I apologize in advance, 'cause this is gonna get long.
Four or five months ago, something changed for me. It came one night while I was brushing my teeth.
I was wearing my oldest, rattiest t-shirt (junior-high old - and I'm 23 and a half) and no bottoms (which i never do) and I happened to look at myself in the mirror for a long moment, when something strange happened. An image appeared in my head, and for a second, I thought "Huh. In this outfit, i look like a girl wearing just her boyfriend's old shirt and her underwear." It was both an idle thought and a bizarrely weighty one. From that moment on, it wouldn't leave me. I went to sleep thinking nervous circles around the idea of wearing girls' underwear, something i had never really tried before. I woke up still thinking about it. I went to work the next day and my head was swimming with these anxious, probing thoughts, half-formed questions about who and what i really was. this lasted for, i think, three days, before i couldn't take it anymore. i went out and i bought a pair of panties. i put them on that night before bed, expecting to feel a surge of some kind of dramatic feeling, after all this tension built up, but instead it was... relief? Almost like nothing. It was the absence of the anxiety and the questions and the obsessive thoughts. My mind was just quiet.
After that, i came to realize what I was feeling every day. It fit pretty well under the description of gender dysphoria: there was this constant nagging sense of wrongness and discomfort, of my body being ill-fitting to what it contained, manifesting in cycles of building anxiety and then emotional exhaustion, numbness. All through the workday i would be a squirming, anxious wreck, and then by the time i got home all the bad feelings would be gone - but the thoughts they were attached to, the abstract notions of being in the wrong flesh, of people seeing me all wrong, those persisted. They just didn't have the same torturous emotional weight, like they'd just burnt me out. Then i'd put on my panties at night, and again i would feel quiet. Only for the cycle to start again the next day.
This went on for a couple of weeks before i told my therapist. By then I'd bought more girls' underwear, and some actual clothes, too. My days were consumed by dysphoric thought-patterns; i'd notice the shape of my shadow out of the corner of my eye and be struck by a pang of sick feelings. Et cetera. And then there was the doubt. Of course I was wondering if this meant I was transgender; i took the COGIATI and got category 4, "Probable Transsexual" - twice. [Four times, by now.] But there was a very significant part of me that was just doubt incarnate, and every time i would think i had landed on a conclusion, it would creep up with all this evidence and these counter-arguments about why that couldn't possibly be true. To the doubt in me, every moment I was free from dysphoria (without having to dress my way out of it) was just more proof that I was a fraud, that this was some kind of twisted bid for attention, a desperate desire to feel unique that was causing me to latch on to a marginal identity. I had no idea what was real; was the dysphoria a delusion? was the doubt a crutch? It was an endless loop of uncertainty, a labyrinth of spiraling doubts.
I told my therapist i thought i might be transgender, told her all about what had been happening. I told her about how strange it was, 23 years and not a hint of this until it hit me one night like a bolt from the blue. Later, i would tell my brother to imagine that he was just standing in the bathroom one night and suddenly a bullet came through the window and lodged itself in his arm. That's how sudden and strange this was.
And yet, as i talked it through in therapy, i could see traces, little ghosts of what was to come hiding throughout my past. The way i'd never had any of the acceptable masculine interests, unless you count video games; the way I had liked it when the neighbor girls would take me into their room and paint my toenails when i was little, even though i knew it wasn't meant for boys. The way i'd had crushes that bordered on hero-worship, as if some part of me was blurring the line between wanting her and wanting to be her. The way i had liked to play dress-up, to walk around in my mother's shoes. The way I had sometimes ended up wearing girl clothes in high school without even meaning to, just because I pulled something I really liked off the rack I didn't realize was 'wrong'.
I started to realize that I had no memory of ever having consciously identified as male. I didn't remember ever accepting or embracing masculinity like my brothers seemed to. I just remember it feeling a little alien to me, without me being able to articulate that until now. I remembered reading Stranger in a Strange Land in sophomore year, and how the book's gender- and sexuality-defying slant had resonated with me, how I had recognized myself as feeling like deep-down, gender maybe didn't quite reach me or apply to me in the way people assumed it to.
