Quotes of the Issue
"Some members of the Guidelines Task Force recommend that clinicians avoid using terms such as 'people,' 'persons,' or other terms that might convey or reinforce a belief that the alternate identities are truly separate individuals." --International Society for Study of Dissociation, Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 2005, pg. 6-7.
"Alter: short for alternate personality. In someone with DID, alters are dissociated parts of the self that represent memories, emotions, and ways of relating. They are able to function independently from each other and are also referred to as 'parts' because they are parts of the individuals overall personality." --Deborah Bray Haddock, The Dissociative Identity Disorder Sourcebook, 2001, pg. 6.
"alter... 1. to make different in details but not in substance; modify 2. to resew parts of (a garment) for a better fit 3. to castrate or spay..." --Webster's New World College Dictionary, Second College Edition, 1968
"How many women would risk the scandal of marrying the first artificial man? None, probably." --Pagan Kennedy, the First Man-Made Man, 2007, pg. 9
What's FTMPD?
FTM stands for "female-to-male," often used to describe men who were presumed girls at birth. It's one way of being transgendered.
MPD stands for "Multiple Personality Disorder," where many people (sometimes called "alters") share one body. It's now called DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Put them together, FTMPD, and you get someone like me: a multiple trans man. An alter boy.*
I've never seen anyone like me in a zine before, so I made one.
Personality
I spent three years believing that I wasn't a real person.
Maybe you don't realize how fucked up you can get, believing that. You know the big questions, "who am I?" "why do I matter?" "why am I here?" Well, if you don't think you're a real person, the answers are, "you're nobody," "you don't," and "you're not here at all, you just think you are."
If you're not crazy already, those thoughts will drive you there. I know I was. If I was nobody, I couldn't love or be loved. If I didn't matter, there was no point in living. If believing I existed was a delusion, then life was just an elaborate prank played on me. You bet your ass I went crazy. I only went sane when I stopped trying to scientifically prove I was a human being and decided to assume I was until given further notice. Suddenly, life had meaning. I could love, I could live. I was real, human, alive.
And that's why I distrust the psych industry. They'd say I was wrong.
Married Man
On November 29, 2009, surrounded by my closest friends, ensconced in a beautiful little chapel by TWU, I married the love of my life.
Ordinary Hallmark happy ending, except Mac and I were both men, and we shared a body. We were not expected, encouraged, or legally allowed to marry, but we wanted to ritualize our love and celebrate our joy, so we did it anyway.
Our closest friends came. Kahootz and the Happy Medians from Boston. A local friend, the only singlet, who we met in a bookshop. The Choir Invisible dipped into their savings to make it from Germany. Within five bodies, we contained roughly thirty people.
Multi weddings are simple to host. We put everyone up at our place on air mattresses and sleeping bags, ate wild hog burgers, stew, and sandwiches. The chocolate wedding cake we baked from scratch the night before in a battered old pan, iced with honey, and topped with chocolate-covered dried strawberries from the local candy shop.
I'm an atheist and Mac is Christian, so we'd chosen together a simple non-denominational chapel, a womb-like place with stained glass figures of great women. Since it was small, we could rent it for a few hundred dollars and a half-fabricated story that we were performing an empowerment ceremony. The staff were bemused, but they wished us well and didn't bother us.
The ceremony itself we built from the imagination up. After all, tradition failed us; we had no bride! No church, no parents, no etiquette to be satisfied. We could do what we wanted—a rare wedding liberty.
So we lugged in our stereo, played music, read bad love advice aloud from How to make your Wedding Exciting (circa 1971). Our guests shared stories; we gave them gifts. Our secular clergywoman, garbed in a nightgown and Doc Martens, congratulated us, blessed our future, and read from the Book of Ruth for Mac, Shakespeare's The Phoenix and Turtle for me—verses about love, devotion, and unity.
I never thought I'd marry. Someone like me is supposed to be too much work to love, and if the government says you can't marry, you're supposed to obey.
We didn't. On a chill November morning, surrounded by my loved ones, witnessed by stained glass women, I read my vows to Mac and was asked, "Do you take him?"
I looked at my husband, smile bright as the sun, eyes warm with love and tears of joy. And I said, "Sure. Why not?"
The kiss felt like sunshine.
Body Mods
When some people hear 'transgendered,' they think of body modification—surgery, hormones. Me? I tailor my body with tattoos.
I've always loved tattoos. Putting my art on the walls of a generic room makes it my room; putting art on a foreign body makes it my body. It seemed a natural step. Plus it's cheaper and less invasive than a mastectomy, with fewer hoops to jump through.
People ask, didn't it hurt? Won't it look saggy and silly when I'm old? Won't I regret it?
Let me tell you, when I'm sitting in the artist's chair and I hear the needle buzz, I don't worry about any of that. In magazines, I've seen photos of ancient Chinese men, wizened legs covered in ink fifty years old. It doesn't look ridiculous; it looks stately, a symbol of tradition and a life well-spent.
I don't have tradition to guide the artist's hand, but after getting unanimous system consent, I spent months designing my tattoos, imbruing them with artistry, joy, and meaning, making them mine alone. And as the needle pierces my skin, it sutures my body and I together, giving me harmony.
Regrets? Never.
Alter: Four Years, Three Acts
I.
Alternate Personality
Fragment
Fractured
Symptom
Sickness
Victim
II.
Change
Upheaval
Surprise!
"I love you,"
Beloved
Warm
Heal
Grow Together
III.
Alter Boy
With needle
With thread and ink
The ties that bind
"Two distincts, division none;
Number there in love was slain."
Freely bound
"Where you go, I will go,
and where you lodge,"
Happily ever forever
Altered
After
* I can't claim credit for the term 'alter boy.' I first saw it on a shirt by stepdesigns on Zazzle. (EDIT 2024/2/27: shirt is gone, but stepdesigns still has a couple shirts up there.)