How I've changed since transitioning male to female

Okay so I’m going to write this entry from home for once.

I went out to Karaoke after work last night. Okay that’s not that unusual. Since transitioning I’ve kind of become a karaoke person. I had the realization that that’s what I’ve become several weeks ago when I realized that in general if I’m drinking I’m also singing karaoke. Okay, whatever. Anyway last night I was sitting at the bar next to a friend of mine from back before I transitioned. We were never particularly close. He worked at a bar I hung out at all the time before I transitioned. Anyway we didn’t really talk. He had just closed down the kitchen and was doing a cross word puzzle while drinking his shift drinks. I left after I sang my last song (“The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Damn those early rappers were really lyrical geniuses) we said good bye to each other and I walked home.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how I’ve changed since transitioning. It’s really complicated.

Okay, I’m much happier. On my 29^th birthday someone described me as “bubbly” vs “always kinda sad.” I don’t think I’m quite a bubbly as I was a year and a half ago. There is something called gender euphoria which is what happens after denying your gender expression for years. It happens a lot when cross dressers come out of the closet and then want to cross dress all the time. I read about it in a book called “My husband Betty.” It’s a pretty good book about cross dressers but most of it doesn’t apply to me very much. Anyway, if you’re familiar with the gender community you’ve probably gone to her blog, engender. I’m not gender euphoric anymore. I mean, I’m still pretty girly, but I’m kind of over that high that “passing” used to give me.

I wrote my last entry about passing actually.

What I’ve been noticing more and more is that really I’m the same person I’ve always been, well… with a subscription to “Glamour” that I actually kind of look forward to getting. And I don’t drink like I used to, and I actually care about my health.

I would like to able to write that our body is just a vessel for our souls but I can’t. It is really a huge part of who we are and when it is wrong it really hurts.

I mean that because I am so very much the same person I’ve always been, I’d like to be able to say that I could have grown into the same person that I’ve grown into as a man, but I couldn’t have.

Gender identity has nothing to do with liking shoes and nail polish and make up etc.

Then again, I’ve changed a lot. I’ve gone through about twenty years of maturing in the last three. I think that being transsexual is a physical not a mental condition. I think that on a certain level transsexuals are very immature until they do start taking hormones. I think that a female brain needs female hormone to mature properly, and I’ve found that there used to be a lot of doors closed to me before I started taking estrogen (and didn’t stop again) that are open to me now. There were a lot of things that everyone else experienced that I flat out didn’t. Like, sexual attraction, real genuine sexual attraction.

No I take that back somewhat. Before I transitioned I did experience being very much in love with someone, but I do think I experienced it in a very adolescent/pre adolescent way. I think that my mind matured sexually normal until I went through male puberty and it did not get the chemicals it needed and it stalled.

I talked about this in a letter to my extended family pretty early on in my transition and I’m a little embarrassed about it now. But I was really excited about transitioning.

I mean, changing one’s sex is kind of a big thing.

So as far as how I’ve changed, there’s the maturity thing.

But the thing about it is. I think I’m probably more similar to my six year old self now than I was when I was twenty six.

I wrote once about how when you grow up transgender you gradually stop seeing your reflection in a mirror. You start seeing someone else, this person you occupy and control, and you look at this person and tell yourself that it is you and you try to convince yourself of it but it never really works. Then you transition and one day you’re on your way somewhere and you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. Not the person you remember from childhood, but the adult version. And that’s when I really knew I was doing the right thing.

See there is also this person you are when no one’s looking, the person you are when you pray to God. This awareness of self that gets lost when you’re not being completely honest or when you’re trying to hard to be someone. I don’t know this is much harder to describe. But when you grow up transgender and don’t transition you kind of lose this person also. Then one day after you have transitioned you’re lying in bed and you recognize yourself and you feel familiar and recognizable.

I think that in trying to describe how I’ve changed in transitioning, I would say that I’ve become more. I’m more of the things I always liked about myself and I’m losing the things that weren’t ever really a part of who I am anyway.

I like to think that someone who used to know me well but hasn’t been there for my transition would recognize me for everything I ever was and more, and have one of those moments where they see me; “Oh of course this person has grown up to be a woman! I always knew she would.”

I can’t imagine having not transitioned. I can’t imagine myself as a man. I don’t think I ever could actually (which I think is probably what made it so difficult to try to live as one).

I don’t know. I’ve gone through this experience that is so unusual and interesting to most people and it just makes so much sense to me that I don’t really know how to explain it.

I mean I was sitting at the bar next to my friend last night thinking about who I was three years ago and who I am now and how much I’ve grown, and how I could never go back to that person I was again.