Quote from: Rowan Rue on February 14, 2013, 12:25:39 AM
My earliest memory is riding the school bus when I was four and hoping I'd grow up to be like this girl called susan who was in charge of minding us very young kids on the bus.
...
I'm pretty sure that had that not have happened I would have come out much much sooner.
Ah, for me, my mom's illness came later, in my teens. It was fairly clear, given my family's religion, and the kind of rural communities we lived in for so much of that time (and despite being born in Salt Lake City, and spending lots of time with relatives there, some of them more educated, but still very Mormon), that insisting I was a girl was not likely to lead anywhere. I knew who I was early, as much as I could, at least, at each particular age and stage of development.
I just felt that I could predict fairly well that the response was not likely to be a good one. I also spent most of my time in the library, and a lot of it was spent reading the fairly small collection of medical books, which, of course, since I was reading them in the late 60s and early 70s, contained very little on gender dysphoria, and mostly seemed to suggest to me (since most seemed to imply or assume that all transwomen were straight) that maybe I was something else, apart from the fact that what I was feeling also did not fit with the thinking at the time about fetishes or any other possible explanations.
When my mom became ill, with pelvic inflammatory disease due to an IUD (one that was recalled soon thereafter, because of that and other risks) I was in my mid-teens, and in many ways became substitute mom in our household, becoming the main one responsible for most of the household chores, menu planning, cooking, laundry and watching over my siblings, but there was still a certain sense of guilty thinking -- did my desires and inclinations bring this on? She was also in a hospital, and later in recovery, far from home, though not across an ocean, just about 8 hours of driving over mostly empty desert, while school and the rest of life kept moving onward.
Like you, though, the feelings were there before the traumatic event. If anything, this might go to explain a little of why, when I felt more attracted to but also more in tune with women, I did eventually managed to meet one who I more or less fooled myself into thinking would at least give me the role I desired, if not necessarily the body.
I think I've tried not to fabricate a history, but there are at least some parts that I do tend to shorthand for convenience, or because some of the details seem mostly irrelevant, but also, probably, a bit because describing them in any depth does trigger unhappy memories and internal turmoil that I mostly realize is imagined or is perhaps an overly mystical form of data mining and pattern matching, but in that, it's not unlike the sorts of pattern matching that are very common in Mormon culture, and often openly expressed to other Mormons... things about how, through prayer and faith, God saw fit to make some wonderful thing happen for the individual expressing a testimony. Not that my mother's illness was any kind of wonderful thing.
Just saying, the temptation to fit one's narrative into something where there's a causal link between things that happened beyond our control, and our own internal puzzling, questioning, or even our feelings of certain identity are probably not limited to transness?
I do think, if the trauma had been much earlier, with the impact you describe, that definitely would have probably put me a lot more in limbo, when coming later, when I was a bit more able to at least consider that her illness and my feminine identity and "role seeking" were unrelated except by coincidence, enabled me to at least make a kind of peace with myself, and solidify my understanding that trying to "man up" was only going to lead to turmoil, unhappiness and no benefit to others or myself.
Another bit here, which in some ways developed out of that illness, was mom and my maternal grandmother's involvement in feminism (grandma was one of the main political activists and leaders in feminist politics in Utah or at least one of those working most within the political system, and particularly advocating the (eventually failed) passage of the ERA, in her position as one of a small number of state legislators and as a leader in Utah's relatively small, non-confrontational feminist community at the time). That part, and some of the common thinking in the 70s about gender and roles was also part of why I felt obligated, at least for quite some time, to try to take on my desired roles, while remaining apparently male, albeit androgynous from my teens onward, aside from the limitations in doing androgyny while enlisted in the Army.
To come back to revisionism -- I think many of us tend to have to come up with a very brief summary of our history, and given the brevity, there's alway likely to be some self-questioning about whether we are being entirely truthful -- we're not, no one is, and no one can be
entirely truthful when describing a lifetime or at least a span of decades' experience in a single short narrative. And my experience with a therapist who seemed to have his own personal reasons for mishearing me, especially when I would go into the story in depth, also suggests that we often deduce that there are some very good and practical reasons for spinning the story in certain ways, especially when we are talking to anyone still devoted to shoehorning those narratives to fit a pattern that was originally based on a very small set of samples, from a time very different from the present.
