I wrote an extremely long drunk post in reply to this thread last night after an evening at the pub but had the good common sense to not post it. I still wanted to comment though and will try to be more brief but I'm not the greatest at that.
It's hard for me to really define the early stages of transition or where things got started. From kindergarten on it became painfully obvious I was not going to fit into the world as a boy so things got awkward right off the bat. After 2nd grade and allowed to start growing out my hair, not only was my personality and manner called out but so were my looks pretty much from then on out until high school was over. I was put into counseling at 10 years old after the 4th grade which was never about "fixing" me but more about learning to deal with the intense social problems I dealt with for being so different.
Obviously the way I was "broken" wasn't going to be changed so how I was treated because of it was addressed. I'm sure my folks had a lot to do with that? In fact, the whole also obvious issue about my gender was mostly overlooked I think now because none of the doctors I was ever taken to had ever seen a kid like me before and it scared them to death? The notion of transsexualism in general wasn't even widely known or accepted in the psychiatric communities in 1965 as anything but some deviant offshoot of mental illness like homosexuality and the idea that there could be pre-pubescent children that were also trans was just too morally, ethically and intellectually ridiculous to even consider. That concept would take another decade or two to gain traction and is still controversial.
This only got worse. By junior high (7th) grade, I had "girl's hair", wanted to do everything I could to be like other girls and was otherwise gender indeterminable, totally ostracized socially and had been in 14 different schools in three different parts of the country by then because every time things got bad for me or I was told my presence was too disruptive or the bullying became too abusive, we moved somewhere else. I became a medical curiosity and at times was made to feel like a lab rat getting passed around to different "mental health professionals".
At home and with extended family though, other than some playful teasing intended make light of my atypical nature because it was funny rather than something making me the spawn of Satan or any big deal, I was supported if not fully celebrated for my uniqueness and who I was so there was some counter to all the difficulties and crappy way I was painfully, awkwardly and humiliatingly treated in school. To my parent's credit, they had always understood my distress. I had happy times and have good memories of my childhood. They made sure of that and I was loved and they did everything possible to treat me normally because they knew the outside world did not, that life was so hard for me and that there was nothing I could do to change who I was.
At 15, I was assaulted by a group of homophobic boys and out of school a month in recovery. During that time, I came to an understanding with my folks that I simply could not live my life as a boy and continue to put up with this crap and there wasn't a chance in hell I was ever going to grow up to be a man so something needed to be done. There were no words, language or concepts about all this as there are now to discuss it and I didn't know
what needed to be done but I was nevertheless understood loud and clear and concessions were made.
For my folks, this came as a Captain Obvious moment they were just waiting for me to bring it to the table again like I had tried to do when I was 5 or 6 but was silenced rather than them being the ones to suggest such a preposterous notion or "plant ideas in my head" which is what they said when I became angry at their unblinking acceptance for knowing I was a girl all along and not having talked about it previously other than to let me know it was okay if I was gay. Like all the doctors I'd seen, I think they were hoping the whole thing would just eventually blow over? But it all made a lot of sense. Life
would have been easier for me if I was a girl because that's just what I'd grown up to be and what I'd always known myself to be. Unfortunately, this was all in 1970 so being actually able to transition in terms of changing names and pronouns as we think of it today was out of the question while a kid in school but now with my parents understanding and support in the direction my life was going, the beast was unleashed you might say in every other way.
What gender I was had always been questionable, obviously incongruent and the root of my issues but by the time I was 16 and the outer me and inner me came into closer alignment, gender ambiguity was no longer a problem for me. In addition to just my personality and manner, something I could never hide or change anyway, subtle cues like pierced ears, shaped brows, shaved legs, less gender neutral clothing and so on plus already having blonde pretty hair halfway down my back finds it hard for me to remember after that when strangers didn't gender me as a girl without them having to think about it or figure out what I was.
Nothing was the least bit different about me when I went to school where I was known by a boy's name and he/him. As you can imagine, I was somewhat in a league of my own you might say when trying to say things tactfully and downplay the social and emotional difficulties of being accepted as and treated like a girl everywhere else and just some queer, confusing and disgusting alien "it" in the academic environment. Every day was a challenge and I dreaded life and waking up in the morning knowing what I would have to go through. I was so lucky to have made it beyond my junior year without dropping out which to my parents was a hundred times more important to them than if I was a boy or a girl which had long since ceased to matter anyway.
It probably doesn't need pointing out but I was pretty screwed up, withdrawn, isolated, depressed and suicidal and really a wreck from having to go through this mind warping change in the way I was perceived on a nearly a daily basis. I was just your average teenage girl in most respects and was accepted and treated as such in all other parts of my life except by the kids and many of my teachers that had problems with that disturbing sick in the head boy that looked and acted like a girl.
I started HRT at the beginning of summer after my junior year when I was 17 and the changes took off quickly having never really had much in the way of natal puberty. By the time I graduated in 1973, I'd been on hormones for a year and passing and accepted as a girl outside of that environment for a couple years that just came naturally to me and I couldn't pass as a boy even if I'd tried by then since I never had before then anyway so my "transition" if you want to call it that was simply a matter of signing the paperwork. I had new IDs with my correct name and gender the week after getting my HS diploma. I got my first job a few months later in an office as a receptionist/gal Friday with none of what I'd been through in life ever known.
I had more or less spent the first 18 years of my life in transition dealing with all the awkward, painful and humiliating things you can imagine as someone might in my situation with the whole world not only watching but pointing fingers. I may have lived the rest of my life successfully and comfortably in stealth and been fortunate and given a lot of unusual and against the grain opportunities when I was a kid but if anyone thinks I or other kids like me somehow have things easy, handed to us on a silver platter or that things were a cakewalk because we're young and have family support, perhaps it's best to reconsider? Kids can be absolutely savage to one another and without the maturity of a fully developed adult mind and experience and the difficulty of being a teenager in general on top of all this makes our "easy" transitions not as simple as they might seem. If you're a kid that doesn't have the understanding and support of their family, it's not like you can get a divorce and start your life over on your own so have a little respect for the fact our journeys, while possibly seeming easier do have their own set of challenges that are often under appreciated.
Getting out of high school, away from that environment and those people and once being able to blend quietly into the world and have a reasonably normal life as a young woman, girl next door, coworker and eventually wife, the awkward, painful and humiliating things to anywhere near that earlier degree have never been experienced again.
Oops! Another long post. Sorry about that.
