I already did an introductory posting, but crossed signals this morning reminded me that I wanted to do a background dump someplace I can link back to it for future reference. I hope this is a reasonable place to do that...
===
I sometimes forget that while I know my history, others are not so fortunate.
So here's a bit of biography, to set context for posts about what I'm up to now.
I'm in my mid-40s, and am a happy resident of the Pacific Northwest - I love me some temperate conditions and some rain. So it's good that I'm here. I live alone with one cat, and often give thanks that he doesn't have opposable thumbs, because if he did, it'd be all over for me as the authority in this household. I'm a late bloomer when it comes to realizing my gender identity, and the major reason for that is ongoing disability.
Very long biographical exposition ensues. Readers may wish to secure a meal or a nap before embarking.
The Disability SideI was the sort of boy that reading tells me a fair number of trans women are: awkward in a lot of social situations, and with a sense of not belonging where I'd been put, but without the clear-cut sense of wanting to be a girl that some have early on. I might have gotten a clue much sooner than I did except that one summer in my teens, my immune system burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp. I went from fit and vigorous at the start of the summer - marching band, mountain hiking, getting my lifeguard's certfication - to so weak I couldn't stand up for more than two steps at the end of it. I had the sort of symptoms that'll be familiar to victims of many systemic illnesses, including the chronic pain that doesn't respond to normal treatments, the mental and emotional disorientation, the grinding fatigue. I had to drop out of school for a year of not especially productive testing and treatment efforts.
I did recover enough strength to manage my last two years of high school on half days, skipping PE and testing out of some subjects. Then I worked part-time for a year, with more testing and treatment, and went off to college. The next two years were the best of my life. I was active and outgoing, even though beneath it all there was still a steady current of feeling just plain out of place somehow. A wonderful woman I shared classes with fell in love with me and pursued me (first time that ever happened to me), and we began a relationship that's continued in one form another, through active phases and quiet, right up to the present.
Then the bottom fell out of my life, again, and worse. I was probably as sick as I'll ever be this side of death in my junior year, with a different array of symptoms, including interference with the creation of new memories and the muddling of old ones. So there's a lot I don't remember about that year and the next - I recall pain and states of anguish more than any details. My parents and a few fantastic friends made heroic efforts to keep me together and get help for me. More testing (without much result), more treatments (ditto), and gradually I slid into the awareness that I was not in fact ever going to get back to where I'd been, nor likely ever get close.
After that came changes at a slower pace: getting onto SSI, and the first of several efforts at finding relatively comfortable and safe places to live. My 20s gave way to my 30s, and I discovered that I could do some writing from time to time. I've now got several horror novels and a lot of writing in the roleplaying game world to my birth name. I had an uptick in my mid-30s and was able to be able out a bit more.
Starting about 5-6 years ago, I fell into another major slump, which has come close to rivaling that one in college. I blew several contracts badly, got depressed, lost a lot of strength and endurance, got more depressed, was stuck unable to visit my parents (who are great, and whom I love dearly) as Dad sickened and then died, got hit hard by grieving, and down I went. It's in the last few months that I've started digging out again.
The Queer SideThis part will sound familiar: I've always been muddled about my orientation. My first relationship, which hasn't been sexual in a long time but remains romantic, was with a woman, and so were two more later. Two others have been with men. All of them had their satisfactions - "+1, would sleep with again", and all that. I don't regret any of them. But each one had its moment of feeling just plain not right in practice.
This has sometimes been kind of a problem. For most of my adult life, my libido's run pretty high, but nothing I tried actually doing about it ever felt like as much gratification as it should be. I'm also very strongly of romantic temperament. But that's also felt not quite right, even with the people I've been closest to.
Since in practical terms I go years on end without any opportunity for romance except long-distance and without any opportunity for sex at all, this has often sat simmering in the back of my mind.
The Trans SideI took much longer I would now like to sort through my gender identity because I kept having other things, both obvious and important, commanding my attention when it came to thinking about why I felt uncomfortable with my self. Feelng shy and awkward? Being seriously allergic to lots of common foods and dozens of common commercial chemicals can do that all by itself, since I have to probe carefully, be constantly ready to flee to some safe spot after unexpected exposures, and like that. Feeling alienated from peers and things they take for granted? Well, yeah, major weakness, limited coordination, and chronic and variable pain will do that all by themselves, too.
