I spent the first twenty seven
years of my life trying to avoid transition when I knew it was inevitable. I
had an impending sense of doom and believed that I was not going to live to see
my thirtieth birthday. I spent countless hours reading books on gender theory,
what it means to be transgendered, what it means to be transsexual, and what
transition entails. I read hundreds of autobiographies; transsexuals telling
their stories, and how they knew they needed to transition. “I always knew,”
they said, but that didn’t help me. I was trying to figure out if I was
transsexual or not. On the one hand I had never experienced life as a female.
How could I know? On the other hand I’d wake myself up praying “God, please let
me be a girl!” no matter how hard I tried not to, and I learned that the only
way I could fall asleep at night was to imagine my body as female thinking
about the soft skin, breasts, and vagina that I did not have. Sometimes my life
felt surreal, like some sort of horrible nightmare in which everyone thought I
was a boy. Sometimes I’d pray to wake up from that dream. Yet, I avoided
transition with all the strength and endurance I could muster. “How can I
possibly be a transsexual?” I thought, “I’m not one of those people.”
With all I read on the subject of
transsexualism. I never answered the question Do I need to transition? What was driving me towards this action I
thought would leave me a social outcast? I knew that I didn’t have a single mental or
emotional trait or combination of traits that wasn’t perfectly natural and
acceptable in either male or female, and I still absolutely and uncontrollably
wanted to be a member of the opposite sex from which I was born. In this paper
I am going explain how I came to understand sex, gender, gender identity, and
gender expression and my identity as a transsexual woman.
“I always knew I was a girl.” I can
say now with complete honesty but it really was much more complicated than
that. There were years in my life when I thought I was a boy. It had been explained
to me that little boys have penises and that I certainly had. I still knew that
I was a girl. Gender identity is not liking dolls over trucks, or preferring
math to reading. Gender identity is an awareness of one’s self and one’s body
as being or supposed to be a certain way. I like to compare it to how an infant
knows it has two arms and two legs and begins to crawl and walk without being
taught. I was born with a female gender
identity. My brain is structurally female and knows it should have a female
anatomy and feminine body. Male and female genitals are similar enough that I
was able to learn to used them, but I have an instinctive disconnect with the
maleness of my body which has caused a great deal of discomfort and eventually
caused me to transition from male to female.
As a small
child I heard the word “tom boy” defined myself with it. I knew I was
physically male as once when I told my mother I was a girl she had explained to
me that having a penis meant I was a boy. Somehow that seemed irrelevant. I was
aware of wearing masculinity but not identifying with it. I knew that short
hair did not necessarily make someone a boy and it didn’t seem to me that a
penis did either. I knew I was a boy but it seemed an irrelevant label to
describe how I peed. My penis was something I used to pee. Other than some
inconveniences like erections which were uncomfortable if not somewhat painful,
it seemed to be an adequate way of urinating. It seemed wrong to me that it was
outside of my body. I remember trying to correct that one day sitting on a
toilet. I pushed my penis inside as best as I could, hoping that it would stay
there except when I needed it. It didn’t, which made me think maybe a penis
wasn’t as similar to short hair as I had thought. Maybe I wasn’t a “tom boy”
but just a “boy.” I felt ashamed that hadn’t figured that out earlier. It
seemed that everyone else had. I decided that it was probably best to keep that
discovery to myself.
My awareness of being female did
not go away but it did not match the definitions that I had been taught to
understand the world by. Having a penis, while I didn’t think it was ideal, was
not the worst thing that could have been given me. My mother always said a girl
could do anything a boy could so I knew that a boy could do anything a girl
could. I rationalized that roughly half of all people have them. It seemed that
a lot of people actually liked their penis. Standing to pee was quite
convenient, though I did have to remind myself frequently that boys stood to
pee when I used the restroom.
I probably began my male
adolescence in the fifth grade. I think this because I spent my twenties off
and on estrogen and testosterone blockers and know how testosterone affects me.
Specifically it makes me feel really depressed for a time when it first enters
my system, then it just kills all my emotions and I feel numb. Nothing is
really bad, nothing is really great either. Fifth grade was the first time in
my life I felt this affect. Male adolescence was a horrible experience for me
that left me somewhat terrified of going through a second adolescence. I began
secretly “cross- dressing” during adolescence and it is when being a boy seemed
to have more consequences than short hair and a penis.
