Why are you or want or have to transiton

[EllieM]

Well, Stephanie, I knew something was not quite right by the time I was 4. That was in the late 50's, so you are quite familiar with the time period we are talking about, and what the prevailing attitudes were. Compound that with the fact that I was living in a small industrial town, far away from any major cities where there might have been (although I doubt it) some acceptance of my peculiar state. Somehow I figured out, at that tender age, that I should not share my problem with anyone. I lived in fear for the next fifty years. I had several brushes with suicide. I suffered from anxiety. I refused to acknowledge that I am trans. Eventually, it came to a head when a marriage councellor suggested that I should seek the help of a psychologist for my depression. I unloaded and was diagnosed. No denying it any further. I lived with the diagnosis for three years (or so) before I started to lose it badly. I broke down, and rather ungracefully came out to my wife. I told her that I needed to start HRT or I would die. Within a week of correcting my hormone balance, Ellie emerged and saved me. It wasn't really a question of want, it was required, necessary, my destiny.

@Julie Blair: you been walking around in my head again Julie? 

[JulieM]

I think mine was precipitated by a combination of things: being with my best friend during the battle she fought and lost with cancer, shortly thereafter followed by finding myself on the gurney waiting to go into the OR for my own cancer surgery. During the wait I did the clichéd yet obligatory reassessment of my life. It's been pretty good...but...I found that I wasn't looking forward to the 20 or so years I'd have if we beat the cancer. I felt like they'd just be more dreary, dishonest, envious, yearning, drab years, and I realized I honestly didn't care if they ended sooner. Actually, sooner sounded better.

So here I am. And I'm feeling excited about those 20 years...along with a smidge of delicious terror. Alive is good.

[stephaniec]

what complicated my problem was that I was an extremely shy and extremely introverted , even if electrodes and tooth pics under the finger nails were used I wouldn't of spilled the beans. and that lasted into adulthood and by that time I had other problems burying my condition deeper

[Trillium]

Transition, Want or Need?  It began need, but is now embraced.  To explain: My life was never bad. I've always had enough. I've lived, travelled, loved, walked, run, ridden across three continents. I've studied, read, acted, built, lit, destroyed, wept, laughed, drank, drugged, learned, forgot, rejected and been rejected. I have been bullied, beaten, arrested, released, won and lost. I have stood up to hate without fear because I hoped I would die.

All of it vanity, all except for the last two years fundamentally alone. I have been at rock festivals, surrounded by music and people, alone. I have danced in clubs, sung songs, made love to both men and women, alone. Solitude was may mantra; Isolation my muse. I have felt lonely, angry, different and afraid virtually every day of my life. I have died in my soul, only to be reborn and to weep at the resurrection. I have silently cried, sometimes with a smile on my face.

I have held and loved babies. I have played with dogs. I have befriended cats, horses, alpacas, and sheep. I have knit friendships and rent the fabric of loving care. For me that is dysphoria. That is what knowing that you are fundamentally wrong, but refusing to acknowledge, even to yourself much less psychiatrists and psychologists, who who are. That is the bullet proof persona of the dying.

Finally I could bear no more and began to seek, as the final meander before I found death by my own hand, the truth about who I was. I did not want to finally embrace the peace and stillness of oblivion without finding and getting to know that spark of the infinite that I sensed was present. I began to look for Julie.

I love her. She is light and she is hope. She could not have been saved without Susan's; She would not exist without HRT; She could not continue to evolve without my lovers here. It is not the venue, it is the people and the chemistry. It is the selfless giving of time and love by people who only know me through prose. It is finding a home where loneliness loses its authority, and its attraction. I have much to do, I have work to be done and I need no longer do it alone, sequestered within battlements of my own making.

Fair Winds,
Julie

Very beautifully articulated Julie x

[Susan522]

After reading all the previous posts, it seems to me that that the simple short answer to the "why" is clearly "need".  I also get the feeling that the reason that some of us are able to get through all the confusion, denial and societal pressures to conform...is the ability to accept and confront our own personal reality. 

