My Trans Brothers and Sisters

Sometimes I get really jealous of people who’ve transitioned at a young age, as a teenager or even earlier.  I know it would have made my life so much easier in so many ways if I could have transitioned in high school or before puberty.  I think of all the years in between then and now that I wasted to depression.  The life I could have had that depression kept from me.  But I didn’t know I was transgender when I was a kid or a teen. 

 I watch YouTube videos of young people who have begun transitioning and I wonder, did they just always know they were meant to be the opposite gender earlier than me or did they just become aware that there was a such thing as being transgender earlier?  A combination of both?  I’m not that old, but the thing is, there was no YouTube when I was a teen.  There was no Facebook or social media.  I did not know the word “transgender” or know anybody who was.  Most schools did not have gay/straight alliances.  There was no awareness of the LGBT community.  No tolerance.  We used the words “gay” and “dyke” as slurs against people who were just different.  There weren’t a lot of gay characters on TV or in movies.  There were no out athletes that I knew of.  Most celebrities were in the closet.  People didn’t even talk about gender roles or things like that.  I know that many places may still be intolerant and unaccepting, but at least there’s more general awareness out there.  There was no national public debate about gay marriage at that time.  Unless you were in very specific areas of a city or had family members, you didn’t “see” gay people, let alone trans people.  I didn’t have my own computer.  “Devices” like smartphones and tablets and iPods were not invented yet.  Yeah we had the internet, but “googling” something did not exist.  Unless I had felt unequivocally, without a doubt, that there was something wrong and it impacted my life so much that I just couldn’t live another day as a girl, and my parents noticed and were worried and they took me to see somebody and that somebody just happened to know just the right questions to ask me and just happened to be accepting and tolerant, then there was really no way of me knowing that I could be trans that early.  I mean, people could walk on the moon and all sorts of amazing things, but the idea that people could change genders was not even fathomable to me.  It did not even enter my little brain at any point in my adolescence.  And even if I knew I was trans, would I have been able to transition?  I HIGHLY doubt my parents would have let me do anything besides maybe dressing like a tomboy at that age.  Certainly not take hormone blockers or testosterone or be called a male name or male pronouns.

 The unfortunate thing is, my parents did notice that I was unhappy in high school, my mom especially, but they did nothing about it.  My mom told me many years later that she had seriously thought about bringing me in to see somebody about my severe social anxiety.  It wasn’t until the summer before my senior year of college that my mom finally took me to see a therapist about my problem with “reverse culture shock” after I returned from my study abroad experience in Australia and was severely depressed.  What she didn’t realize is that I had already been severely depressed for quite a while, over a year in fact, and that it was only made significantly worse by the fact that I had to return to my boring, horrible life after having a fun adventure overseas.   I did still manage to enjoy the experience while being so depressed, but I can’t help wondering how much better Australia and New Zealand could have been had I not been depressed.  I didn’t make very many friends over there and I didn’t partake in many social activities.  I spent a lot of time alone and sad in my room writing poetry and listening to my iPod.  I did push myself out of my comfort zone on many occasions, but I think overall, the trip would have been a completely different, more fulfilling experience had I been able to enjoy it free of mental illness.  But I still wish my parents would have done something while I was a teen.  Maybe I seemed fine in junior high, but I was definitely not ok a year or so into high school.  And by senior year, I was downright miserable.  I had practically no friends and I often sat alone at lunch or in the “reject cafeteria” with other nerds and freaks that never talked to me, so I basically felt invisible.  I remember at the very end of senior year all I did at lunch was sit alone on the end of the reject table, eating my food and reading Harry Potter.  I inhaled Harry Potter.  I read every single one of those books in two days or less apiece (the four that were published at that time anyway).

