Am I satisfied?

So I just got home from a day trip to DC. I spent a little bit of time with an old friend whom I haven’t seen much of in the last few years. She asked me if I was satisfied.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean are you satisfied with life.”

I answered briefly that I am not satisfied with my career, that I want better friends, as in I don’t have very many close friends, that I don’t want to remain single for the rest of my life (even though I’m kinda beginning to lose hope that I’ll ever find someone) but that I am very thankful for what I do have.

It’s a strange question. It’s a very probing question that really asks me to think. We were close before I transitioned, and her ability to challenge me was something I always liked. I feel bad, because I feel that I pretty much just talked about myself and didn’t try to find out to much about what has been happening in her life since we talked more often.

I have gone through a lot in the last few years. She told me I never seemed to be inauthentic before I transitioned, that I always seemed to be sincere. “Unhappy,” she said, “but sincere.”

I will say that she is one of the few people that I didn’t hold much back from, though I’ll also say that she is basically right.

I am the same person. In fact I’m very much the same person. I’m living basically the same life I did before…well with a few exceptions. I’m generally a much healthier person, and I think that I am better at dealing with my problems.

I am more satisfied with life. I don’t feel that my life is completely wrong, (even if not much has changed) I feel like I match. I don’t feel like I look like someone different from how I feel.

Is that to say I feel like a woman? Well yes, and no. I feel like myself, like I’ve always felt. There are things about my appearance I don’t like sometimes, but basically I feel that I look like myself and I act in ways that feel natural for me. I mean, objectively speaking I look and act like a woman and feel very comfortable with that, much more comfortable than I ever felt when I looked and acted like a man. I have no way of defining what it means to “feel” like a woman, but I am pretty confident in saying that if I try to define myself I fall pretty squarely into the woman category.

Gender is a really tricky thing. I felt completely mismatched as a “man,” but to a lot of people who knew me I seemed perfectly normal. I mean, I was never a butch guy, and I did come across as Trans to quite a few people, but I didn’t seem as blatantly wrong to them as I did to myself. If I hadn’t experienced just how real it is, I would want to conclude that gender is meaningless.

Then again, if I feel like myself, and I’ve always felt like myself, and I self-define as a woman, then I’ve always felt like a woman. If I’ve always felt like a woman then I never felt like a man and I have never experienced having a male gender. All I can really say is that my gender hasn’t changed, which means, I have no special insight into the male gender.

Weird, huh?

May 24^th marks the two and a half year anniversary since the last time I ever presented as a man. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Outside of work I  presented as a woman. I had a four day weekend presenting only as a woman. Monday morning I woke up and could not force myself to present as a man ever again. I realized that for better or worse, my female gender presentation was all I had to work with.

That’s a weird experience also.

Am I satisfied with my decision to “change my sex?” Well, yes. Every morning when I wake up, and before I go to sleep and at odd times in the day when it occurs to me, I thank God that I am now living the life that I am living, and that I now have the body that I have. I’m even thankful for the little things like not having to use the men’s restroom at the Greyhound station. In another sense, it’s something that I am, not so much something that I did. Am I satisfied with being a woman? Well, I guess. It’s hard for me to imagine anything else. I mean, irregardless of how masculine or feminine I may be this is who I am.

Am I satisfied with my life? Well…

Last week I wrote a blog entry about once again getting a “thank you for applying but…” letter. I went home later that night and lay in bed praying for quite a while. “God,” I asked, “What mistakes have I made that this is my career?”

I fell asleep and had a dream. In it, I was sitting outside on a patio, around a table with about five or six other people. Some were people I knew, some were people I had never met and I was feeling disappointed that a Trans guy I once had a thing for couldn’t be there, wishing things between us could have been different. Someone commented on how big my breasts had become (which isn’t that unusual for people to tell me) One woman, a larger type, not unattractive but not my type said something about her breasts being larger than mine. “Of course,” she said, “Mine are implants.” Somehow she told me that she was Trans and that we were all sitting together to celebrate my birthday. “This is all for you.” She said referring to the group I was sitting with, “Today is your day, you’re the guest of honor, so today we’re going to serve you.” Then she gave me a birthday card.Inside there was a long “inspirational” poem. I skimmed over it, I didn’t know this woman and I wasn’t particularly interested in her advice, but I didn’t want to be rude either.

I woke up, and had to rush to get ready for work.  I wasn’t particularly happy about going to work.. About two minutes into my walk my radio shut down and refused to start playing music again. So I had my entire walk (about an hour) to think. I tried to remember what was written in the woman’s card. The closest I can remember is “Always remember that there are no right or wrong decisions. There are only choice that you make to become the person that you are.”

This actually made me feel quite a bit better about being where I am right now in my life. For one, it takes a lot of pressure off of me in trying to decide what I am going to “do” about the things in my life that I’m not satisfied with, and it makes me feel a lot better about the decisions I have made that have put me where I am right now.

In some ways Transition, once I was able to accept it, was one of the easiest, most natural things I have ever “done,” but only because it is who I am. My transition was never about trying to act, and look more like a woman. It wasn’t about learning to “pass” as a woman. It wasn’t about changing my sex. All it was was deciding that I was going to make choices to be true to myself. 

This is why it is so odd for me to ask myself if I am satisfied with my decision to change my sex. It wasn’t so much a decision as it was the only possible outcome of a bunch of tiny choices in which I could not have chosen differently and have remained true to myself.

When I was contemplating transition, I always tried to figure out why a “boy” would want to be a “girl.”  It’s the first thing people always ask me when they find out I’m Trans, and it is what makes Trans people absolutely baffling to Cisgender people. There is no answer; it’s the wrong question. The question I asked myself that finally allowed me to make sense of myself was “what if I am a girl, how am I any different from how any other girl would be given my situation?” and the answer is I’m not.

Transition is this thing that I dreaded for most of my life and then I went through and it was wonderful and now it’s in my past and I still don’t really understand it, but I am satisfied. I’m still the same person.

I don’t know. I feel like in my transition, and in everything else, there aren’t any right or wrong answers, only choices that I make to become someone I already am. I think really the only wrong choice is to choose something that isn’t who I am or what I want.

Am I satisfied with life?

In so much as it is mine, I am very satisfied.