Basically by the time I started seeing a therapist I was so far along in my transition that I never was actually diagnosed. I was already living almost full time as a woman and I did have a couple of things to sort out still but I basically knew that transition was in my future.
I want to clarify that a little. When I started seeing a therapist I was living socially as a woman. I had begun removing my facial hair, and I was pretty sure I wanted to start hormones. It took a couple months for me to be really sure that hormones were the right step. I wanted to make sure I didn't have any delusions, which speaks to the fact that I still wasn't all that confident in my transness though I was basically out of the closet. I also had a history of starting estrogen and then stopping a month or two later and I wanted to make sure I was ready to continue with the treatment and fully transition.
Trans panic can be a real bitch. I started to transition several times only to stop because of a case of trans panic. "I can't really be this much of a freak."
So this time as much as I wanted to start hormones I waited until I was confident I could work through any case of trans panic.
What a lot of people don't realize or don't think about is that being transsexual is actually a medical condition and it is diagnosed by certain set criteria. Okay so they've learned a lot about it since they first wrote the guidelines and they changed it to allow for greater access of treatment. Still you actually have to be approved for Gender Confirmation Surgery.
So my therapist asked me all the diagnostic questions:
Did you ever engage in cross dressing [before you transitioned]? Yes
When did you start? age 9
Did you ever stop? I tried to several times but I never was able to.
[Before you transitioned] Were you into men or women sexually? I kind of wasn't into sex, but if forced to choose I would definitely have chosen women. I think it was a trust thing. I don't trust men and never really have. I've never understood them very well.
[Now that you've come quite a long way in transition] Are you into men or women sexually? I don't know. I mean more and more I think I'm going to end up in a relationship with a man but right now I don't have the right equipment. It might be really judgmental of me but it seems that the only cis men who are interested in women like me are also interested in something I'm not into. Your male parts? Yeah. I don't really see myself sexually involved with a cis guy right now because I have very specific boundaries that I don't trust they would know how to respect. Women and trans men understand boundaries. But then I also don't know if it is completely a trust thing. I don't know that I'll be into cis men after I've had my surgery. I need to feel comfortable with my body before I really know who I am sexually.
Did you have any discomfort with your sexuality?I don't understand the question. What are they asking about? Well you did say you weren't really interested in sex. Right. I don't know what they're asking for. I'll make a note of that.
[Before you transitioned] Did you ever have sex? Yes, I had one girlfriend for six months it took her 3 months to convince me to have sex with her. [How did you do it? Did you use fantasies?] I played a role.[Did you ever have fantasies while you were with her] Well...I played a role. (actually except when I was with her I only have ever had sexual fantasies of myself as a woman having sex with a man, when I was with my ex and we were having sex I only ever thought about her outside of the bedroom. A pre-transition mtf is pretty loyal that way. I didn't tell my therapist this.)
[since you've transitioned] have you had any sexual partners? I've had three. [male or female] two trans guys and one girl. I tend to be attracted to trans guys. But it wasn't actual sex. I don't really go any further than heavy petting. The best thing about coming out as trans was being able to admit that I don't like this (motioning towards my penis) and don't like doing anything with it. Before I started taking estrogen I never really understood sexual desire. All my friends (and I almost teared up) had this thing that I didn't have access to. They enjoyed sex and desired it and I never really got that. Now I can at least understand the desire.
I'm probably leaving out a couple of questions. I answered as honestly as I could, though my answers probably would have been different before I started hormones. I have a little more perspective now, and I'm comfortable enough with myself to admit the truth. Before I'd been on hormones for a while I doubt I would have admitted I had no interest in sex, though the truth was the idea that someday I'd get married and have to do it regularly scared the hell out of me, and when someone asked me how I'd feel about being in a relationship with her knowing that she was going to wait until marriage to have sex I was all for it even though I wasn't particularly religious.
The thing about this blog is that I share an awful lot of personal information. I'm a bit of a narcissistic extrovert. But seriously I think it is really important to share stuff like this. I spent most of my life thinking I was a deeply disturbed freak, I mean, what type of guy wants to be a girl, really wants to be girl. No matter how hard I tried not to or how hard I tried to ignore it, it was always there. After a while I realized that I wasn't and never could be a man. You know that Goo Goo Dolls lyric "I guess I'll never know what it means to be a man, there's somethings I can't change, I'll live around it." I thought I could "live around it." 'cause afterall there really isn't anything wrong with being a really feminine guy. The thing is that really isn't possible.
I actually wanted to write this blog entry to talk about trans self acceptance, and the cisgendered perspective on trans people. Cisgendered people do not understand us and they can't from there perspective. I came a long way in my own self acceptance when I allowed myself to think from a trans point of view, or I allowed myself to ask the questions "What if I am a girl? How would any other girl react to having excess testosterone and a penis? How would any other girl feel about being constantly mistaken for a guy?" And the thing is answering those questions I suddenly make sense. Asking the question "What would cause a boy to want to be a girl?" is a dead end, and that is the question every cisgender theorist always asks about trans people. That is the question I spent my entire teen years and most of my twenties asking myself, and there is no good answer. There are only a lot of answers that contribute to transphobia and anti trans thoughts and theories. It's the question that so many people answer by blaming our patriarchal society, by saying trans men can't cope with the partiarchal hierarchy and trans women can't accept their masculine femininity. The truth and the only way to understand trans people is that yes a trans woman is female and always has been and a trans man is male and always has been.
To realize that all my thoughts and feelings and actions prior to transition were pretty consistent with how any healthy well adjusted girl would have thought felt and acted given identical circumstances as mine, helped me come a long was in my own self acceptance.
Now I generally consider my transition to have begun during the beginning of summer 2010 and to basically be over now except for raising funds for my surgery, and the bulk of it did happen during that time period but the reality is I was always in transition and always will be. That is the human experience. I mean at what point did it become inevitable that I would grow up and become a woman? Was it the first time I went to a gay bar dressed en femme, or was it the first time I went out en femme, or the first time I bought women's clothing, or the first time I tried on a bra, or the first time I saw other trans people on the TV, or the first time I looked and the mirror and saw a girl? There isn't one event, except perhaps my birth, that happened to me which put me on the path to womanhood. In hindsight there really was no other possible outcome for me other than an early death and in this I'm like every other woman.
Sometimes my transition feels like a rolling stone. It took a while to gain momentum but there has been no stopping it. Cis people will always ask why I decided to become a woman and I think that the answer to that question is that I really didn't decide. I'm the same person I always have been. Now that I've corrected what is a medical problem with a medical diagnosis I am a happier, healthier, more confident woman than I was before, but I still wake up the same person I always have been.
The thing about transition is that it saved my life and my spirituality. Living as a man, for me, was pure hell. I hope that other people read my blog entries, (and eventually after I've had my surgery and can pursue other things like a PhD) my theories and that being trans becomes less of a burden.
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