Thought I'd check in with where I am with my life and my issues at this point, in case anyone is interested.
Externally, not a lot has changed. I had my first electrolysis appointment today, and it did hurt a lot and left the area she worked on pretty red and sore. She sold me a tube of lidocaine creme that I'm supposed to trowel onto my neck (that's where we're starting) before my next appointment. A first baby step. I ordered some feminine-looking "tops" -- tunic-length shirts/blouses with things like pintucking and lace and embroidery. I discovered that my men's undershirts do
not work with them, so I'm going to have to figure out what does. The nice thing is that since they're intended to not be tucked in, they cover my beer gut. And I'm looking forward to the Philadelphia trans conference with a mixture of excitement and dread. (What will I
wear?!)
Internally, there's a lot going on. I'm dealing with my gender issues and with the damage that my childhood did to me. They sound like separate issues, but for me, I don't think they can be separated. What I know is that pretty much every aspect of who and what I was was wrong, defective, etc., in the view of all the people around me, and how much should be chalked up to my being male and how much to the general screwed-up-ed-ness of the family and the society I grew up in is kind of arbitrary. On top of that, I was emotionally starving -- I realize now that neither of my parents were able to relate on anything but a superficial level, or to deal with any issue that couldn't be handled in five minues with a dime-store child rearing cookbook recipe. (I often feel like I was one of the monkeys in the infamous Harry Harlow attachment experiments.) It's like dealing with a splinter (or a bunch of them) that have been stuck deep inside me and festering for 50+ years.
Anyway, I've been feeling obsessed by this stuff lately to the point that I'm having trouble concentrating on anything else. My gender therapist turns out to also be a specialist in trauma, so I feel like I'm beginning to actually open up about this stuff for the first time. I'm wondering if I should even continue with my old therapist, but I hate to end my relationship with her because I feel so comfortable with her.
As if that weren't enough, over on a blog I frequent (Pharyngula, at
freethoughtblogs.com) they've revived an "Online Gender Workshop" series. One of the exercises was to put oneself in the role of a transgender person at one of thee ages and imagine what one could say to get someone important in that person's life to understand or at least accept their transgender-ness. FYI, the blog is
not aimed at a trans audience, though the whole site is fairly LGBT-friendly -- they get called "Social Justice Warriors" by their detractors a lot -- so most of the responses seemed to be from cis people.
Anyway, I chose option (a) age 10, explaining to a parent. I thought it would be easy, given that I've been thinking about it day and night, but when I tried imagine myself back then, even assuming I knew everything then that I do now, I could not figure out how to get through to people who seemed (and, in memory, still seem) to not have the slightest interest in understanding what was going on with me. Just as a TL;DR, here's what I wrote. When I read it, it seems just too, too emo for words, but aside from the comments about being a girl (which I would have been petrified to even imagine back then), it pretty much describes how I felt as I might have expressed it if I'd ever found someone I could have trusted to listen. And just writing it left me in a kind of state of shock for a day or so, I guess because it put me back in touch with feelings I'd kept safely locked up all this time.
Quote
Mom, Dad —
I'm no good as a boy. I hate athletics. I hate having to get those stinky uniforms on and go out and run into other boys. I'm no good at throwing or kicking or knocking people over or jumping. And I kinda don't want to be. Sometimes I think, I wish I could be like the other boys and then I feel like I've got a mouthful of source milk and I want to throw up. And when the other boys are horsing around and stuff, it's creepy and scary. Even when they're not stealing my lunch or throwing my underwear in the shower. And all this stuff about being tough and demerits and acting like we're in the army when we're at school. I've tried and I can't. I can't hit back. Mr. P [headmaster] talks to me all the time about what I need to do but I can't. I don't know why, I just can't. And okay I'm a crybaby and a sissy and a queer and a wimp, but I can't.
Sometimes I wish I'd been a girl. If I were a girl it would be okay to cry, and people wouldn't yell at me if I couldn't hit the ball very well. When I was in first grade, on the playground, I wished I could play with the girls, but of course nobody would have let me. The girls pretended they were horses and got rounded up and then rounded up other girls who were horses and they didn't get hit and have to hit back or be called names. Girls hug each other and sometimes kiss each other. They can want their mommies and get hugs when they're sad. I could be pretty and wear pretty dresses and nobody would call me a sissy or anything. If I were a girl, Dad wouldn't give me a crew cut all the time, he'd let me grow my hair long.
I guess I'm just stupid. I bet I'd be just as bad a girl as I am a boy. I don't know what. I can't figure out what to do. I don't know why I'm writing this, if I can't figure it out, I don't know why I think you all can. I just know I can't do this any more. I feel like I'm dying. If I have to keep on being a boy, I think I _will_ die.
I had a hard time writing this, because I cannot imagine ever having any hope that my parents would have listened, since they never listened about the more conventional things, either. I had to imagine this as a suicide note before I could get any words out.