 I feel like I was thrust out into the big bad world beyond high school without any idea of what I was really good at or who I really was.  I know most people feel this way, it’s normal, but I can’t help wondering if I was aware of just how much I really didn’t know.  It seems like kids grow up much faster these days.  Is it more exposure to the outside world at an earlier age via internet?  Is it that they have more adult responsibilities earlier on?  I have no idea why, but I just know that they grow up a little faster.  Most of them.  I was a kid who never wanted to grow up, no matter what age I was at.  I still played with dolls right up until high school (and probably secretly for a while into high school too).  I didn’t want to stop playing with them, but there was this major line I had just crossed between the childish world of junior high into the burgeoning adult world of high school and it just suddenly became not ok to want to play with dolls.  And yes, in case you’re wondering, I DID like my dolls and other girly toys very much thank you.  Does that mean I couldn’t really be trans or I’m not “trans enough”?  No.  Does it mean that maybe I just got to enjoy the best of both worlds as a kid?  Maybe.  Does it mean that even as a kid I was basically a gay boy in the making already?  I hope so!  But no matter what the reason, I enjoyed a lot of things from my girlhood that I would have probably never got the chance to experience had I been a transwoman, a boy who wanted to be a girl.  I was what people call, a “late bloomer."  That was everyone’s excuse for why I wasn’t as mature as the other kids in the social realm.  It wasn’t until college that I personally started to wonder why I wasn’t like everyone else.  It was then that I would start a journey to figure out all the answers to all the ways I was different. 

              It pretty much all started with sexuality.  Because honestly, I didn’t even consider gender to be, well, anything.  It wasn’t something I pondered for a second.  I was born a girl, with girl chromosomes and girl parts and that was science and that was it.  If there was a problem with me, and I could tell there was something wrong/different, that was not the first place I would think to start.  So I started by trying to figure out my sexuality mostly because I had never dated or even been interested in dating anyone or having a boyfriend.  But people were exploring that at an even higher rate in college and I was left in the kiddie pool or on the bunny hill so to speak.  I have written extensively on the subject of discovering my sexuality (for myself) and how this all came to be, but for the purpose of this post I’d like to keep it short and simple.  For the record, I never thought I was heterosexual at any point in my life.  In college, first I thought I must be bisexual because I couldn’t really figure out if I was attracted to men or women or anyone.  It turns out, I wasn’t sexually attracted to anyone at all, which is why I couldn’t figure out my sexuality.  I finally figured out that I was asexual.  And from figuring that out at 19 or 20 years old until about six months ago when I started testosterone (I’m 29 now), that was my sexuality.  Now yes, there was a large period from age 21ish to age 27ish that I fully believed I must be a lesbian because I identified so much with the queer community, and even though I came out as a lesbian and thought I must be one and subsequently identified with one and hung around a lot of lesbians, etc, etc, I wasn’t really one at all.  I was asexual with a proclivity for watching as many gay movies that I could get my hands on.  Gay as in gay men, not women (though I watched a lot of lesbian movies/TV shows too).  But anyway, the point is, until I started testosterone I did not have a sex drive or anything close to it and was not sexually attracted to other people. 

 So, my sexual identity went from bisexual to asexual to lesbian to I’m-sick-of-dealing-with-this to asexual again to gay (or something close to pansexual because I’m attracted to androgyny itself regardless of the gender identity of the person, maybe more on this in another post...).  So, when did I start thinking about gender?  Well, I’m not entirely sure, but I know that a lot of things changed for me during my last year of college.  I came back from my trip to Australia and when school started, I moved into my first apartment with my best friend Katie and our friend Pam (both whom I had been roommates with before).  One of the things I remember from living there was when I stopped carrying a purse.  I’m pretty sure it happened then, but it could have actually been earlier.  I NEVER liked having to use a purse and I DO remember when I first started using one in high school.  In junior high I managed to hide my feminine hygiene products in the back of my purple Five-Star Binder, then slipped one into my lunch bag before lunch and went to the bathroom before I got to the lunch room.  Putting it in my pocket was always too risky.  It was an unspoken girl code that nobody (not even other girls for that matter) was supposed to see your tampons or pads, but definitely not boys.  If it weren’t for the purpose of carrying tampons, I probably would have never carried a purse to begin with.  But by high school, it unfortunately became somewhat of a necessity.  My mom also made me start wearing makeup in high school even though I never asked to start wearing it or cared about it.  I was kind of neutral about the makeup thing.  I guess I assumed that it was just one of those things you had to do to fit in.  So that’s why I had a purse in high school, to carry all the girl things I was supposed to have on me at all times.  It was out of practicality and function, not for fashion or because I wanted to be girly.  In college, I pretty much got sick of my purse, so I’d just stick it in my backpack as I’d go out for class.  Then that morphed into me converting the front pockets of my backpack into holding the contents that would have made up my purse.  Eventually I had a small “aha” moment when I realized that my best friend and roommate Katie never carried a purse.  It’s like I suddenly noticed it one day out of the blue.  I basically figured out from her “how” she did it and soon I transitioned to no purse.  It wasn’t easy, but I made it work.  I thought, if guys don’t need to carry around a bag, why should we?  So de-pursing was kind of a big step for me into becoming less feminine.  It snowballed into me getting a short “lesbian” haircut, ordering a compression bra to bind my breasts (that didn’t work that well because it was sadly too small, so I gave it my roommate to use as a sports bra), buying clothes in the boys section at a department store, and just becoming more aware of gender and de-feminizing myself.  For some reason, it was always about becoming less feminine, not more masculine. 

