The Follow On

I guess it does actually all catch up, snippets of human affection from people who you can't be with actually aren't enough.  Sometimes its just safer to stop hoping and hurting yourself waiting for it to last more than a night at a time.

And I know I deserve better than that kind of thing, but its been well over a decade, and nobody has put their hand up for that particular task.  The loneliness is real, the anxiety is also real.

My last real relationship was in 2010, and it was a nice simplistic hetero situation, I have no idea how to find whatever I need to find now.  I am basically looking for that pan/bi/lesbian needle in the haystack that will love me for me, and I am trying to find it in some of the smallest most narrow minded places in New Zealand... it's actually really hard when all my friends are telling me I deserve better, or I will one day find the most amazing person to be with.  I am 43... being real there are not that many awesome years left to enjoy the early parts of dating people, traveling, adventuring.  At what point does it actually get too late to start over.

I cry at night sometimes, for the girl I wish I could be with, for the girl I wish I was, but mostly I cry because I want to matter enough to somebody again that I am where they want to be.

How To Be Attracted to Everyone

Happy New Year everyone! 

I really hope that you have had a most amazing festive season, and that you haven't found yourself in the numerous highly strange situations that I have.

So lets go back, to just a little before Christmas time, I'm just a feisty lady living the best life I can manage, and have somehow found myself in love with one of my closest friends, the same friend I've loved for years.  

It's just a crazy situation, and realistically can only end a few different ways, most of them not great.

But you know me... I am an optimist, Queen of the Longshot, and I like to believe that love is always worth having.

However, you also know that this is my blog... where things are never quite as simple as they should be.

Much as I really thought it might end up happening someday, and various pieces of evidence had hinted that I wasn't completely insane to think so, I finally had "the talk" about it with her.

And she told me that it couldn't ever happen for various reasons, it really hurt because she had decided all of these things without ever talking to me.  

I am a flexible lady, I adapt to the situation always, if I knew there were requirements I probably could have met them you know? 

But I hate the idea that I would need to convince anyone to date me, or talk them into it.

So as much as the no hurts... she is still one of the most precious people in my life, we talk about everything all the time, and I can't ever lose that.  

So I let myself be sad for a few days, and now I need to start thinking about dating again.

I had basically been emotionally unavailable to anyone else for quite a long time just because I had that tiny shred of hope that someday her and I would find a way to make it work.

And that brings us to New Years, I volunteered at a music festival and set off with a positive attitude about meeting new people.

It was all fantastic bonding time with my good friends, really good discussions with a lot of new people, and of course some peculiar shenanigans along the way that I am not quite ready to write about.

But what honestly surprised me the most, was the tail end... the after party, the bonding over food with the other volunteers, and the fact that I actually found one of those boys...

The ones I have talked about on Facebook whenever people have asked me about my sexual preferences, that only existed theoretically up until this point. 

The 0.0001% of boys I am attracted to.

He's just a gorgeous fun man to be around, and I found myself quite shocked to be so instantly smitten by him.

So we have spent a few days hanging out, and it has been really nice, I am just assuming at this point that we will be best friends forever.  

If you are my friend on Facebook you have probably seen my post about Alterous Attraction, where you could either love someone, date someone, fuck someone, or be their best friend just as easily, and whichever one happens you'll be totally happy.  That's basically where I am at with him.

And as if that wasn't enough, I installed Tinder just to see exactly how bad it would be in my town...

I matched with a girl, and we exchanged a few messages, but I really don't think my lifestyle and attitudes are going to match hers.  

I am quite open about the kinds of silliness I get up to, and I don't think she would approve at all.

But it IS nice to get the validation of someone wanting to talk to you, that you are theoretically considered a viable romantic interest.  And that made me feel pretty happy actually.

Where does that leave me.... honestly I have no clue, and I don't even care.

I'll just keep being me, and hopefully at some point somebody will just see me and think "That peculiar lady is fucking gorgeous and I want her"

If that person is you, be incredibly direct and just tell me, because apparently I can't read intentions.

So for now, that's it... its time to start getting organised for my study this year, to take my life a little more seriously, and basically switch into productive mode for awhile again.

My holidays have been crazy, but my year needs to be much more calm.

