How Do You Know? How Are You So Sure?

I think that's a pretty common line of questioning from the people who I have talked to about my gender identity, and honestly those are the two questions that at some stage we have to ask ourselves as well.  I can only really talk about this from my perspective and that goes for everything else here, there may be common threads to transition but almost every person experiences things differently.

So with that in mind....

The tired old cliche is that "I have always just known", and I think probably for the next generations of transgender people that will probably be true enough.  But back in my day (because I am absolutely archaic compared to these glorious modern creatures) things were a little more rigidly defined.  While its true that I always knew, from my perspective at the time there was something deeply wrong with that, and it was a "problem" to be corrected from societies perspective.

The problem with that is that you become victim to that conditioning as much as most of the general public are, for years now crossdressers and transgender people have been portrayed as abnormal monsters or the punchline in most media.  The general public are not really informed and tend to think of it as belonging somewhere on the sexual deviancy spectrum.

So you are raised in this culture where you need to stay hidden, nobody can ever know how you feel, how you would prefer to look, how distressing the realization that quite probably you won't EVER get to be the person you long to be.  And so you have to try and come up with ways to manage.

For almost my entire life I have surrounded myself primarily with women, I find it much easier to talk to them and always have.  The guys that I consider close would probably all be considered somewhat soft and delicate by your average alpha male type.  And so most of my life I just fit in as "one of the girls" even if it was a token membership to the club.  It helped a lot to be thought of that way even if it was said jokingly.  Because with the girls I could just be myself, be expressive, emotional, and bond on a more intimate level.  The stark contrast to that was pretty much any interaction with a "manly man" it's honestly like talking to a badly written chatbot online.
It's like they have some form of approved content list... that goes something like sexual conquest bragging, cars, dick measuring in the form of drinking/drugs/again sexual conquests/income etc, sports... and basically once you fall through the cracks or are discovered as not knowing a goddamn thing about any of that you are immediately suspect.

And the most fucked up thing is that spending a lifetime being told what SHOULD be important to me as a man, you actually have to learn to fit in with that shit, and thats a problem not just for the transgender girls its a problem for everyone who has to deal with these assholes.  This is how toxic masculinity starts... talk about women like high scores or you're a faggot....ummmm....
And why the fuck does everything need to be a contest?  Every fucking interaction has to have a winner and a loser with these people.

So yeah...I don't really want to give that much more time, clearly hanging with the lads was shit, it eroded parts of my soul I didn't realize how hard it would be to get back, and so I spent a lot of time alone and thinking or hanging out with my girls.

One thing I will say is that I firmly believe that transgender people REALLY end up knowing themselves, when you spend your whole life questioning who you are, what you are, how you can be the sublime version of yourself you can imagine if you just close your eyes and ignore all of that fucking body hair for a second. 

When I moved to Germany for a few years after a particularly rough breakup I suddenly found myself in a situation where I was completely alone, with minimal options to talk to anyone, zero influencing factors or other people's feelings to take into consideration and I really spent the majority of a year tucked away in an attic thinking about who I am.  Normally speaking you would have your friends, your partner, your coworkers etc who all influence who you are whether you see it or not.
And the thing I realised was that most of my life had been wasted attempting to fit in rather than attempting to fit me.  Along the way I had confided in some of my closest people about how I felt, usually with a typically defensive type explanation of it just being some lighthearted crossdressing.
Because up until that point that was all I could really afford myself, when you are deathly scared of people finding out that you are deeply resentful that you are not a woman, you really don't want a flatmate to find a stash of clothes and improvised bra padding you know?
A little kink I have found is at least forgivable by most people.  But once it is more than that its like the step too far that you can't walk back from.

And then there were hallucinogens.  I am fairly honest with people about my drug use, so no matter what your personal views are on drugs I want you to just hear me out for a second.

So LSD is a really interesting substance that allows you to consider things in a lot of different ways, you can consider a viewpoint from multiple perspectives, argue the point from each perspective and generally come away with a deeper understanding of each sides view and reasoning.  You can imagine scenarios and ask yourself hard questions from an ever so slightly detached mindset and be okay with the answers no matter how personal or confronting they may be.  Which is why it is being used to treat people for PTSD, depression, childhood trauma etc... you can process these things without as much harm to yourself.

The scenario was that a friend and I had been tripping and talking all night as you tend to, solving the worlds problems, envisioning a utopia of enlightened humans working together etc all those fantastic cliche hippy things...as well as watching all the pretty sparkles on everything.
Once we were nearing the end of that, my friend went to bed, and he told me I could go and sleep in his daughters bedroom.  You have to imagine this bedroom, we are talking six year old girls pretty pink unicorn fortress complete with bunk beds....
So there I was on the top bunk, in the pretty princess fort and as had been the case for that year alone in Germany I again was thinking about what to do about myself.  And I began to imagine how life might have played out if I had just been born a girl, the thing you have to keep in mind is that on LSD its not just a wistful sigh of that would have been nice.  Its a full blown reproduction in incredible detail, no crushing human development moments were spared, I experienced bullying and heartbreak and the eventual comfort that comes from knowing yourself and contentedness within your own skin.... and after living that entire life compressed into a few hours lying in a bunk, I cried, for quite a long time actually.  I escaped back to my apartment and called my best friend in Australia to talk to her about it, and I think that was the first time I actually openly applied the label transgender to myself, because I knew that just continuing to exist with this constant sense of unease was never really going to be enough after feeling how much more confident and at peace I could be.