 One of the first things I rented on my very first free trial of Netflix during that same senior year of college, was the documentary series called Transgeneration that followed four college students through various stages of their transitions (two FTM, two MTF).  For a creative writing class, I wrote a short story about an FTM transgender child (that was also published in my college’s literary magazine).  In 2007, after I had graduated and moved back in with my parents,  I ordered Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook, read it and filled it out on Halloween while I waited between trick-or-treaters at the front door.  I wrote in there that I no longer identified as a lesbian and that I knew I was queer in some way and that if I were a gay male I would totally have a crush on Rufus Wainwright (one of my favorite singers).  I wrote that I identified as an “androgynous pangendered asexual who has been seen as female all my life and has thus been adopting many masculine traits/sensibilities to cancel out the longevity of this female self.”  I even referred to a story I had been writing at the time with a genderqueer character, where I had changed all the pronouns in the story to gender neutral “ze” and “hir” for all the characters.  In that workbook I also wrote about how my gender identity had taken a backseat to my mental health issues which had been of much significance in college, but were of the most importance after I graduated up until recently.  Gender was on my mind for many years!  But always on the periphery.  I’m 29, so that’s at least eight years ago that I noticed gender and thought about it in regards to myself.  I even lived with an FTM roommate in 2009-2010 and got to know many of his trans friends and then lived with another trans roommate who was MTF a few roommates later at a different apartment.  I remember there being two FTM trans people who were trumpet players in band, one in high school and one in college.  I saw their entire transitions unfold from pre-T to full on presenting as male and changing their names/pronouns.  It’s as though I merely observed the world and things happening around me all those years, but never really understood them or let them sink in.  It wasn’t until xmas 2012/New Years 2013 that I thought that I might actually be transgender.  I had never considered that I could possibly be transgender that whole damn time, not once in a period of about eight years.  It is CRAZY to me that it was under my nose the whole time.  It is CRAZY that in all those years and seeing a dozen therapists, discussing gender never came up.  I can’t even believe this, really, when I put it all together like that.  Why did it take so long!? 

 That is a question I may never know the answer to.  Which brings me back to how I started this post talking about my jealousy of young trans people today who are transitioning earlier.  I am so happy that they have the opportunity and self-awareness that I never had.  I know that generations before mine transitioned later than I have and that every year it keeps getting earlier and earlier, which is wonderful, actually.  But it leaves me, adult female-bodied and all, wondering if I’ll ever really look and feel as male as I’d like to.  Or at least as not female as I’d like to.  Will I ever love the way my body looks?  Will I ever feel comfortable in this body?  Will I ever feel confident enough with myself to be in a relationship and share my life with another person?  I don’t have these answers right now and I don’t know if I ever will.  But what I do know is that I now have the answers about my gender that I searched for many years ago and for many years.  I’m proud of my trans brothers and sisters who have the courage to be themselves and I’m so, so hopeful that they might be able to avoid the pain I went through, and that so many others before us went through.