The Gay Agenda - Benny Urban's Portfolio

The Gay Agenda

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Dad, thanks for giving me copious amounts of inspiration. If you wouldn’t have died, I don’t know what I’d write about. Jokes aside, I miss you more than anything. I love you, bud.

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Table of Contents

Introduction……………………...…………..4 Creative Writing……………...……………..5 For What………………….…………...…6 Acid Rain……………………………...…7 Sex………………….…………..……...…8 I Know What My Aunt Meant Now……..9 Daddy Gave Me the Trailer………....…10 Bowling Balls…………………...….…..11 Stories I’ll Never Hear………..……12-15

Technical Writing…….............…..………16 Literature Doesn’t Need More Queer Representation..……..…17-22 Transgender People Don’t Have to Use the Bathroom………..…23-27 The Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID) Trend of the 2020’s...28-36

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I’ve never been good at introductions. I think of a lot of things to say about myself and reasons why I write what I do, but I never feel like it sounds right. Writing is universal, and by that, I mean: we are made to write about everything. It’s hard to get by in college without writing something, and it’s just as hard to write what you want. College has completely removed the ability to write in my free time, and it has made writing somewhat of a chore. Looking back at a lot of the things I have written is painful, honestly. I feel little passion in what I have written, and it makes me ashamed. Then, I remember how far I’ve come, and I take another look at what I have written.

My dad died less than a year ago (since the making of this document) and I still don’t think I’m over it. I struggle with my gender and mental illness daily. Life seems to flip on me as soon as I think everything is going well. I can’t catch a break, but I still manage to create. I may look back on my past works and cringe, but the moment that I finished writing them, I was so proud. Everything I put in this portfolio is something that I worked incredibly hard on, and all the works are about something I truly care about. Queerness, mental illness, and loss are all things commonly written about, but it is my experience with them that makes these topics special. I get so frustrated with myself and my writing sometimes, but then I remember what it can do for me. It’s an escape, and it’s a very special and intimate part of me that I am willing to share with whoever cares, even just a little.

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Creative Writing Writing is a way to express those innermost feelings that you are afraid to let others hear. It adds a little bit of subtext to almost everything. If you look deep enough, you’ll find it. I love poetry for this reason. I can hide all my feelings behind simple lines of text. I don’t have to be blunt, and I don’t have to force annotations and heavily biased opinions down someone’s throat. Poetry is life, so it’s hard to disagree with. I only started writing poetry when I came to college. My whole life I had only written stupid, little songs on my guitar. The content was immature, but I missed how writing them made me feel. Poetry was similar. I didn’t need to sing or play chords.

All I had to do was think and write. Sounds easy, huh? Well, to me, it can be. It can be relaxing or fun or–sometimes–really irritating.

Poetry is the perfect way to display emotion while also making you feel. It’s moving, or rather, it’s methodical and manipulating. I have six poems and one short essay in this section, all of which I did for Professor Jason McCall’s Poetry and Nonfiction (EN-556W) class. The first three poems are “For What,” “Acid Rain,” and “Sex.” All three poems have similar themes. “For What” is about the feeling of imposter syndrome–never feeling like you can measure up to the people in your life and feeling like you let everyone down. “Acid Rain” and “Sex” are both about overstimulation and being uncomfortable in either the situation you’re in or your body. The next three poems “I Know What My Aunt Meant Now,” “Daddy Gave Me the Trailer,” and “Bowling Balls” are all about dealing with the loss of my dad. I may have written them in times of grief, but I put my heart and soul into those poems, and they are probably three of my favorite things I’ve ever written. Last in this section is my short essay titled “Stories I’ll Never Hear.” This essay is about my father and the stories he used to tell me as a child. I wrote this essay with much more of a clearer mind than I wrote my poems in. After I wrote this essay, I really decided that I would be interested in writing more about my

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dad in the future. I would write about him just to cope, but to document his life. As I stated at the beginning of this introduction, words carry emotion. The emotion is pretty plain to see, but the meaning might be a little more difficult. Take a closer look, and think about–not just what these pieces mean to me–how they relate to you.

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For What the calluses on my hands are there for what, for what i don’t work how my father worked i don’t build the houses tall board by board nailed in by hand i don’t do the work my mother did mopping and cleaning putting food in her babies’ mouths breaking her back i write all day and dream all night for who, for who i don’t paint like my lover does i don’t raise children like my sister i can’t even handle the simplest task anymore i write some days and i have nightmares at night the calluses on my hands are there for what

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Acid Rain in the clouds is such an unimaginable heat. a heat the burns from under. no one tells you that the rain you love are acid puddles at your feet. pooling into your shoes and soaking your socks and making you feel overwhelmed, anxious, and uncomfortable. the icky wet that makes you want to jump in the puddle and drown.

