So, last week, I got link another poor girl's Tumblr suicide note without any warning on what it was, just like what happened with me and Leelah's note. So I decided to make an anti-Suicide note. Or a Life-Affirming note. Or a It-Does-Get-Better note, or whatever. I just needed to get it all out there in a place where I could share my story with people. You can read the original here:
http://katherinethegrape.tumblr.com/post/108716750576/a-transgender-anti-suicide-note (and feel free to follow me, or ignore or whatever.) Also, I apologize for the formatting.
QuoteA Transgender Anti-Suicide note.
It seems that, right now, we're only seeing two narratives coming out of the transgender world. The first is the successful transgender woman, glamorous and beautiful, confident in herself and effortlessly passing. The other is the tragedies of our trans youth like Leelah Alcorn, and more recently Carlotte Loh. Young people who feel trapped in their lives, with unsupportive or abusive parents, who get to the point where they see suicide is the only way out. I feel that these, really, are the two extremes of the transgender experience and doesn't truly represent us as a whole. I want to share my story (such as it is so far) partially to show that there are people who live in the middle of these two extremes and partially to exorcise my own demons on the recent tragedies that we've experienced.
Before I start, however, I feel the need to put up something of a disclaimer. This is my story. This is my narrative and it shouldn't be used to define anybody else's. I don't speak for all transgender people. I don't even speak for late transitioning middle aged women who work in IT. I just speak for myself. Each person has their own story, and it is as wide and varied as any section of humanity. I only mean to share my experience to illustrate this, and not to add another template for people to try to fit into. I'm not exactly the best person to model themselves after.
One of the biggest questions that gets asked of me is, "When did you know you were trans?" This is a hard one for me to answer. The stories that we get from Hollywood and the newspapers would make you think that if you are transgender then you spend your youth knowing, without a shadow of a doubt, what gender you are, and actively rebel against the gender you were assigned. Maybe you sneak into mom's closet and put on her dresses and shoes. Maybe, on the other end of the spectrum, you tear up your dresses and cut your hair. Regardless, the standard seems to be that, by four or five, you just know.
Not me. This is certainly true for some, and from what I understand talking to other trans people, I am hardly alone in this. When did I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was trans? Thirty-nine. When I was young, when I was old enough to start figuring out my own gender identity, it was in the late 70s, early 80s. The Internet was still just ARPANET and just started branching out into research and education organizations. Truly it was the before time, in the long-long ago. I, simply, had no exposure to transsexuals. If you had a penis, you were a boy. If you had a vagina, you were a girl. Period. End stop. The mere idea that sex and gender identity were separate things was a completely foreign and unknown concept. God how I wish I had the internet back then. If I had known then what I know now, I probably could have saved myself a good thirty-five years of pain and heartache.
Still. I look back and think to myself, "God, it was so obvious, how didn't I know?" As far back as I can remember, I've always felt that I should have been born a girl, and I felt stuck in a body that I didn't want. I didn't really feel so much a girl stuck in a boy's body, like the most common story you see in the media, but more like there was some kind of cosmic mistake that had happened which caused me to end up being born a boy. As such, I knew that I was a boy. I had to be since I had a penis. I just.... shouldn't have.
A lot of my early memories revolve around this. Here's a picture of me, as a child, trying on my mother's floppy hat.
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I don't remember having that picture taken at all. I remember asking my mom to put nail-polish on my nails when she was doing hers. She did, bless her. I think I was 5 or 6. I remember, around the same age, the first time I saw a girl's private parts. I remember finding myself both mystified and strangely envious. I remember wanting to keep my hair long when I was... I want to say 7 or 8. I know my parents wanted to cut it, especially after I got mistaken for a girl when they took me out to the mall one day. I remember seeing ads during Saturday morning cartoons for Strawberry Shortcake and being afraid to ask for one.
Don't get me wrong. There wasn't any real kind of active dissent from my parents. They've always been supportive in their own way. My father always had a tendency to be hypercritical of me academically, and to this day we still rarely see eye to eye. But I know he loves me, and I know that he's doing his best, and Lord knows, I'm not one to judge about good parenting. The point is, if I had known, and if they had known, I probably would have been able to transition before puberty, if that was an option. Just, at that time, it was still relatively unknown, or relegated to Jerry Springer.
My first real exposure to a transsexual in any medium was Wanda in the most excellent A Game of You story arc in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic. This was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that my first real exposure was of a person who was written as a person. Not as a caricature, not as a drag queen, not as Jerry Springer rodeo clown. A person. I remember feeling her hurt when she was told she couldn't accompany Thessaly and Barbie on their journey because, at the end of the day, she wasn't a woman. A curse because I remember being jealous that, after she died, she was shown briefly to be a ciswoman in death. This was the seed for my suicide attempts. Somehow I got it into my head that if I killed myself, it wouldn't end my life, it would mean that I could move on to my next and be who I should.
