All about trans panic: what is it? and love.

I meant to write a post Sunday night, and then Monday, and then yesterday, but well...I never got around to it. I'm painting again, not that that has anything to do with why I didn't post, but I thought I'd mention it. I'll write more on that later.

Really, what I meant to write about is the case of trans panic I had Saturday night.

I don't get trans panic very often anymore. Really, this is only the second time since early in my transition. It used to happen frequently. It halted my first two attempts at transitioning hormonally in their tracks.

Which is why, when I did start hormonally transitioning the third time I spoke to a therapist for several months prior...I wanted someone to be there when I had that inevitable trans panic attack.

Okay, I need to back up a bit. It turns out that a lot of people don't even know what trans panic is. I define it as something separate from dysphoria. Dysphoria is something I feel constantly about my genitals, and used to feel constantly about the gender I was assigned to. Dysphoria is no joke. I wish I could make people understand how intense it feels, then no one would have any questions about why I transitioned in the first place or why I need Gender Confirmation Surgery urgently. Trans panic is when I feel panicky about being trans, as in: Oh my God! What am I? Where do I fit in? I'm never going to be completely accepted as a woman and now I'm somewhere in between and I can't deal with it. Or, it was that fear of being in between that made transitioning so difficult in the first place.

I go a few months on hormones, my body would start to change, and I was terrified to come out as trans to anyone, and terrified of ending up somewhere in between male and female.

I guess, no scratch that, I know that some most people think I'm in between genders now. If only because I haven't been able to raise the funds for my surgery yet. Sometimes only because I'm out of the closet as a trans person.

It is so tempting to go stealth. I think about it a lot actually, to move somewhere where no one knows I'm trans and not tell anyone and just be treated like a normal human being...God that would be nice.

But no, for me personally it is really important to be an out trans person. It shouldn't make any difference if someone is trans or not, and we need more people willing to be out so that trans can be seen for what it is: a naturally occurring variation.

I think my trans panic stemmed from a couple things: I've been putting a little more effort into finding a relationship. When I first started transitioning it was my intention not to date until after my surgery, but well...I'm really lonely, and I'm tired of not having anyone to hold me, or stay in with. So, I've been trying to talk to some people on Okcupid. One girl, a bi girl (not that that makes any difference, but I guess I ignorantly assumed she might not have the hold-ups a lot of lesbians do about dating someone like me) told me she'd never dated a trans person before and didn't think she could deal with it—thanks for being upfront (no seriously actually, I appreciate that). Another girl contacted me, was really interested, and wrote like a page about herself. In my reply I told her I was trans, haven't heard back from her since. The second thing--I think the trigger--was a post I saw on Facebook. Some celebrity (I haven't heard of) was caught with a trans woman prostitute. I guess there was a huge scandal, and he responded to the press that she fooled him into thinking she was born a woman and then tried to extort him when he found out she wasn't. The trigger was the comment the person wrote who shared the article: see maybe was shouldn't judge people when these things happen—Seriously! The fact that he was with a prostitute is trumped by the fact he was with a trans woman? I'm so sick of people thinking it is somehow less straight (or less gay for that matter) to find women like me attractive. The hormones I take orally are the same hormones that occur naturally in cisgender women (who haven't gone through menopause or had a hysterectomy). The changes in my body they have caused are identical to the changes cis women go through in puberty. Everything about my body is natural, and my “sex change” surgery won't be a “sex change” so much as it will be genital reconstruction. Fuck, if I'd served in Iraq and had my vagina blasted out by a grenade no one would judge my vaginoplasty then...would they?

I think all this culminated with my having a case of trans panic on Saturday night. Slow breaths, calm down, looking at my boobs in a mirror helps actually.

So I wanted to write about that. But then it makes me think about how much love is dependent on the body someone has. If I was dating a girl and she told me one morning that she was really a he how long would it be before I was uncomfortable in the relationship? For me, it probably wouldn't be until after he started taking T and his body became a body that I related to as male, but still...

Most relationships and marriages end when one partner transitions.

So every person I have ever fallen in love with has been female bodied, and when I really think about it, a huge part of that love I've felt has been because of their bodies, not just their personality. We like to think that we exist as an entity separate from our bodies, but how many of us are capable of actually seeing someone as not their body. Our bodies are as much who we are as our souls. And I know this, because it wasn't enough to come to terms with having a female mind and soul, I needed a female body. How can anyone love me if they see me as anything other than female?

Of course then I think about friendship. Someone (I think CS Lewis) said friendship is the purest form of love...but is it really? Most friendship is circumstantial, and honestly selfish. Friends are people we enjoy spending time with, they're the people who enjoy the same things we do, who are going through the same things we are. What happens when we change? The sad truth, (and I know a lot about change) is that your friends don't want to see you change. They love you as you are, not who you are becoming. Every time I've gone through a major change I've lost friends.

It's the people who are still there when change happens. My two best friends have been there for a long time now. They were there when I was a huge partier in college, and while I was a drunk after college, and when I came out as trans, and while I grew up in my second puberty, through all my crushes, insecurities, and flaws.

I don't see either of them very frequently. We have completely different lives. The circumstances that brought us together in the first place have changed. But they're still there, and most other people aren't. It's like they always saw me, not the momentary me but the permanent me. The me that stays the same no matter what changes I go through.

So, I'm looking for a partner like that. Someone who loves me.

I finished my memoir about a month ago. It's something I worked for over two years on, then self-published on kindle. I'm not the same person I was before I published it.

There's been some upheaval in my friendships since, but I'm not really upset about it. I expected it. I'm disappointed because the people who stick are rarely the ones I expect. The people who seem to love me more than anyone else are usually the people who love who I was in that moment, that circumstance, and when change happens they're not the ones who stay.

But we always meet people in the moment. I guess part of what I was trying to share (with my friends specifically) in my memoir, is who I was before now, and maybe a glimpse of the permanent me. The part of me that hasn't changed. The way I think, the way I feel, the way I reacted to having a body at complete discord to who I am.

It's a need I have, that I think we all have, to share our inner-selves (to greater and lesser extents considering the relationship). I must say that having transitioned people see me more than they did before, but still to be trans is in some respects to be invisible. People see someone in transition, or someone who isn't quite a woman, or someone who isn't quite female, when my inner-self isn't at all in-between.

Surgery will relieve this to an extent, hopefully enough that I can live a full complete life. But it scares me that maybe it won't. Maybe people will never see me for how I see myself. Or worse, they will but I won't ever know it.

I grew up with the same prejudices about trans people everyone else did. I've read the same articles about “Men” who want to be or think that they are really women, and I've seen the same talk shows with linebackers in mini-skirts insisting that they are real women.

And I think, that's trans panic. It's when the prejudices that I grew up with, and the prejudices that are so prevalent around me, and the prejudices I face collide with the fact that I am trans.