Community Conversation => Transgender talk => Topic started by: blueberry pastry on August 04, 2026, 02:17:24 AM Return to Full Version
Title: That Night in January...
Post by: blueberry pastry on August 04, 2026, 02:17:24 AM
Post by: blueberry pastry on August 04, 2026, 02:17:24 AM
I was 17.
It was very well late into the night. My room was frigid and pitch black, save for the soft moonlight seeping through my window. I laid doubled over with an ache in my chest as my fingers gripped the sheets as if in agony. It used to be insignificant. This lack. I could ignore it. Sublimate it. I unconsciously did so for many years. However in the weeks prior, the lack took grip of me. It progressively became worse as my awareness increased until it was all I could think about.
"Please let me wake up as a girl." I prayed to God, still holding out an ounce of belief in the extraordinary. I wished with everything in my heart each night and I'd wake up thoroughly disappointed by day.
Prayer was the best I could do, because to become a girl was an impossibility to me in the same way water cannot turn into wine. In the face of an impossibility, one can only be agonizingly disappointed, like love never destined to be.
That night in January, a question I had never thought about nor asked before materialized from seemingly nothing. I had never even seen the question asked nor answered seriously because of my self-imposed digital and social isolation.
"Is it possible to become a girl?" I hesistantly typed on my computer as my heart pounded.
It turns out it is. And so I felt the greatest excitement, like a child on Christmas. I hadn't been so happy in years.
"Magic is real!!" I immediately typed in a note with glee.
But in that very excitement, I suddenly felt a very, very deep weight settle in my chest from the implications of my own excitement.
"I know I want this bodily change, but I cannot guarantee every consequence."
This is the dichotomy I've struggled with these past four years.
There is no one more vehemently against my transition than I.
I can attest to that because I've had a hidden agenda in my own introspection and self-exploration these past four years I've only now identified.
I have ruthlessly, in my search for self-understanding, have been implicitly searching for something that would disprove my desire for femininity. I had implicitly hoped that I would find something that would make everything fall apart. A contradiction, a complex, an insecurity, a character flaw, a mental illness. Something that would allow me to dispel the excitement I felt that night, forever. Months ago, I reached the ceiling of what introspection can achieve without a framework. I made the following observations out of exhaustion because for several months prior I had finally hit a dead end.
1. I do not seek to fundamentally change as a person. Likewise, I do not want to be treated as a fundamentally different person.
2. I desire for change in my body towards femininity.
- This is persistent regardless of internal state and repression does not solve anything.
- Anxiety acts as a reliable inhibitor of this desire.
3. The desire precedes my explanations for it.
- My explanations catch up to my desires. Post-hoc rationalization.
4. The more I try to understand the exact cause of my desire, the more nebulous the cause becomes.
5. Not understanding the exact cause does not make the desire any less real.
6. Approaching the question of transition from a conceptual lens yields increasingly diminishing information from reality after a certain point (healthy introspection to rumination).
- In general certain questions can only be answered via experiences.
These are the constants I've identified in my reasoning these past four years via empirical observation. In my mind, this statement:
"I know I want this bodily change, but I cannot guarantee every consequence."
Turned into this somewhere along the way:
"I cannot guarantee the outcome, therefore I cannot trust the desire."
Because I could not trust the desire, I sought to disprove it, if not fundamentally destroy it. Eventually in my earlier observations (3.), I found that it was impossible as I began attempting to socratically examine it and recursively employ dialectics as one final Hell Mary.
I have come to realize that a common misconception about transgender people is that the decision to transition is fundamentally a choice. It is not. I did not choose this desire as much as I did not choose my eye color. After years of attempting to destroy it, it is ultimately a psychological fact of my mind. So much so that it drove me to briefly begin questionable DIY HRT when I was younger. I have come to find peace with this because after all of this time I have not found any reliable way to eliminate this desire and quite frankly at this point, stopping it feels extremely ego-dystonic. It's part of me and I cherish it now despite the pain it brings me. It's like trying to fight a river, it only makes sense to go with the flow.
I keep saying I desired the destruction of this desire, but I feel that if I had ever succeeded I would have lost something fundamental to my identity. I wonder if had I succeeded, I would have felt that same agony I felt that night. I intuit, I'm correct on that because I could never put the question down. In fact the questioning itself became a source of comfort for me because it prevented me from feeling the aimless stagnation I felt all those years ago. When I look in the mirror and I look beautiful, I just feel like me. Who am I to take that away from myself?
I think I've spent the past four years attempting to verify if whether or not I genuinely experience the desire consistently enough to accept it. Time has answered that question. I must ask now how do I interpret this? Is it identity, embodiment, preference, something still emerging? Whatever interpretation I come to, I must ask practical and ethical questions on what to actually do as a result of it. These are fundamentally much different questions than the ones I have been asking for so long. They are matters of practical rationality as opposed to mathematical certainty. I will do what I can with what I know. If what I know is disproven I will continuously refine my beliefs (via dialectics) into something I can stand on and act on logically.