Love you all,

Abigail

Gatekeeping in Mental Health

So today was one of those days that you hear about all the time, I was having a conversation with a psychiatrist to try and do something about my anxiety.

The guy was bonding with me over my IT/general nerd things and I thought everything was mostly going okay... and then he tells me that I am doing my transition "RIGHT" because I waited this long and these damn kids these days think they're transgender and have no idea, and that's why they all end up killing themselves.

It's SO hard to deal with that kind of situation because obviously I was there looking for help, and arguing is not the best way to achieve that.

So I basically just sat there gritting my teeth....

Honestly I WISH I had the option when I was young to do something about this sooner, but lots of people strenuously object to the idea of young people transitioning, so here's where I stand on it.

If your child/teen insists for an extended period of time that they are a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, and they frequently talk to you about that and want your help, then you should listen to them.  Visit a child psychologist who specialises in gender diverse people, and READ, read everything you can.
If the time comes that your child wants to transition you can consider puberty blockers which basically prevent them from being forced through puberty and being affected by hormones they don't want and the physical effects of those.  And that buys them the time to make an informed decision for themselves as an adult.

I get that its scary.... but the alternative can be much scarier.
The idea that people are claiming to be transgender, genderfluid or nonbinary to be "cool" is really fucking silly, we don't choose this.  We are this.

Love your kids.  Talk to your kids.  Avoid bad mental health professionals.

Oh and I guess just to kinda finish that initial story, I was prescribed Escitalopram an SSRI to help with my anxiety.  Lets see how that goes over the next little while, fingers crossed.

Love,
Abigail

Developments

There has been simultaneously rather a lot going on recently and also nothing at all, I am currently on break from my university studies until around the start of March so there has been a lot of time to relax and get caught up on movies and video games which has been lovely.

And amidst all of that lazing around I have also been trying to find a place to live for next year, I went and saw an awesome share house with a really nice group of people on Thursday so I really hope I get that one.  And it would mean living with another trans girl which would be strangely comforting I think, to have one person I could talk to who would understand exactly whats going on, and who I could get some pointers from.

My credit card is finally paid off, that's a pretty massive achievement really, and hopefully most of my other bills will also be paid off around March if everything goes according to plan.

But first! I am going for a brief visit to Europe to visit as many of my friends there as I can fit in, and to tick the Venice Carnival off my bucket list, well at least to tick it off in "boy mode" and I hope to get back there in a few years to do it again in "girl mode"
So basically the plan for that is hire a gorgeous 17th century costume and buy a mask, go to a masquerade ball in a palace, and just soak in the gorgeousness of it all.

And as far as my transition is concerned I also started taking hormones a few weeks ago, at the moment I am on a relatively cautious dose of estrogen (25 microgram/24hrs patch) and so far no testosterone blocker but we are looking at revising that when I see her again in March.
I really didn't expect to notice very much so soon, but I was wrong about that haha.
I've been a little headachey which I think is just down to needing to drink more water, and thankfully its solvable with some paracetamol, I've been ever so slightly more emotional and crying about all manner of random things on TV, and then there's the tender breasts.
It comes and goes, but it's just this strange feeling of ache and tingle for sometimes all day, sometimes just a few hours.  While that might sound a bit disconcerting its also probably the most noticeable sign of change, so even though I mutter about how tragically painful it all is, it actually makes me really happy as well.

The next steps I need to take are reasonably straight forward, I need to expand my wardrobe of female clothes and I need to start my voice training, all of which of course requires a little more money than I will generally speaking have once I pay off all my bills.
But I will find a way, and in the meantime I will also need to practice some makeup skills with an aim to be presenting feminine full time from around mid-March.

So everything is happening, and nothing is happening, and I couldn't be happier about all of it.

My Girl Wants To Party All The Time...

The fact that I take drugs is not something I hide from the people I am close with, it is not something I really think should be hidden, or ashamed of.  Whatever side of the drug debate you stand on I don't mind, and I understand both sides of it.  I have seen what they can do to people, I have experienced at least some of what they can do, and I have also seen some of the ways that they can really help people too... so how do you know when its too much?

Bill Hicks once said that we never hear about the positive drug stories, so I want to give you a couple of mine that actually changed my life substantially for the better.  Lets offset a few of those "man cut up his girlfriend with a samurai sword" news articles okay?

