Simultaneously Screaming and Crying

I'll admit it, I am currently lying in my room wanting to punch kittens, slash artworks, and generally just set fire to the entire fucking universe.  I don't have any one particular reason, it has been a general mood for a few weeks if I am honest.  Maybe it's being trapped at home, maybe its hormones, maybe its just the constant setbacks and disappointments.

I think under ordinary circumstances I'd be crying but with the chemical cocktail I am currently on, crying isn't really an option, so apparently instead I get to feel "burn it all down and salt the fucking ruins" if that is some kind of mood.

But at least one thing triggered me exceptionally hard today, to the point that I actually HAVE to write something about it, because I am fucking tired of it.

As a trans person all you can really do is TRY to explain to your cis friends what it's like to be trans, and hope that you find some perfect metaphor or philosophical scenario that actually gets them to understand.  

More often than not though it doesn't work, so what ends up happening is people are friends with you enough to respect your gender identity and pronouns, but in practical terms you will ALWAYS be the product of your genetics, and only in their limited understanding of them.

Boys have a peepee, and Girls have a vajayjay... that is all.  

And if you chop off your peepee, the secret chemical soup underneath remembers still, and you can't ever trick the chemical soup.

So lets cover some biology....most of you are familiar with XX/XY/XXY/X combinations of chromosomes, holy shit notice how we are already at four.... yeah it only gets more interesting from there.  

When you are nothing much more than a clump of cells the SRY gene on the Y chromosome can be activated and begin the process of male development.  But it is only the very start of a series of steps that need to happen to result in what most people decide is a MALE.  

And even that is a fragile state, you also have DMRT1 and FOXL2 genes which help keep that state in adulthood, if either of those genes ever become damaged...uh oh your gonads (that's fancy terminology for sexy bits) will actually start changing.  

So that's the kinda base biological on/off boy/girl mode stuff... its already more complicated than XX/XY..... and we haven't even gotten to the brain.

The common theory at this time is that the brain and the body develop their sex characteristics separately which can in some instances cause the brain to develop as the opposite gender likely as a result of hormonal fluctuations during the pregnancy.
On top of that the transgender brain shows numerous structural similarities to their cisgender counterparts, and even a few structural differences unique to transgender people.

And then we have hormones... which are a wildly chaotic mess even between individuals of the same sex, levels can change due to social activities and external stimulus, diet and behaviour.  

Any number of things can cause an individual to exist outside the spectrum of "average" male or female.

SO.... that's the biological stuff....links at the bottom for much more hardcore science on that, but the consensus from geneticists is that simply looking at XX/XY chromosomes is incredibly inaccurate, and when you start looking deeper than that there are actually a multitude of combinations which could result in a wide variety of differences in the genitalia, secondary sex characteristics and brains.

Moving on then....next we have gender identity.  

All the nice little social constructs we have convinced ourselves separate the boys and the girls.  This is where we enter the realm of the assholes who say that our gender identity is a CHOICE.

My gender identity was no more a choice than my eye colour, there is no possible way to explain this to someone with no experience of it, I have tried so many times, and here we are... I am still frustrated and angry.

But as a meme once said.... Imagine you woke up tomorrow morning, and everyone was treating you as the opposite gender, you know for sure that you are definitely not that gender, but nobody believes you and if you argue too much they might kill you.  

That is the day to day.....until we transition.... and then it just gets worse in some ways because we can't hide it anymore.

Genetics don't matter nearly as much as you think they do, there are two genes keeping your fragile masculinity together....and if they failed ya know what would happen? You'd start developing female characteristics and your brain would remain male... so I hope that happens to some of you, so you can FINALLY understand that this isn't a choice, it isn't a costume we get to slip in and out of.

Anyway in summary... your peepee doesn't matter as much as you think it does.

Or if you want a more serious summary from a real life geneticist:
So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.




Educational Resources:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-science-of-sex-and-gender/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/stop-using-phony-science-to-justify-transphobia/
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/are-the-brains-of-transgender-people-different-from-those-of-cisgender-people-30027
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/

What Happened?

I haven't written anything here for months, and that isn't because I don't want to, it's because I am honestly not sure where to begin, and exactly how much legal risk I would be taking to do so.

And I am really writing now because I don't want to go into this too many times more for each new person I tell, and I want to get a little more to the heart of things than I have been in person, I have a nasty tendency to make light of serious situations so here is a much better place to get honest.

