I have thought about this long and hard. And I will state at the outset that this post is only as it affects me personally, and is in no way an attempt to speak for anyone else. But on balance... no, I don't agree. I think my life would have been happier had I been born correctly. For one main reason:
A great many experiences I had, and choices I made, while growing up were directly influenced by my incessant feeling of not being right. And they had long lasting effects throughout my life. Although I made the choices, they did not feel like choices. Or, more specifically... in hindsight they did not feel like choices. They felt like attempts to escape this feeling, and an attempt to escape those who took advantage of me not fitting in with the stereotypical life and lifestyle of someone I was supposed to be but wasn't.
These choices felt like they were made for me, based on a lack of alternatives, or desperation, or sheer misery. And I feel that while my life may not have been tangibly happier in the choices I made were I born correctly... they would have been my choices to make. Free of the relentless feeling of being different, being someone who didn't belong. And in that, I find an intrinsic happiness which comes from the freedom of being able to make one's own choices and know that they are one's own. Of living a real life, not escaping a bleak existence in an attempt to repress something which only brought pain through lack of self-realisation and information. Conformity, for me, was not living. Conformity was the escape of a weak psyche who didn't know better.
I would have been happier knowing the mistakes I made, the times I screwed up, weren't because of a fundamental inability to fit in with my peer group. Of not understanding the nuances in conversation, expectation, romantic protocol, or self-imposed isolation caused by feeling decidedly awkward or uncomfortable. I would have been happier to not have to feel like every encounter was a clandestine operation, with me playing the part of someone I wasn't. Nodding and smiling from behind a mask. Forming friendships with people but never escaping the aching loneliness that comes from knowing that however close you get, they never know the real you.
I may have had a different set of problems had I been born correctly, but they wouldn't have been problems compounded and exacerbated by one rather huge problem. And one which coloured my responses and coping strategies for every other one. One which became not a life, but a life sentence. A prison with no bars.
The thing is, though, I am not sad for missing out on womanhood, in an anatomical sense. I don't lament what I never had, because I cannot know how my life would have been were I born correctly. For all I know, I might have done most of the same things exactly the same way but for different reasons. I take comfort in the belief that I did live my life as a woman, because that's just what I am. What I feel sad for is that no one ever knew it other than me... eventually, all the issues that led to directly and indirectly... and that it's taken so long for me to figure that out. Had I not needed to figure it out at all, my life would have been happier. Because it would have felt more like mine from the start.
Everyone's life is different, however, and I don't think there's a blanket statement which applies to everyone. People find their own answers. The above only applies to me. And I understand what you're getting at, Suzi. Lack of unhappiness isn't the same as happiness. It's easy to say something would have made you happier when the antithesis of that thing made you miserable. But if you never knew that antithesis... how can it? How can you know pleasure without pain?
In that, my answer is very biased, and very subjective. Because it's incredibly hard to imagine not knowing that antithesis when it's impacted on so much of your life. Maybe by happier I just mean ignorance, in my case, is bliss.
