Lauren Black: “Gloves off. I’m going to talk about how dysphoria, plus the gingerbread model, plus pornography, leads to the creation of who I call ‘porn addled robot people’.”

Lauren Black lives with dysphoria

Writing about dysphoria is difficult for me. I am not great at talking about my feelings, even to my wife. And dysphoria is an obsessive and dissociative condition. Thinking and writing about it can make it worse. But there are young women out there, just like me, who are being lied to, instead of helped. They need to know the truth.

So I’m going to talk to you about dysphoria, even though it costs me to do so. I’m going to tell you what it is like to live with and how I deal with it. I’m also going to tear an absolute strip off the gingerbread model of sex, sexuality and gendered identity in the process. Gloves off. I’m going to talk about how dysphoria, plus the gingerbread model, plus pornography, leads to the creation of who I call “porn addled robot people.” I’m going to suggest how I think these people come, in good faith, to the conclusion that ‘genital preferences are transphobic’. I’m also going to tell you about my beautiful wife who loves me just as I am. Buckle up.

The Gingerbread Model

The Gingerbread model suggests that we all have a sex(ed body), an internal gender identity, an external gender expression, and a sexuality. These are separate things. Your sex is what you are “assigned” at birth, based on observation of your genitals. It is “in your pants.” Your gender identity is whether you feel male, female, non-binary, or something else. It is “in your head.” Your gender expression is whether you are socially male, female, non-binary or something else. It is “in your presentation.” Your sexuality is who you are sexually attracted to. It is not anywhere, it is an orientation towards others.

Some people, according to this model, have a mismatch between their sex “assigned” at birth, and their gender identity/gender expression. This causes distress. The Gingerbread model calls this distress “dysphoria.” They don’t say “born in the wrong body” anymore, but this is what they mean.

Framing my experience of dysphoria in the terms I’ve just outlined is laughably inaccurate. It’s offensive, two dimensional, entirely lacking in any depth or understanding. I could laugh at it, if I wasn’t so furious about what this cheerful, lying, cartoonified oversimplification is doing to the brains of the (mostly gay) young people it harms.

Developing Dysphoria

What was it actually like to develop dysphoria? I knew very young that I was attracted to women. I knew that being attracted to women was ‘wrong’. My religion told me I would burn in hell because of it. There were messages in society that told me it was taboo. I thought not that I had done wrong, but that I was wrong. I was ashamed of who I was. I kept my secret all through my childhood. I told nobody who I really was. Instead, I prayed to God to make me into somebody else. I prayed to God to strike me down for my sin. He did not.

Instead, he gave me large breasts at ten years old. My period arrived without warning. I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I was going to die. Full grown men started to leer at me. I felt vulnerable, exposed, objectified, frightened. I didn’t understand. I hated it. I always fought the boys on equal terms. But they overtook me in size and strength. They started to see me in a different way too. A way that made my skin crawl. I lost a sense of how to be myself, how to exist, how to relate.

Given this history, it is unsurprising to me that I developed a deep and abiding discomfort in my sexed body. Given this history, it is unsurprising that I wanted to be a boy.

I had no hope that I would ever have the things that the boys took for granted. I didn’t even allow myself to want a wife, children, a family. I did not think they were open to me. Given this history, it is unsurprising to me that I developed a deep and abiding discomfort in my sexed body. Given this history, it is unsurprising that I wanted to be a boy.

Compare this to the happy little story told in the Gingerbread model. “Lauren’s sex assigned at birth doesn’t match her gender identity and expression. Lauren decided to become Lawrence. Now he’s very happy.” It is anodyne. Insulting. My developing sexuality, my female body, and my female socialisation were all part of the development of my butch lesbian identity. You can’t pull these pieces of me apart and separate them from their origins, as if I were made of component parts, like a robot, an android. I am made of my body, my history, my way of being in the world. I am a whole, integrated, authentic human, not a bunch of robotics components. Not a disparate collection of body parts and identities, a customisable avatar. It’s offensive to my sensibilities to suggest it.  

Living with Dysphoria

This sense of the body as a collection of parts is intensified in dysphoria. Why? If I’m in a dysphoric cycle, I fixate on a body part/function (breasts, womb, periods). I think about it. I obsess about it in unhelpful ways. Too much thinking leads me to objectify that body part. I dissociate from it. If I think about it too much, my breasts don’t feel like breasts. They feel like uncomfortable, inconvenient lumps attached to my front. You can pull a similar trick on yourself if you think about the fact that you have a tongue. There it is, in your mouth, pressing against your teeth. The longer you focus on it, the more like a foreign object it feels. Dysphoria is way worse, there are more obsessive, distressing aspects too, but that feeling gives you a hint as to what the dissociative part is like.

If I think about my breasts long enough, I feel like they are not mine. They are not me. They hurt me. They stop me doing things I want to. Obsession, dissociation, dysphoria can create the sensation that my body is not an integrated whole, but a collection of parts. As if I could detach the bits I don’t like. As if my breasts were somehow not me, but stuck on the front of me. I want them away. I want to switch them out for something else. It is as if I were a robot, not a human. It is a short step from that feeling to hormones and surgeries. But the problem is not in my body, it is in my head.

