I am on the brink of becoming everything I ever wanted to be in terms of my soul, my spirit being able to be set free.
I am in transition from an oppressed unhappy individual perceived by most of society as a gender I am not to being seen as nothing but what I am, just another guy.
This has been an incredibly long journey and it is not without struggle along the way, not without much misery, not without suffering pain but that this fact alone makes me no different from that of thousands upon thousands of other transexuals is in my mind especially considering the fact that we are now living in the 21st century shocking to say the least.
The simple fact is that the information that needs to be out there reaching the the people who need it most is not out there and is not reaching those people. People like myself who could have benefited from education and information on these issues at a much earlier age than my eventual emotional watershed at the (relatively) late age of 27.
I have, my whole life felt an outsider, a freak, misfit, a weirdo call it what you will I have always in the back of my mind and sometimes in the front felt accutely that I did not belong, that I did not fit that something about me just was not right.
Although I can clearly remember being occasionally aware that there was supposed to be some difference between those perceived to be female and those perceived to be male when I was as young as maybe 5 or 7 years old this did not impact upon me perhaps because I was an extremely wilful child who would do pretty much as they pleased anyway. I benefited from the relatively androgenous way society on the whole tends to treat children oh yes there are the sports meets and the ballet lessons but I ran bare chested along the shoreline then with my fellow brothers without a care in the world.
It was only later, at puberty when even my own body begun to betray me that the great dividing line of gender and all its implications began to fully impact upon me. As a result I struggled through a pretty miserable adolescence, unhappy and uncomfortable in my own body while my soul, my spirit longed to be free. I craved to act just as a man did and to be treated as such, taken seriously not mocked or questioned because as a transexual albeit unknowingly I of course felt just as a man did.
My unhappiness was such that I desperately wished that I was a lesbian because in that culture it seemed that there was at least more possibility for someone such as I to be treated if not as a man as a masculine figure.
I wished this desperately despite not being sexually attracted to women because the soul craves freedom, liberation and one will always eventually gravitate to acting in accordance to what feels natural for the self.
Eventually although I came to terms with the fact that I was not actually a lesbian my sexuality still did not sit well with me as I had yet to make peace with my gender identity.
This unhappiness took its toll both mentally and physically leading to self harm, depression, body dysmorphia and severe anorexia the latter form which I still suffer adverse health effects to this day.
I must stress here the importance of trans education and consciousness raising a subject I feel strongly about and which I feel would have prevented me many years of unnecessary misery and pain. Information should be, must be made available not to convert but to inform others like myself that there is another way, another possibilty for them to exist, that they are not freaks of nature, that something does make sense for them.
The advent of the internet I believe will go a long way to making this information available but I feel we as trans people collectively have a duty to educate and inform not only those like us but the general public as much as we can on these issues to ensure that those coming after us do not suffer as we have.
This to me makes sense of the pain I, we have suffered and I see now that perhaps there is indeed a reason for the struggle I have endured if only I can prevent 1 other person from enduring the misery of alienation that I felt.
There is a happy end to this story as I now type this to you I ahve been on testosterone for 3 months now and finally my voice has broken (although it still has some way to go) and the dreaded indignity of monthly bleeding has ceased. Hormonally at least I am undoubtedly male, mentally I have always been that way.
It took a simple magazine article on FTM transexualism for me to connect with myself and to open the floodgates, unbelievably now Female to Male transexualism was a subject I had not heard of or considered before as I knew nothing of it.
But on reading the stories of FTm's whose voices seemed to resonate so much with my own I broke down as finally something seemed to click into place and it all made sense, all the years in the wilderness, the sense of not fitting even into my own body, the years of depression of insecurity, of living on the internet behind a male personna that I so desperately yearned to be mine and yet felt I could not even hope for.
I am angry as I do feel that society in some part has a vested interest in keeping this information from some of us, I admit I am angry at having to go through that which I absolutely know I would not have had to endure had what I know now been presented at least as a possibilty to me. I am angry but I am not bitter for I am, at last at peace with myself now.
Yet even now today we live in an extremely transphobic and homophobic society one in which we are judged and expected to play by heterosexual, cisgendered standards when they do not, cannot and never will appy to us.
I at least hope to add my voice to the cause of raising trans awareness, to be a testament if nothing else of the transexual experience and to educate wherever I can so that trans visibility and consciousness is raised.
Look they will try and tear you down, they will try and ridicule you, invalidate you, those that don't understand transexualism you but you must for your own sake endure, you must stand firm, you must be who you are.
Together we can endure and we can, must help others to endure it also.
Peace and I hope eventually all like us may find the courage and strength to become their fullest selves.
