Being Transsexual is Like ...

[Terra]

...is like wearing the wrong clothes. Everyone may like your style and your look but you just feel like an idiot. Then when you change your outfit everyone has to tell you how much they hate it or how much they liked your old look better.

[Nero]

Being tortured physically, chemically, psychologically, and spiritually - only nobody's doing the torturing. It's real, it's happening to you, only nobody's doing it, and you're not doing it. At least with other forms of torture, abuse, or imprisonment, other people can have eyes and ears to it. And there's some hope that somehow, someday someone will help you. Make it stop. But with this, it's all coming from inside you. And that alone drives you nuts.

Or maybe I'm describing puberty. After puberty, it's like Stockholm's.


Disclaimer: Not trying to make light of what some torture victims have really gone through, it's just the closest feeling I can come up with.

[Blanche]

No, I think she's looking for a simile.*  

* as though there's a meaningful difference between simile and metaphor

Yes there is, but cut me some slack, will you?  English isn't my first language; it's actually my fourth. 

I'm Swiss!


Since I mentioned 'metaphor', I'll give you one, KB.

Transsexualism was a fire that was consuming me inside.

[Northern Jane]

... imagine a girl that would be raised as a boy...

That's very good Joandelynn!

I had SRS and 'transitioned' at 24 a LONG time ago and a short time later I looked back at my childhood and saw how all the pain and confusion was exactly that - a very normal girl's response trying to deal with to a horrible situation. Any normal girl would have responded exactly the same way and gone through exactly the same feelings.

[Krissy_Australia]

Kate
You are not born transxual. Its how you are brought up,
Im female treated as a male and I hate it.

[Dawn D.]

Being a transexual is like feeling trapped in a lightless hallway groping for the door of escape. If your lucky enough to find the right door, your reward is freedom.


Dawn

[Sandy]

Kate
You are not born transxual. Its how you are brought up,
Im female treated as a male and I hate it.

I don't want to derail this thread, but the whole nature vs nurture argument is still out but there is some very significant early evidence that it is more nature than nurture.

In other words, it is not all about how we are brought up.  Were that the case, I would not have had to transition at all...

Perhaps I have misinterpreted your meaning, if so I apologize.

-Sandy

[Krissy_Australia]

Hi Sandy
I meant I was born female, transexual is the term used because thats how society sees me and thats how Ive been treated

[Miniar]

Transsexual simply means that your brain and your crotch(and chest) don't match (the current scientific information available supports this supposition anyway).
It's a birth-defect, and as such, it stems from birth, not nurture.

[Lachlann]

Being a transexual is like feeling trapped in a lightless hallway groping for the door of escape. If your lucky enough to find the right door, your reward is freedom.


Dawn

Oh I really like that one.

[jesse]

"silent Lucidity" your vary lucid to the pain suffering and inability to look in the mirror and not want to slit your wrists yet its all in silence no one knows very few care and with each passing day your soul dies just a little more
jessica

[Dana_W]

"silent Lucidity" your vary lucid to the pain suffering and inability to look in the mirror and not want to slit your wrists yet its all in silence no one knows very few care and with each passing day your soul dies just a little more

What Jessica said.

[Chamillion]

"Being a transsexual is Like... "

... Being the only human being on the face of the planet that sees the colour blue and finding yourself forced to explain the colour of the sky to everyone who's remotely involved in your life.

wow Miniar I really like this

as for how being a transsexual feels, since I've never been non trans, I wouldn't really know how to describe it cos I have nothing to compare it to 

[Arch]

It's a lot like Freud's Unheimliche--uncanny.

Remember that show Quantum Leap from the eighties? Sam would "leap" into another person's body and live that person's life for a short time, then leap into someone else. There was always a moment when he would see his own reflection--but it wasn't his own reflection; it was a reflection of the body he was occupying at that moment. I loved this show not just because it was science fiction and pretty good but also because every day of his life Sam had to pretend to be someone else, just as I was doing in my own life. And he had to have that moment of looking in the mirror and seeing what everyone else saw...but it was someone else, not him. Nobody ever saw him.