I can certainly understand the utter terror and fear.  After all, I went through it too.  Perhaps it is because I was born into an Old World culture in an age just barely emerging from the indescribable wreckage and utter destruction of WWII...and still managed to confront and overcome and defeat my demons, that I believe that it is not so much a question of courage, or availability of knowledge or resources, but a question of intense personal need and integrity.  I think it boils down to a question of being honest with ourselves and those around us.

[Lynne]

what complicated my problem was that I was an extremely shy and extremely introverted , even if electrodes and tooth pics under the finger nails were used I wouldn't of spilled the beans. and that lasted into adulthood and by that time I had other problems burying my condition deeper

That description fits me well too. When I realized what is my problem, I also realized that it is not "normal".

So I denied everything that could be associated with anything feminine, although I could not really foul anyone but myself. Even when my parents asked me about it I denied everything, I did not want to talk about it. I wanted it to go away, but it didn't. By the time I was 12 I learned to suppress my emotions long enough to not let anyone see me cry, ever.

I tried to man up, with limited success. In the last years of primary school I started to learn a lot about trans things, and I started to over-analyze myself and my problems. I tried to stay away from my emotions regarding transition and concentrate on the rational side of things. I did all this to find a category which does not require transition and I convinced myself a lot of times that I don't need to go through the transition because I don't really need it will and it not make my life better. It was hell, I was depressed, without motivation and every time those feelings came back, it was worse. I distracted myself as much as I could and I was successful, because I'm not finished with transition even now, 18 years later.

Long story short, my life from that point on was a constant identity-crisis and even now it is sometimes hard for me to not over-analyze myself.

I came to the conclusion that it really does not matter what category I fit in, I should do what makes me happy and not what society thinks I should do.
If it would be necessary I would probably survive without transitioning but I would become a zombie slowly. Surviving is not enough for me anymore, I want to be happy, and it seems that can be achieved easier if I listen to my heart and transition to female.

[Jessica Merriman]

I had a medical condition. Transition is the required treatment. Patient is much happier and healthier now. Pretty much it.

[Newgirl Dani]

First I I felt the desire to transition, but only in a very vague way, these continued only as background notions as my mental self protection measures were too strong.  After a good deal of attempts to look directly at them, the idea began to take on a less threatning standpoint which allowed a more in depth study of myself.  It was somewhere in this timeframe that I decided to give hrt a chance, knowing I could reverse this coarse if needed.  I was hit squarely between the eyes with a new understanding, and this could only come from seeing contrast for the first time.  What I mean by that is the hormone therapy allowed two views, the old and now the new.  Oddly enough this did not happen suddenly, it was only after a few injection cycles that toward the end, when the estrogen level dropped, the contrast was sharp.  I now had my answer.  From this point on I knew it was not just desire or need, it is a have to thing, with no room for compromise.   Dani

[Lady_Oracle]

Latina, too? I understand the machismo part lol Never really gave a ->-bleeped-<- though

Yep I'm puerto rican cause of that culture I was thrown into sexist environments, pressure to be manly from my family, basically it just made me too afraid to come out and with my teachers in elementary school enforcing gender roles, it just made my fears even bigger. I wish I had been stronger back then because I of would of started transition much sooner and wouldn't have lost so many years to my depression.

[Danielle Emmalee]

Seemed like something fun to do and I needed a hobby

But seriously, I just had an epiphany that it was better to be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not.  Turns out I didn't have to make that choice and I'm loved (possibly even more) for being who I am.

[ElDudette]

I need to.


i spent most of my life with a static-y background noise in my head, killing myself slowly trying to be something i wasn't. Literally i saw no future that wasn't me strolling into the woods and eating a Smith & Wesson sandwhich by the time i hit 40.

