Why do I know I'm a girl despite the body that I was born into? I could cite dozens of reasons. The sense of kinship I've felt with female characters and other girls since before I was even old enough to know the differences between girls and boys. The strange, sickening feeling I've had in the pit of my stomach my whole life when anyone refers to me as a boy and when I have to tick 'male' as my gender on forms. The absolute horror and revulsion I felt as my own body seemed to turn against my during puberty, and my longing when I looked at my increasingly beautiful, feminine female friends not to be with them, but to be them. My secret joy when people frequently likened parts of my character and habits to those of a girl...
More than all of that, though, I need only look to my own heart to know that what I am doing is right for me. I was morbid and melancholy as a child, and suicidally depressed as a teen. I bounced in and out of various psychiatric facilities, saw a half dozen school counselors and psychiatrists, tried god knows how many different medications... And nothing helped. Not one thing made me feel even a little bit better. In time, I learned to tune out my suicidal feelings and to live with my crushing depression. There were even moments where I could manage a smile, largely due to my being extremely fortuitous and meeting some utterly wonderful people. Still, I was always one step away from complete meltdown, and nothing took away the black cloud hanging over my head. Nothing, at least, until I came out to my best friend one rainy morning this January. As I sat sobbing on her sofa and telling her things I had never told anyone before, I felt twenty-five years worth of fear, doubt and anxiety lift off my shoulders. And when I came out of the doctor's office that afternoon having put the first stages of my transition into motion, the smile I showed to that same friend felt like the first time I had really smiled in my whole life. Though the next few weeks were filled with a series of mad adventures through female clothing, makeup, name changes, coming out to everyone under the sun, going to classes in a skirt, and all sorts of terrifying inbetweens, that smile...sort of never left my face. Actually, it's still there as I'm writing this. 🙂
How do I know I'm a girl, and that the difficult road I'm embarking upon is the right one? Because setting off down it has made me happy for the first time in my life. 😀
