life before and after transitioning

Well, I have something to write about!

Okay, so it's been kind of hard to update as regularly as I would like. I mean, the further and further in the past it is the less and less I really have to say about transition. It's really surreal for me that I wasn't always as I am...or rather, because I've realized that transitioning didn't really change me, that I'm no longer living a life that felt wrong.

Actually, I've had two conversations this week that are kind of the inspiration for this entry, and it's something that I really have been wanting to write for a long time, and I probably have attempted to a couple of times but haven't ever seemed to really get down to the truth of it.

So the first conversation was on Friday night. I was asked how it felt to transition, did it feel like a huge relief? Yes. The other conversation was yesterday via texting, and I'm trying to describe what it was like to have a serious gender identity issue and what helped me work through it and I ended up, albeit lamely, just saying something along the lines of, "gender is a really difficult thing to struggle with."

To which the reply was, "I can't imagine." I'd like to clarify the "yes" and share my response to the second conversation

But first I think I kind of need to say some things about my previous life. I read a blog entry recently that really summed up gender dysphoria rather well “That was dysphoria?” 8 signs and symptoms of indirect gender dysphoria. I particularly identified with the part about counting down the days til it would be all be over. That was life. I stayed in bed as long as I possibly could every morning, got drunk as soon as I could and passed out as early as I was able in the hopes that I could drown out all the feelings of gender dysphoria. Or sleep as long as I could hoping that i would wake up one morning and find that it had all been just one really horrendous dream.

In a non-crazy way, life as a guy just didn't seem real. There wasn't really anything to work towards because...why? I did my best to continue and do what I needed to do and hope that someday everything would be all right. An awful lot of my hopes rested with the idea that someday I would marry the right woman and live my life for her and everything would be alright.

Also, I wasn't suicidal, and only intermittently depressed. Actually when my I came out to my mother as trans she told me I was bipolar and the trans thing was all just some illusion. But there are ups and downs with gender dysphoria. It was always intense and present, but there were the times when I'd psych myself up into believing that I could do something about it, ie: transition and I'd feel pretty good, there were the times when I didn't think I could do anything about it at all, the "I'm really just a boy, a really fucked up boy with really perverse thoughts that I need to get out of my head and I'd feel pretty shitty, and then there were the times I was taking estrogen and felt...normal.

Gender dysphoria seems to increase in the intensity that you feel it also. At twelve, for me it was kind of a big deal and I used to stay home sick from school so I could dress up as a girl. I thought it was curiosity first but then it kind of didn't go away, but my need to dress did. By high school I learned to suppress it a little bit, I still read about transitioning, and still thought about it all the time, and had a small box of clothes that I kept hidden in the back of my closet mostly, but I had kind of created some sort of an identity as a guy.

The feelings don't go away, and my opinion is that if you struggle with gender, like really struggle with gender, you might not need to transition but you are trans.

But there is no magic diagnosis. There was nothing, other than myself and my own feelings that I could point to and say definitively that "yes, I should be female and I need to transition." I firmly believe that my brain is hard wired, so to speak, to have a female body. I'll take it further than belief, I know that my brain is meant to have a female body. I know this only because of how transition has affected me.

Like, I finally realized, before the third and final time I started taking estrogen that the reason estrogen made me feel normal was because it was a chemical that I needed in order to function the way I was supposed to.

But...I started taking hormones the third and final time with an openness to maybe not having such a straight forward trans identity. Also, I had a prescription of my own, and I had basically already socially transitioned.

That worked for me. The relief of socially transitioning was pretty intense also. It felt like taking off a costume and laying down a script.

My life prior to transitioning was very scripted. Everything I did or said or to a certain extent thought was intentional so as not to be read as non-male/ not masculine. And the better I got at it the worse I felt.

But it was the ticking away days. I was raised in a Christian tradition and had always been taught to believe that life after death awaited me, that I could hope to spend eternity in paradise....and you know, no matter how much in denial I was about being trans, I could never bring myself to believe that an eternity stuck with (what I thought to be) myself could possibly be anything other than hell.

Life, pre-transition, was, in a sense, tolerable only because I knew it wouldn't last forever.

So I finally decided to transition. Or, actually what I could commit to was more like this."Okay I am going to go out as a woman and meet people and see how that feels and see if I really want to take it further, if I do I'll see what living outside of work as a woman feels like and I'll give myself a year to adjust to it before I take it further if I still want to...then....."

It happened much more quickly than that, because I found that for me living as a woman was immensely easier and much less hassle than keeping up the appearance of being a man. I barely lasted two months living part time as a woman before it just flat out became too difficult for me to present as a man.

Not in a physical sense. I started hormones one month after starting to live full time as a woman.

Hormones, as anyone who has transitioned can tell you go excruciatingly slow, and incredibly fast at the same time. I knew right away that I wasn't making a mistake in taking them. I started to notice my skin getting softer with like a week, and you know ever since then my life is a life of just being really really thankful.

Struggling with gender is really really tough, and my life prior to transition was rather hellish in a lot of regards, but I wake up every morning, or if I wake up in the middle of the night, and I just thank God. I mean, I love my breasts, and my body, and will even more so after I have my surgery, so much despite everything I feel is imperfect about it.

I'm not going to spout off that I don't have the same self doubt about my body, if not more so, than other women, but the thing I have because I am not cis, because I know what it is like not to have a female body, is just such an appreciation for what I do have.

I mean, it's waking up and feeling my breasts, looking in the mirror after taking a shower, catching a glimpse of my reflection while walking the dog, noticing how no one thinks it is at all odd if I choose to wear a skirt and leggings to the office, or that I have a bright pink overcoat, or for that matter wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt and still looking female. It's not having women put me in a separate category from themselves, and not having guys assume that I think the way they do. All these moments just constantly where I pause and just thank God, because this is what I always wanted, because I'm not looking enviously at some other girl because I want what she has; I have it. It's just so many things that I can't even describe.

And the thing about it is, I wouldn't wish being transsexual on anyone, and there are times when I really wish I wasn't, with so many people who don't consider me real, or who would be uncomfortable dating me, or who (ignorantly) put me in the same category as cross-dressers and drag queens, but then again I'm actually kind of thankful.

I mean, all this stuff that cis women don't even think about that I just appreciate so much.

And also the sense that I am a place in my life that for the longest time I didn't even think was possible.

I've lived the impossible. I mean, it really might be just a medical issue, and I do believe that it is, but it's also a miracle, and there is a lot that I have as a person that I wouldn't have had I not gone through the life I've had to live.

I think, overall, it's more of a blessing than a curse.