Quote from: MaryT on November 16, 2018, 12:32:50 PM
I am guessing that when Lisa transitioned in her teens, openly trans people were too rare to form a community.
I grew up thinking there was no one else on the planet like me and had no words or concepts to understand anything other than I was a girl in spite of the obvious contradictory evidence that said otherwise. In the 5th grade, I came across the word ->-bleeped-<- in a dictionary and even though it wasn't really close, I figured I must be something like that and I thought the whole thing was pretty weird. I just went on being my normal self that wasn't enough boy to ever be seen or accepted as one and not enough girl to be one of them either and just figured I was somehow caught in the middle at least as far as others perceived me but inside, I knew and have always known who I am and did whatever I could to show that to the world.
By the 7th grade, what gender I was had become even harder for people to figure out and kids has started calling me names like queer and homo and for a time, I wondered if I really was gay even though I didn't like boys at all and avoided them because they were such total dicks to me and later in life would try to kill me but I didn't really like girls either, at least not that way, they were just who were on the side of the fence to which I belonged.
I had no "community" growing up. I didn't even have words or an understanding of what I was other than a girl that was somehow victim of a grand cosmic mistake and I couldn't imagine that there was anyone else on the entire planet like me that felt the things I did or was in a situation like mine. At least when I was "officially" diagnosed at 17, after years and years talking to clueless doctors, I had an understanding of my condition and a name for it and the language to talk about it. I wasn't really happy about it but it explained a lot why I had always struggled so hard and things had been so difficult for me growing up as a boy that never really passed as one.
Because there wasn't really a lot of information available, all I'd ever heard about people changing sex was the Christine Jorgensen story and while it was nice to know that such things were actually possible, it was like some far off fairytale land and I just couldn't relate or put myself in the same category. My life had been so different. According to my parents, my spirit and my true nature was something that was "always known" and I was nurtured as a child and not forced to inhibit my sense of who I was or my personality which is probably the most unusual aspect of my life considering this was in the 1960's and the problems it caused for me socially at school. I had no connection to anyone else in the world that might be having the problems I was having, the feelings I was having or was in a situation anything like mine at all. There simply was nobody else like me and if there was, there was simply no way to know about it so I grew up with this with just me, my mom and step-dad and eventually a doctor I could talk to about it with. The dark ages truly were.
The word transitioning that we use today as a verb wasn't neatly organized into a concept back then as it is now. What they really wanted you to do was blend into the world with the recommended path being to move to a new city and start life over as your new self as kind of an all or nothing proposition but this strategy didn't account for trans youth because we really hadn't been recognized as even being a conceivable thing at the time and there was no sort of roadmap what to do with us.
At any rate, socially I was really out there on the spectrum way past what today we'd probably label non-binary leaning toward the feminine side when, besides my already long blonde hair, I started what we'd now call the start of my physical transition kicking into high gear when I was 15. As probably the biggest spectacle anyone had ever seen, I graduated high school after being on HRT for a year and immediately went "full time" which was all such an anti-climactic, non-event and a relief to everyone.
Still, having survived through my brutal and violent school years and being accepted into the mainstream world as just a regular teenage girl, life still seemed very surreal and that there couldn't possibly be anyone else as strange as I was.
It wasn't until four years later when I was 22 and checked into the hospital for SRS that I had ever met or spoken to another trans person in my whole life. I wasn't alone after all but they weren't quite the same as me. None of them were young or grew up not hiding or not being able to hide who they were growing up and much as I had disconnected from the Christine Jorgensen story and couldn't relate, it was much the same with them and I never really felt any kind of sense of community or commonality other than we'd come from vastly different directions but mostly ended up in the same place.
I was more at home as part of the cisgender world and that was the circle I lived in. I had met gay and lesbian friends and kind of identified with them to some degree as just being different and felt a bit of comradeship on that front and although I did have a few of close both straight and queer friends that knew, I was not open or out about being trans and it wasn't really a thing so I never met or had the opportunity to meet or interact with any other people of trans experience.