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Sex thighs dripping with sweat hand gripping onto my hair finger sucking nothing feels worse bodies pressed together hands in places i hate wet mixing sounds vibrating in the air nothing feels worse gasping for a breath choking dying i hate it here, i hate it here nothing feels worse rolling out of bed cleaning up contemplating death my body is a foreigner my hands are traitors my mind is a prisoner nothing feels worse

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I Know What My Aunt Meant Now i miss you.

memories of you, instead of actually you, sitting with me quietly – smiling at me, truthfully.

maybe “i’m lost,” too. yeah, i think i’m more than lost.

dad, i am withdrawing, and it’s not from the fentanyl or the meth or the roxys. drugs aren’t the only cause for rehab.

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Daddy Gave Me the Trailer you hold your breath & hope it’s enough to kill you because you don’t actually think you could do it any other way. you feel he’s gone & you know he’s gone, but maybe he’s still somewhere driving his green truck & falling asleep behind the wheel.

you put your hand over your chest & hope you can feel something inside. people don’t give pity because people don’t really care how many live or die. you call & leave a voicemail – crying like a fucking baby. maybe he’s still there & he’s got another token.

you hit your lover & he cries & you cry & you feel so bad that these feelings are making you a monster again. your face doesn’t look the same in the mirror & daddy didn’t take care of the cabin no more, but he’s out there playing checkers & you’re losing again.

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Bowling Balls dreams can be forgotten, but a dream can’t forget you. i still remember your voice, and i still remember your smile, and i remember being so scared to lose you.

being a child would be a blessing, then i wouldn’t have to worry about where you are now. i just hope somehow you’re at a cracker barrel or a bowling alley with the girl you love, and you’re still thinking about me too.

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Stories I’ll Never Hear All I can think about is my dad. As I’m writing this, all I think about is him. We’re a lot alike. Really. Stubborn and attached. We say that we let things go, but when we need a weapon, we use it.

Words were his favorite weapon. He could make you laugh. I laughed a lot with him, but I cried over him more. Far more in life than in death. If something happened to him, it would have been my fault. Even now, not knowing what truly happened, it is somehow my fault. Words are still being used as a weapon.

In movies, there’s always a letter. A letter that explains. A letter that devastates. A letter that makes things better. There’s always a letter. I got a letter. A letter like the movies. It came in a white envelope, written on notebook paper, and addressed from Cumberland Heights – a rehab center. He said some of the things I had always wanted him to say. Some. I was grateful. I was the only one with a letter, but I was still disappointed. My dad could be a writer. I saw the letters he wrote my mom when they were kids. He wrote her about being grounded and missing her. He wrote about his love and devotion. I saw the letters he wrote his girlfriend. He wasn’t young enough to be grounded, but it was much of the same.

Long and meaningful. Love and devotion. He knew how to write. I was his child. He wrote that he’d get better, and I’d see him soon.

Those words hurt.

I remember our short phone calls. They felt long, but they were truly short. He said a lot without saying much. He wanted to tell me about his girlfriend and the goats and how sorry he was. He never let me talk much or really asked me anything. I think he asked about my cats once. That impressed me. I held on to that. He cared how my cats were. He never got to see them, and he never asked get an education, I didn’t do drugs, and I seemed to be doing fine.

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about them again, but he cared. Once. I held on to those words.

He often told me how proud of me he was. It always confused me because I wasn’t sure what he was proud of. I was his first child to get an education, I didn’t do drugs, and I seemed to be doing fine.

When I would ask why he was proud, he wouldn’t say any of those things. He’d just say, “I just am. You’re my kid.” I’m reminded of that a lot. Not that he was proud, but that I was his kid. I was his kid, I’m only 22, and—because he didn’t keep his word about “getting better”—I don’t have a father. I never really had much of one to begin with, but now I can’t even laugh with my sister about what Joel Urban has been up to.

Before I knew who my dad really was, what he was secretly doing, and how he was inevitably ruining our family, he was my best friend. I thought he was mine. He never treated me super well. He only ever beat me one time, but he didn’t need to. He was scary. He weighed well over two hundred pounds. He had a big belly, and he really liked to eat, but the man could pick up a horse. He wasn’t tall, but the way he acted put him at about six feet in my mind. None of this was what scared me though. He knew how to talk to you and just what to say to make you feel… worthless. Worthless words. Now when I think of him, all I can think about is that feeling, and I forget the good words he said. The purely creative and happy words. His stories.

I grew up on a street that matched my last name. I always knew that, but the street name I’d usually use to explain where I lived was Beartown Road. It’s where kids would go to fight, drink, and swim in the creek. It surrounded Urban Lane, and, really, my road was just an

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extension of it. My family, including my dad, is buried on Beartown Road, I wrecked my car on Beartown Road, we rode fourwheelers on Beartown Road, and—most important of all, Dad had a million stories about Beartown Road.

He always told me that the street got its name because of the infamous bear man. No one else has heard of the bear man other than me, so I’m not so sure if he’s all that infamous. Nonetheless, the bear man was a celebrity in my mind. Apparently, a man—well—turned into a bear. That’s basically it, but the way my dad would tell it was horrifying. It was like a werewolf, but a bear, I guess. I don’t really remember what caused it. He probably drank bear piss or something (my dad was weird), but that’s not super important. What’s important is that it has stuck in my mind all these years.

