So.... here I am. I'm a 22yo college girl. I enjoy the outdoors and hanging out with friends. I'm an unabashed geek, I like anime, programming and chatting on the Internet.
I also spent most of my life as a boy. Certainly not a very normal boy, as you can imagine, but a boy none the less. I was very girly in elementary school and my mom didn't seem to care. She'd take me to the craft store and help me pick out cross stitching patterns and fabrics and such. She'd always be like "I have to cook dinner, go play Barbies with your sister" or whatever. I'd always be mommy's little helper in the kitchen. I'd play clapping games and spin on the bars and jumprope and all those sorts of things with my friends (all girls). My mom always said she wanted one boy and one girl but when I was little, it was like she had two girls.
Then things changed, I became very aware that I was a boy and not a girl and that I was disliked because of it. It seems odd that it took me that long to realize that girly boys are not accepted in society and that acting like a girl would not actually <em>make</em> me a girl, I'd always be just a girly boy.
I was still girly, of course, I played flute in a band-intensive middle school ("The Motzart Effect" and all that) from 6th grade through 9th grade (Freshman year at high school). I prayed a lot for God to change me so I'd just be like the other girls and not this weird girly boy.
Additionally, some point in 5th grade, I believe, I read some of my parents' propaganda that I wasn't supposed to read on THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA... dum dum dum. I discovered that girly boys turn into big hairy guys with leather vests and assless chaps and that terrified me. What terrified me even more was that, I discovered, everyone hates these people and they live on the fringes of society (although to us fundamentalists, most of the world was this vast wasteland of debauchery and Satanism). Not only do they live in misery on earth, but they burn in Hell for being this way. I was very scared and this was one of my biggest motivations for trying to get God to save me from such a fate.
It's weird, you know, unlike a lot of gay boys and transsexuals, I don't remember ever praying that God would turn me into a straight man. I was just so much the antithesis of a straight boy that I couldn't ever see being one. I just wanted God to make a small change to my body, not to my entire personality!
I knew I was gay and I had looked at porn on the Internet a lot when my parents weren't home (I keylogged their password). The dilemma between straight porn and gay porn is the same as it is now -- the guys in gay porn are way cuter but I can't relate to the actors. Anyway, 8th grade is also the first time I remember my mom confronting me about homosexuality. I was trying to do my final report on King Ludwig II of Austria ("Mad King Ludwig", famous for Neuschwanstein) but my mom found out that it was rumored that he was gay. My mom told me, very seriously, that it would be a sin to do a report on him because it would be honoring a homosexual so she forced me to change my report topic. I remember that conversation fairly clearly because I felt very awkward and anxious. If she was this upset about me doing <em>a report</em> on someone who was <em>rumored</em> to be gay, how much more so would she be upset when she found out about <em>me</em>?
My mom also told me a couple stories about kids in the neighborhood who had been molested by other kids and she made it clear that gay men are pedophiles and sexual perverts. I tried to be straight briefly after this, but I soon developed my first big crush. He had just moved here from Guam and he played baseball and football and was two years ahead in math. Just the perfect combination of physical attraction and intellect. So, I resigned myself -- I was definitely gay.
I had a few friends in 9th grade, stoners mostly. But by 10th grade, I was less obviously depressed and more people knew who I was. It became to be known that I was gay. I can't tell you who I first came out to because it was kinda just obvious and I just stopped avoiding the question if people asked although my usual response if it was just some random guy was, "Who are you and why do you care?"
I was 16 in 2001 when I discovered an entry on Christine Jorgensen in the encyclopedic yearbooks that I had picked up at a library booksale (yeah, I'm weird like that). It was a contemporary article, with photograph, of the first transsexual many Americans had heard about. Just as in 1953, I became fascinated with the woman and the revelation that there were people like me, not just creepy crossdressing men on Jerry Springer. I read her autobiography and many other books and websites on transsexuality. I didn't join the antijen lists, although I probably should have, but I read the stories on her website about other teen transsexuals.
My mom picked up Christine Jorgensen's (auto?)biography from the floor and said "what's this?" I didn't reply, so she opened the flap and read the description. She got this horrified look on her face and said, "you'd <em>better</em> not be thinking about getting a sex change!" I shrunk and wimpered "no". I don't remember if this was before or after the next event because they were close together, however, she was with me at the library when I had another book in on transsexuality and my mom refused to let me check it out.