Much like how I learned an undeniable fact about myself after four years, how I interpret and act on that fact will become self-evident with time, experience and structured reflection. I think this is a turning point for me and one that will allow me to finally move forward. It suffices to say that the way I went about this was not healthy and was flawed. I have a particular psychology and circumstances, I am prone to repetition and contridiction. I am a thinker, not a doer (I am working on this, I may have ADHD). In a perfect world, I probably would have never had to do any of this. I would consider my experience a cautionary tale if anything. It may not be so much a matter of whether or not you can or can not stop what you are compelled towards, but rather what you do as a result of it. Which in that case, I argue one should live virtuously, but at the same time not at expense of one's self either. Because the latter is not life and does not allow you participate in it fully with those who you love. My own virtues and love for my family paralyzed me. But how can I be a fully loving, present person if I am falling apart from the inside? If by destroying myself from the inside for those I love, am I at the same time destroying my relationships with them? I cannot pour from an empty cup. It makes no sense.
There are no easy answers here, but I am determined to find them. I always have been.
(https://files.catbox.moe/d7ajz5.png)
ps: I'm 21 now. Yay!
It was very well late into the night. My room was frigid and pitch black, save for the soft moonlight seeping through my window. I laid doubled over with an ache in my chest as my fingers gripped the sheets as if in agony. It used to be insignificant. This lack. I could ignore it. Sublimate it. I unconsciously did so for many years. However in the weeks prior, the lack took grip of me. It progressively became worse as my awareness increased until it was all I could think about.
"Please let me wake up as a girl." I prayed to God, still holding out an ounce of belief in the extraordinary. I wished with everything in my heart each night and I'd wake up thoroughly disappointed by day.
Prayer was the best I could do, because to become a girl was an impossibility to me in the same way water cannot turn into wine. In the face of an impossibility, one can only be agonizingly disappointed, like love never destined to be.
That night in January, a question I had never thought about nor asked before materialized from seemingly nothing. I had never even seen the question asked nor answered seriously because of my self-imposed digital and social isolation.
"Is it possible to become a girl?" I hesistantly typed on my computer as my heart pounded.
It turns out it is. And so I felt the greatest excitement, like a child on Christmas. I hadn't been so happy in years.
"Magic is real!!" I immediately typed in a note with glee.
But in that very excitement, I suddenly felt a very, very deep weight settle in my chest from the implications of my own excitement.
"I know I want this bodily change, but I cannot guarantee every consequence."
This is the dichotomy I've struggled with these past four years.
There is no one more vehemently against my transition than I.
I can attest to that because I've had a hidden agenda in my own introspection and self-exploration these past four years I've only now identified.
I have ruthlessly, in my search for self-understanding, have been implicitly searching for something that would disprove my desire for femininity. I had implicitly hoped that I would find something that would make everything fall apart. A contradiction, a complex, an insecurity, a character flaw, a mental illness. Something that would allow me to dispel the excitement I felt that night, forever. Months ago, I reached the ceiling of what introspection can achieve without a framework. I made the following observations out of exhaustion because for several months prior I had finally hit a dead end.
1. I do not seek to fundamentally change as a person. Likewise, I do not want to be treated as a fundamentally different person.
2. I desire for change in my body towards femininity.
- This is persistent regardless of internal state and repression does not solve anything.
- Anxiety acts as a reliable inhibitor of this desire.
3. The desire precedes my explanations for it.
- My explanations catch up to my desires. Post-hoc rationalization.
4. The more I try to understand the exact cause of my desire, the more nebulous the cause becomes.
5. Not understanding the exact cause does not make the desire any less real.
6. Approaching the question of transition from a conceptual lens yields increasingly diminishing information from reality after a certain point (healthy introspection to rumination).
- In general certain questions can only be answered via experiences.
These are the constants I've identified in my reasoning these past four years via empirical observation. In my mind, this statement:
"I know I want this bodily change, but I cannot guarantee every consequence."
Turned into this somewhere along the way:
"I cannot guarantee the outcome, therefore I cannot trust the desire."
Because I could not trust the desire, I sought to disprove it, if not fundamentally destroy it. Eventually in my earlier observations (3.), I found that it was impossible as I began attempting to socratically examine it and recursively employ dialectics as one final Hell Mary.
I have come to realize that a common misconception about transgender people is that the decision to transition is fundamentally a choice. It is not. I did not choose this desire as much as I did not choose my eye color. After years of attempting to destroy it, it is ultimately a psychological fact of my mind. So much so that it drove me to briefly begin questionable DIY HRT when I was younger. I have come to find peace with this because after all of this time I have not found any reliable way to eliminate this desire and quite frankly at this point, stopping it feels extremely ego-dystonic. It's part of me and I cherish it now despite the pain it brings me. It's like trying to fight a river, it only makes sense to go with the flow.
