Minor Spoilers for the Movie Logan Follow and are used as part of the metaphorical ideas of this article
In the 2017 movie Logan, the titular character is shown to be evidently dying. He has remained relatively youthful across his many years thanks to his mutant healing factor, but after 60ish years following an operation to make him near indestructible by infusing his bones with adamantium, he is dying.
Visiting a doctor midway through the film, it is revealed that the metal in his bones is slowly poisoning him. It's causing his natural healing factor to fail, and unless it's removed somehow will eventually kill him. The very thing which is supposed to make him stronger and in some ways better off than others is going to result in his death. Something pushed on him, that has been an intrinsic part of his sense of self and lived experience as long as he can remember, is going to kill him.
Logan isn't intrinsically linked to his adamantium skeleton, it's something done to him. Exactly how this happens depends on which timeline you follow, but in this case it was essentially forced upon him by some asshole he doesn't even really know. He was given something he didn't ask for, which supposedly grants him some forms of privilege over others, and if he can't get rid of it he's going to die from it.
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Recently I was thinking about this idea in relation to some experiences I went through several years back. I won't go into any details but I experienced a period of intense suicidal depression and self-destructive impulsivity lasting several months, was very difficult to get out of, and I hope never to be in that space again. At the time it felt like everything that kept me anchored to reality (my identity, my sense of purpose, my drive) was falling away like wet cake. I'd built my house on the sand and after a minor seismic shock everything was disintegrating. I needed to find a way to stay tethered, latched onto some extremely unhealthy ideas and behaviours from my past in order to find something real about myself, and basically just had an awful time as I gradually put things back together.
Of course, at the time I didn't realise I was trans, and that everything falling apart was because my sense of identity and much of my life was based on a lie- a falsehood, a decision somebody else made for me that set everything else up to collapse. It wasn't sustainable to live as who I'd thought I was because trying to be somebody you aren't, to deny who you are so deeply it will take you years to actually admit it to yourself, is toxic and deadly. The inherent contradictions in so much of what I'd taken to be true about myself produced a poisonous tension that, as far as I could tell, would only lead me one way.
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Masculinity and male privilege, despite never feeling truly comfortable with it or thinking it was a good idea, undoubtedly factored into how some elements of my life worked over the years. Once I stopped dressing kinda gothy and cut my hair short people stopped yelling threats at me in the streets. I was never denied a job because my prospective employer tended to screen young women who they thought might get pregnant and go on maternity leave. I was never subjected to the sexual harassment and attacks that practically every woman I know has experienced at some point in their lives. Because of what? My appearance? Other people's interpretation of my gender?
I think what I'm trying to say here is that while I acknowledge that the supposed benefits of living as my "assigned gender" may exist, I don't want it. I don't want adamantium bones that slowly kill me from the inside. I never asked for it, and I can't keep it. Wolverine's indestructible skeleton will kill him, and forcing myself (or being forced by others) to "be a man" would kill me. Every privilege I experienced was wrong, because nobody should have threats yelled at them in the streets just for walking, be shut out of opportunity because of their gender, be attacked and humiliated and abused by disgusting opportunistic men. My sheltering from these experiences would be counted as a blessing by people who want to reduce us to fundamentally oppositional binary genders, but it's a curse to have to pretend to be something I'm not in order to protect myself from something that should never happen in the first place.
I'm a non-binary transfemme. I've known I'm trans for years now, and my life would have been better if I'd have understood this sooner. I cannot and will not live as something I am not. It is a suffocating shield that will kill me if I do.
I cannot accept these Adamantium Bones, for they are not mine.
(ORIGINALLY POSTED 23/03/2022)