Nobody ever saw me.

[placeholdername]

I'm still very hesitant about this word 'transsexual'.  I know a lot of us use it, but I'm a bit of a word nut and at least when applied to me, it doesn't feel accurate.  I don't mean that I feel any different than most of the people here, but sometimes words sneak into our vocabulary and we use them without taking a deeper look at what's behind them.

My issue is this: what exactly is 'trans' about being 'transsexual'?  Dictionary.com gives this definition for the prefix 'trans-':

1. a prefix occurring in loanwords from Latin (transcend; transfix); on this model, used with the meanings "across," "beyond," "through," "changing thoroughly," "transverse," in combination with elements of any origin: transisthmian; trans-Siberian; transempirical; transvalue.

Now, for people who are on the outside watching us, I can see how things like 'across' or 'changing thoroughly' could make sense when applied to our sex/gender situation.  But from my perspective, on the inside, there's nothing 'across' or 'beyond' or 'changing thoroughly' about my sex/gender situation.  I'm just me, I've always been me, it's just I've spent 27 years playing the part in a script that other people have given me.  I mean this is what happens to 99% of people: the doctor pulls you out of the womb and looks between your legs.  Depending on whats there, they say 'boy' or 'girl' and that defines the entirety of your experience for the rest of your life, not because it says anything about you, but because everyone else in the world will treat you one way or another because of what the doctor said.

So for me, 'being transsexual is like' having the courage to tell everyone in the world, you know what, the doctor was wrong, and I'm done playing by his/her script for my life.  And by 'tell' I mean either through words (which some of us are okay with), or just action and presentation (for those of us who may want to put past gender scripts behind us).

As for the word 'transsexual', people can use it for me if it helps them talk about me without tripping over themselves, but it's not a word I use for myself.

[Janet_Girl]

trans-:

1. a prefix occurring in loanwords from Latin (transcend; transfix); on this model, used with the meanings "across," "beyond," "through," "changing thoroughly," "transverse," in combination with elements of any origin: transisthmian; trans-Siberian; transempirical; transvalue.

sexual:

1 : of, relating to, or associated with sex or the sexes <sexual differentiation> <sexual conflict>

Based on these two then transsexual is changing thoroughly ones sex.  Which means then being a transsexual is like changing one sex.  But I am not changing my sex, I have always been a woman,  I am only changing my genitals.  I am actually Transgenital, or better yet Transgendered?

Whichever I am only changing the package, so does that make me Transpackaging?  ~giggles~

Being Transsexual is like having a 450 cid engine in a Tank.  It gets the job done, but it would be better in a slick hot Maserati.  Vroom Vroom Boys.


Janet

[placeholdername]

I mean, you could say some people are transblonde or transbrunette .

The other thing I don't like about the word is that it comes with a bunch of externally imposed negative connotations, and one particular slur in specific.  I'm of the mind that we should do away with all of the labels -- by saying 'I am X', it just puts up a divider -- some people are X and some people aren't X, and human nature just leads to conflict in any of those situations.

I am not transsexual, or homosexual, or heterosexual, or transgender, or WBT, or bisexual, or christian, or atheist, or agnostic, or muslim, or man, or woman, or boy, or girl, or any other divisive word.  I'm just me.

[Janet_Girl]

So true, Ketsy.  So true


Janet

[Tammy Hope]

Id love for there to be a word that didn't have "sexual" in it and didn't imply some variability in our innate gender but I don't know what it would be. Perhaps someone who knows latin could come up with something that means "appearance mismatched with identity" or something...

[june bug]

I like the catch-all word of simply "trans" by itself, because the transitional experience is something I feel I share most in common with other trans-people.

I also agree that having the word "sexual" involved just has all kinds of horrible connotations associated with it I'd rather not have non-trans people floating around their heads.

... and same with "gender" because it implies that there was a gender that could be pinpointed as being the "right" or "wrong" state of being and... *phew* ... it's just confusing as hell to explain to people.

Anyhow.