I became fairly convinced that I was transgender. So, after a few weeks of talking it over in therapy and coping with the dysphoria, I decided to tell my best friend. He's a wonderfully sweet, loyal person; sometimes I wonder if he's not actually a golden retriever who decided to take human form. He said he wasn't surprised. He told me that he'd always noticed my negative comments about my body had seemed... weird, to him. Like it was something more visceral and strange than merely feeling like I was unattractive. When he said that, I knew he was right. All through my teenage years, I was always frustrated with the maleness of my body, though I framed it a bit differently. I wish I was skinny and waifish and pretty, I always told myself (and sometimes my friends). I had always written it off as wanting to look like an anime boy, at the time. But sometimes the lumpy, hairy, angular, pudgy squareness of my body would get me so upset I'd self-harm ─ not in a really serious, permanent way, just punching myself in the stomach and things like that. Just every once in a while.
But the fact remained: I was starting to notice a pattern, a history to this seemingly out-of-nowhere thing taking root inside me. So, with the support of my best friend, I did the only thing that seemed right, and confessed to my girlfriend. A little background here: the two of us have been together for almost six years. At 23, that's nearly a quarter of our lives. We've felt like soulmates, even though neither of us believes in soulmates, for a while now. We're very, very close, and since we've been both next-door-neighbors and college roommates, we've spent almost every day together since May of 2010, the month of our high school graduation.
I told her. It was the second-worst night of my life. She sobbed like she was dying, and after a while, so did I. At first it was just an outpouring of grief, as we both fought off the feeling that our lives were over, because we couldn't be together anymore if this was the case. But then things took a stranger turn. She started... questioning me. Pointing things out that didn't sit right with her, little indicators that led her to believe this wasn't completely true, like something was missing from the picture. As first, I was resistant, but I listened to her, even gratefully after a while, as we talked it through. She said there were things about me that definitely seemed male, that I didn't really understand what being a girl was like. We convinced each other, over the next few hours, that I probably wasn't transgender. I probably wasn't a girl. I had to be something in the middle ─ still worth exploring, but different in the key sense of being livable. It was like a compromise that our relationship could handle.
That was three or four months ago, now. In the meantime, it's been a bit of a double life for me. During the great majority of the day, I have to maintain my masculine presentation, at work and with my family and friends. Every once in a while, I steal away to go shopping, and when I'm alone in my room, in the hours before bed, I experiment with gender. Slowly but surely, I edge closer to full-on feminine presentation; first it was panties and bralettes, then there were shorts and camis, followed by cardigans and sweaters, and then lipstick and a nightdress, until, the other day, I finally bought a full-on, actual dress. I'm trying these things out and finding them comfortable, finding that they all have the same quality of stilling the dysphoric thoughts, even dispelling the constant, wordless awareness of it, the background-radiation form of dysphoria that is little-felt but always there. It all seems to fade, when I'm dressed up. And in its place rises this lovely, subtle feeling of purity: of being in touch with my soul in a way that I wasn't before. I keep waiting, as I dig deeper and deeper into feminine expression, to find some kind of stopping-point, like a barrier that I'll hit where I realize "nah, this part isn't for me, this is the limit" ─ because I've been understanding myself as genderqueer, so I expect to have some kind of middle ground, right? Because if what feels right for me is full female expression, rather than a mix of genders, then... I'm back where I started, aren't I? I must be trans after all.
The doubt is stronger than ever, now. I feel my mind splitting into three parts, each with their own beliefs and agendas. One part is expecting this all to pass, assuming it to be some kind of short-lived phase that will leave me feeling oh so silly when it's all over ─ you're just a normal boy, it says. Get over it. Another part suspects that this is definitely real, but is convinced that I must be "just" genderqueer, or genderfluid, or a demigirl, or whatever mid-spectrum term works the best ─ don't be too hasty, it warns; don't go getting carried away, thinking crazy ->-bleeped-<- thoughts. And the last part of me earnestly believes that I was right all along, that I'm a trans girl ─ trust your feelings, it tells me. But beneath all of them, connected to all of them, is a fourth part, the part of pure doubt: it uses my own capacity for logic and self-reflection as a mercenary weapon, fighting for all sides and none. My mind is a never-ending debate, where all three sides, fueled by this fourth indestructible quantum of doubt, seek to undermine and debunk each other. I have no idea what to believe, what thoughts to trust and what to dismiss. I don't know what I am or where I'm going. I don't know what's real within my own mind. I feel so... unspooled.
This last week, I told two more people. First was my best female friend (besides my partner), and then my favorite brother. Both of them had more or less the same response as my best friend, the first one I told; they both seemed unsurprised. It made sense, they told me, without any sense of judgment or even distress in their reactions. They seemed less surprised or upset by it than I was.