There was another story he told of a mother and baby that fell into a ditch just behind our late neighbor Mean Gene’s house and died.

There was a tree or a rock or something down there that very, very vaguely looked like the figure of a woman holding a child. I think he randomly came up with it on the spot one day and decided to look for shapes in the woods like you would with clouds. Either way, I saw her crystal clear. I don’t know by what logic their bones got immortalized like the people of Pompeii, but I believed it. I still want to believe it.

Then, there’s the story of the men that died on the bridge. There’s one actual bridge on Beartown Road. You got the low water bridge that goes through Bluewater right next to our favorite swimming hole, and you got the drowning bridge. It goes over Bluewater too, but it’s up high. It was built for flooding or something, but, honestly, the creek has never been that high. Except once. I’m not sure if this was

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true or if it was just another one of Dad’s fucked up stories, but, apparently, there were three men that built the bridge. One day, while they were working, it started to rain. It rained and rained and rained until it was hard for the men to keep footing. One of them slipped and got pulled in by the creek. The current was strong—impossible to swim against and too deep for him to dig his shoes into the rocks. His buddies tried to grab him and pull him out, but both were just as unlucky. They slipped, got pulled in by the current, and got taken further and further down the creek. They drowned, hence the name, and got a plaque and three crosses placed at the top of the bridge after its completion. I think the actual story is probably pretty close to the one Dad told, but, that doesn’t really matter. I like his better.

I know I said a lot of bad things about my dad in this essay, and, don’t get me wrong, the good doesn’t necessarily outweigh the bad, but there was some good in his words. He never got to write his stories down, nor did I think he wanted to. Regardless, I hope he’s proud that I wrote some of them down for him. My favorite memories with my dad aren’t when he was sober and taking me to cow sales or riding four-wheelers or swimming in Bluewater Creek. My favorite memories are of us laying in the bed he shared with my mom, telling me stories, and then singing “Wooley Swamp” until I fell asleep. People say it all the time: words hurt. Worthless words hurt. The words that hurt the most are the ones I’ll never get to hear—the stories that I missed out on and will miss out on now that he’s gone.

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Technical Writing While I love creative writing and the freedom from restraint that it brings, I also appreciate the technical side. I used to hate writing essays, but I think it’s because I was never told to do research.

Writing in high school was strictly opinion-based, and, while I love to give my opinion, it’s hard to prove that you’re right without any evidence. I really started to enjoy technical writing when I took Professor Christa Raney’s Advanced Composition (EN-310W) class. I was given the freedom to write about subjects that I could never imagine writing about in high school: queerness and mental illness. My two essays “Literature Doesn’t Need More Queer Representation” and “Transgender People Don’t Have to Use the Bathroom” were both written in this class, and I really enjoyed seeing the responses from other classmates. Most people were respectful, but one person in the class thought that peer reviewing meant voicing their opinion. I wasn’t insulted, but I was a bit hurt. It made me realize that, if I ever wrote something like this again for the public–not just for a class–that I needed to step it up. I needed to give the absolute amount of effort possible so that I could change their mind. Both titles are the reverse of the argument I’m making, but I chose to make them that way, knowing people like the person I mentioned before would read it. The papers I wrote in Professor Raney’s class were controversial, sure, but I’d like to tackle subjects that are even more difficult in the future.

The third piece in this section is “The Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) Trend of the 2020’s.” I wrote this essay for Dr. Tammy Winner’s Qualitative Research (EN-595W) class, and it stands today as my favorite essay I’ve ever written. I have had a fascination with the subject of DID for a long time, and I finally got to put all of my findings to paper. While I’m not a psychiatrist, I am a person who is on the internet all of the time, and this paper is more about an online perspective than it is a medical one. Technical writing may not always be as freeing and fun as creative writing, but it is the most pleasing

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thing in the world to write that last sentence–combining all of that hard work and research into one document.

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Literature Doesn’t Need More Queer Representation The first movie I ever saw with a queer main character was in Stephen Chbosky’s movie adaptation of his book The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I remember being surprised that the character, Patrick, was gay, and as I sat in the same room with my older sister, I felt slightly embarrassed watching him kiss Charlie. I was only 13 years old and definitely not out as transgender at the time, so I had no idea what her opinion on homosexuality or queerness in general was. Other than hearing her loudly sing Katy Perry’s song “I Kissed a Girl” in the car, we had not been exposed to something so blatantly gay together.

My fears were dissolved after she bought the book online and allowed me to borrow it. To this day, I still have not returned the book to her.

The pages are torn and wrinkled, but the queerness and relatability of it all is what draws me to reread it every summer. I was scared to come out for a very long time. There were not many TV shows about people like me growing up. The shows that did include gay or transgender characters were forbidden for me to watch, and all the books in my school library explicitly contained heterosexual and cisgender narratives. We were not even taught about gay or trans people, and the one time I did hear anything about queer people was when a teacher was talking about how disgusting it was. The textbooks did not talk about Stonewall or how gay people were put into the concentration camps with the Jews. I was clueless about the queer world of the present and the past, which led me to be clueless of queer people even existing. I felt like I was the only person in the world that felt this way, but reading books like The Perks of Being a Wallflower proved me wrong. Representation for any type of people is important, and it helps lead the world to a more accepting place.