I went for a visit to Europe earlier this year, and when I returned I made the worst decision of my life and bought with me a schedule B restricted substance, in fact I probably mentioned that substance in my entry about drugs (GHB/GBL)
As a result I was arrested at my border reentry to New Zealand, spent a week in prison, and am now out on bail pending my court case where I will be pleading guilty.
Before you all play Google lawyer, the maximum charge for that is around ten years, with my relatively clean criminal record it might be more like two years, so that has really changed my life in an instant.

So why would somebody risk something like that? As some of you know or probably guessed I suffer fairly extreme anxiety and PTSD at times, and GBL in very low doses does a phenomenal job of alleviating those symptoms.  In the past I was prescribed Valium but in New Zealand that is not prescribed and Quetiapine does nothing for me.
And I remembered what GHB/GBL were like in recreational doses, so tried some in sub-recreational doses just to see how it would go, and it was like a weight was lifted.

And of course that is a really problematic attitude to have, remembering that GBL was legally available in Germany I decided I would get some there and just bring it home.  Of course if you are going to risk something like that it's kind of a case of bring as much as you can.

So anyway, I was caught, with quite a lot of it.... and as a result I am no longer at university, my court case is on May 21st and life is somewhat on hold until the outcome of that.

I am doing everything I can to try and prove to the courts that I am not the evil drug dealer they think I am, that I am usually speaking an incredibly positive person with a lot to offer the world, and that this was an isolated incredibly stupid decision.
I have started seeing a drug counselor, and will likely spend some time in a residential rehab center, and then I just need to hope that its enough to avoid a very serious sentence.

Whats bothering more right now is my future, this is going to impact literally every area of my life, my transition and my ability to travel.  And I have no idea what to do once my sentence is over, I am going to need a lot of help over the next few years.

So that's the short version of events, I may write another post about my time in prison at some point as well because it was fairly traumatic and life changing.

In other news, I have started testosterone blockers which make me really sleepy all of the time, but have noticed a little bit of breast growth which is exciting.
I have an at home laser hair removal device which I am using whenever I remember to, I figure any amount of progress on that front is a good idea.
And I am going to start doing my vocal exercises soon, though I need to find a way to do these alone now since I can no longer afford or reach the vocal coach in Dunedin I had found.

Anyway, if you read all of this thanks, I just needed to put it somewhere I can point people to.

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.

Therapeutic Word Menagerie

I don't write as often as I actually should, writing has been my therapy for myself since I was about six years old and I really need to try and remind myself of that more often.

Anyway I have been going through some relatively simple and entirely complex things at the same time really.

So as most of you know I quit my job, moved cities, started university and I thought I had a pretty solid life plan organised you know? Get a psych degree, write some books, council LGBTQI folks...
What I probably didn't elaborate on was how I actually came to that decision, and it could best be described as the result of a serious head injury and a fucking ridiculous living situation.

I was working in a job where I felt incredibly undervalued, I was living with a flatmate going through her own fairly serious mental health concerns, and then to top it all off I needed to spend a few months essentially lying on my back with almost no stimulation.  So that was a LOT of thinking time.

So there I was lying in a dark room, with nobody but myself and my thoughts, and you'd think I had done enough of that in Germany being mostly isolated for a year.  But no...
And I basically came to the realisation I needed to be doing something more for my dreams, I needed to be taking steps towards my goal not away from it, and I needed to be away from all the things exacerbating my own depression.

And because I was depressed and recovering from a head injury, I did what I have been known to do on a number of occasions and made an incredibly impulsive decision to uproot myself and go chase the dream.  Relying on a LOT of things to work out in my favour along the way for it to work.

Here we are a few months later, and guess what... those things didn't work out in my favour.
Mostly monetary things to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, which has left me even more anxious, even more depressed, and of course not really committed to my studies to the extent that I really need to be.

Shits bleak... this is probably the lowest I have felt in a long time, but simultaneously the most free I have felt in a long time.... so let's get to some of the better things.

My appointment with the endocrinologist has been booked, so on December 17th I will be seeing them, and hopefully soon after I can be approved for hormone replacement therapy, assuming they don't find any crazy hormone/thyroid type issues which is entirely possible given that I have felt exhausted my entire life.  Not the "Uuuugh Mondays" kind of exhausted most people feel, but rather the "I can't face getting out of bed ever again" kind associated with the glandular fever I had when I was 20 that never really ended.

