I'd like to preface this topic and my introduction by saying that it is not my goal to undermine anyone's experience or the trans community at large. That said, my real name is Michael and I'm a 21-year-old mechanical engineering student starting my junior year. I started questioning my sexuality and then my gender identity just under a year ago after falling out with my small group of friends from freshman year; the only people I really ever hung out with. With their move off campus, I ultimately found myself with a roommate who had no interest in being around me and a hall full of people who largely kept to themselves and were just not the same party-hard kind of people I had hung out with Freshman year. After eventually smoothing things over, I tried to keep in touch with my known circle of friends in spite of the fact that many of my gripes were swept under the rug. I would catch up with them in class when we first sat down, but the interactions weren't nearly as meaningful as Freshman year when we spent most of our time with each other. Sometimes they would invite me to come over on a Friday or Saturday for a party, but never to just hang out or do something as a group (except for a handful of times). In short, I was alone most of the time and this lead to me asking the question, "Is there something wrong with me?"
I eventually came to the conclusion that the "wrong" in this situation stemmed from the fact that I never independently defined or accepted myself. Rather than find people that thought similarly or had the same interests, I willingly or unwillingly was placed in social situations where I had to adapt my interests and personality traits to fit in. I recognize now that this has been extremely damaging to my sense of self, but given that it's the only thing I know, I do it subconsciously. Getting a bit more psychological, I think this was originally a defense mechanism that I set up due to fear of rejection from my parents. They divorced when I was only three years old and it was not clean in any sense of the word. My father's side of the story states that while he was on tour in Bosnia, my mother was cheating on my him and dealing with substance abuse problems related to alcohol and other drugs. She would leave me with my aunt for days on end and then come back to pick up where she left off. In one such instance, she was gone and I was in the care of my aunt for over a week. When my family couldn't find or get in touch with my mother, the state had no choice but to get involved and sent out an order to the Army to bring my father back. When he arrived home, he found that his joint account with my mother had been drained to only a few hundred dollars and our hose in disarray. In the following days and then weeks, my father received divorce papers from my mother in addition to putting our house on the market to make ends meet. This prompted my father's exit from the Army as well as our move from Vermont to Connecticut. Because he had so little money, he and I were forced to move into a small two bedroom apartment in Hartford while my mother had no job and payed no rent because she was living with my grandparents. Given all this and the fact that my mother lost the ensuing custody battle, I spent most of my early life around my father and began to see him as perfect and a symbol of what to strive for and my mother as dysfunctional and a symbol of what to avoid. To make sure that my dad didn't reject me, I had to like classic rock and help him work on his cars. To make sure the my mom didn't reject me, I had to accept whatever guy she decided to date and eventually marry (and divorce) along with sitting in bars while she drank and played pool.
And while I could talk at length about my issues with rejection, it's only a small stepping stone of what lead me to question if I was even straight and eventually if I was even a man. Given my tendency to obsess over problems or issues, I went straight to Google and began taking quizzes that gauged sexual orientation based on everything from index finger vs. ring finger length to pictorial tests where you rated men and women on how attractive they were and compared your results against a pool of people with known sexual orientations and genders. This eventually lead me to take the S.A.G.E. test. After taking the time to go through the entire test, I was found to be a normal cisgender male except for one thing: possible ->-bleeped-<-. The provided description fit me accurately, although I had never given a name to it and only saw it as a kink rather than some kind of disorder or paraphilia as I was soon to discover. Reading Blanchard's accounts of autogynephilic males and said males anecdotes about their struggles, I was struck even harder when I discovered that many were incapable of forming intimate sexual relationships with people. At first I was petrified of the thought of dying without ever loving someone in that way and then I started to worry that if I never had sex or a sexual relationship with someone, particularly a woman, that I could never consider myself a man.