I think it's human nature to seek out others like ourselves or to try to make connections and probably around the late 70's somewhere, (I had SRS in 1977) I was subscribed to a couple of newsletter type things that came in the mail which was the main way I learned about people like me but much of it was geared for the cross-dresser crowd and drag queen crowd because transsexual people really hadn't formed any sort of collective identity. After all, we were expected to blend into the woodwork and disappear so I became disenchanted with it all and since I didn't even want to be trans in the first place, I just closed my eyes to it all. Well before I had met my future husband at 29, I was so assimilated into the world and comfortable with my body, having anything at all to do with "trans" fell completely off my radar
for like the next 20 years.
After having been through a divorce and failed 5-year relationship after that in my late 40's, I went through a period of self-discovery and began to realize there was now this online world where other trans people were gathered and talked and as this was new to me, I took interest. I ended up meeting and getting to know a couple of local ladies and their friends for a few months which was a learning experience for me but things didn't work out because something about them was different or because they saw something different about me and it created tension and maybe jealousy? I learned to not care too much for and maybe be a little bit leery of older transitioners because it had proven to be a complicated dynamic with awkward situations so I once again withdrew into the shadows of non-trans awareness...
until I was 60 years old.
Totally by chance in a completely unrelated online forum, I met and got to know a 20-year old university student talking about her life growing up trans to try to educate and help others understand and we formed a friendship that changed me and changed the way I thought of myself and what I went through during my school years. For the first time in my life, I'd gotten to know somebody that was like me, that grew up like I did and fought the same battles and faced the same challenges at the same times in our lives and it was a revelation in acceptance and self-understanding.
I'm sure many of you here are looking for your own sense of community or where you fit into this whole big messy picture and I'm sure many of you here have found that sense of comradeship in others going through the same things dealing with coming out, family, marriages, transition and so on and that's a wonderful thing for you but from my perspective, the things that bond many of you together are the things that make me feel like more of an outlier.
Surely there are things we all do have in common or we probably wouldn't be here and it's not like I don't see a little of myself in all of you but most of the time it all just helps reinforce how much different my life has really been from those that did have to grow up hiding and repressing and did their best to play the part to fit into society and the world or didn't figure things out until later in life.
Disregarding any unpopular theories tied into sexuality and particularly not making value judgments of one over the other, does it not seem like there are two types of trans people? Without overcomplicating things, the most prominent distinction to me is if we went through this trans business at the same times in our lives, how much of our childhood and adolescence was affected by it getting there and how involved our parents were. In my tenure here, one young woman matched my "timeline" and life growing up almost to a tee and one other with unsupportive family that had to wait until she was 18 and neither are active anymore it seems so I really don't have some grand sense of community or of fitting in around here either.
So true, as an isolated kid growing up, into my teens, through transition and then into my early 20's, outside of things I'd read, I didn't realize real trans people actually existed in the real world until meeting them with my own eyes so maybe you can imagine what that was like growing up in a bubble and dealing with all this without the knowledge, experiences and wisdom of others that had come before me?
Being trans and by default grouped into the transgender community, particularly this one, finds me still isolated and alone although granted, more broadly knowledgeable and with a greater understanding about the different ways this condition has affected other's lives. It's hard to say if I had known about other trans kids growing up or even if doctors had known about us how that might have changed things? Perhaps I would have taken some comfort knowing that I wasn't the only one but when it comes right down to it, it seems likely that there wouldn't have been too many of us from my generation to know about in the first place? It does make me wonder though how many kids that were like me during the era I grew up that were sheltered away and kept hidden from society or simply didn't survive?
Needless to say that because I am posting here and thinking about this stuff, I'm still processing some of the things I went through as a kid because it's all pretty unimaginable but I really can't over think or over analyze too much because growing up with the family I had that loved and accepted me for me has always seemed like karma's way of balancing out nature's cruel mistake of being born male in the first place and it's probably best to not look a gift horse too closely in the mouth. For being born cursed, I have truly been blessed, fortunate and extremely privileged. I really haven't needed others to make me see this.
