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