But anyway, its a positive... things are happening and I am really excited about it.  It has made me think about all kinds of weird things.  Once I start hormones its unlikely my penis will be useful for much within about a month.  And to be honest I haven't really used my penis for anything much in the past six years, but just knowing that soon I wouldn't be able to even if I wanted to sort of makes me want to go get rampant with it.  Like a disgusting genital montage, taking cute pictures by a lake with a picnic basket, scrapbooking memories of the peen, throwing a goodbye party like its going backpacking in Europe...

I probably won't do any of those things though, because any kind of sex that actually involves dealing with it is a bit weird in my own brain still..it has kinda been an issue the past few times I even tried.
Like there is a scrolling list of things making me feel uncomfortable going through my head at the time.  Penis... Stress....Money....Emotions.........and.....sorry I don't think this is going to work.

The other positive, is I feel really free, I think when you are so close to complete collapse you reach a really unhealthy but satisfying point of not really giving a single fuck about anything.  When bankruptcy is a very real possible outcome you can really just throw yourself at any scenario knowing whatever the outcome it won't be as bad as the potential shitstorm you are facing in the future.  It's fantastic.

More people than ever know about my plans, I have been really considering getting my name change out of the way as soon as I can actually afford to do it.  Just so that I have that extra step along the path covered, ticking a thing off a list for the endorphins, that kind of thing.

Anyway I guess that's all I really have to say for now...I am like the cat in the tree, hanging in there baby... and I will endeavour to let everyone know if that status slips much further.

"One could imagine a delight and a power of self-determining, and a freedom of will, whereby a spirit could bid farewell to every belief, to every wish for certainty, accustomed as it would be to support itself on slender cords and possibilities, and to dance even on the verge of abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book V, Aphorism 347

Tightrope Artistry and the Perils of Hormones

I haven't written anything here for a long time since I have been so busy moving islands, starting my university classes, and trying to pull together some semblance of a financial plan.
For that I am hardly sorry at all, but we are about to have one of those milestones together, so I thought I should get some of my thoughts on paper.

Next Tuesday I will be speaking with a therapist about starting Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), so for those that don't really know how that works, the process is basically a discussion with a therapist about whether or not HRT is right for you.  In the past this was a process that involved a lot of "gatekeeping" (people assuming they know you better than you know yourself and preventing you from doing what you need to)
Luckily for me, I am doing this through the University's Student Health services, who apparently work on the basis of informed consent being enough, so for someone like me who has spent the past decade keeping up to date with things shouldn't be too big of a challenge.

So what happens? Usually speaking you will then need to go and see an Endocrinologist to determine your baseline hormone levels, and then with a combination of testosterone blockers and estrogen they will gradually shift that baseline to be more in line with a cisgender female.

Typically speaking the results of that will be fat redistribution to the butt/boobs/hips/face, an awful lot of mood swings because you are essentially going through puberty all over again, thinning of body hair, and I may end up with acne for the first time in my life properly (I somehow dodged most of that growing up)
And after a year or so of that, I will start looking at next steps like breast augmentation and facial feminisation surgery.

The other major thing I will be starting pretty soon is voice training with an awesome local lady who works with a friend of a friend, so I need to get myself ready for that.  The totally awesome thing about that is she also does singing coaching which I want to get involved in as well, because its one of my secret loves.  I was in the choir when I was very young, and I loved it, I just hated the teachers involved.

So all of these fantastic things are going to be happening, and then we step onto the big metaphorical tight rope right.... if I am going to sound like a girl, and have my teeny HRT boobs going on... there's going to come a point where presenting feminine is going to have to happen.

And I really want everything to line up nicely before I do that if possible, like rather than just diving into everything at once and suffering maximum "man in a dress" remarks, I'd like to ease into things a little... wear a smidge of eye makeup on the regular, dress a little more androgynous, let things develop, get a halfway acceptable voice going on.... then bust out the cutie Audrey Hepburn dresses I'm destined for once that's going to work.

Nothing ever works out as simply as that, and I expect hurdles, setbacks and oh god disparaging glances... but I knew all of that a year ago when I told everyone this was the plan.  But now its all happening, so its time to put on my badass warrior girl pants and handle it.

Anyway I will update when I can.... there will be some combination of tears, exuberance and shame probably in the next several posts haha.

Love you all,
Abby

Educational Resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_hormone_therapy_(male-to-female)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_therapy_(transgender)

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.

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