Without it, kids like me could go their whole lives suppressing their true feelings—believing they do not exist or that everyone hates them.

Representation for queer kids, in a sense, is suicide prevention. John

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Hudson stated in his article on LGBTQ representation in the classroom, “At worst, [exclusion] is an expression of our culture’s homophobia, a message of exclusion and delegitimating which, along with the steady stream of other messages of exclusion heaped upon LGBTQ individuals by our culture, can do harm to a student’s selfesteem as it reinforces heterosexist assumptions in general” (3).

Showing growing teenagers and children that there is more than one option when it comes to gender and sexuality can help these young queer people figure out exactly who they are. Generally, the longer a queer person stays in the closet or remains confused about their identity, the shorter amount of time they have before they feel completely hopeless and lost in society. Most of the time, this causes the queer person in question to develop minority stress, which, in effect, also causes mental health problems. In a study by the American Public Heath Association, they concluded that “the association between sexual orientation and mental health has been demonstrated for certain conditions, including suicide attempts, eating disorders, substance-use disorders, panic attacks, depression, and anxiety disorders” (Sandfort et al.). Being queer does not automatically mean that you’ll have to deal with mental health issues, but being unaccepted by society, feeling excluded, and being queer will. In Carson Cook’s honor thesis, he states, “In another study which surveyed adolescents across the country, Bradley Bond found that more media exposure correlated feelings less sad, dejected, and depressed.” As I stated before, representation is a way to stop queer suicides. Unlike antidepressants, representation is free, it is harmless, and it does not just trick your brain into feeling better.

Representation is a more permanent solution. Queer literature is not harmful to children who are cisgender and straight, so why not begin exposing children to it at a younger age? Sadly, a lot of people would

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argue with this statement, but there is not a single study proving that being exposed to anything gay could potentially “turn” a child queer.

Equally, the straight media queer kids have taken in their whole lives did not turn them straight. With that being said, middle school children should be allowed to read books that contain LGBTQ characters, especially since most books featuring these characters are rarely even about being queer. Most of the time, these readings are just pointing out the fact that queer people do indeed exist. I do not think this sort of inclusion harms anyone, especially not people like Christians who would normally be against queer literature in schools on the basis of it being sinful. If children can read books about murder, lying, and adultery why can’t they read books about queer people? Letting kids ingest queer literature and media in school does not mean that the teacher or the school is in support of it. It just means that you are allowing children to be curious and to find themselves without the school stepping in to shelter them. So, this leads to several questions: how much representation is needed, how should queer people be represented, and who should be writing these queer pieces of literature? There is not a clear-cut answer to the first question. I cannot say that gay people need 1,000 books written about them and transgender people need 500, and I cannot say that every other book written from here on out needs at least two bisexual characters and a lesbian. Holding representation to a number would be ridiculous, but, as of right now, that is how it is being counted.

From 1969 to 2011, there have only been about 371 titles; that means, out of the (roughly) 129,864,880 books that have ever been written, only 4% are queer (Tyner). The 371 titles include picture books for children, fiction, and non-fiction books. Of course, ten years have gone by since 2011, so surely that number has risen. Still, the amount of representation queer people are getting is nowhere near where it

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should be. Representation can come in many different forms. It can come from having multiple queer side characters, one queer main character, or even the main character just having a queer best friend like in Chbosky’s book. The storyline does not even have to be inherently queer either. I have seen several recent movies such as ParaNorman and Onward that include gay characters in relationships without going into too much detail about them. The use of even this much representation can slowly help normalize same-sex relationships, and, hopefully, one day, allow a more accepting world. In slightly older films, the presence of queer characters is still there—they are just hidden. A lot of the time queer writers would write a character to be gay but leave out any mention whatsoever of their sexuality. Think about characters like Lefou from “Beauty and the Beast” who was obviously in love with his best friend Gaston or think about Ursula from “The Little Mermaid” who had similar features to a drag queen.

This technique of writing is called queer coding. This type of writing used to be acceptable since most things queer during that time was either illegal or extremely frowned upon, but now queer coding is just a way to get away with having a queer character without angering anybody. People that do not like the idea of queer people existing can ignore the gay qualities of the character and still enjoy the movie.

Since the character cannot 100% be guaranteed as a queer character, it is not good representation, especially since the writers and directors usually refuse to comment on whether the character’s queerness is genuine or not. Queer coding relies heavily on stereotypes to hint at the audience that this certain character might not be heterosexual or cisgender. Gay people used to live for this sort of representation. As Arnie Kantrowitz said in his essay about representation, “Whatever is gay is there to be rejoiced over or analyzed” (Kantrowitz, 329). Now though, stereotyping can be extremely harmful to the gay community.

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Not every gay man is feminine, and not every lesbian is masculine.