It's about this time that I started to battle depression. I mean really started to battle it. (It's still a battle, mind you, but one that I'm winning, now.) Let me tell you a few things about depression. A lot of people just don't understand it. They've felt sadness in their lives, and think that depression is just prolonged sadness. Yes. There's sadness there, but it's the tip of the emotional iceberg. Holding up that sadness is hopelessness and despair. It's the inability to process anything positive in your life. It's a silent and deadly worm that insidiously wraps itself around your cerebral cortex and poisons everything good in your life, twisting it, and turning it against you. It's a sadistic babelfish. It takes a lot of effort, and, in most cases, medication to help untangle that worm and to start seeing the world as it really is. I suffer from chronic depression, which means that I'm two weeks worth of missed medication away from having that worm back in my head, no matter how good my life is gotten. Yes. I counted the days.
I was 19 for my first suicide attempt. I was about as low as I could get. I was in this podunk little university town, and I couldn't get a job to save my life, so I ended up stealing from my parents to try to keep myself fed and housed. I got most of my escape at that time from reading comics and reading books. Some of my favorites at the time had a character who would somehow through magic or technology switch genders (most notably books Robert Heinlein and Jack L. Chalker). I was always envious of these people. I never thought of myself as transsexual at the time because I didn't fit the classic narrative. I didn't have the deep down feeling that I was a woman trapped in a man's body. I was also convinced that since I was primarily attracted to women, I couldn't be trans. After all, I had the right parts to love a woman, so I must be in the right body. This was a misconception that would haunt me until much, much later in life. Because of this, and because of Wanda, I felt that the only way out, the only way to be who I wanted to be, was suicide. So, a handful of prescription meds later, I ended up in the ER getting my stomach pumped. I honestly don't remember how I got there.
I remember that after I got released from the hospital, I got put on medication. My father made me go to this councilor to help with my depression. I remember, very clearly, about a month or two into the sessions I thought to myself, "I should really blow this guy's mind. I should tell him that I think I should have been born a girl. They'd lock me up for sure." I kind of wish I did. This was in the early 90s by this point, and knowledge about transseuxals have started getting around, and maybe I would've gotten the help I needed. Or, maybe, I would have just ended up hospitalized.
Regardless, at that point I knew I had to get about as far away from that town as possible, which led me to Florida. Things were okay, there, for the most part. I had decent enough friends, one of whom introduced me to my future wife. Long story short, I became unemployed, she got pregnant, and I suddenly had to do a lot of growing up. We ended up moving back to my state of origin, and I ended up in college trying to get a degree in Software Engineering, but me and traditional schooling have never gotten along, so I ended quitting early and getting a job doing tech support.
I kind of bounced around jobs at that time, always letting my depression sabotage every job that I held. Eventually I went to a kind of focused technical school to get a handful of IT certificates so that I could try to hold down a steady job. It kind of worked, but after working for a failed startup that tried to compete with Geek Squad I ended up doing contract work. My relationship with my wife kept on getting more and more strained, as I struggled keeping myself together. I always felt that I was on the edge of self destruction and it took every ounce of willpower to keep it from happening. Outwardly, I became withdrawn, surly, and largely absent in everybody's life. I only found solace in computer gaming since it offered a way for me to turn my brain off for long periods of time.
All this time, I was on the edge of suicide. Depression had convinced me that I was worthless. That I didn't deserve the love that I had, and that in the end, the world would be a better place without me. Always, in the back of my mind, was the thought that if only I was born a girl, and all else equal, things would have turned out better. I would fantasize, nightly, about waking up, back when I was 10, in the body of a girl and starting things over. I was convinced that if my life would end, this would happen.
It was during one of these contract jobs that I attempted suicide again. I don't really remember what the catalyst was for it, to be honest. At the time we were having a lot of monetary issues and I was having problems accepting help, or even asking for it. I just didn't think I was worthy of help. I knew that my marriage was on the verge of imploding and I wasn't convinced that was a bad thing. If something happened to me, or if I died, then my wife wouldn't be shackled to me as I drowned, and she wouldn't go down with me. I'm told that I was a very unpleasant person to be around, and I believe it. Unfortunately, I couldn't see it myself, since that worm, Depression, had firmly coiled itself around my brain, my ears, and my optic nerves, squeezing them tightly. I just couldn't see the truth of things.
