Hey, everyone. It's me again. I decided to take a break from this site for a little while, but I wanted to make a post here because I had intended to use this thread as sort of a mini blog about what I was going through in transitioning, and it's been far too long since my first post. Also, I didn't want anyone here to think something horrible had happened to me because I suddenly dropped off the face of the earth.
So here's what's been going on. I had a really sucky Christmas to put it mildly. I basically quit talking to my mom for three months, and I mostly refused to even acknowledge her existence. We had a pretty bad fight about the whole transition thing, with me wanting to move forward as much as I could, and her wanting me to not do anything before I actually talked to a therapist. The whole thing came to a head when I found out what presents she had gotten for me: an ugly green sweatshirt (men's size, of course), a bag of mixed nuts, and a bottle of barbecue sauce that had "fat bastard" on the label. No, I'm not making this up. I'm not positive there was subtext implied by the bag of nuts, but at the time I chose to assume that there was.
I was just so sick of fighting that I couldn't deal with it anymore. Not talking to her was really the only way I could cope. But then that left me without a lot of people I could talk to. Not having a job or a whole lot of connections to the world, most of the time I had nothing better to do than sit alone in my bedroom and feel miserable about how horrible my life was. This is not good for your self esteem. I was seriously getting obsessed for a while with my poor body image. I was spending hours with a tweezer just tearing out random body hairs and hoping they wouldn't come back. And in the mean time, I was building debt because I had no way to pay for the medication I taking without my parents' help.
In order to keep myself sane, I started working on programming a Bitcoin trading program. I had doubts that I would ever be able to program something that would make a lot of money (and as it turns out I was right), but I needed some sort of hope to cling to that I could take control of my situation. I wasted about three months before realizing that in order to make as much money as I needed, I would have to already have as much money as I needed. Which I didn't, and I wasn't willing to borrow a huge amount of money and risk losing it all.
While this was happening, and I was still waiting for my first appointment with my therapist so I could start to get my meds though legitimate channels, I had a little incident. For some reason my medication was taking much longer to deliver than usual, and I was starting to have a bit of a panic attack about it. I think I've mentioned this before, but I really hate testosterone, and even the thought of my levels going back up had me scared enough to do something desperate. After doing some research, I discovered that it was possible to castrate yourself by injecting you testicles with alcohol. After about a week without any medication, I decided to go through with it. I'm not going to share the details of the process, for obvious reasons. (Just for God's sake don't try to use rubbing alcohol or something like that, because that would probably kill you.) What I will say is that was able complete the first set of injections without any notable complications. But when my parents found out what I had done (I had to explain why I got a package that needed to be signed for that contained alcohol, when they knew I was taking medication that didn't allow me to drink), they immediately forced me to go to the ER to get checked out. That was pretty embarrassing, but since the doctor that saw me couldn't find anything wrong, other than testicular atrophy of course, they sent me home after a couple of hours. Then I had another fight with my parents, and then resumed not talking to them. The next day my medication arrived in the mail, and I agreed to not do any more injections, but I still held onto the supplies as a just in case thing.
At the beginning of March I finally had my first appointment with my therapist, and thank god, things went really well. I'm not sure if I impressed her with how feminine I was
,, or if she just wanted to make sure I wasn't putting myself in danger with what I was taking, but she referred me to the endocrinologist after my first appointment.
She also said, she would look into referring me for an orchiectomy, but she wanted to have a few more sessions with me first. I was ecstatic, but my family was less enthusiastic. My mom had made it very clear that she was not going to support me taking any action towards transitioning until I was under a the care of a therapist. But now that I was, and that it was starting to look like they were not going to string me along with several years of therapy before diagnosing me, she suddenly had very little to say on the subject. The whole conversation was just basically one big I told you so, with my dad being indifferent, and my brother being the only one supporting me (as usual).
If it wasn't clear before that I needed to find a way to start making money, it certainly was now. I started turning my energy to a few ideas I had for creating websites. Both because I might make some money from the advertising revenue, and more importantly, because I could use them on a resume to apply for actual jobs that would let me work from home. I'm a college dropout who has never had a real job, so I knew I would need something pretty impressive to stand a chance of getting hired. Currently I'm almost finished with the first site, and getting ready to move onto the second. I'll share a little more on how this whole process goes some time in the future.