I first saw other transsexuals on a
day time talk show. I was horrified by what I saw and drawn to them. In them I
saw myself, and saw the possibility of my childhood prayers being answered. I
had pushed those memories to the back of my mind and had convinced myself that
I was “normal.” and “normal” people did not want to change their sex. I could
not possibly be one of them, but I really wanted to have a vagina.
I began to explore my sexuality as
a female in my early teens. I
instinctively had begun masturbating as if I were as girl. Testosterone
eventually gave me a body that made that difficult to do, but before that
happened I explored my female sexuality by tucking my penis between my legs and
using layers of underwear and tape to hold it securely in place hidden behind a
pair of women’s panties, then applied pressure through the layers imagining I
had a vagina. I suspect that this is common among male to female transsexuals.
My friends went “girl (or guy)
crazy” and I just kind of grew older. I deeply desired close companionship with
a woman but I never really understood sex or sexual attraction. In college I
tried sex and had found it very uncomfortable unless I was wearing a condom
that dulled the experience. When I began HRT, estrogen almost immediately awoke
my sexuality and its feminizing effects made it possible for me to have
enjoyable sexual encounters.
As a small child I had played
dress-up in my mother’s clothing and tried to walk around in her heels, but I
hadn’t thought of it as “cross-dressing.” I wanted to wear “grown-up” clothing,
and for some reason it just made more sense to me to try on my mother’s
clothing instead of my father’s. As an early teen I was dressing as a girl my
age in the privacy of my bedroom. As pre-teen and teenager it satisfied a growing
need I had to see what I looked like as a girl. I didn’t begin stuffing my
breasts until the other girls my age began to grow them.
I thought of myself as a
cross-dresser until I discovered the term transgendered. I never seemed to be
very interested in any of the cross-dressing topics I came across on the
internet. Cross-dresser forums typically discuss thousands of different ways to
apply make-up, all sorts of different ways of stuffing, and tucking, how to
adopt feminine mannerisms, and passing. It was extremely important to me that
I’d be able to pass, but I found reading “passing” advice, hair, make-up, and
clothing articles to be a little boring. Beyond wearing clothes and make-up
that look good on me I don’t find them very interesting. I always ended up
reading about hormones, and sexual reassignment surgery. I wanted to inhabit a
female body if I could do that under male clothing I would be satisfied. In
early adolescence my “cross-dressing” sometimes consisted of merely wearing my
own clothing in a way that made me look female.
Puberty for a transsexual is a very
unpleasant experience. We don’t know when the changes will stop and we really
don’t like the changes that are happening. As a teenager I identified as
transgendered not transsexual. It was undeniable to me that my gender issues
went much deeper than just a desire to wear women’s clothing. I absolutely
needed to keep a feminine enough appearance to be able to pass when I dressed.
I was terrified to be a transsexual but I absolutely could not dismiss the it
either. The idea that my body might possible become so masculine that I could
never become a passable woman was not something I could deal with, and I did
the best I could not to think about it, and prayed every night that that would
never happen. All the time my body was becoming more and more like that of a
man’s.
By my late teen years feminizing my
body became more important to me than clothing. I started by keeping my legs
shaved, and started researching and using herbal hormones and testosterone
blockers which I could buy at Wal-mart. Herbal hormones are not strong enough
to feminize a male body but in high doses they will keep your skin a little
softer, swell your breasts slightly, and decrease your erections. I took herbal
hormones as much for the psychological effect of knowing that my body was not
as masculine as it could be as for the physical effects.
I have always been aware of myself
as female. Throughout my male adolescence my awareness of my body remained somewhat
as it had been as a pre-adolescent. I always expected to have the slight
androgynous body the boy I had been when I first started dressing. My skin
slowly became tougher, my body hairier and more muscular. The more I looked
like a man the less I saw of myself in the mirror. Sometimes I would feel
really disconnected from the good looking man I saw. Other times I saw a really
“ugly” woman. Facial hair seemed to obscure my view of my face, and I was more
aware of my absence of breasts than I have been of my breasts I’ve since grown.