Having a variety of different queer personalities in literature can help humanize queer folks. Every queer person is not the same and establishing that early on in a child’s education or showing that in films and TV can help break stereotypes. There is a lot of discourse going around about whether it is okay for a heterosexual person to write for someone who is gay. Like most things, there is not a true answer, so this topic of discussion is completely up to opinion. I believe that anyone is capable of writing for a queer person just as they are for writing a person of color. If authors do their research and are accurately portraying queer characters, then they are doing no wrong. Of course, queer writers will always have more merit when writing about themselves, but I doubt many queer people will complain about any type of good representation. Representation can be easily given and should be easily accessed. No one should have to fight to be seen or have to feel invisible. Adding queer literature to middle school, high school, or college curriculums can be helpful to anyone who is unsure of themselves or struggling to come to terms with their identities. We should be represented as just as human as everyone else and not restricted to harsh stereotypes or forced to hide. Any writer can help with queer representation. All it takes is adding one little word.

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Works Cited

Arnie Kantrowitz. “Homosexuals and Literature.” College English, vol.

36, no. 3, 1974, pp. 324– 330. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/374844. Accessed 15 Apr. 2021.

Lo, Malinda. “I Have Numbers! Stats on LGBT Young Adult Books Published in the U.S. Updated 9/15/11.” Malinda Lo, 13 May 2019, www.malindalo.com/blog/2011/09/i-havenumbers-stats-on-lgbt-young-adult-books-published-in-the-u-s.

Tyner, Madeline. “The CCBC’s Diversity Statistics: Spotlight on LGBTQ+ Stories.” The Horn Book, 15 Nov. 2018, www.hbook.com/?detailStory=ccbcs-diversitystatistics-spotlightlgbtq-stories.

Cook, Carson, "A content analysis of LGBT representation on broadcast and streaming television." 2018. Honors Theses.

Hudson, John. “Breaking the Silence: Toward Improving LGBTQ Representation in Composition Readers.” Composition Forum, Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition. e-Mail: Cf@Compositionforum.com; Web Site: Http://Compositionforum.com, 30 Nov. 2013, eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1021995.

Logan, Stephanie R., et al. “Criteria for the Selection of Young Adult Queer Literature.” English Journal, 2014, pp. 30–41.

Sandfort, Theo G M, et al. “Sexual Orientation and Mental and Physical Health Status: Findings from a Dutch Population Survey.” American Journal of Public Health, © American Journal of Public Health 2006, June 2006, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470639/#.

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Transgender People Don’t Have to Use the Bathroom Choosing what bathroom to use has always been a struggle for me.

The constant fear of someone hurting me or misgendering me plagues my mind every time I have to stand in front of those two bathroom signs. My feet anxiously move to the bathroom with the man on the door. The hinges squeak as I lightly push my way into the almost too bright bathroom. Instinctively, I duck my head to search for any feet underneath the stalls. My anxiety subsides when I finally realize I’m alone. Many transgender people like me have had the same exact problem. When it comes down to it though, eventually we all have to go. It doesn’t matter if we are at home or in public. We often fear for our lives when we enter the restroom, so why are people suddenly fearing us?

Since the birth of our nation, gay and transgender people alike have feared for the loss of our lives and our rights. People like to assume that all of the out-and-proud members of the LGBTQ+ community came out of thin air– as if they were products of the newest generation. In actuality, they have been here all along. Though painful, it was easy for gays and lesbians to hide their identities, but it was difficult for transgender people. For centuries, transgender men were excused as tomboys or butches, and transgender women were just cross-dressers and drag queens. Today, those behaviors can’t be excused by those who don’t understand, as more and more transgender people accept their identities.

Although self acceptance is a positive thing, there are hardships that result from coming out– with growing acceptance also comes growing ignorance. The transgender bathroom debate has been a hot topic for quite some time; only now with our new president is it coming back up. The idea that transgender people could use the bathroom that matches their identity wasn’t up for debate with Trump in office; that

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would simply never happen. Now that our new president is working towards giving LGBTQ+ people back their rights, many people that often disagree with the “transgender lifestyle” are worried about the safety of women and children.

One of the biggest concerns for many people is that transgender women will exhibit predatory behavior if they are allowed to use the women’s restroom. Maybe this mindset stems from the unusualness of transgender folks or the way they are often demonized in popular media.

Movies like Psycho and Silence of the Lambs portray cross-dressing men as perverts and killers. I suppose that’s where this idea about men pretending to be women came from. I’d like to be able to say that there isn’t any proof of transgender people assaulting others in the bathroom, but, sadly, there are several. What people do fail to realize though is that there are cases of men and women sexually assaulting transgender women in bathrooms too. Statistically, one in two transgender individuals have experienced sexual assault and violence, not only by people in restrooms, but also by police officers and health care workers.