The first person I came out to was a butch lesbian I met in early Junior year. She was the first openly gay person I had actually ever met, even though I was openly gay myself. We would write letters back and forth, just as I did with my other friends (all girls, of course) all folded up into weird shapes (I recently went camping and this other girl and I were talking about things we used to do as kids and we were trying to remember clapping games and how to fold up notes). Anyway, I told her in a note that I had always wished I had been born a girl but that I probably didn't have the strength to transition. She responded by telling me that she had always felt the same way about being a boy (you'd be surprised how many lesbians I've met who have admitted to dealing with gender issues, a couple of whom later transitioned, many times more than gay men).
I pushed my parents' boundaries a lot. I had gone shopping with a female friend of mine and we had spent way too much money on little $0.50 stickers from the vending machine. I don't remember all of them but they were quite girly and had to do with boys and such. I put them up on my wall next to my other stickers. I figured that my parents would just have to get used to it, if they even noticed. Well, my mom did notice one night and confronted me about it. She made me take the stickers down and give them to my sister, who restuck them all on a piece of paper to go in her notebook. I wonder if she still has that paper.
The next morning my mom up early on the couch and in tears, she yelled at me -- "I hope you're happy! You almost killed your father last night! When he heard you had homosexual tendencies, he almost had another heart attack!" I didn't feel guilty though, because it should have hardly been a surprise, I mean had he ever <em>met</em> me? Everyone at school, including my sister, already knew or assumed I was gay. I guess my dad had just been in complete denial my whole life.
That evening, we had a "family meeting" to discuss my homosexuality. Unfortunately, I can't find my journal entry from that time but essentially they sat there and berated me for two hours. I got my sister about half way through so I could have someone to hold and cry on as they judged me. They said they would never accept me as gay, I was never allowed to bring any boyfriends into the house, they told me that homosexuals don't have real love or real relationships and are miserable, they told me that nobody would let me babysit because homosexuals are pedophiles, etc. My mom also told me that no one would ever love me and that I would die alone on the street an AIDS-ridden whore.
After all this, my mom finally asked me if I was homosexual or transsexual or what? I was terrified of the possibility of ending up homeless at 16, my life would be so much worse and I would <em>still</em> not be able to transition. So I just curled up in a fetal position and cried and said "I don't know, I don't know", hoping that they'd just leave me alone and that things wouldn't be made worse for me.
I was still out as trans to my friends, of course, and openly gay but my plans of making it through therapy and starting hormones by the end of Junior year and attending Senior year, Prom and Graduation as a girl and being able to go to college all stealth were shattered. It took me <em>three years</em> to recover from this.
What my mom said to me about how no one would ever love me was probably one of the reasons that when my female friend displayed an interest in me and asked me out, I said "yes" despite my lack of interest in girls. I was open to all of my girlfriends that I was primarily interested in guys and only one decided eventually that she was not cool with that.
Senior year came and I was still living as a boy, I was president of the LGBT club at the community college, however. One of my friends from there introduced me to a girl who had just broken up with her girlfriend of a year. We became a very interesting queer couple for two years, even becoming engaged.
Early in the relationship, I told her that I had gender issues, that I wasn't entirely comfortable just being a girly boy. She told me that she had gender issues as well and that she had contemplated transitioning the year before but had decided that she was able to deal with being a girl. She continued to have certain issues regarding her period and breasts but seemed to enjoy the attention from having a female body. I was suprised to recently learn that she is now living as a boy and is in the process of starting testosterone. Just like me, he said he probably wouldn't transition but just like me, he did.
I went into therapy the summer after high school because I was very upset and depressed and suicidal (I had attempted a couple times in Sophmore year). She begged me to talk to my therapist about my gender issues. I told her that was useless because there wasn't three months left in which to get hormones before I had to go off to college and start all over with another therapist. Both my therapist and my girlfriend made me promise to see the counselors at the university. Of course, I avoided doing that, saying they probably wouldn't be able to help me because they were just counselors, not therapists and probably couldn't write the letter I needed to get hormones. I also saw a poster for the local trans group and told her about it but I was too chicken to go, saying everyone there would probably me much older than me.
My girlfriend and I had decided to move in together and so I was going to transfer schools. That fall, we formally got engaged. However, I did not want to get married as a straight couple because we didn't really see ourselves as a straight couple at all because both of us were far from straight. I had already gone to my prom as a boy and I'd be damned if I had to wear another tux. I was also coming up on my 20th birthday and I thought to myself one day, "I'm almost 20, I thought I'd be transitioned by now. I really don't want to be saying the same thing when I'm turning 40!" So I decided that I would actually finally seek treatment and start hormones.