After i realized that everything i had been suppressing, all the static noise was the real me, " i " became " I "
Like a painted over glass window, i's view cracked and partly shattered away, and I knew right away where I needed to go, where I needed to be, because I do have a future, I do have a life to live.
I'm going to take a hammer to whats left of that window, and escape..

[Carrie Liz]

The moment for me basically came when I found out about discount SRS surgeries in Thailand.

My whole life, I'd told myself that it wasn't worth it, that $30,000 was just too much. Dropping that number into the low $10,000 range, though, when I found out about Chettawut and Sanguan and the Samui clinic suddenly SERIOUSLY got me thinking about it for the first time, because for the first time it was financially feasible for me.

I was on the Eunuch Archive at the time, mainly surrounded by men who desired to be castrated or penectomized. So I asked the following question "what's the biggest thing stopping you?" I was shocked when everyone else's responses were completely in the realm of "financial / can't afford it" or "not sure if I really want it or not," and "sexual concerns (afraid of loss of sensation afterward.)" I was expecting more people to be, like me, afraid of what their family would think, or afraid of not carrying on the family legacy due to reproduction now being impossible, or afraid of social ridicule. I was the only one. And that was when I realized, I've known that I wanted to be a girl since I was 13 years old, nonstop. The only thing that had EVER stopped me was that I was afraid of what other people would think.

That was the moment where I decided that, for the first time in my life, I was going to do something for myself. I was going to take life by the reigns and do a trial with chemical castration to see if I really would be okay with having no T in my system long-term, and thus if surgery was right for me or not. And, well, because of looking up that information on chem-castration, that was how I found about about HRT. And because I found out about HRT, I started researching the effects. And as I researched the effects, I stumbled onto this site's "before and after" topic for the first time, and then onto Youtube transition timelines. And that was when, for the first time in my life, I realized that transition was possible. I'd kept myself from it for so many years because I believed it was impossible, that I was just too big and too masculine to ever pass, but now I was proven wrong. And with that, I immediately started HRT, went into therapy, and started working toward transition.

And, well, here I am almost exactly 2 years later.

Once I found out that transition was really was possible, that I really could be female, NOTHING could have stopped me.

[LizMarie]

Transition was not something I considered because of early childhood conditioning. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I felt different, cross dressed, wanted to be a girl, but was repeatedly told that only "perverts" and sick people did that. I didn't think I was sick and I didn't want to be called a pervert so I forced it down... until I couldn't anymore. And along the way there were over 30 years of unlearning the crap that was shoveled into my head as a child.

Once enough of that crap was gone, and when I finally reached the point of planning my own suicide, I knew I had to do something or end it all. So I did something, the only thing I could do - I transitioned.

[Hailey zy]

I knew i was a women at about 12 but tried to deny it for the next 6 years. Nearly everyday of those 6 years i'd have thoughts of being a women or a voice that would torment me about not looking like the other girls, it become so bad i had i wasn't able to concentrate in school. Next came the feeling to die so I was left with the choices of transition or die, I chose to transition and I haven't been happier  .

[Ally_B]

I had a medical condition. Transition is the required treatment. Patient is much happier and healthier now. Pretty much it.

Snappy and to the point. I like it!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Luna Star]

wanting it as my whole life I felt I'd never fit in society once. I thought a lot about myself and after being ill from the shock.The puzzle pieces finally begun to fall together. I accepted it and know it won't get better if I don't take action. Why live life being sad, only getting more sad when that ONE day WILL come

[Cee Myk]

My reason to transition is simple: I am at peace. This process has been long and hard for me, as if forces have been keeping from pursuing my true self outwardly all these years. I choose to transition over depression.

[Joanna Dark]

Simple: to be happy, for once. (not getting beaten up for being  a queer  or asked if I'm a boy or girl was just a good side effect. I call it my half life. It'll hopefully be longer than a half unless i die decades younger than average.

[Susan522]

So it really does come down to transition or die...slowly.

[ImagineKate]

So it really does come down to transition or die...slowly.

Pretty much. Die slowly or die quickly.