So. I'm thirty-two. I'm a man. My body is a female body.
My parents are both biologists. I remember being three years old or so, very small, and hanging out in the garden with my brother and my mom. We noticed a couple of grasshoppers mating on one of the plants, and my mom took the opportunity to give a little science lesson:
"Most animals that are big enough to see are either male or female."
"I'm female!" I crowed. I thought that females were the boys, because boys grow up bigger than girls, and female is the longer word. I remember casting a defiant look at my brother, as if by 'calling it' first that way I'd get it, I'd be the boy and he'd be the girl.
"Yes," said my mother, "Girls are female and boys are male."
Heart-sinking, that. I felt like I'd cursed myself. A couple days later I got my brother to give me a boy's haircut. Or rather, cut my hair short. He was five. And we did it in the closet, in the dark, the way you do taboo stuff like try to change your gender. The results were comical. My mom's cool. She just laughed and took me to the barber to get a real boy's haircut, since that's what I wanted.
I always felt like a boy, whenever I daydreamed about growing up, the imaginary future me was a man. Still is. Heck, the me I see in my own mind as I'm going about the business of life is a man. A short, relatively sexless, intellectual and un-macho man, but a man. Not really very different from my physical incarnation at all when it comes down to it.
I went to school with my boy's haircut, but after a few years I decided I wanted to grow it out. I was tired of the "are you a boy or a girl?" teasing, every day, from schoolmates. I became the icky, ugly girl that nobody wants to play with. I don't know that this was any better than having my gender-expression mocked and hammered on every day or if it was worse. I hated being a child.
When I went to junior high and high school my brother tried to coach me in being a girl. He's a kind man and was a kind boy, and it was a kind act even if he was fourteen and said he was doing it so I wouldn't embarrass him so much. It didn't work. I always was awkward as a girl. I came into myself a little better as a teen and got somewhat less awkward, but I also became violent -- fistfights with teenage boys. I became a goth and won a lot of friends that way. Tough grrrrl baby-dyke with black eyeliner and a Bela Lugosi costume, acts psycho and aggressive, rants about anarchist politics, what could be more cool to teens in the punk/goth scene?
Went to college. Had a mental health crisis. Dropped out. Went home and threw myself into remodelling a bedroom in my mom's house. Went back to college, still unstable, had another mental crisis, recognized my gender problems as a source. Read about transgender issues seriously, for the first time, at eighteen. Read Gender Outlaw. Wrote a big whiney miserable angst-laden email letter to Kate Bornstein. She answered me. I don't think she said much, really, but I think she saved my life. Just by being who she is, and being so kind and understanding about who I am.
Over the next few years, I learned to stop. Stop trying to fit in as a girl or a woman. I struggled with wanting SRS and HRT (totally out of reach at the time, I went to school on the 'eat nothing but beans and rice, get a part time job, beg dad for book money, and sell LSD on the side' financial-aid plan) and trying to crush everything feminine in me, and I learned to stop that rubbish too. I came to a decision -- that I want to be me, and that I don't want to medicalize my condition. That there's nothing wrong with me being a man with a female body, or at least nothing wrong with it that's in me. I'm not the one who needs to be broken and reset to function in society, it's society that needs to be broken and reset to function with me in it. Of course, this is not going to happen in my lifetime, but what the hell. I guess I am a man of principle, even when principle is a big pain in the neck.
Things were going well for me. Fell in love. Got married, to a gay-acting straight man, very much a Chopin to my George Sand. He knows that I feel like we're in a gay marriage, and I know that he feels like he's in a sort-of straight one, married to this cool avant-guarde crossdressing female that he does not think of as a woman or as a man.
Doesn't seem so bad. Pretty damn good, really. Or at least I thought so until, well. Last week. Sort of. There was a detectable build-up and now this emotional explosion. I'm having some massive trans-angst fit now. I feel utterly miserable about it. My boss had a dream where I was the mother of three daughters, my hormonal-cycle hit that day when my mood bottoms out, my best binder's about worn out and I read Max Valerio's The Testosterone Files and all the sudden I feel like crap and don't know how I can face the rest of my life. Thinking about SRS and HRT and still hating the idea for so many reasons. Feeling angry, feeling sad, feeling crazy and hopeless and alone. Feeling unmanned, really, my confidence and zest and strength sapped away.
Anyway. It seems like there are several people in positions similar to my own on this forum, and that here (unlike other transgender forums I've visited) they're not getting pushed aside as 'not real trans' so I'm thinking there might be something for me here.