I started hormones on December 3, 2004, after three and a half years of planning my transition and frustration from being so close and yet so far away. My headaches went away for the most part, my impossible skin cleared up a lot and my body started to slowly feminize. I was very happy.
Unfortunately, my fiancee and I split up a few months later, shortly after our two year anniversary. This left me in an unfortunate bind. Normally, I was leaving all my girl clothes at my girlfriend's house and as soon as I'd get there, I'd change and then before I went home, I'd change back so I wouldn't piss my parents off. A short while later, I started going to school as a girl and then changing before my mom got home.
I started to push the issue, not wanting to wear boy clothes anymore. My mom came home one to find my sister and I sitting on the living room floor sorting out clothes for ones that might fit her boyfriend. I pushed to wear more and more girl clothes at home.
What really changed things was that one of my friends finally came out to her mom about being lesbian. She was like "You know M? We're more than just friends. We've been dating for about two years, actually." and her mom was like "Yeah, I figured." I had a full-on panic attack thinking about coming out to my parents about having started hormones. I didn't know what it was, just that I was in a lot of pain and my chest hurt. I woke my parents up, kinda like when I was little, and asked them what to do. I think my mom thought I had overdosed on something so she drove me to the ER since it was after midnight.
The triage nurse was interesting. She asked me my name (admittedly somewhat andro), age, etc. Then she asked me when my last period was. I was buckled over in pain but I turned and looked at her and said "what?" and she repeated "When was your last period?" and I almost smiled, hoping that she'd get it, and said "What?" she said, somewhat frustrated, "When was your last menstrual period?" and I grined like a mofo and said "Not applicable." She got this really weird look on her face and was like "What?" and my mom was sitting there the whole time looking upset and finally said, rather loudly, "He's a boy!" The nurse apologized and complimented my pretty hair.
Then the nurse asked me what medications I was taking and I told her I was taking spironolactone and estradiol and she asked me what for and I said I was transgendered. My mom was upset that I was actually on hormones.
We didn't talk really until I got into the doctor's. It took forever, even at this little hospital to get in to see the doctor. They did an X-Ray to see if there was anything wrong with my chest but there wasn't. The doctor told me it was probably just a panic attack. The doctor asked me why I was taking a diuretic (spiro) and I said it is used as a testosterone blocker because I'm transgendered and he made some comment about "wow, that must be hard for you" and so on. While he was out of the room, my mom told me that she had watched CSI with my sister last night (my sister was a big CSI fan but said she felt really offended by the episode but didn't want to turn it off because my mom would ask why). She said that it's very hard to be transsexual and they have to have lots of surgeries (o_0) and such and that she didn't want me to do this to myself and my family, etc.
I was finally out and not backing down this time. So the next day (well, techincally the same day), my mom informed me that they were kicking me out and that I should find another place to stay, "maybe one of those queer youth shelters or something", she said almost sneeringly. I advertised on LiveJournal and maybe 15 minutes later, I had a phone call and within two hours, I had a short-term and long-term plan.
In the short-term, I drove down to my girlfriend's place in Seattle, who is also trans. I stayed with her for a couple weeks and then moved into a place back in my college town, planning to get into Summer quarter. I ended up moving around a lot, about once a month. It was a big mess.
A lot of little stories happened within that time period but in short, I got back into school, changed my named, moved into the dorms without informing Housing or my roommates that I was physically male and have done my best to live a transitioned life without much money for physical transition. I have met straight guys (and even one girl) who have liked me and I became involved with a couple. I haven't had a serious relationship with a guy yet but I'm still having fun in school.
As always, my sister supports me, although she got married and moved to another state (she visited me for Christmas though) but I haven't talked to my parents or any members of my extended family since I got kicked out nearly two years ago. I have managed to make it, difficult as it was.
As frustrating and as long as it's taken me to get to where I am today, I am very glad I have had the opportunites that I did. I know things would have been much different if my mom hadn't decided that it was no longer acceptable to be me and if I had been able to transition in high school with the support of my parents, things would have gone much smoother. I maintain a strong hope that some day they will come around and things will be good.
Sorry for such a long story, I'd be amazed if you read it all but I felt like writing out a longer version than I usually tell. Thank you for listening.
