or message, but rather a memory of being seventeen years old, hospitalised with a feeding tube down my throat as I had stopped being able to eat, undergoing repeated painful operations and investigations and feeling terrifyingly, painfully alone. I can see my teenage self in that hospital bed, overcome with the sense that I was likely going to die, and mentally counting how many people would be likely to attend the funeral. There is nobody holding my hand.
When the physiotherapist counts back up to seven to raise me from my trance, I begin crying as soon as I am mentally back in the room. She hands me tissues and moves to embrace me, but stops herself in a moment of uncertainty, and instead reminds me of the sankalpa (a Sanskrit term for a solemn vow or desire) we have set for our sessions. “Remember,” she says, “Remember you are safe in your body. Say it back to me.” And I do say it back to her, through tears, over and over again, like a prayer - I am safe in my body, I am safe in my body, I am safe in my body. The tears eventually stop, and I’m left hollowed-out and exhausted, making my way home on the rush hour tube and immediately into the cocoon of my bed. I wake the next morning after twelve hours of sleep with an imperceptible sensation that something, somewhere deep in my psyche has shifted for the better. Perhaps it is that I feel more connected to my body than I have in years.
I began seeing the holistic physiotherapist because I was desperate - after a traumatic event last year triggered a domino effect of reigniting previously suppressed traumatic wounds, I developed debilitating tension in my jaw, the back of my neck, my shoulders and my pelvis that made many daily tasks, including carrying a bag or eating, excruciatingly painful, and rendered activities like sex nearly impossible. I had had a tight jaw, pelvis and shoulders for years, but it had finally toppled over into chronic pain that I could not seem to come down from. The body, unfortunately, keeps the score, and the intense stress that had accumulated in me over a lifetime had decided to make itself known with such intensity that it became impossible to function. I had become stuck on high-alert mode, as though perpetually ready to run from an attacking tiger, and in the absence of any material threat to my safety, I did what I knew best - dissociating my mind from my body, and working very hard to keep it that way. The trances my physiotherapist was putting me into were an attempt to reconnect my physical and mental states with the aim of grounding me in the safe present, rather than remaining stuck in prior trauma.
The thing about feeling safe in your body when you have rarely felt that way before is it’s a Sisyphean task - as soon as you push that boulder up the mountain and think you’ve done it and you’re all better now, it begins to roll back down. I recently had sex with someone new for the first time in about 18 months and I was, quite frankly, terrified of someone unknown touching me and seeing me naked. She touched my knee over a drink and I jumped like I had been given an electric shock, but the refrain I am safe in my body seemed to kick in in some subconscious way, and stopped me getting up and walking rudely out the door. She was direct and upfront about what she wanted - and how she wanted me - and gave enough direction that I felt my mind sink into soft pleasure of following her orders. After two months of being put into a weekly trance, and seven prior years of psychotherapy, my body relaxed alongside my mind, and I not only felt pleasure, but genuine desire and desirability. She made me want, and I came away thinking that I was cured of chronic dissociation - perhaps I was safe in my body again, and the long work was over, and I could finally feel sexy again.
This lasted for about a week before the Supreme Court of the UK ruled that women were to be defined in the Equality Act as those who were assigned female at birth (there are nuances and complications and equivocating, but that is the gist), swiftly followed by public bodies moving to amend their policies to ensure that trans women would be treated as men. The newspaper headlines in my local supermarket screamed “COURT HEROES FACE VILE ABUSE” at me as I bought a meal deal, positioning the anti-trans advocacy group that had brought this case to court as the plucky underdog heroes standing up to Big Trans. Readers - you may not know this, because I purposefully have not written about it here - but I am a transgender man, and by extension part of this nefarious Big Trans that the UK’s elite seem so intent on mandating out of existence. It is an odd position to be in at times, because the degradation of trans men is collateral damage to the war that the state, press, and courts are waging on trans womanhood, who are primarily impacted and therefore subject to greater systemic and material violence through rulings such as these. The fact that I am not the direct target of these attacks is cold solace, and certainly did not calm my nervous system, which reacted to the ruling in the manner of a startled horse trying to bolt out the stable.
The Sisyphean boulder, which I had pushed so determinedly up the mountain, began to roll back down again. I woke up a couple of days after the ruling and could not seem to get out of my own head, which was circling around questions like will they make it illegal for me to use the men’s toilets? What if I’m rushed to hospital and put on a women’s ward - what kind of abuse would I get? Should I make plans to leave the country before it gets worse? The old programming, established over a lifetime, kicked in and my mind was utterly convinced that not only was I in imminent danger, but I had to escape any potential threat right now, and, crucially - I am not safe in my transgender body, and I must do my best to separate myself from this site of unsafety. In the week since the ruling, I have spent at least a few hours in a dissociative haze most days, unaware and unfeeling of my physical self, which seems to transport me from place to place of its own accord while my mind whirrs over potential escape plans and strategies, the recently diagnosed PTSD rearing its ugly head and making itself loudly known. I am not safe in my body, it says, over and over, I am not safe in my body, I am not safe in my body, and I have to get out.
Naturally, during these episodes my sexuality feels more like a desert mirage than a tangible desire. I lay on my bed and stare at the ceiling or scroll through Instagram, unaware that I’m hungry or needing the toilet, let alone feeling horny. That is, until the woman I am sleeping with texts me, telling me that she’s thinking about me and, yes, thinking about my body. She tells me how much she likes my body, and what she would do to it if she were with me. I stop scrolling through panicked Instagram posts and text her back, suddenly aware of myself - my legs resting heavy on the bed, my chest going in and out with my breath, and a pit of desire growing in my guts. In terms of grounding exercises, it’s akin to a gym session or my guided meditations, but quicker and, in many ways, more enjoyable. When she comes over next time, I’m calm and present, and the old pull of dissociation quietens until I am just a body with another body, and we are both safe here in my room, and the hum of danger is outside of this space, far away in supreme courts and parliaments that people like us don’t seem to belong in anymore, if we ever did.
I push the boulder back up the mountain, as I probably will have to do over and over again for the rest of my life. The trick, I have learned, is letting people help me push it, and commiserating with them when it falls down as we take a deep breath and commit to rolling it up again. I went into my physiotherapist’s office this week and spent half an hour telling her how afraid I am (and apologising for coming in in such a state), and she took my hand and told me she believes in my inner strength, and guided me through a grounding meditation that brought me back to the world. My psychotherapist emailed me out of the blue to tell me he’s thinking of me in light of the ruling, and hopes I’m surrounded by people who love me. I attended an Easter lunch with five other trans people and, after we shared our worries, we ended the afternoon laughing into our glasses of crémant over some gossip. Twenty thousand people marched through London in protest of the ruling, and while the stakes are still real and so is the violence, in increments my body calms down. I have sex and read books and watch TV. I think of all the queer people who have lived through persecution before me, and I feel loved by them just as much as I love queer people now. As Lauren John Joseph wrote on the ruling: “Through protest, performance, double-dealing, political pressure and a gorgeous instinct for self-preservation these other [queer] ancestors of mine have endowed me with an almost psychotic sense of optimism.” She’s right, and perhaps this is what queerness is - the boulder rolls back down, and we push it back up, and I am, for a moment, safe in my body.
Thank you for reading - if you’re concerned about what’s going on with trans rights in the UK, I urge you to support FiveForFive. You can read from some brilliant trans women on Substack at Josie Giles, Lauren John Joseph, and of course Shon Faye. I’d also recommend this essay by Judith Butler for the London Review of Books.
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