I read through this thread with a hand on my heart. So many emotions, such feelings of one kind or another leapt from the page. Some very poignant expressions have been voiced; so many hands on hearts. Although I am post-op and out in the world, living my life to the full, being the confident, proverbial woman about town, I still remember the difficult times. So, I will open my heart to you here and voice a little more about me...
At aged eleven I had an emotional breakdown because I could not understand why I had not been born the same as other girls; I knew I had the right gender but the wrong sex. I was referred for gender linked counselling eventually moving on to becoming very focussed on my SRS and direction in life. During those early years though, from seven to sixteen, I had to endure with being threatened daily at school. I was verbally bullied, punched, spat on, ostracised and publicly humiliated to name a few instances, even to the point of being shot, point blank, with an air pistol on one occasion; all this for simply addressing my femininity.
The ignorance, the lack of understanding, the cruelty and the homophobic overtone is in certain aspects of society still as prevalent as it was then. I had friends, who professed support dump me as soon as I had had my SRS. There are family members that do not speak to me now, and they already had an insight as to where my life was heading. Yet in opposition to this there are others who have been very supportive and treat me as simply a female friend and within the family a sister.
Our focussed determination through transition and then our surgery I think frightens some people. Perhaps it is fear fuelled by their ignorance and their inability to accept that we are being true to ourselves and actually have followed it through. Then of course there are other people who have insight and for them we are an inspiration...
The people we know, be they friends or family, have to realise, to learn, that SRS is not the end of the person that they knew but is a beginning for the woman that they should get to know.
Rara. x