Quote from: pamelatransuk on December 19, 2018, 07:12:13 AM
Hello again Everyone
I hope you don't mind me raising this point about childhood experiences as I have never seen anyone else refer to it and I find it hard to believe I am the only trans person to have thought it. Although number 4, it is serious and very relevant to me.
4. I was able to count before starting school at age 5 of course, and certainly by age 7 I was aware of halves and quarters. Therefore by age 7 I really believed there must be 4 equal gender groups:
a) Girls who wished to be girls
b) Boys who wished to be boys
c) Girls who wished to be boys
d) Boys who wished to girls I was obviously a member of group d)
I was correct to assume that as we all now know but I also thought that each group would probably have an equal proportion meaning around 25% in each group! How naïve and how pessimistic could I have been!
Anyone else recall thinking this as part of the wonderful fantasy of childhood please?
Thanking you and wishing you all a Happy Christmas.
Hugs
Pamela
I didn't see myself even as part of group d until I was eight. Until then, I thought that I was part of another group, i.e. girls whose parents force them to dress as boys. When I was about four, while explaining why I couldn't be called Mary, my mother told me that she knew that I was a boy because boys have different teeth from girls. I never quite believed her and although I spent a lot of time looking at teeth, I thought that the only differences between boys and girls were that girls had different names, wore dresses, had longer hair and played the games that I liked. Clearly, I never discussed male and female anatomy with boys or girls but why would I, when the differences between boys and girls seemed so obvious? Also, I was alone a lot as I didn't like playing with boys and teachers and parents didn't approve of me playing with girls. As I thought that it was just hair and clothes that defined gender, when my parents saw my early cross-dressing (although I didn't see it as such), I was often naked (cross-undressing?) except for my mother's headscarf.
I understand that not all trans children are, or were, embarrassed at being seen while expressing their true selves. It is a good thing when such innocence (I don't mean it as an insult and I don't mean naivety) survives into adulthood. I am not yet convinced that it is because of the innate qualities of the child, though. I wasn't embarrassed or ashamed in those early days when for me, cross-dressing (for want of a better word) meant going naked except for a woman's headscarf. Fear, shame and embarrassment have to be instilled in us by other people.
When I was eight, I made a plasticine model of a nude woman and showed it to my mother. I think that I was trying to shock her. I never really noticed breasts (my having been bottle fed may have been the reason) and the model was basically of an anatomically correct boy with long hair. It was me that got the shock and I have never recovered, as my mother explained that women and girls did not have willies. A few months later, a Playboy magazine appeared in the spare room where my toys were kept. For many years, I presumed that it was left there by mistake and it is only since the deaths of my parents that I realised that it was probably their idea of sex education. Although I found the centrefold fascinating, I didn't learn much from a 1964 Playboy. My mother had told me what girls didn't have but it was several more years before I learned what they did have.
Having eventually realised that treating me as a boy was not simply my parents' lifestyle choice, I really did try to be a boy. I loved my parents and wanted to please them. I adored my father and it made him visibly happy when I did boy things. I couldn't help myself, though, and when my parents found me wearing my mother's clothes, my father's quiet disappointment hurt even more than my mother's scathing insults.
Yes, like most trans people who feel that there is no future in which they can stop pretending to be other than what they are, I contemplated suicide. I never threatened anyone with it, though and I'm sure that if I had it would have resulted in my institutionalisation, not in SRS. Institutionalisation was certainly on the cards at one time and I was left with a fear and distrust of psychiatrists. Yes, the alternative to being oneself is soul destroying and to be truthful, I feel that I am not a trans woman but the ghost of a trans woman. Not that there were never joys in life. I especially loved exploring nature and viewing wildlife. Having interests outside of oneself does help. Even so, I'm sure that I would go insane if I didn't have the ghost of my mother's dog to talk to (yes, I know what you are thinking). Being one's true self is necessary for mental health.
It must be remembered that my parents did not really have a choice in how they reacted to my expressing myself as a girl. It was not just their personal feelings or upbringing. In the country where I lived, gatherings of more than two cross-dressers were arrested for constituting an illegal "homosexual party". My mother was among those who believed that "impersonating a woman" was a criminal offence and I believed her at the time. My parents' attitudes must have at least in part have been down to concern for my welfare. Even in my teens, I could see their point. At least by my mid twenties, I had only read of one AMAB person living in that country as a full-time woman, and she worked in sheltered employment for people regarded as mentally deficient. She made the news because she had been chosen for experimental sex change surgery.
As a more extreme example of why I believe that trans children in some environments MUST quickly learn to fear the consequences of being seen expressing their true nature, I only have to draw attention to existing members of Susan's Place (and those whom I hope are still existing):
Finally escaping Saudi Arabia to Safety For some people, being "caught" cross-dressing means just that, and it can be the difference between life and death.