This time, I did end up in the mental health ward for about a week after the attempt. We did finally get me some medication that seemed to be working, but I never really engaged in any of the activities. I just laid in my bed and read all day. Eventually I decided it was time for me to go. I wasn't getting anything out of it, and I wasn't much of a danger to myself, and I was racking up a huge medical bill. My marriage got better for a little bit as we decided to work on it. Then it got worse. Then better, then worse, and so on.
Meanwhile, as I started settling down and actually get a career for myself getting good, stable jobs, transgender started coming more and more into the spotlight and I started reading more and more about it. It wasn't until I found out that one of my internet friends was an intersex child assigned male at birth but identified as female who, then, had gender confirmation surgery did things start to click in my head. I got jealous of her. Stab you in the gut and twist the knife kind of jealous, and I couldn't figure out why.
It wasn't until I read an article, here on Tumblr, about a transwoman and her girlfriend doing something nice and normal like did it all click in my head. I saw the picture of them and it felt like a punch in the gut. Look at how happy they were. Look at the transwoman. She doesn't look anything like I've seen on TV or the movies. She looked natural, and happy. She has a girlfriend. A transsexual woman can have girlfriends. That should be me. At that point, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place and, for the first time ever in my life I felt something that I had never felt before. Hope.
And then panic set in. Good God, how am I going to tell my wife? She's going to leave me for sure, and for the first time I didn't want her to go on some level. What about my son? What about my parents? How am I going to pull this off? I don't want to start this and end up looking like a gorilla in a dress. I'm 39. That's way too old to start transitioning. It's too late for me. I nearly had a mental breakdown in the middle of work. I had to take my lunch break early and I spent the entire time crying my eyes out.
I spent the next couple of weeks alternatively doing research on what it means to be transgender, and loosing sleep at night worrying about the possibility of this ending my relationship with my family. The first thing I learned from my research was that it's never too late to start transitioning. On one of the support forums I visited, I found many, many people transitioning late in life. Some didn't start in their 50s and 60s. Let me reiterate this, if somehow this manages to find its way into the hands of anybody post puberty who thinks that it's too late to start. It is never, ever, too late to start. It's never too late to be who you are.
I eventually sought out a therapist who specialized in gender identity issues as a way to work out how I needed to go from there. I knew I'd have to eventually tell my wife, my son, and my parents, and the prospect scared the crap out of me. My wife knew something was going on, and even though I couldn't tell her at the time, I did tell her that the biggest reason for me to go to the therapist was to get myself to the point to where I could tell her. Eventually she sat me down and convinced me that I could tell her. I did. It wasn't the end of the world. She didn't leave me.
I'm lucky in that. The majority of marriages are destroyed by something like this. Some continue to have friendly relationships with each other, and some less so. For a lot of trans people, coming out to your loved ones is a frightening prospect. You're opening yourself wide and bearing your heart, and you're taking a chance that they won't stab you with a fork when they learn. Each person I come out to I worry incessantly about the outcome, but it gets easier for each person you tell. I think that coming out was the first step for me to peel away this elaborate and fragile facade that I had built up over the decades, and that each layer that was removed left a layer that was raw and tender and easily hurt, and for the most part people have been gentle with me.
The coming out process took me about three months or so. Once I was done with that I started working on a timeline, a roadmap if you will, of my transition. I came to my epiphany in February of 2013. I wanted, by the end of the year to start hormone therapy. In November of that year, I got an official diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria, and had a letter that I could take to my Endocrinologist to begin my therapy. I wanted to start going full time by the end of 2014. That didn't happen, but only because I put my transition on hold while I dealt with moving myself and my family across the country. After a few months of waffling I finally decided that I better set a date or else I'll never feel ready enough to take the plunge and go full time. So, as of April of 2015, I will no longer be Erik, but Katherine forevermore.
I have to say that this journey I set out on has been worth it. My wife tells me that she finally has the person she fell in love with all those years ago. Yes, we still have our issues. We have over a decade of hurt to work through, but as time goes by it becomes clear that we can, indeed, work through them. My son, who I've been absent for the majority of his life has said that for the first time I'm a real person. I finally like myself. I can finally look at myself in the mirror and not flinch. I've known happiness, true happiness, for the first time in my life.
They say it gets better, and it does. It really does. Please don't lose hope. Even at it's darkest, know that it's never too late to be yourself. Know that you are not alone. Know that no matter your circumstance there is always a way out that doesn't end in death. Know that there is hope.
Please, if you, or if someone you love is transgender and considering suicide, please call the Trans Lifeline at 1-877-565-8860, or in Canada at 877-330-6366. It's staffed by transgender people and was created for transgender people experiencing crisis.
