My history of trans ignorance:
I found out about a woman who transitioned in my hometown when I was 12 or so. My friend's mom worked with her and told me about everything she went through before surgery and I was definitely intrigued, but I had already recognized how my family reacted to my gender variant behavior as a little kid, so I kind of just pushed it aside. Then, when I was 16 or so, I remember there being a big case where the defendant was a trans woman and I brought up the notion of a "sex change" (not for me, just the existence of it) to my parents, who scoffed that such a person would always still be a man and couldn't ever feel sex, which still didn't make me not want to do it. I just had to wait until I was independent and also wanted to experience the sensation of sex at least once first. Then, there's the whole mess of people who kept telling me that trans women were just gay men who were trying to make their homosexuality "normal". I bought into it and kept thinking that maybe I was somehow tricking myself into thinking I was attracted to women because I didn't want to be gay, which still didn't make sense because I was in the gay circle of friends in high school. Anyway, a lot of these notions got all mixed up in my head for way too long. High school was also a mess because a lot of grunge musicians were wearing dresses, but in such a way that they were clearly men wearing dresses. Trans women visually existed only as drag queens from what I had been told. I just wanted to be a normal girl. I'd wear barrettes sometimes and shave my legs sometimes and felt like I just didn't fit in, like I wasn't enough of a social misfit to do something like that; or like other people were doing weird things to evoke a reaction from people and I just wanted to look cute. I distinctly recall when I was 19, complaining for quite some time to a friend of mine that I just wanted to be a normal girl and that that just wasn't a thing and I was so mad! Then, we went shopping and I bought a nice plain skirt that I was too afraid to wear and just kind of tried to get by from there in romantic relationships with women and musical relationships with men.
Almost a decade later, I was doing research on chromosomal variance for the sex portion of a series of essays I was writing on Sex, Drugs, and Religion. I was so disappointed that the descriptions of typical side-effects, such as sterility, meant that I almost certainly did not have a chromosomal imbalance. But then, I was led into finding out about what transsexuality really is and was completely floored. Holy ->-bleeped-<-! That's me! Then, I spent a couple of years slowly coming out to a few people and dealing with a massive amount of everything being terrible and then it was now and then I don't know what happened.