But signs were there all along, starting with my profound unease at being in boys' (and then mens') locker rooms and other male social spaces, and the observation that my whole life, I've dreamed of myself as female except in nightmares, when I'm always male. I've always been more or less just plain uncomfortable in my skin, and worse when sickness piles up.
What really got me thinking that I had to grapple with the body loathing for true was this last few years' slump. I realized gradually that I felt no motivation to get better, insofar as that meant getting back to where I'd been. Fitter? Stronger immune system? More of a life outside the apartment? Why bother with any of that, when I'd still be sick and ill at ease with everything? I got to the point where, to be honest, I scared myself with my degree of detachment. I knew I needed something or I'd die of self-neglect—suicide by depraved indifference, so to speak.
In parallel with this increasing loss of interest in struggling back to the same old, same old, I felt increasinly intense and wide-ranging misandrist impulses. It would take a whole long separate post to show that I do know the difference between biology and culture when it comes to shaping gender norms and that I don't really, deep down, think it's fair to blame a whole sex for the evil deeds of particular subcultures. But the '00s were such a horror show of the worst in masculinity unleashed, and I noticed that my response wasn't just "I want this to stop" but "I want to be away from this, to be less like them than I feel compelled by biology to be now". That roused my self-curiosity.
Last year I started doing a serious mental inventory of the interior and exterior qualities I did like that I already had, and that seemed worth cultivating. It's at this point that I crossed paths with some advocacy for genderqueer ways of living, and I found them appealing right away. Yes! They made sense to me: make a virtue of the fact that I was already irrevocably walled off from standard masculinity and set about assembling a new locus for myself out of where I am.
The more I read, the more I noticed myself feeling most comfortable with a lot of bits over on the girls' side. The tipping point came when I read Julia Serano's
Whipping Girl and I realized that the suite of qualities that she summed up under the heading "femininity" is in fact what I want, and what I've wanted for a long time without knowing it. As this realization dawned, friends (who had no idea what had been going on in my head) started commenting almost immediately that I seemed happier and less stressed, and that when I did get down again, I got back up more quickly and effectively.
The thought "I should have been a woman" snapped into focus as an explanation for a whole of things. The matching thought "I can see just how far I can get toward being that woman now" is what's driving me on, giving me that sense of hopefulness that people I deal with keep noticing.
ProspectsIt's a hard road ahead. Maybe even the dark road Annie Lennox sings about.
The truth is that I have no idea, at all, how much physical change my body can take. I'll walk through the prospects in a sort of backward order.
Surgery would be horribly risky right now. There are so many chemical threats to my immune system in the hospital environment; my medical case file has big warnings in several places about the desirability of avoiding anesthetics wherever possible at all, for instance.
Hormones will be nearly as iffy. My body does so many wildly inappropriate things. I'll have to go at them very, very carefully. (Likely with herbal ones to test-drive early impressions.)
But before I get to those, I've really got some serious getting in shape to do. I am way overweight. It's a major reason I got introspective in the first place, with family history that makes heart disease, diabetes, and other complications real risks. I'm estimating that, based on past experience with successful weight loss, it'll take a solid 2-3 years to get to a weight that's not just safer but desirable to me. And certainly no point in stopping sort of that.
I need to get established with a new doctor, and I'm so dreading it. My case file is
big, and going over it all is deeply depressing. It has to be done, but I'm taking my time researching possibilities. I've already done the thing where I work up my nerve, do the intro presentation and suffer its wear and tear, and then find the doctor not really interested after all, and don't feel like I have it in me to do that again. And when I do go in, I feel I need to be able to say with a straight face that, yes, I'm applying the advice already given to me about weight, diet, exercise, supplements, and the like. It would be a terrible waste of resources all around to have to say anything like "Oh, yeah, they told me that in 1992 but I sort of never quite got around to it."
So this is my year of getting started: time to learn a lot, start identifying choices I'll have to make, make sure I clear old debts as fast as I can so that I have the prospect of more available money to save, get my head set on right. I don't plan on doing a general coming out yet, but there some trusted friends who deserve to know, begin experiments in the parts of presentation I can control here and now, like voice. Next year will be the year of continuing progresss: work on the weight, get set with a new doctor if I'm not by the end of this year, be well into practice with presentation. After that? All I know now is that I don't know yet, but I hope for good stuff.
And that's where I'm coming from. (This is why commercial writers are so dangerous. We keep acting as if we're being paid by the word.)
