Quote from: CapnKye on January 15, 2015, 05:18:30 AM
I am male...I know that.
<snip>
For a while, I thought that maybe I am not "truly trans," but the thought of being called "she" makes me physically shudder and sends me into panic.
First of all, "trans" doesn't say what (generic) you
are, it says what you
aren't -- that is, that you don't fit into society's expectations of what someone with the sex the doctor put on your birth certificate. Every trans person is trans in a different way and has a different story.
And "trans" is a label of convenience. If describing yourself as "trans" helps you to understand yourself and be comfortable with yourself, go with it. If it doesn't, then forget about it. Whether you call yourself "trans" or not should not burden you with being this way or that way. And if somebody tries to tell you you're doing trans wrong, you can give them a hearty <expletive deleted> from me!
I'd second the recommendation to find a good therapist. As cindy16 said, there's nothing "wrong" with what you describe; from what I can see, you mostly need to not be afraid of it and maybe figure out how to deal with it in a way that doesn't hurt you. A good therapist
won't tell you you are "wrong," but will listen and sympathize and help you to feel less anxious about what you're finding out about yourself and to have patience with yourself. No matter what you find out about yourself, none of it means you
have to do anything in particular. IMHO, the goal you should set for yourself is to figure out how to live so you feel most comfortable and don't have to lie (well, not too much, anyway.)
+ + +
As for shuddering at the idea of being "she" -- I had something similar when I was young.
NOTE: this is me talking about me. I hope it helps you feel like you're not entirely alone with this. If not, just ignore it.
The issue and even the idea of my being called "she" didn't come up back in the Dark Ages when I grew up, but every now and then I'd run across a story where a character gets transformed from a boy to a girl (I particularly remember the Tip -> Ozma transformation in
The Marvelous Land of Oz) and every time I read it or even thought of it, I got
very uncomfortable. I now suspect that I reacted that way because some part of me
wanted to become a girl, but because I'd gotten drilled into my head that being
anything like a girl was a fate worse than death, it terrified me.
It took me some 40 years to realize that there were worse things than "being (like) a girl", and I'd been through a lot of them and lived to tell the tale. And even longer to realize that "being (like) a girl" isn't so terrible after all. After all, something like half the human race has done it their whole lives, and they (mostly) don't think it's so terrible (and they would know, wouldn't they?
)