The problem with transgender people in cisgender bathrooms seems to not just come from fear, but from ignorance and feelings of uncomfortableness. I started hormones in 2019 and I would still be on them today if it wasn’t for discrimination coming from my primary care doctor. Nonetheless, my voice had the chance to deepen incredibly before my treatment stopped. Men don’t often speak to one another in the restroom, which is the opposite of what I've experienced in the women's bathroom. If I were to speak during my time in the women’s restroom, I believe I would make some women confused– some uncomfortable. There are plenty of other transgender

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men who are considerably even more masculine than me, so I’m sure that confusion would only grow. Regardless of their sex, women would be quite uncomfortable washing their hands beside someone with a flat chest and muscles or even a beard.

So transgender women aren’t welcome in the women’s bathroom.

From stories I’ve been told by transgender women, they aren’t welcome in the men’s bathroom either, especially since most are greeted with violence as soon as they walk through the doors. I’ve heard the same for transgender men, so what are our options? How can we possibly fix this problem?

The only people I know who have real answers are other transgender people. Personally, I avoid both bathrooms and tend to use family restrooms or restrooms with a lock on the door. If I can hold it, I just wait till I can get home, but that isn't fair to anyone. Restrooms for one occupant are hard to come by, and not everybody has my steel bladder. People suggest to have three bathrooms, one separate for transgender people, but that would be insanely expensive. The only true option, even though most will disagree, is to let transgender people choose for themselves.

Most transgender people are aware if they pass as the gender they identify with. For example, I pass considerably well, so I’ll use the men’s bathroom. If the men’s bathroom becomes a dangerous environment for me though, I’ll just make the tough decision to avoid bathrooms. Something people don’t seem to understand is that most transgender people can’t be told apart from cisgender people. No one questions me about whether I was born male or female because the thing is– it’s not obvious, and that’s the whole point. Transgender

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people have been using whatever bathroom they have chosen to use for years. The only transgender people that tend to stir up fear are the ones who don’t pass.

The transgender bathroom debate is a new one, and hopefully one that people will slowly start to understand. The concern for women and children is an important concern, but why are we suddenly putting all the blame on transgender folks? If I’m being honest, there aren’t that many of us compared to the rest of the population. I doubt most people have even been in the same bathroom with a transgender person, and if they have, I doubt they know. Transgender people already have to deal with coming out, medically transitioning, and fearing that someone might hurt them for the sole reason that their sex doesn’t match their gender identity. Don’t make transgender people have to struggle to use the bathroom too. We all have to go.

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Works Cited: Office for Victims of Crime (OVC). “The Numbers.” Sexual Assault: The Numbers | Responding to Transgender Victims of Sexual Assault, June 2014, ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/pubs/forge/sexual_numbers.h tml.

Press, Associated. “Two Women Sexually Assaulted Trans Woman in North Carolina Bathroom, Police Say.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 11 Jan. 2019, www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/twowomen-sexually-assaulted-trans-woman-north-carolinabathroom-policen956671.

Frank, Nathaniel. “Op-Ed: How to Stamp out the Transgender 'Bathroom Panic'.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 15 Apr. 2016, www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0415-frankbathroom-panic-tactics-20160415-story.html.

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The Dissociative Identity Disorder Trend of 2020’s For my field notes observation, I chose to focus on the controversial topic of faking mental disorders, specifically dissociative identity disorder (DID). The criteria for having DID in the DSM-5 is as follows: switching between two or more alters, recurrent amnesia between alters, symptoms cause distress or dysfunction, symptoms not due to culture, religion, or fantasy, and symptoms not due to substance use or to another condition. I chose this topic because I see a lot of people in my generation (Gen Z) turning DID into a joke online. Since I’ve learned about DID, I’ve had a fascination with it. I was diagnosed with bipolar II my senior year of high school, and, let me tell you, there’s nothing fun about that; however, I can see how someone might think DID would be. Every kid wants to be somebody else sometimes, and I do too. To someone who is uneducated on the disorder, they might think it isn’t any different from playing pretend, so it’s not a surprise that kids with boring or awful lives might be drawn to that idea.

Most of the targets of this abuse are preteens or teens who may or may not actually have DID. Either way, it does not matter because – like me – the people bullying these “fake claimers” online aren’t professionals. I can’t tell a person whether they have DID, and neither can a mean sixteen-year-old girl on TikTok. What I would like to do though, is lighten the stigma around the disorder, and, hopefully, help everyone conclude that – fake or not – accusing someone of faking a mental illness just by what you see online is wrong.

The biggest assumption I made going into my research was that I would find tremendous amounts of people who I thought were obviously faking. I’ve always been very skeptical when it came to the validity of DID or other specified dissociative disorder (OSDD-1). The DIDR website explains the difference between DID and OSDD-1 well

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by stating OSDD-1 is “used for individuals who have similar symptoms to those with DID but who do not meet the full diagnostic criteria for DID” (“DID Versus OSDD-1,” 2019). In other words, people with OSDD-1 may have alters, but they might not experience amnesia, or it can be the other way around. My skepticism would slowly die out though as I started to pick apart what was really going on in these people’s brains.

