You gotta get your shit together if you want to transition, and some of the stuff I had to deal with in my transition

Last week I wrote a great blog entry and accidentally deleted it.


I believe that sometimes things happen for a reason. Maybe it was something I didn’t need to post.

Oh well.

In a nutshell, I think my transition ended when I cut off a friendship with a person I was very much in love with. That’s when I started at my current job, when life really seemed to get back to normal for me, when nothing really seemed that new or exciting to me and I just kind of am what I am: a 30 year old woman.

Jesus Christ, I’m getting old.

Well I’m not, but I can see 40 around the corner and the rest of my life. I hope I accomplish something by then.

The thing is that I have to remind myself is that transitioning is a huge accomplishment. It’s something that I forget (my life being back to normal and all) when I get down on myself for not working in an office, not doing something important.

It makes me smile. I look back on my life three years ago, beer cans everywhere in an apartment that I rented above a crazy guy who yelled at me every time I came home and cut off the power to my apartment, spending money to hang out at a bar rather than pay rent and spending evenings at home in a skirt that didn’t look very good on me and a stuffed bra. Then I moved home.

I’ve been meaning to write a blog about this for a long time. I’ve talked about this with friends who have transitioned.

If you want to transition you need to get your shit together, and that is hard to do.

Transition is hard. I mean, everything is going to get thrown at you.

Let’s see. I had to lose that comfort of being thought of as a straight guy. I had to deal with the fact that I was doing something for my health that my parents really didn’t understand and had a hard time being supportive of. I had to deal with the fact that I couldn’t help my parents accept what I am. I had to deal with the fact that half my family was going to delete me from their facebook, not reply to my coming out letter, and basically didn’t support what I was doing with my life. I had to deal with the fact that my employer assumed that I am an extreme individualist who actually wanted to be different. I had to deal with the fact that I made people uncomfortable and that they looked for and found reasons to place blame on me. I had to deal with losing a job, extreme poverty, brief periods of homelessness, crazy roommates, and disappointing people’s expectations of me, not being understood, wrong pronouns, prejudice and wrong assumptions about who I am and what motivates me.

Trans people are a “high risk” group for having HIV, because we’re assumed to be promiscuous. MTF’s especially are assumed to have had some experience with prostitution or at the least to have had sexual experience with men. So I had to take a class on how to properly put on a condom.

People look up to me, people look down on me, people still think that transitioning was some sort of decision I made. Like I thought it would be nice to be a woman.

And then, God damn it! I still can’t help but to feel uncomfortable around cross dressers and drag queens. I still have that compare myself with them, and I still make jokes about being an “extreme” cross dresser because I still am insecure with myself as a female person.

I don’t mean this to be discouraging, throughout all of that shit I had to go through my life has gotten progressively easier. I mean all of that (choosing to fill my prescriptions rather than eat, sleeping in front of Union station, living on a box of bacon my roommate took from a Wendy’s dumpster) was easier than not transitioning would have been.

Yeah, I’ve experienced some shit to get to this point in my life.

And I think my transition wouldn’t have been nearly as rough if I had transitioned earlier. Transition is a need. We need to transition. It isn’t about feeling suicidal necessarily, but it is about needing to transition and as long as we don’t fill that need we will try to fill it with other things that aren’t as healthy and our need to transition does not diminish or go away it grows. I transitioned when I absolutely had to, when the discomfort of not transitioning was so great that I couldn’t really function as a healthy adult anymore.

And yet I’m writing a blog entry about getting your shit together before transitioning.

There have been a couple people I’ve met or known who needed to transition and knew it. I sincerely hope they do but they aren’t taking the steps that they need to take in order to transition.

Step one: No one, nothing is more important than your transition. I mean, “Oh I’m going to wait until I graduate and get a good job and then I’ll transition,” or even “I’m going to stop sleeping on my friends couches and have my own place before I transition…” isn’t good enough. Putting anything ahead of your transition is going to jeopardize your transition.

What I mean by getting your shit together so you can transition is not solving every problem in your life. For one, a lot of those problems are caused by the fact that you haven’t transitioned and can’t be fixed until you do transition.

What is that prayer alcoholics say? “Lord help me to accept the things I can’t change and to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” Or something like that anyway.

I mean in order to transition you have to one present yourself as your “target” sex, you’re probably going to need hormones so you’ll probably need to find a therapist to approve you of it, so maybe you should make therapy a priority. Find a way to do what you need to do.

And whatever you think you need to have before you transition…that’s an excuse.
“Oh I need a good paying job…”
“Oh, I’m in transition and just got fired from that good paying job.”

I don’t know. I feel like I’m ranting a little bit here. I guess I just find it sad when people I people who have convinced me that they need and want to transition kind of just stall out and can’t seem to start transitioning.

I was like that. Hell I was 13 when I realized I wanted to transition.

Transition for me started when I started to present myself as who I am. It started when I stopped hiding and I got rid of anything that stood in my way of transitioning, including a job in an office where I got to where nice clothes.

I guess the thing about transition is that it is really simple and really hard. It’s a simple as “just be yourself no matter what,” and it’s as hard as all the things that will get thrown at you.

You gotta get your shit together if you want to transition and I think that sometimes just simply getting your shit together is transitioning.

I don’t know. Maybe I should write more about this later and try to be a little more clear in my writing.