Quote from: Kirsteneklund7 on December 15, 2018, 12:38:56 AM
The story always reminds me of a good friend of mine that never transitioned. As a child she often wore girls clothes- but not to school.
As a teenager she seamlessly lived full time as female - surgery and hormones fixed the minor detail. I think she must have transitioned as a baby(lol).
In her life she felt nothing shameful or unusual about dressing as a girl- even though her brothers and father disagreed. She simply expressed her natural self and knew no other way.
She and I have had some interesting discussions about how her experience of being trans is quite different to my experience.
She never fought herself over being male or female- she just was.
Kirsten, this sounds so much like how things were for me. Your first line about your friend having never transitioned really grabbed me because that's how I see my life and I sometimes think it's almost hard to grasp for some here what this was really like. I've kind of had to just pick out certain things or events to define the concept of transition so that others would understand it in a common way but it seems as seamless to me as it was moving in the world as a girl full time after I got out of high school. Things just happened as if some unseen force was organically driving them. Any sort of before and after is largely indiscernible beyond the obvious change of name and paperwork as I never had to learn how to be a girl or be feminine or change my behavior, personality or even my appearance that much and I never had to unlearn how to be a boy either having never acquired those attributes, whatever they are, in the first place. What came out was just me. As a boy, that was too much of a girl to be perceived as one. I've posted enough recently for many of you to be familiar with my story (if you've ever managed to wade through my lengthy posts) but another line from your comments about your friend;
"she simply expressed her natural self and knew no other way" describes me perfectly.
I've read through this thread and heard things like embarrassment, humiliation and punishment for getting caught and hiding your gender atypical behaviors and interests fearing repercussion from your parents, sibling, friends and peer group but this hiding simply wasn't an option for me nor was it something I ever tried to do. The whole concept of that escapes me but don't get the impression I don't know what you were hiding from.
I was a boy. I know the boy rules and I know the kind of familial and social pressures put on boys that don't follow those rules or don't fit into the club. I may even be more aware of these things than those that
were able to hide or fake it, save for your few close calls with getting caught and awkward moments because not following those rules and not fitting into the club was an inescapable part of my everyday life. This was not something internalized or hidden and very visible to others. I was a girl and wanted others to see me as one and to be one. That was my struggle.
I don't really like the term gender non-conforming because it insinuates that there are standards that need to be conformed to but if look at things from a 3rd party perspective and we want to fall back to some of those old Harry Benjamin concepts and terms, I was completely "pychosexually inverted" or cross-gender identified. In today's vernacular, I was an extremely gender dysphoric prepubescent child which in itself is a concept and mindset I have a hard time applying to myself. Then as now, I just understood myself to be a girl and I've lived my entire adult life in evidence of that and rather than hide, my challenges were to express that as clearly and as loudly as I could when I was a kid so that others
would share in my understanding. The things that most of you kept to yourself or tried to hide from your parents or whomever were the things I most wanted to them and the rest of the world to see in me. At least somehow my folks got it.
I knew no other way to be other than to just be myself and you might say I uninhibitedly and unconsciously wore my gender on my sleeve for the whole world to see but this just happened and wasn't something I did on purpose until I got older. I
wanted people to see me as a girl which to me wasn't something shameful or unusual because that's what I knew myself to be without any internal conflict or questioning about it.
Certainly my life was confusing but I wasn't stupid. I knew the parts I had made me a boy but I just couldn't understand why this had happened to me and how things could have ever mixed up so badly? How did me, a girl, end up in this predicament was the biggest question I had and much of my young life was all about making sure everyone else did understood me the way that I understood myself. I never debated if I was a boy or a girl, or even considered it as a question - I was just who I was and who I've always been my entire life.
QuoteLisa_K I would love to be upset by one of your posts!
You may be one of the few with the patience to even read my novels. For some reason, this thread kicked off me writing a response over the course of several days that I only posted about a quarter of because it was painfully long even by my standards.
Yes, we do all have different experiences and ways we deal with our situation, no doubt.