I was continuing to ignore my mom, until one day she told me out of nowhere that my aunt (her sister) was in the hospital for a serious lung infection and probably wasn't going to make it. She was going to fly to Las Vegas to visit her, and wanted to know if I would come with. The aunt that I am referring to was someone I was close to as a child, though I hadn't talked to her in years, so I agreed to go, against my better judgment. The thing is, at first I was extremely nervous about the whole thing. This would be the first time I had been to an airport since I had started to transition. More importantly, this would be the first time seeing a lot of my (rather large) extended family since starting to transition, and I hadn't exactly broadcast what I was doing to the world just yet. I basically just decided to dress androgynously and hope for the best.
What's funny though, is that most of the time, I ended up having no idea how I was actually being perceived. I usually don't get out a lot, and I don't make it my business to ask random strangers how well I pass. I do think though, I can be at least semi-passable if I really put my mind to it. My chest is probably the biggest problem, as it's still really too small for my frame, but other than that I can look halfway presentable. Still, my voice is a little rough around the edges, my shoulders are too broad, you can still see a bit of beard shadow if you look closely (no matter how close I shave). I'm not exactly unclockable.
I was almost shocked by how uneventful the whole thing was (maybe they're just used to this kind of thing in Las Vegas?) In public, I never got called "sir" once, but people mostly just avoided using gender pronouns altogether to refer to me. But then when I thought about it, how often did people use words like that before I started to transition? I couldn't remember being called "sir" that frequently in any situation, so I wasn't sure how to interpret the lack of gender related terms. On the other had, I wasn't getting any uncomfortable stares or anything like that. As far as I could tell, I just wasn't that conspicuous. And while my chest isn't as large as I'd like, it is still pretty hard to miss. And I was wearing girls' jeans most of the time. So I really had no idea what to think.
The only real issue that I had was that my mom was still using my male name (not that I have decided on a female one yet, so that's still sort of a problem), and that made me feel really uncomfortable. I really envy people with androgynous names, I'm sure that would make things a lot easier. While it does bother me to think that people are reading me as transgender, what bothers me a lot more is that someone might be reading me as female and then hear me being called a male name. I would have made an issue of this, but there were more important things to focus on during the trip, and I had decided that it wasn't the time or place for an argument. In most cases I would just not respond when she used my male name in front of someone, so at best, they might be confused about who she was talking to or think they misheard what was said.
When talking to my family members, surprisingly the issue of gender just didn't come up. One of my other aunts was traveling with us, but she already knew I was transitioning (in fact she has generally been very supportive). And with the rest of the family, while I did notice some people taking an extra long look at me when they saw me, the thing I heard more than anything was just how different I looked. No one ever brought up my voice. I have no idea if they were just avoiding the subject or what, but I wasn't going to make an issue out of it if they weren't. Actually, most of the time it would have been pretty hard gendering me by appearance either way, since the stuff we had to wear in the hospital room with my aunt was staying to keep from spreading infection left a lot to the imagination. We just visited normally, and there was no drama whatsoever. This despite the fact that some of my family members that were present in the room happened to be very conservative Christians.
After a whole week of my gender just not being an issue, I was pretty confused. But then, when boarding the flight back home, the woman taking ticket stubs unmistakably called me "miss". This was not the first time I'd been referred to by a female pronoun, but it still made me feel a lot better (I'm just glad she wasn't taking the time to read the names on the tickets
). And then when looking for our seats, I overheard one of the other passengers refer to me and my mom, as "those ladies". And I wasn't wearing any makeup, I wasn't wearing a skirt, and the way I was dressed was fairly androgynous. For me that kind of passing without effort is really my biggest goal, so that was a pretty big moment for me, even if in retrospect it seems like a pretty small thing to get excited about.
Over the days we visited, my aunt thankfully did get better, things looked pretty bad on the day we arrived, but she really recovered amazingly well. There was no funeral, and by the time the trip was almost over, my mom was in the best mood I had seen her in years. I wasn't sure it it was a good idea, but I knew that if we were going to be able to continue to live with each other, now was the time to try and work things out. Especially with my supportive aunt present.
Hmm... I think I'm going to continue this in another post some time tomorrow. This is already one of the larger walls of text I've written, and I don't think I need to go for the record right now.
