Man In Therapist Office Says He's a Woman: Being Transgender
A therapist can be the difference between life and death for transgender people.
Published on May 13, 2013
By Joy Ladin, Ph.D.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/contemporary-psychoanalysis-in-action/201305/man-in-therapist-office-says-hes-woman-being-transIt's hard for me to imagine how the therapist felt when my friend J, who lives as a married man with several young children in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave in the UK, showed up for her first appointment dressed, as we trans people say, as herself.
In J's case, dressing as herself meant wearing the garb of an Orthodox Jewish woman over a male torso and under a bearded face. J is literally dying to lose the beard and change her body to fit her female gender identity. If she can't transition – begin to live as a woman instead of a man – soon, she'll kill herself; she's come close many times this year.
However, the moment J begins to live as a woman she will lose her marriage, children, home, her minimal livelihood, her Orthodox Jewish world. She'll become an object of gossip, mockery, public humiliation. She fears she will lose her closeness to God; she fears she will never be loved.
It's easy for me to imagine how J felt, because, though my male life was very different from hers, my anguish, fears and prospects were much the same. Like J, when I began gender identity therapy, I didn't know who I was, because I had never lived a day as myself. But I knew what I was: a male-to-female transsexual, a person whose male body was painfully, depersonalizingly, tragically mismatched to my unshakably female gender identity.