Right now I know at least 30% of you are going to be thinking, but a drug addled imagining is hardly a thing to determine your life from.  And I just need you to know that the particular night I just mentioned was just the catalyst, I have felt that way my entire life, I recall really vividly when I was quite young that my only option would be to fake my own death and move to New York... because somehow in my child brain that was a place where living in the open as a lady would be totally okay.
I spent my entire life suppressing that urge to just pull a vanishing act... and the only reason I never did was that I didn't want to damage my family like that.
So there was this constant internal debate between the vanishing act, accepting my internal identity and giving it rare moments of expression in private being somehow enough, and my most pessimistic self saying that maybe you actually are just a fucking damaged mess of a human and you should be grateful nobody knows.

I don't know if everyone feels like that.... but its not really sustainable.  You know the old thing about when you cant make a decision just flip a coin and even before it lands you know what you want the result to be?  That has been womanhood from as long as I have been aware that I wasn't a part of it because of my body.

So yeah, drug epiphanies may not count to you, but it helped me just surrender to myself long enough to accept that and end the debate.  So I don't really care if you don't like it.

One other thing I want to mention because it has been a bit of a personal revelation in the past few months, I have ALWAYS desperately needed to be loved, for a lot of reasons I don't feel like going into tonight.  And my relationships have always been quite serious, emotional, and intense.  But one thing I never realized until quite recently was that some of those relationships were really just about the girl being in some way exactly the kind of girl I wish I was.  So not realizing I would get involved and think it was love, when really it was more like a deeply sincere admiration.  I think in future I need to notice when something is an intense platonic admiration to save all of the hurt feelings later.

Someday

The title of this blog is intended to be fairly tongue in cheek, since I am transgender and have spent my entire life feeling abnormal, and still do really.  And of course at any point in conversation with an anonymous internet zealot online I get called an abomination.  So you know lets run with it.

The feeling of dysphoria is a feeling of abnormality as well really, so i think it fits, and the oddities well they're all of the things that are going to happen along the way during my transition.  I expect there to be a lot of them, my life up until now was not really oddness free.

This is going to be a really hard thing to write for me, in many ways it is the second step for me after taking the arguably harder first step of talking to my friends and family about being transgender.

Over the past few years I had watched hundreds of YouTube blogs and read thousands of pages on the internet to somewhat help me along, and to really understand what the process of transition is going to be like.  And the one thing I noticed about most of those resources was just how much they stuck to the steps in whichever country, and provided tips around passing, which are definitely useful things to know and will in some way also be covered here.  But very rarely did those girls actually talk about their feelings, the setbacks, the internal monologue and doubt of it all.

So I am hoping that I can do that here, to help myself work through things, to try and put into words some of the things I think and feel and understand them better.  And I guess as something to talk about with a clinical psychologist since that is one of the many steps along the way.

This blog will be fairly frank in its language, probably awkward at times, and won't be softening things up just because the audience could be almost anyone.  So please if you don't want to hear about specifics its probably better to walk away now.

So the background, a little over 39 years ago I was born, and branded a male.  And really life ever since has been difficult to reconcile.

As the story so often goes, when I was younger I was absolutely crushed once I was old enough to actually begin to understand genders.   And was told that it was not something you can change.

I was always a little resentful that my sisters were allowed all of their nice clothes and weren't expected to really care about cars and sports.

I wore their clothes when chances to presented themselves, and I tried a few times to wear my mum's makeup...which probably actually just ruined it.

But it was really clear growing up that the way I was feeling was not acceptable.

In my first years at school I was teased because I spent all of my time with girls, which is absolutely criminal to a 7 year old boy.  The worst a 7 year old can really do is tease you about wearing dresses and hurt your feelings.

So as you can imagine by high school and quite a few difficult conversations along the way I had learned what I think an awful lot of us learn.  If you don't want to get beaten up regularly its much easier to just do your best to fit in.  Even if you can't relate to people, you basically just have to learn what I imagine most girls learn as well to make things easier. And that is to smile and nod, and pretend that all of the ridiculous shit that boys say is reasonable.  Only for me I needed to go as far as to be able to fit in among them.  So I am not sure I really escaped the toxicity of masculinity either way, in fact I am not sure anyone does really.

Unsurprisingly most of high school I was still considered weird, nobody knew how I felt, but I was definitely not fantastic at fitting in and not making waves.  I was reclusive, read books, wrote stories, hung out with the other weirdos.  Basically still a target.  And this was in a country school so we are talking the picture of cliche jock douchebags.

And I only really mention this to paint a picture of just how much this conditioning matters, we train ourselves to be invisible, to not be targets and that probably goes for other groups of people who are targeted by bullies as well.  But that conditioning gets so strong that you start questioning yourself, and that feeling of abnormality just ruins you, because no matter how hard everyone else tries to convince you, or you try to convince yourself, the feeling persists.

And that is basically how the next few decades went... I would dress in girls clothing when I could, and then feel stressed that somebody would find out.  So I could rarely actually keep any around.

Of all of the girls I dated, only one was not actively repulsed by the idea when I finally got around to telling them about it.   And so I resigned myself to just knowing this truth about myself that I could never act on.  Every time I was referred to as "just one of the girls" I would have an enormous smile that I could only have on the inside.  And basically life was just about finding other things that could potentially fill the void of never being what I needed to be.

Most of those things were intoxicants of a huge variety.

So if we skip over all of repetitious cycles of desperately wanting to do something about it, deciding I couldn't for whatever reason (mostly fear of rejection) or keeping a job or girlfriend.  We basically arrive here... at the point where someday is no longer good enough.  I told my friends and family last year, and haven't actually started a transition yet because I still need to talk to my employers about this.  And there is the next someday really.   But that someday needs to be soon.   So thats the story up until now in relatively short form.  I want to write something else about the differences between cross dressing and being transgender, because that was really one of the biggest questions I had to answer about myself.  But that can wait for the next post.

Night kids,

Abby