Part of my assumption was that people who had fictives or introjects were automatically lying about having DID or OSDD-1. Introjects are “alters [that] believe they are another person entirely, such as an abuser or a close relative” (“Alters in Dissociative Identity,” n.d.). A fictive is also considered an introject, but instead of the alter being based on a person you know or someone famous, a fictive is based on a fictional character. Most of the examples I’ve seen are characters from the shows South Park and Rick and Morty, the boys a part of the Dream SMP, and Satan. In my head, it was safe for me to assume that these alters were made up for the enjoyment of the people that created them, but after doing a lot of research I came to an entirely different conclusion. Since alters are made to either help or hurt the system, I think it would be convenient and comforting for a person to have the voice of their favorite cartoon character in their head.

Likewise, I think it’d be incredibly distressing for an abusive parent or authority figure or Satan to be one of your alters. With all that said, and knowing how intricate the human mind is, I can’t deny that introjects aren’t anymore outlandish than the idea of DID itself is.

Another assumption I made was that the human imagination could in no way affect the inner world of a person with DID. An inner world is a place where a person “or their alters can manifest as themselves and interact” (“Internal Worlds,” 2015). It made sense to me that the

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alters would be able to speak to each other somehow, but what did not make sense was that the alters could be in war, kill each other, be a known cannibal or criminal, or have inner romantic relationships with others. To be honest, it didn’t take a lot of looking for me to figure out how any of this could be plausible. As a writer and someone who likes to look at the tiniest details to figure out a story, I’m a bit disappointed in myself that I didn’t figure out on my own that we can look at the inner world and the problems within it as something metaphorical. I didn’t find this out by looking at articles written by professionals but by simply letting other Redditors explain.

I will admit, most of my observations came from Reddit, but there is so much information on there! One Redditor explained that war could simply represent an internal conflict, so maybe a cannibal alter could be explained by the feeling of being eaten up inside – feeling remorseful for something stupid you did. Maybe the alters killing each other could represent feeling like you’re dying inside, or that you just need to let that alter go. Similarly, maybe the inner romance just represents the person learning to love themselves. In a brain with so many voices, there’s no way that a person like me – with one inner dialogue – and a person with DID experience all these feelings exactly alike.

I think in my research that I am a bit biased. As someone with a misunderstood mental illness, I find that I’m a lot less judgmental when it comes to other mental illnesses as well. I don’t want to assume that anyone is lying about their disorders or illnesses. Even when I speculate that someone might be bending the truth, I automatically think that I might just not be comprehending it as much as I think I am. Someone could make the argument towards me that I am just too nice – that I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, and

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the truth is, that I don’t. In my humble opinion, I don’t think it matters if someone is lying about a mental illness because we shouldn’t treat that person any differently than we treat someone who doesn’t have DID. Giving that person special attention for “faking” or treating them like some phenomenon is exactly what they want. Not only are you feeding into their lie and making them feel like they can’t back out of it, but you’re also furthering the traumas and the perceptions of the world they already have in their heads – that people are inherently bad, and they don’t deserve support. You must consider what this person is feeling, and that there may be an underlying reason this person you perceive to be faking is doing just that, like “needing admiration, social connectedness, or love” (Upshaw, 2020). My bias is out of tenderness and experience because I can imagine what it would feel like to be grasping for love and not even getting a crumb, just backlash.

I’ve had a lot of prejudice toward the DID community in the past.

When I first heard of DID, I thought, “There is no way that this could be real. A person… with more than one voice in their head… and amnesia? That sounds like Norman Bates! It’s unbelievable!” and – to be honest, I still had remnants of those thoughts left behind up until I started this observation. I’m truly ashamed to admit that, but I must be straightforward and say that – since I don’t have DID – I don’t ever think I can truly understand it or the people that have it. I think that’s why it’s so easy for people to say that others are faking or lying despite having a diagnosis from a professional. Even when I was first diagnosed with bipolar II my mother would deny that I had it, and – to this day – she still does. Most people don’t want to accept that there are other people different from us because that makes our own problems seem more obsolete next to theirs. The only thing I can do

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with this prejudice is to continue to keep it in mind and to not forget that it can affect the way that I perceive things from now on.

I think that if I were to do this assignment again, I would want to have a personal relationship with someone who has DID. There’s a big difference between observing and talking through one’s own experience. Like I have stated previously, I don’t have DID, but the closest I could get to knowing what it’s like is by talking individually with someone that does. I think if I would have started this observation by being friends with someone who has DID or OSDD-1, then that prejudice I had when starting this observation wouldn’t have been there, and my findings and paper may have went in a totally different direction. I don’t regret doing this assignment in the way that I have done it now though because if I do ever decide to come back to this topic, then I have a different perspective to look at.

Considering how often I go on social media, I can say that I will be visiting DID hashtags and forums again. My favorite place to observe was r/DID on Reddit. I mistakenly made a post on there before being banned for not having DID, which is a requirement for being a part of the subreddit. The fact that the only people that can post there are people with DID is what made me particularly like it. People were searching for relatability, advice, a place to vent, and answers. It was nice to see a community of people who didn’t judge each other or cause each other grief. Even when I made the post, it was well received by the community, and I immediately got the answers that I was searching for. I would love to be a part of a community like that, and it gives me hope that – one day – all this accusing will stop.

