Hello there all!
I've always been a bit terrible at introducing myself, so bear with me here if you would, haha. I'm certainly not known for conciseness.
I've known something was not quite 'right' about my body my entire life, long before I knew the word transgender. I was lucky enough to have a punk for a mother, and so I was exposed to many different people from many different walks of life early on. That being said, I had never really made the connection between what I felt and dysphoria. Having been born female, I was socialized from an early age to believe that it was normal to hate my body, and that this was just something that all those designated female at birth experienced. As such, when I hit puberty I attributed the horror, the disgust, and the nausea at the changes that were occurring to my body to this, and the fear of change. Despite not having made that connection, I dressed exclusively in traditionally masculine clothing in order to cover my body in as many layers as possible so that I did not need to see what was happening to me.
I now know I'm somewhere on the autism spectrum, but have only come into this diagnosis as an adult. The result of this, unfortunately, is that I fit ill with my peers; I experienced horrific bullying growing up, partially for my 'weird' behaviours, and partially for this penchant to exclusively wear extremely oversized clothing. I believe, had it not been for the one time I removed my sweater during the hottest day of the year, that I would have realized much earlier on in my life that I was transgender. Shedding my sweater that day netted me positive attention - for the first time in my school years, my peers were nice to me. I began to crave this nicety - as any kid would, and so, I began to dress more femininely. I realized that if I performed this act of femininity for my peers, they would be kind to me - and so I pushed down my own misery and discomfort and acted as they wanted me to for years.
Well, as you might have guessed by the fact that I'm here, hiding behind a mask and lying to yourself rarely works out like you'd hope. I continued to deny that I could, in any way, be transgender - despite being an active part of my local LGBT community and having many other transgender friends, I refused to even consider the idea, because at the time I knew that I would never be accepted, nor would I 'pass' as it were, due to the shape of my body. I suppressed the idea of gender dysphoria and instead attributed it to severe body dysmorphia - in short, I attributed the hatred of the feminine characteristics of my body to the hatred of my weight. Eventually, my adolescent mental health struggles came to a head, and I found myself in a hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling. It was in that moment, half dead and hooked up to more wires than an old computer that I finally allowed myself the truth. I remember the exact thought crystal clearly to this day:
"->-bleeped-<-, I'm trans."
Oddly, though I wasn't particularly happy about this revelation at the time, knowing the difficulties I would face, as I slowly came out to close friends over the next few months - with a warm welcome - my mental health dramatically improved. It wasn't until a friend openly introduced me as 'he' that I realized, all of a sudden, that I was happy. Truly happy, for the first time in my life. As a teen I did not see a future for myself, because I had only imagined it as a woman - but as a man, even just among close friends, I had the desire to keep going. I wanted to live. And so live I have! Though there has been hiccups along the road - and admittedly a very long and ongoing pause with HRT after several years of being on it, mostly due to the difficulty in finding a doctor, I have been living life as a man - now completely stealth save to close friends - for almost eight years.
That being said, I certainly do feel isolated. As I began to pass completely, I lost a lot of my support network, and I find that many LGBT spaces geared to those in my age group are not a great fit. I often feel othered, not because I am openly trans as I had once feared, but because I refuse to divulge it and simply present as a gay man. I don't feel a sense of community in my community anymore. Outside my immediate circle of close friends and my fiancé, who is also trans, I don't discuss being transgender. This brings me here to you lovely people! It's been incredible reading over some of your accounts of your experiences, and I hope to keep an active presence here.
Sincerely and with some amount of apology for the absolute novel I've just written,
T
