Righty, well, I'm on here periodically, and then I retreat as many of you know. What a kafuffle this all is.
I had the money to go private, and to, in effect, tailor my transition without having to jump through the damaging hoops specified by the UK's wonderful and well-meaning but also frighteningly old-fashioned standards of care. But I ended up spending my money on projects instead, and am now taking second job to pay back the credit card bill. I should be square again and in credit by this time next year. This really seems like a confession.
In the end, I couldn't make up my mind, I didn't have the power to go through with it. I am furiously bad with making decisions day-to-day, I panic at the choice extended to me at music shops, for instance. And this opportunity and the decision presented, just blew every logical and emotional circuit in my brain. So I buried myself in distractions. I used to think that with the cash available, I would take HRT. But it appears, not. I now wonder whether I'd actually get FFS if I had that amount of money, even though that's what I've always wanted, even before I recognised I had actual gender dysphoria.
So why so?
I feel there's no point. For various reasons. I've even stopped dressing up in private now. And I just accept the receding hairline, thinning hair, pointless bulking out and coarsening skin with a resigned sense of deep defeat. I don't have enough faith I'll gain any positive effects from HRT to balance out the destruction of fertility, sex drive and collapse of metabolism. I can't get over the feeling that ruining fertility is a sin, even though that I logically know that its not a sin and I could bank for future IVF (though from what I hear, conceiving successfully through IVF is fairly difficult at the best of times).
As well as these hang-ups, I also continue to feel cut-off from the mindsets of men and women. I feel as out of my depths in a group of women talking about "feminine issues" as I do in a room of men taking delight in being gruff and being "guyish". After spending more time with women than men over the past two years, I feel a dispiriting sense of familiarly to my fish-out-water feelings. As if I've travelled the world to its further reaches only to find I'm essentially back where I started. Men and women are just so...utterly polarised and so almost hysterically keen to be seen as distinctly male or female, that every facet of existence has to conform. Whilst I do understand that there are many on this forum that feel the same, indeed, even a forum unto itself. However offline and in real life, there just appears to myself. I've tried meeting with others but it never pays off. Binary transgender people want to disappear into the masses without trace and non-binaries continue to dress-up indoors and alone. Sadly, I don't have the confidence (or more importantly the skills in work) to be financially secure as someone who stands out as a non-binary transsexual. If I were to be more attractive (as beauty is an immutable currency that allows for many socially-unacceptable traits) and more intelligent, then I could weather the potential crap-storm that invariably follows a transition.
Yep, I'm aware I'm courting a "well, welcome to being transgender/ transexual" comment, which is fair enough, but its still irritating that it's like this. Its irritating because it means I can't make a decision, as all the bullsh*t surrounding being male or female is just deafening, and I'm barely sure of who I am in the shadows, let alone in the sharp lights of everyone else's bigoted gleefully smug-to-be "real men" and "real women" gaze. There's not enough who are transgender, let alone non-binaries, in positions of power in the media to begin reshaping the very malleable minds of the populace. Control the media and you control people. Anyway, I'm going off on one! 😛
So I could just slink away and get on with conforming, but the trouble is, I feel angrier still. And of course, its not healthy or wise. How do you quell the anger? I increasingly feel jealous of the women I am attracted to, its ridiculous really. My emotions fire off. But, there it is, the annoyance and anger as I see my decay and their luminance, they look and present how I want to. And then to add insult to injury in order to attract them as a partner, I then need to further restrict my identity to conform to the standards of behaviour and presentation that 99.9% of women expect from a guy. I'm expected to appreciate the modern women's gender duality, and yet I am expected to be a one-dimensional male. It'll continue to damage society, it will, this gender equality paradox which we're cultivating. Only those non-binaries like myself notice this though, (as we're not just disenfranchised by one gender but by both) as everyone else trans or cis are picking a side and sticking with it, keeping their heads down.
Its strange, I feel the need to defend masculinity, and I feel threatened by femininity and feminism, but ultimately its my own "masculinity" I feel is being threatened. Which isn't the masculinity that regular guys seem to even need to defend, so it seems. I feel threatened by feminism as there's no place for someone like me in that equality, in the same way as there's no place for me in the patriarchy. Its one gender dictatorship or the other. Doesn't matter whether its cis women or cis men in power, I'll never be appreciated, non binaries never will. You won't find us on the cover of any fashion magazine, or in demand on dating sites or "employee / employer of the month in any industry.
Yes, this has turned into a rant, wasn't meant to be, but I feel the need to just express this. I have to. I mean no offence and I do not wish to upset anyone. Tis the season, afterall.
I just wish I could calm myself, and find some peace, to be able to make a decision. This gender stuff with me, its a fire that's always existed. Couple that with my attraction to women and this confused attraction with certain males, makes no sense. There seems to be no end to it, that's what frustrates me the most. I just don't see how to make who I am work.