When I began transitioning I started “passing” very quickly because I can’t
help but to think of my body as basically feminine and I feel more confident
dressed in ways that emphasize that.
I began taking estrogen and a
testosterone blocker for the first time on my twentieth birthday, and again
when I was twenty six without a prescription or medical supervision. I wasn’t
capable of talking to someone about possibly being a transsexual but my need to
have a feminine body was so strong that it was very difficult not to self
medicate, especially since estrogen was affordable, accessible, and legitimate
from online pharmacies. Though it was risky I believe I did gain the benefits
of permanently lowering my testosterone levels as well as changing my bone
structure slightly. Combined with the herbal hormones I took through out my
twenties, I believe I kept my body more sensitive to estrogen than it would
have been at twenty eight when I finally started HRT under medical supervision.
The first two times I took estrogen
I stopped out of fear for my safety and also because of my inability to accept
myself and own my identity as a transsexual woman. I still felt somewhat
ridiculous referring to myself as “she.” I still defined sex by genitalia not
by gender identity. I took estrogen at times when I began feeling my body was
becoming unbearably masculine. I was incapably of allowing my body to fully
develop into the masculine body it might have become had I not interfered.
Being transsexual is mainly a
physical disorder. My gender identity has always been female. I have always
expected to inhabit a feminine body, and I developed sexually as a female prior
to exploring male sexuality. Treating transsexualism is as simple as correcting
a hormone imbalance, but we psychologically need others to identify us with our
gender identity. Even a female body wouldn’t have relieved the discomfort I
felt from being identified as a male.
I have been using the term “gender
identity” to refer the physical sex of the brain. There is also a term “brain
sex” which refers to typical differences in abilities between the male and
female brain; for example, men think more linearly and women more abstractly.
Various brain sex tests are available to take on the internet, which are based
primarily on statistical differences. Brain sex is measured on a spectrum
ranging from feminine to masculine. Almost everyone falls somewhere in between
and it is not uncommon for a male identified person to fall within the feminine
range and vice versa. The term “brain
sex” refers more to a person’s gendered abilities and less to the actual
physical sex of their brain. I believe these terms should be reversed, as
gender identity is the brain’s sex. Transsexualism
is defined as when a person’s gender identity does not match their physical sex.
I will define sex, gender, gender identity, and gender expression according to
my experience.
For my purposes “sex” is determined
by a person’s genitals. “Gender identity” is the sex of a person’s brain.
“Gender” is how a person relates to other people in masculine and feminine
ways. “Gender expression” is how a person communicates their gender, and gender
identity to society.
Gender and gender expression are
difficult if not impossible to specifically identify, but some qualities are
generally understood to be feminine, and others are generally understood to be
masculine. Competiveness would be understood to be a masculine characteristic
whereas cooperation would be understood as a feminine quality. Certain actions
are identified as feminine and others masculine. For a complete list read a
cross-dressing forum on line about passing.
Gender identity or the brain’s sex
and sex are usually, but not always, either male or female. They are both
present at birth. It is possible to surgically alter sex but it isn’t possible
to change a person’s gender identity.
Gender and gender expression range
on a spectrum from feminine to masculine. It is possible and common for someone
to be more feminine with one person than they are with another. Consider all
the genders one person may have during the course of the day. For example, I
consider my gender to be rather feminine. I generally relate to others in a
more feminine way, and generally in friendships, and relationships I will be
the “woman” if the other person is the “man,” however we experience gender in
ranges where we feel comfortable. Sometimes I just feel more girly than I do at
other times.
Gender expression can communicate
both gender identity and gender. For example, a man typically will occupy more
space than a woman of similar size. Consider the stereotypical effeminate gay man.
His gestures might indicate femininity but he might occupy space that
communicates a male gender identity.
Gender identity or the brain’s sex,
is not the same thing as gender. Gender identity is the physical sex one
identifies with independent of culture. Gender is who a person is in relation
to other people. The fact that I am a transsexual woman is unrelated to the
fact that I am also a feminine woman. I think one of the biggest mistakes
transsexuals make when transitioning is confusing gender and gender identity
and trying to emulate a gender which is not necessarily their own. Some women
make sense in heels and make-up; not all women do.