When I couldn't come to a clear definition of what a man was outside of sex or how a man's life was fundamentally different than that of a woman's (in terms of being a 'virtuous' person), I think I lost some part of myself and my drive. I'm very much a goal-oriented person, and my goal in life up until that point consisted of getting a good job and eventually getting married, having kids and being a good father. But the more I questioned my motivations and whether that's what I truly wanted, I came to the conclusion that this goal was largely the result of me trying to live up to an expectation. Beyond living up to an expectation, I think a lot of my reasoning for holding to this goal came from me rationalizing that my life would simply fall into place with the help of a good career and a loving wife; someone who could provide me with the validation that my parents never ultimately gave me. When the prospect of me not being a man crested over into my mind, I gradually became more and more depressed to the point where I could barely find the motivation to eat, let alone go to class. I resigned myself to the idea that the only reason why I chose mechanical engineering in the first place wasn't because of my love for applied science, but because I was trying to fulfill that expectation. After trying and failing to find answers with a local therapist, LGBTQ+ center and trans support group, I sort of began to accept the thought that nothing was going to get better and I would never understand this part of me or who I was as a whole. With the semester coming to a close, I began to dread the thought of having to face my family and coworkers knowing that I was not the same person or at the very least, didn't view myself the same way; a confident, heterosexual male who knew what they wanted and where they were going.
I eventually turned to marijuana to help cope with my feelings of depression and later tried to use it as a tool to think about my gender and who I was in a more abstract sense. As I began to move further and further from the person I was when I started questioning, my sense of self began to erode. I started to feel disgusted with what I saw in the mirror. Disgust eventually turned to confusion when I began having points where I would look in the mirror and not even recognize my own face, or feel at least some kind of disconnect from my own reflection. This caused a great deal of anxiety for me and lead me to believe that I was going crazy and had some sort of mental health disorder. In response, I sought the help of a qualified gender therapist as well as frantically searched the internet for some sort of explanation. After smoking one night at our family's summer place (campground in Stafford, CT) I experienced a panic attack. Jumping onto the mental health disorder bandwagon once more, I began to read about dissociation and dissociative disorders. Eventually I landed on Dissociative Identity Disorder as well as a series of personality disorders related to my isolationist behavior. Not long after seemingly diagnosing myself (which I know is wrong), I started to experience even greater anxiety at work as well as flashbacks to seemingly random childhood memories. I would try and place myself as some kind of amorphous blob into the situation, but I couldn't do it. I tried to think of myself as a boy, which I couldn't do, and then I tried thinking of myself as a girl, which I also couldn't do. Interacting with other people has become arduous to the point where I can barely stand to hold a conversation with someone for more than a few minutes. I can't focus in class and all my attention seems to be devoted to figuring out whether or not I'm a pervert or a trans woman in serious denial.
I've been seeing a therapist at school who works with LGBTQ+ people, but I don't know if he'll be able to really help me understand what I'm feeling. I could simply be an autogynephile in the classic sense where this is all just misdirected sexuality, but that seemingly doesn't explain the memories I've dug up from my childhood: comic strips I drew and threw away of me turning into a girl, trying on my mom's high heels, and moments where I wished that I could see what it was like to be a girl even for a day. In that light, I would say that I am trans, however, I feel like I've lost some measure of that innocence to the fact that I seemingly can't stop myself from eroticizing being female; being forced to become a woman and enjoying female things like clothing and even being taken by a man in a sexual way. Even after getting in touch with people over at the Crossdream Life forum and reading some of Felix Conrad's books and Jack Molay's posts, I feel like a monster and have seemingly always felt that way. I certainly don't want to hurt anyone, I'm just so tired of feeling like crap and I feel like there's no light at the end of the tunnel for me. I want to cry about all of this, but I feel so numb that I have to talk aloud to get myself to the point where I'm upset enough to feel anything. To try and sort through this once and for all, I've decided to talk to my therapist about trying HRT for a month to see if this improves. Either way, it seems that I have an extremely hard road ahead no matter what I do...