For an awful lot of my younger life I was plagued with low self-esteem, there are a bunch of reasons for that which are probably better discussed in a clinical setting but I understand them and I have worked on them.  And much as most of you who know me may find it incredibly hard to imagine, there were times in my life where I was very quiet, nervous, shy, and unable to talk to people.
And that really does seem like a different life to me now, but during my teen/early adult years I really just latched on to a few core groups of close friends and they were my people.

So when I moved to Sydney, I found myself alone in a huge overwhelming city with no real friends, and I had to really force myself to go out and try to meet people.  And then I found MDMA (E, Molly, ecstasy)....
On MDMA you feel like you can trust everyone, you open up, you can talk for hours with any old random you find in a gutter or smoking area of a club, and you have thoroughly meaningful conversations with those people.  (there is also a lot of hugging, glowsticks, and dance music)
So for somebody like me it really taught me that if you are not scared of the rejection of being that honest and vulnerable with people, you CAN absolutely make meaningful connections with other human beings.  And I think unlike most people who run around on pills the most core difference was that I realized that if I could have those conversations with people on drugs... there was absolutely no reason that I couldn't also have them while sober.  And so the noisy emotional vulnerable honest creature that you all know and love today, was born from those sweaty Sydney nightclubs and long rambling bullshit talks in hotel bathtubs.   And so it will always be hard for me to hear strenuous anti-drugs objections, because the gift of meaningful moments with people is the one thing that has actually saved my life more times than I can count.

And then of course there was the moment I described earlier where LSD allowed me to inspect myself enough to be able to realize who I really am, and what that actually means to myself.
But another time I did it, I was basically home alone and having some self-diagnosis time, and I thought to myself how would the 16 year old me react to the me of today, would that wide-eyed sober child approve of my drug taking antics and my running around the world throwing my life away on a regular basis.  And so I basically had this conversation with myself, and it was deeply therapeutic, at first I felt like he would have been disappointed in me.  So I also explained all of the once in a lifetime moments that I had along the way.  In the end it was really nice to feel like we had resolved our differences.  For anyone who has never taken LSD that will probably sound super rambly and odd... but for those few who have, you probably understand.

SO.... all these beautiful things, and yay moments.... and then the other shoe drops.

Another substance I play with on occasion is GHB (GBL, fantasy) and it basically takes you from sober to the pinnacle of drunken selfish obnoxiousness in the space of moments, and lasts for around two hours.  You will basically be a loved up floating monstrosity of self absorption and you will be incredibly horny.  In short its a really dangerous feeling for someone who is repressing who they are, because on that substance you give absolutely zero fucks about hiding things.
And so while I was overseas I was able to get litres of it at a time reasonably cheaply, and you only take 2mls of it at a time to get high.  So whats a girl to do with literally hundreds of doses of readily available relief from feeling like she needs to hide, but do a lot of it, on a regular basis.
The thing with GHB is that you start getting used to it, so you start taking more of it to try and feel like it did early on, but REALLY it is affecting you just the same and the higher dose is actually a bit more than you should ever take at once.  And that leads to... spontaneous unconsciousness, in public places...and if you do it long enough, your body will actually panic when you try to stop unless you reduce your dosages very very gradually.
If you have ever wanted to feel like you are having a stroke... that is how you do it.  So that is the one time I have ever been physically addicted to a drug, it hospitalized me, it caused depression and erratic behavior and it was really not good for me.

And yet.... even now if I can get just a little of it once in awhile, I still do it, I just don't ever want so much of it available to me that I can ever become dependent on it again.  And that's the real kicker, knowing why you do a drug, knowing what it does to you, knowing its all an illusion... it doesn't always help.  Sometimes a fake moment of being truly free to be yourself is worth it still, even at such heavy prices.

And of course there is the standard drug of damage, the most ill-reputed of desperate filth... crystal methamphetamine (P, Crank, Shabs, Meth)
When I was going out partying back in the day I tried crystal meth a bunch of times, and it never really held that much allure to me, it was fantastic for partying all weekend, but I never really felt the thrall a lot of my friends did during that period of my life.  It only ever felt like a tool to remain awake and focused for long periods of time.
So how have I managed to find myself having problems with it?.....Work.
In the past year or so, I have found myself using it more than I ever did before simply for the fact that it allows me to focus and be productive, and I have always struggled with that.  At one stage I actually did visit a psychologist for an evaluation for ADHD and while she said that I was definitely symptomatic it was not negatively impacting on my life enough to medicate it.  BUT... that was when I was unemployed and not in a relationship so there was no yardstick with which to measure it anyway.