Gender
dysphoria, is the discomfort experienced when someone’s perceived gender
identity is different from their actual gender identity. An effeminate gay man
most likely feels no gender dysphoria as he is perceived as male. A transsexual
woman can never find relief from her discomfort by adopting the mannerisms and
dress of an effeminate man though she might be perfectly happy as a masculine
woman, because it isn’t femininity she needs to communicate but the femaleness
of her mind.
The biggest challenge I had in beginning my transition
was justifying my need to. I was familiar with the transgender spectrum theory
which states all transgendered people are on a spectrum with cross-dressers on
one end and transsexuals at the other. Somehow it seemed inadequate to describe
my need to transition. It is based on
the assumption that transsexual women are men that identify as women, not
“real” women, and reinforces the idea that transsexualism is somehow a mental
illness. When I asked “Am I really any different from how any other woman would
be in my situation,” instead of “What is it about me that makes me want to be a
woman,” I suddenly made sense. Give any woman the high levels of testosterone I
had endured for years and she would have the same dissatisfaction with her body
that I had. What I had spent years trying to understand with gender theory and
the transgender spectrum was as simple and treatable as a severe hormone
imbalance, and the transgender spectrum was essentially useless in justifying
my need to treat it.
The transgender spectrum theory is flawed. It only
accounts for gender and sex. Gender, gender identity, sex, and gender
expression all contribute to making a person who they are. The transgender
spectrum places a cross-dressing man at one end and a transsexual woman at the
other end, when in fact they might have very similar genders. It doesn’t allow
for “butch” transsexual women, or female to male “queens.” Being feminine or
masculine is not the same as being female or male. Transsexuals need to
physically change their bodies to match the sex of their brain. They don’t
transition because they are masculine or feminine, but because their gender
identities are male or female. The transgender spectrum combines gender and
gender identity when it is observable at any gay bar that the two are not the
same.
Transgender in a sense is a useless term. It means
someone who is across or above gender. No one is completely masculine or
feminine. So we are all transgendered to some degree. It is also defined as
someone who doesn’t fit within the gender norms of their sex but this is
essentially useless because people usually assume the status of someone’s
genitals based on their appearance and mannerisms. I am transgender by this
definition but socially I pass as a woman and don’t come across to most people
as transgender. I don’t really have a transgender experience in my day to day
life and I don’t particularly identify as transgender. I have come to define
transgender as someone whose gender identity is either difficult to categorize
as male or female or whose gender expression doesn’t match their gender
identity. By this definition I was transgendered while I lived as a man but I
am no longer.
I look on transition as basically the same process
non-transsexuals experience during adolescence. A female brain needs to experience
female adolescence or she will experience extreme distress. A transsexual’s
effort towards transition is her instinctive drive to have her proper
adolescence. My brain developed pre-natally to need estrogen both to develop
and function properly. Estrogen has allowed my brain to mature the way nature
intended it to.
I experienced transition not so much as something I did
but something that happened to me. When I gave up trying to figure out where I
fell on the transgendered spectrum and decided that whatever I was, I was going
to be myself, I just naturally became a woman. When I dress the way I like, act
and speak the way that feels most natural for me, and when my body feels right
and comfortable I look like and come across as a woman, which makes me a woman.
In short, I am a woman because I am.
Transsexualism is primarily a physical disorder caused by
a person having the brain of one sex and the genitals of the opposite sex. Transition
treats a psychological need for the brain to be perceived as its proper sex,
and its physical need for a proper hormonal balance. Transsexualism is
fundamentally different from cross-dressing because it derives from a physical and
psychological need, whereas cross-dressing satisfies only a psychological need.
Transsexuals don’t exist on the same
spectrum as cross-dressers because our need to be perceived as members of the
sex to which we properly belong according to the physical structure of our
brains is different from a need to express gender. Transsexual women are women
and can not be understood in any other way.
It isn’t actually possible to change one’s sex. We just
define sex wrong. Sex isn’t derived from our genitals but from our brain. A
female is a female no matter what is in between her legs.
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