Lastly, I can say that I came out of this experience with more questions than answers, and that is a good thing. If I wouldn’t have done as much searching and digging that I did, I don’t ever think I

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would have been able to come to the conclusions that I landed on. My first question would be: what would a relationship with a system be like? The DIDR website describes a system as, “a collection of alters within one body” (Systems and Subsystems, 2016). How challenging would it be to manage friendship between each alter? I imagine it would be difficult for me, but I can’t imagine how difficult it would be for them.

I also have many, many more questions about the inner world like: how similar is the inner world to real life, does the inner world and real life often get confused, how intricate can these worlds be, and how often is there an unknown alter hiding out? Of course, if I redid this assignment, I would like to delve deeper into that subject, and I would probably come out with many more questions. I think I would also like to do more research on subsystems. Subsystems are systems within a system. This means that alters can have their own alters, or there can be a group of alters that are unknown to the rest. I came across this idea near the end of my observation, so I didn’t have enough time to thoroughly research the topic.

Another question I have is: other than the DSM-5 criteria I listed at the beginning of this paper, what clues psychiatrists in that someone has DID or OSDD-1? I think a lot of people get confused – including myself – about the diagnostic process. Sometimes I feel like I have other voices in my head or that I lose chunks of time, but I don’t have DID. If I were to tell a psychiatrist that, without telling them anything else, would they be able to decipher my paranoia from real DID? I watched a YouTube video for my research about a person who recently got diagnosed with DID. They were surprised when they got the diagnosis, but they said that, during their psych evaluation, the doctors noticed them switching between alters multiple times. They

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had no clue that they were switching during that time and was also surprised that the doctors even noticed. I just wonder if a normal person like me would be able to tell, but, honestly, I don’t think so.

Therefore, if I couldn’t diagnose a person in front of me – even with knowing all that I do – then a random person over the internet can’t either.

The last question I have is about switching between alters. Most of the videos I have seen – specifically on TikTok – about switching portrays it as dramatic and extremely noticeable. On the other hand, I can think of two videos on YouTube that have shown me the exact opposite; therefore, my question is: does switching look one way? Like subsystems, switching is a topic I got to at the end of my research, so I feel like it deserves more attention.

To end my paper, I would like to state that this observation wasn’t meant for me to make a spectacle out of DID. It’s a serious disorder that “affects between 0.01 and 1% of the population” (Dissociative Identity Disorder, n.d.). Though it is rare, that doesn’t invalidate those that suffer from it, and, while it is an interesting topic, it’s not a fun thing to have. While I know my research will only reach one person, I still hope that it has an impact in some way whether it be a change in perspective or just a deeper understanding. I don’t love my mental illness, and I’m sure people with DID don’t either. Nevertheless, I think we should all love people with mental illnesses.

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Works Cited Alters in Dissociative Identity Disorder. Traumadissociation.com. (n.d.). Retrieved Mar 19, 2022, from http://traumadissociation.com/alters.

Comparing OSDD-1 and did. DID. (2019). Retrieved March 20, 2022, from https://didresearch.org/comorbid/dd/osdd_udd/did_osdd

Did in the DSM-5. DID. (n.d.). Retrieved March 19, 2022, from https://didresearch.org/did/basics/dsm-5/

Dissociative identity disorder: What is it, symptoms & treatment.

Cleveland Clinic. (n.d.). Retrieved March 20, 2022, from https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9792dissociativeidentity-disorder-multiplepersonalitydisorder#:~:text=The%20disorder%20affects%20between%200 .01,than%20men%20to% 20have%20DID. Hargis, B. (2018, June 14). About Alter Switching in Dissociative Identity Disorder, HealthyPlace. Retrieved on 2022, March 20 from https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/dissociativeliving/2018/6/aboutalter-switching-indissociative-identity-disorder

Internal Worlds. DID. (2015). Retrieved March 20, 2022, from https://didresearch.org/did/alters/internal_worlds#:~:text=Many%20indi viduals%20with%20dissoci ative%20identity,range%20in%20size%20and%20complexity.

MultiplicityAndMe. (2018, October 25). Switching alters: Our experience. YouTube. Retrieved March 20, 2022, from https://youtu.be/lBCf2gHn_Y4

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Pixielocks. (2021, November 21). Re-introducing ourselves dissociative identity disorder.

YouTube. Retrieved March 20, 2022, from https://youtu.be/3T9qRlwz5aE

r/DID. reddit. (2010, November 22). Retrieved March 20, 2022, from https://www.reddit.com/r/DID/

Systems and subsystems. DID. (2016). Retrieved March 20, 2022, from https://didresearch.org/did/alters/systems Upshaw, W. N. (2020, October 2). How to know if you or a loved one is faking mental illness. NeuroSpa. Retrieved March 20, 2022, from https://neurospatms.com/how-to-know-ifyou-or-a-loved-one-is-fakingmental-illness/