I keep saying I desired the destruction of this desire, but I feel that if I had ever succeeded I would have lost something fundamental to my identity. I wonder if had I succeeded, I would have felt that same agony I felt that night. I intuit, I'm correct on that because I could never put the question down. In fact the questioning itself became a source of comfort for me because it prevented me from feeling the aimless stagnation I felt all those years ago. When I look in the mirror and I look beautiful, I just feel like me. Who am I to take that away from myself?
I think I've spent the past four years attempting to verify if whether or not I genuinely experience the desire consistently enough to accept it. Time has answered that question. I must ask now how do I interpret this? Is it identity, embodiment, preference, something still emerging? Whatever interpretation I come to, I must ask practical and ethical questions on what to actually do as a result of it. These are fundamentally much different questions than the ones I have been asking for so long. They are matters of practical rationality as opposed to mathematical certainty. I will do what I can with what I know. If what I know is disproven I will continuously refine my beliefs (via dialectics) into something I can stand on and act on logically.
Much like how I learned an undeniable fact about myself after four years, how I interpret and act on that fact will become self-evident with time, experience and structured reflection. I think this is a turning point for me and one that will allow me to finally move forward. It suffices to say that the way I went about this was not healthy and was flawed. I have a particular psychology and circumstances, I am prone to repetition and contridiction. I am a thinker, not a doer (I am working on this, I may have ADHD). In a perfect world, I probably would have never had to do any of this. I would consider my experience a cautionary tale if anything. It may not be so much a matter of whether or not you can or can not stop what you are compelled towards, but rather what you do as a result of it. Which in that case, I argue one should live virtuously, but at the same time not at expense of one's self either. Because the latter is not life and does not allow you participate in it fully with those who you love. My own virtues and love for my family paralyzed me. But how can I be a fully loving, present person if I am falling apart from the inside? If by destroying myself from the inside for those I love, am I at the same time destroying my relationships with them? I cannot pour from an empty cup. It makes no sense.
There are no easy answers here, but I am determined to find them. I always have been.
(https://files.catbox.moe/d7ajz5.png)
ps: I'm 21 now. Yay!
Title: Re: That Night in January...
Post by: Stottie Girl on August 04, 2026, 07:12:46 AM
Post by: Stottie Girl on August 04, 2026, 07:12:46 AM
I am staggered that you have only just turned 21. The way you write is well beyond your years and quite beautiful to read.
Being transgender is absolutely not by choice, the only choice we have is whether to act on those feelings and live life as our true self or bottle it up and try to live in the shadows, hiding your true self away. I have never wished I was "normal" never wished I was anything other than female. I have been paralysed by fear of loosing my family, of being a social outcast, of never being accepted by either gender. I battled with these feelings for 50 years and the dysphoria has never waned, it has in fact become louder as I believe is true with so many on here.
Times were different when I was your age, the opportunities for transgender people were not so widely available, medical proceedures not so advanced or affordable and society was not really aware of trans people. If I had been born a generation or two later I would not have hesitated to transition.
I think you are absolutely doing the right thing with your soul searching and contemplation now. If you have the space and time to decide your future then do it now before life gets in the way. You have a glorious opportunity to live a long and fulfilling life on your chosen path. Don't end up like me at 50 having lived a lie all your life. I am filled with regret of what could have been.
Ultimately only you can decide your path and your timescales. This is life changing stuff so take your time, think everything through, consider your options and then act.
I wish you all the best for whichever path you choose.
Being transgender is absolutely not by choice, the only choice we have is whether to act on those feelings and live life as our true self or bottle it up and try to live in the shadows, hiding your true self away. I have never wished I was "normal" never wished I was anything other than female. I have been paralysed by fear of loosing my family, of being a social outcast, of never being accepted by either gender. I battled with these feelings for 50 years and the dysphoria has never waned, it has in fact become louder as I believe is true with so many on here.
Times were different when I was your age, the opportunities for transgender people were not so widely available, medical proceedures not so advanced or affordable and society was not really aware of trans people. If I had been born a generation or two later I would not have hesitated to transition.
I think you are absolutely doing the right thing with your soul searching and contemplation now. If you have the space and time to decide your future then do it now before life gets in the way. You have a glorious opportunity to live a long and fulfilling life on your chosen path. Don't end up like me at 50 having lived a lie all your life. I am filled with regret of what could have been.
Ultimately only you can decide your path and your timescales. This is life changing stuff so take your time, think everything through, consider your options and then act.
I wish you all the best for whichever path you choose.