“Are you sure?” I ask my therapist, incredulously and also a little hopeful.
“Yes,” she says, letting a friendly knowing smile out the side of her mouth and adds, “I certainly haven’t.”
I sat there in silence for a moment, marveling at how well I had convinced myself that that wasn’t the case, as my shock at this now obvious fact faded away. Most people don’t have constant casual thoughts about being the opposite gender as kids. Huh. Well, yea when you say it like THAT it does seem silly. This was still in the early days of my state-mandated therapy, as you have to be officially diagnosed with gender dysphoria before starting HRT in Texas, and while I was already convinced on a personal level of my own transness, I had kind of accepted it as a given that only very recently did my mind actually know I was trans. So I felt silly, but also with a giddy warmth like a sugar rush flowing through me, because I now had clear-as-day evidence that a large part of me always knew who I really was even if I couldn’t verbalize it to myself.
Now that was over 2 years ago (wow, time flies!), but I started thinking about it again recently as I’ve been watching the Child’s Play series for the first time. A series that is very much concerned with swapping into different bodies, and increasingly LGBTQ+ as it goes along as well, and it made me wonder if the idea of being “someone else” and body swapping was really a common enough theme across media. So common in fact, to possibly let a kid (me) in the 90s and 00s convince herself that it was also common in everyone else’s thoughts? Maybe. So naturally, I went a-googlin’ and found lots and lots of examples of depictions in books/tv/movies of switching into a different body than the one you’re born into.
I specifically looked at stuff that I would have seen as a child or a teenager (so forgive me if I don’t list others that you know of) and I was not let down. Starting with TV, lots of children’s shows had at least one episode focusing on either a hero/villian switching bodies or members of a team swapping with each other. Shows like Captain Planet, Darkwing Duck, Justice League, Futurama, Dexter’s Laboratory, Jackie Chan Adventures, Power Rangers, PowerPuff Girls, and Teen Titans were all ones I had some memory of watching. Not all of them had characters swapping into the body of a different gender, that seemed to depend mostly on the gender ratio of the cast, but a fair amount did. I can’t remember most of the books I read as a kid, I was quite a voracious reader, but a couple series do stand out. The Animorph series which is all about “morphing” into different bodies, mostly animal but they occasionally did other humans and also the series of Help! I’m Trapped In _______’s Body books which were about as blatantly transbaiting as you could get while still being written by a cis person, as the author appears to be.
Movies were the least plentiful, especially if we don’t include ones about cis straight men crossdressing like Mrs Doubtfire, The Nutty Professor, Big Momma’s House, etc. Those types of movies mainly had the effect of making me feel ashamed of wanting to dress up in women’s clothes anyway. I also never saw any of the well-known Freaky Friday movies for whatever reason. Oddly enough there were two in the same year though, The Hot Chick and Scooby Doo in 2002. Not exactly deep stuff but I definitely saw them at least a couple times. So counting everything in all, I’d say there was a fair amount of body swapping in my media diet as I grew up.
Now clearly the answer is yes, right? I wasn’t wrong for thinking that a lot of writers/authors/creators of the media I experienced thought about being in different bodies too? Well, yes and no. The big catch that I didn’t realize for a long time was that for cisgender people writing body-swap narratives, they’re for the most part merely treating it as a tool for giving characters different perspectives and experiences. The characters usually act like their own selves inside this new body, treating any change as an obstacle or challenge to overcome in order to get back to their original body. If an a different gendered body, they are typically laughably bad at “being” that gender, showcasing how extremely cisgender they really are at all times. There’s a big reason so many of the examples were comedies, the idea to them is inherently ludicrous. There was never a serious attempt to explore how a different body would affect how you feel in a society that doesn’t recognize your true self, or if somehow you felt more at home in a stranger’s body than you ever did in your own. Nope! It’s all only a temporary embarrassment for everyone that will be neatly rectified by the credits.
Now what sort of effect did that have over the course of my childhood? At the time it somehow both managed to make me feel less weird by seeing the body swap narrative over and over again, but at the same time it deflated any sense of insight into the deeper meaning of why I had these thoughts over and over and over again. With each new depiction, I could convince myself that wondering about being a girl was somewhat common for storytellers and also nothing to take seriously apart from a wacky fantasy. Why should I seriously grapple with my desire to find out what it would be like to live life as girl if every time I saw it onscreen it was never something worth that serious consideration? Combine that with no desire to ask if other people shared these sophomoric thoughts, and yea I could go a long time believing this self-imposed deception.
I’m not sad about it though because now I realize that while no one else in my little world was taking the body-swaps seriously, small child me was absolutely giving it all the attention she could muster whether she knew why or not. It was the precocious start of a long journey to constantly critically investigate the media I watched and to eventually explore the deep inner feelings they conjured up.
TransLana 