My Personal Struggle With Trans Acceptance

[Shana A]

My Personal Struggle With Trans Acceptance
As a gay woman, I felt ->-bleeped-<- was homophobic and sexist. It took a while to understand that it's neither.

By Stephanie Fairyington
April 29, 2014

http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/personal-struggle-with-trans-acceptance

It's a sleepy Saturday afternoon in Downey, California, a dull suburb of Los Angeles, where I grew up. I'm 10. The sun rains a shower of light through the window in my parents' bathroom. I'm sitting on the cold toilet seat after a hot bath, examining, in horror, the burgeoning mound of flesh on my chest. My mom is golfing at the Rio Hondo Golf Course, and my dad, a computer engineer, is invariably hunkered over his workstation. My brother, 13, is probably biking around Cord Street, on which our house sits. I'm certain that all the potential witnesses to the devious act I'm contemplating are out of sight so I proceed to the medicine cabinet and pull out my dad's Barbasol shaving cream.

After slathering it like frosting all over my face, I take the bristly end of my toothbrush in the palm of my hand and start "fake-shaving," mimicking my dad's brusque hand strokes. It's exhilarating and satisfies me on a level too deep for words, but halfway through, my brother appears out of nowhere. "What are you doing?" he asks. He looks shocked—like he's just seen a monkey-manned vehicle drive by. "Just messing around," I say, trying my best to make it seem like innocent fun. A smirk of contempt spreads across his face and he snort-laughs. "Dude, you're weird," he says before sauntering off. I pray he doesn't tell our parents. I can't quite lift the feeling of his disdain off of me. It lingers as I wash off my face, retreat to my bedroom, and realize that I'm only a boy in my mind.

[gennee]

One of the greatest days in my life was embracing my ->-bleeped-<-. I 've never been happier. Some folks perception of gender can be blurred by the idea that one is better or preferred to the other. A question I hear is how can I choose to be a woman? It's because I am. My body is male but my mind is definitely female.

For many people this is very difficult to fathom. Gender and sexuality are thought to be the same but they are not. Most everyone I know told me that they knew that they had same sex attractions as children. Some felt that they were opposite their birth gender as children. More information is coming out and showing this to be true.

[suzifrommd]

I found this article upsetting in the misinformation that it perpetuates:

From the article:

"Trans youths experience an early onset identification with the opposite sex," Green explained, "an unwavering persistence in feeling that they're in the wrongly sexed body and torment at the approach of adolescence."

None of those things happened to me. I didn't identify with the opposite sex (though I wanted to be one), and my body never tormented me. And yet, I'm clearly trans.

Whenever I read this sort of nonsense, I'm concerned that someone, perhaps even this author, will read it and wrongly conclude they are not trans.