Then there was this weekend. I hung out with some old friends, while wearing an outfit of mostly feminine or gender-neutral clothing, but in a way that wasn't very noticeable ─ crossdressing in stealth, essentially. And it felt good. I noticed a shift in my personality, as if the clothes brought out the truer form of me. There were moments where I actually kind of saw myself as a girl, that evening. The next morning, at therapy, I wore a black dress and a girl's sweater, my hair in pigtails done up just right, red lipstick on my lips, my face freshly shaved. It didn't feel like crossdressing. It felt right. More and more, I was experiencing myself as female. I felt more sureness, more of a sense of something real, than I had in weeks. Until that evening, when I got together with a different set of friends to go look at Christmas lights, and I noticed something disquieting: the dysphoria was hardly there at all. I barely thought or felt anything about my gender at all, the whole evening. And that was upsetting, because the doubt latched onto it and used it to dismantle the precious feeling of mostly-sureness that I had arrived at only that same morning. I was cut loose, adrift once again, and worse than before.
This all leads up to last night. My girlfriend and I, due to a series of ->-bleeped-<-ty events, ended up talking about it all over again. She wanted to know if our safe compromise was still holding true, if I still felt like I was really genderqueer, instead of being a girl. I told her the truth, that I was more uncertain than ever before, but she could tell I was leaning toward the trans theory. Things got heated, and I lashed out, admonishing her for the way she'd spoken to me in our first conversation, months ago. She had said these things to me, little insinuations that had taken root in my mind, exponentially feeding my own innate tendency to doubt and question: "You know sometimes your imagination gets you carried away", "I think you're biased, you're ignoring all the evidence", "It seems like your obsessing over it blew it out of proportion", things along that sort of gist. I blamed her for breeding this monstrous doubt that refuses to let me have a clear answer. We fought each other terribly, and apologized in turn. She said she hadn't meant to do that, to make me distrust my own feelings and question the validity of my thoughts, my reality. She had never intended to throw me for a loop like that.
But then the fight cycled back around, and she said more of the same, this time even worse. "I think you want it to be true," she said, when I suggested the possibility of me being trans. "For some reason, you're trying to see it that way." I told her point-blank the damaging effect those words would have on my ability to understand my situation, but she had already said it. Now I trust myself even less, though I don't trust her any more than that. After all, who stands to lose more from my transition, should that be what I decide to do? She needs me, she's told me. Her family life is in shambles, she tells herself she has no friends, but there's always been me. I try to tell her, "Maybe you're biased, maybe you have the ulterior motives," but she doesn't listen. I point out to her that everyone else I've told, who all have known me as long or longer than she, told me how unsurprised they were to consider me trans, how nonplussed they had all seemed—"They're just telling you what they can tell you want to hear," she tells me. We came closer to breaking up for good than we ever have before, but eventually we reconciled.
Now I am truly and utterly lost. The period of believing I was "just" genderqueer was where the dysphoria seemed at first to fade, though I never stopped having thoughts about my gender and its need to bend. But after a peaceful month or two, it just came creeping back, and I found myself hungry for more and more complete forms of feminine expression. Just when I was feeling almost like I could believe I was trans, for sure this time, the events of the last few days come along and detonate all those feelings of understanding. This week, I've decided, I'm going to test myself. I'm not allowing myself to cross-dress or engage in gender-bending experiments in any way, shape, or form, until next Saturday when I see my therapist again. I want to know how that absence makes me feel. It's the only move I can think of. But I don't know how to feel. All weekend I was considering this test, and the mere thought of it brought the familiar airless feeling of anxiety to my chest... but today, Day 1 of the new experiment, I feel less dysphoric than I have in a long time. I go looking for thoughts about my gender, and I don't find a lot. Maybe I'm just exhausted and blown-out from last night, probably the worst night of my life. Or maybe it means something else.
Please, someone, anyone who might have answers, help me. I am so, so terribly confused. I don't know what's going on in my head. I haven't known for a long time. It's only getting worse.
I feel like I'm losing my mind.
TL;DR – What am I?
P.S. It's gotten to the point where, even when writing this, I couldn't stop questioning my own motives. "Are you really looking for honest answers, or are you constructing the whole narrative in such a way to ensure validation of your own pet theory?"
I can't stand it. It never ends.
