Well I had a good night at Karaoke, and I ended up with a transgendered cabbie. I got hir number so I now have preferred driver. (Actually I don't know what pronoun zi prefers so I'm using these)
Anyway I found out a person I know is about to transition or thinking about transitioning or in transition already and just doesn't know how far to take it. I tried to give advice about transitioning last night but I was too drunk really. I never wrote the blog entry about deciding to transition. I'm going to try to do that now.
I've left my first entries up which were before I transitioned because it was important for me (prior to transitioning) to read blog entries from people about to transition. I read my first entry recently and it isn't quite as bad as I was thinking, but still...kind of embarrassing. Oh well. I think it is important that people be able to see it.
Transition is a big decision and the only person who can make that decision is the person about to transition. Talking with other people about it can be helpful but really no one knows you like you do. I mean I talked to people for years prior to transitioning and when I finally did "come out" to my parents my mother told me I was such a masculine person, :) LOL. People see and interpret things the way they want to. It's hard for people now to imagine me as a man but I never acted particularly masculinely. Anyway it's good to talk to people, especially if you trust them, but I think it isn't a good idea to allow them to help you decide whether or not to transition. Keep in mind that the people in your life will lose someone if you do transition and as fake as that person feels to you, it doesn't feel fake to others.
One nice thing to keep in mind is that regardless of bad advice when it comes to transition the only decision you will be capable of is the right decision. I can't even begin to say how many times I decided not to transition. Every morning I woke up and decided to be a man, I really only had to decide to be a woman once and the rest just kind of happened. In retrospect, trying to make the decision not to transition was not something I was capable of. So there it is. For a transsexual deciding to transition is really only an illusion.
Another nice thing to keep in mind is that transition is not becoming someone else and it doesn't have to be all or nothing. It's hard for me to actually say when I started transitioning. You don't have to know how far you want to take it when you start transitioning. Transition really is only changing things until you feel comfortable. Maybe that means hormones and surgery or maybe it only means dressing more androgynously than you do now. When you feel comfortable with yourself you stop.
Transition is not learning a new gender, gender role, or anything else. On the one hand people will react to you differently when you come across as a different gender and they will interpret what you say differently also, but you just react and adjust. Even if you are particularly dense you'll adjust. It's misleading to call us ftm's and mtf's because really we were always male and female. Sex change is really just a misconception. Your sex is in your brain and is pretty much set in stone the moment you were born. So you're not learning to be male or learning to be female you already are. Hormones merely allow you to experience the adolescence you should have had, and would have had were it not for a chemical imbalance. Everyone goes through adolescence and learns how to act as an adult man or woman. It isn't any different for a transsexual, we just do it later. We're late bloomers so to speak. That's okay.
You don't even need to know your gender identity before you begin transitioning. The only thing I knew when I started transitioning was that I needed present and interact with other people as a woman. Although I'm not a cross-dresser and in actuality never was I had to accept that possibility. Maybe you aren't male or female. The only way to know is to start transitioning. Start by doing what you know you need to do and stop when you feel like it. A lot of mtf's stop shy of surgery. I know I need it but only because I went through all the other steps first. I strongly suspected it before I transitioned, but now I know.
I also want to talk a little about transpanic. That sense of being overwhelmed by the though of being transition. The "I can't do this, I can't possibly be that person, what if I go through all this and then find out I'm wrong?" feeling. When that happens when you are thinking about transitioning just remember that you aren't deciding everything at once. Maybe the only thing you're deciding is whether to wear eyeliner or not. You don't need to panic about such a small decision. If you are already in transition just take a breath and think "Am I more comfortable with myself now than I was before?" and then because you don't have to go any further than you need "Is this enough?" Eventually you'll stop having transpanic attacks, or they start to be really mild. I occasionally doubt myself and ask "am I really female, do I really need to transition or am I just some really sick guy?" but then I ask myself whether I would go back to who I was before transitioning and I realize just how much I love having the female body that I have. And then I laugh at all the really transsexual things I did even as a little child that I was totally unaware of or didn't think about when I was terrified of transitioning.
Approach transition honestly and you have nothing to be scared of. Don't feel pressured to go further than you need to go, and don't be scared to not go far enough. Transition is becoming yourself and everyone is in transition all the time. Transition is only being true to yourself.
Finally transition might end some relationships. So might other things. All relationships eventually end even if it be by death. Don't be afraid to transition because you fear losing something you aren't promised anyway. I mean you could die tomorrow or have a heart attack five minutes from now why be afraid of losing something in the future, you might not have it anyway.
Sorry about the rather vague paragraph I just wrote. I do just want to quickly say to anyone in a relationship with a transsexual that transition is adolescence. Your partner will start thinking and acting differently, it's really boy into man, and girl into woman. You might lose that sweet boy you're partnered with and end up with a nice man. And that girl is going to start thinking like a woman with all our illogical emotions and preferences. I said it earlier, dating a transsexual is not going to give you a break from the typical male/female, male/male, or female/female disagreements. Don't expect that it will, and don't expect us to be able to understand the opposite sex any more than anyone else. I lived as man. It wasn't particularly easy. I never really understood "other men," before I started hormones. Now I don't even understand the person that I was. I am not capable of thinking like a man any more, and it causes problems when people think that I can.
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