Quote from: Emelye on January 02, 2013, 09:49:08 AM
I read once that the selfishness of transitioning is the same as the selfishness of eating - we help ourselves to survive by doing it. I agree. I think being selfish when you have a viable choice to do otherwise is a problem but when all the options are bad then it's hardly selfish to choose the one that adds to physical, mental and emotional survival.
This pinpoints for me why I so wish we would stop referring to transition as selfishness. It's true, in the confrontationally literal, Richard Dawkins' "lets sell a book" sense (i.e. why else did he title his book
The Selfish Gene if not because it was attention-getting and also true in the most literal sense?).
Breathing is a selfish act too. But it really winds up feeding into something that often spills over into a sort of self-flagellation. Then again, in some ways I suppose it also affirms (at least among (typo!)
M2Fs) our sense of female identity, since this sort of condemnation of selfish acts is very common in ciswomen's dialogues surrounding personal sacrifice for family, children and other aspects of female identity that society at large tends to endorse?
I haven't done my introduction yet, and I also haven't slept well, so I'll resist the temptation to flesh out the novella-length essay I'm tempted to improvise after reading as much of this thread as I have to this point.
Instead, let me echo that while my own story is very different, had I told it in shorthand the way Gemma told hers, I might have sparked a similar reaction. Heather (who commented a few posts earlier than Emelye's) already knows much of my story. It's not all that different than hers, though I could easily recast it to show myself in a terribly unflattering light. I knew, after all, from a very early age that I identified as female. Looked at from at least one POV, I chose to marry with that knowledge in myself, in part because I tried to rationalize that, by marrying a woman in a high-pressure profession, I would be able to (and in fact did) manage to negotiate and manipulate the situation so that I could become as close to a full-time mom to my own biological kids as is possible given the current state of options for transwomen.
Granted, I had made most or all of this clear to my spouse years before her first pregnancy, so she was an informed partner in this. On the other hand, it became clear too that she was in denial about how profound my dysphoria was, and it's very likely that I wasn't as clear about that as I could have been, had I not been trying to frame things from just about any angle but the one that was most obvious to me.
Being a mom is a central part of my sense of what being a woman is about. I put off transition in part because a therapist convinced me that coming out to young children could be a bad idea. Mine were 8 and 6 when my spouse asked for a divorce, though "blackmail" might be a more accurate way of describing it, the threats to misrepresent matters only she and I were witnesses to only came when I made it clear to her that I most certainly did not want to separate. The main reason I don't use that term is because she's still the person I am most attached to romantically, and I still think some day she might actually come to identify as lesbian, hopeless romantic that I am. In defense of my POV, she
did at one point say to a group of her childhood friends (in my presence) that she really wishes she were a lesbian.
When she pressed for divorce, she made it clear she'd be looking for a man to fall in love with, and yet, 10 years later, she remains single and stopped dating after only a few years of unsatisfying experiences with men who couldn't give her what she desired. Who's to say what the future holds? If she had found someone I think I might have managed to move on by now.
Right now, though, the added irony is that my eldest has been coming out as F2M (he's been going by an ambiguous name and insisting on use of male pronouns since before the start of the current school year... entering his gap year program under the new identity. He had his first appointment with a therapist for gender identity issues just yesterday, and I'll be driving him to a second appointment on Monday.
I could tell some very unflattering stories about how I came out most fully to my spouse, and I could make them sound horrible, partly because I do fault myself for how I handled things.
On the other hand, I already knew who I was and the gender I identified with... my "impulsiveness" could almost as easily be described as an act of desperation, trying to get something obvious through to someone who was seemingly being intentionally dense. My memories are of growing up with most people assuming I was gay, and me letting them think that, since to clarify the situation more specifically didn't seem like it was likely to improve my social status in any way. It astounded me that my spouse didn't see that, but that blindness was also part of the reason she was the only woman I have ever had sex with... it was much easier to make mental adjustments in my mind that allowed me to hang onto my sense of womanliness if my partner was almost as clueless as most of the men I have ever known.
The point, and I think several have already touched on this, is that we each come to this along a slightly different path, one that is influenced by how we were raised, how much we were able to accept ourselves along the way, and also based on the nature (and neediness) of those in our lives we might be seen as having "deceived."
In my experience, such deception is very rarely a one-way street, and it's not particularly wise to judge someone until you know the full story, and have some basis for taking a look at things from their perspective.
If I had acted with perfect integrity, I might well have had my brain burned out... they did use ECT back when I would have been coming out to my parents, a lot more often than they prescribed testosterone inhibitors to pre-teens. Or, coming out in my teens I might have fallen to AIDS like so many of my childhood friends did, since most likely I would have entered sex work at the peak of when there was almost no effective treatment available for those who were HIV positive... in fact, I was reaching prime sex trade years right around the time that HIV had yet to be identified as the underlying agent of the syndrome and the epidemic.
As it stands, one of the small mercies in this is that my son is a much more courageous and direct person than I am, and he has in many ways given me the strength and resolve to come out to those I've known for many years behind a kind of masque... in part because I can see how his dysphoria is affecting him, his moods, and filling him with suicidal thoughts that, blessedly, he has always been strong enough to come out and talk about, rather than shut down and be tempted to act upon. At this point, I just couldn't see NOT coming out, whatever difficulties and compromises might lie ahead for me, trying to transition as my age.
PS: Thanks for the affirmations. I think I've lived a charmed life in many ways (not so much in some others) that I can manage not to get lost in my own subjectivity. I try not to judge harshly when others don't manage to do so. Rather than offer apologies when our own issues seep out and catch fire, I'd be interested, for those who are able, whenever that might be, if they were to share some insights over time about where their particular outbursts happened to originate. I say this mainly in the hope that such sharing of background and experience might offer more insight and understanding to those, like Gemma who come here, maybe as their first contact with other transwomen, to find themselves on the hot end of the flame, potentially thinking (mistakenly in most cases) that they were the cause of the outburst, when in most cases it came from somewhere or something else in the life of the transwoman (or less often, the transman) who was the source of the fire.