Robots, Not Humans

The Gingerbread model actively encourages people to think of themselves as if they were made from component parts, like robots, not humans. It encourages people to think of their body as disconnected from their identity and their sexuality. It encourages disintegration of, and dissociation from the self as a meaningful whole. It encourages people to think of their body and their identity as a moment in time, disconnected from their history, their culture, their way of being in the world. It leads them actively away from the hard truth, that as an adult, if you want any kind of authenticity in your life, you need to integrate, to become a whole, messy, human self.

The Gingerbread model actively encourages people to think of themselves as if they were made from component parts, like robots, not humans. It encourages people to think of their body as disconnected from their identity and their sexuality.

The Gingerbread model also discourages people from considering or addressing pressing political and social issues. “Never mind taking political action to protect women, children and LGB people, so they don’t suffer how you did. No! YOU are the problem. And I have a solution! Take this pill and, by magic, you’ll be a straight man. Transmen are men, you know. Congratulations, Sir!” This is beyond unhelpful, it is reductive, two dimensional, harmful. It stops people from doing the hard work required for depth, richness and authenticity. Instead, in this model, fake authenticity is achieved by correctly matching customisable, robotics parts of the body to inner feelings. Couldn’t be me, although I know that some people have gone so far down this road that transition feels necessary to them. I am not against adults doing as they please with their bodies. I am against the assumption that this is the only solution for every case (as in the affirmation model). It is the nuclear option, and as in all good medicine, the nuclear option should be considered last, not first.

Porn Addled Robo-People

I’ve talked about how unhelpful it is for me to think about my body as made of detachable parts, like an android. I believe that excessive use of pornography can exacerbate this robotic self-concept, until people don’t think of themselves or others as really people at all, at least not in the sense that I understand it. In my view, this is how we end up at the “genital preferences are transphobic” discourse.

The people in porn do not have pasts or futures that the viewer imagines. They have no depth or personality. They are plastic, dissociated people, rubbing up against each other, trying to feel something. Or maybe trying not to feel anything. People made of parts. The camera often focusses only on genitals. They might as well be robots for all that we are encouraged to empathise with them, or understand their characters. It’s brutal.

Porn reduces empathy for the sexual other. It reduces sexual function in the real world. It further disintegrates the coherency of the whole self. It takes you out of the moment you are in with your real life lover, as a steady stream of plastic people parade their way through your imagination. They might as well be robots. Indeed, there is a growing worldwide trade in sex robots, some of which can even hold a conversation with you.

By the time you are masturbating using a robot that looks like a woman, you are lost. You have lost all sense of grounded presence. You have given up on yourself as a going human concern, and given up all hope of having meaningful sexual relationships with others. You have given up on genuine human connection, with all its messy reality, and you have given up on ever being better than you are. You are lost.

How much worse, then, to regard your self and your actual human partner as robotic, as a collection of parts. How dissociated from yourself and your partner do you have to be to say “if you want penetrated, why does it matter if it’s a penis or a strap” or “he’s just a man with an extra hole.” These are the words of porn addled robot people. People who view themselves and others as a collection of interchangeable, swappable identities and parts. People whose concept of their self and their body is robotic, rather than human, in nature.

Authenticity

I do not view myself in this fractured way. I take the reins of my dysphoria. I keep it in check. It is always there, but I am in control. I ground myself in my body. I reach out for authenticity and genuine human connection. I wear what I want and I cut my hair how I want and I let the stares slide off me. Let them look. And I reach out to my wife, who brings me her whole self and loves me just for who I am. She’s my woman, and she reaches back to me in the half light. I am hers and she is mine, and I am her safe home. I hold her in my arms and I feel right. I am at peace.

For me to be whole I need love, connection, intimacy, I need to be grounded in who I am, and to be truly present to the woman I love.

Those of us who have truly loved in this way could never say such things as “if you want penetrated, why does it matter if it’s a penis or a strap?” We could never reduce the people we love to their component parts like that. Those of us with integrated selves could never say such things as “he’s just a man with an extra hole.” No! I reclaim sex from them. I reclaim human connection from them. Let them keep their dissociation, disintegration, and the reduction of human experience to its component parts. Good luck trying to find happiness there. For me to be whole I need love, connection, intimacy, I need to be grounded in who I am, and to be truly present to the woman I love.

I would rather reconcile with myself in this way than take cross sex hormones and have cosmetic surgeries so I can look as acceptably masculine as I feel. I am not a robot, not an android, not a collection of parts and identities. I am not an avatar. I am a woman. I am made of flesh, and blood, and feeling, and thought. I bleed. I sweat. I bore down in fear for my life and brought my son into the world. I fed him at my breast. I am in awe of my body for doing these things. I love my clever hands. I am proud of my physical strength. I am a whole person. Like everybody, I sometimes feel a little broken, but I know who I am. I am a butch lesbian, a strong, masculine woman. I have found my voice, I am raising it. I am in my power, in my female body, and I am home.

Lauren Black is a butch lesbian who lives with dysphoria and she chooses not to transition. Instead, she is learning to love the skin she’s in. She is a cofounder of the LGB Alliance Ireland, and lives with her wife and two children in Northern Ireland.