So here I am, in a job which involves juggling numerous large scale projects and I am the only one in my office who can handle that work so it all falls to me.  And so on occasion I have used meth to achieve the required miracles, but of course that comes with all of the downsides, what goes up must come down... and on that substance the down is a nasty haze of uselessness for a few days where I will be ridiculously unproductive.  Right now I am doing my best to avoid that, and it has been mostly successful, but really, I just wish I could feel that focused in some way without it.

The other thing about that substance, is that it can be used to buy yourself a 12 hour window where everyone else is sleeping to get some you time when you are totally drowning in work and feel like you haven't had a moment to breathe.  And that can be a really enticing proposition when you are depressed and need a break.
And theres your vicious cycle again... afterwards you will experience a massive burst of depression on top.... and so you want a little more to feel better again.

So there you all go... drugs.... my experiences....

And at the end of ALL of that... I still think there are a lot of situations where drugs are actually super beneficial, and for those of us who need that level of escape sometimes there are just not any options to relieve the root cause that makes us need that escape.  Its not always about robbing old people to get "high", sometimes its just a desperate need to express parts of ourselves we normally can't.

For me... I need to start transition sometime soon, which means finally talking to my employers about it, which means finally talking to my doctor about it, which means a lot of really hard moments... so forgive me.  There is a plan to handle this in the long term.  And in the meantime kids, if you want to take drugs PLEASE do them safely around people who will take care of you.

Love...

One of the things I really struggled with when I was considering letting people know that I was transgender was the fact that it would completely change how I date.  And I think it's worth talking about really, it might help dispel some of the illusions that people have that telling people you are transgender is somehow just a phase or an attention seeking behavior.  On YouTube I have seen numerous comments about people being "transtrenders" which is probably an entire post on its own really.

But honestly, we are voluntarily reducing our dating options massively, that's no small life choice entered into easily.  OR we become somebodies sexual fetish which at least for me will never work.

So LOVE.... My entire life I was I guess a heterosexual man from the outside worlds perspective, and of course I was always a very sensitive soul who needed to find exactly the right types of lady to be with, all of my relationships were quite monogamous and intense.  And I had a desperate need to be loved.

When I moved to Germany it was at least partially because I had just undergone a fairly intense breakup and that is my typical response to fairly intense breakups, which is probably a pretty self destructive response but I am nothing if not a slave to my very intense emotional responses to things.
So there I was in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language, and my dating options were quite limited, I got very used to living on my own for the first time in my adult life.  And... well I feel like I have gotten stuck there really.  Like including someone else at this point would feel really strange.

And then of course it was in Germany that I first labelled myself transgender, which has somewhat changed my attitude towards dating.  I feel like it would be quite unfair to fall in love with someone and then expect them to understand my wanting to transition.  And finding someone who would be okay with it just seems so daunting.

But I have also realized recently that I deeply miss that level of affection with other people, I tend to fall in love with anyone who shows me any form of kindness at all, and that is hard too.  It makes it really difficult to determine whether I actually feel something for these people or if it is just an intense overreaction to something that I have neglected for so long.  But having experienced a few moments that were similar enough to being in a relationship really showed me how much I intensely miss those feelings, and that was just with one of my incredibly good friends.

I really want to be loved again, but I am also keenly aware that the people I have loved have quite often been the reason for me to stay firmly in the closet about who I am.  Because my need to be loved overruled my need to be me, and I just can't do that to myself anymore.  So I think I need to find some very timid way to step a toe back in the pool, find some regular affection where there is very minimal pressure, and not immediately dive headfirst in expecting it to be the last relationship of my life as I normally would.

It's a really strange position to find myself in, and I just wanted to document it, in case anyone else is feeling this way too.  And if anybody has any fantastic suggestions to resolve this, please do let me know.

And of course if that job description sounds like something you might be interested in (affection without commitment, a partner who will someday be a woman, and probably some complex emotional scenarios) then definitely let me know, and also you should probably seek some mental health advice because those would be some weird things to find appealing hehe.

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