H-hello there. I'm an old hat at the forum game, but I have been growing steadily more hermetic in the last few years, leaving me with a heaping scoop of social awkwardness. My talent for writing is primarily in writing fiction, so forgive me if I stray off-topic or get a bit too flowery for an introduction.
My name's Oliver, born from Violet. I'm a twenty-three-year-old femme transman living in Washington state. I try to keep my birth name under wraps in most groups, but I felt like I might find more understanding in the frustration of having such a 'sweet', 'beautiful', and 'unique' name growing up; it was one more thing people could settle on guilt tripping me about once I came out. I may skip around a bit here and there, because I had an unsavory childhood that left my gender preferences on the back burner, even for me.
I didn't really have a heavy feeling of being 'gendered' pushed on me as a child. I can't tell when I really knew that I was different, but I know that it started with my feelings for dresses and accessories and other 'girly' things; they never felt like normal clothing to me, wearing a dress was always a fancy dress-up day, no matter how plain it was. If I wasn't in dresses, my clothing fell into more standard boyish fare, preferring overalls or cargo pants and t-shirts, usually paint-stained. The biggest gender-related trauma was the suddenness of not being allowed to be naked with people who had different plumbing, but feeling more uncomfortable when I was naked around girls than when I was naked around boys (they did bathe me and the neighbor boy together frequently, which helped throw a wrench in my perception). My friends were either males or tomboys, though I usually only kept a close few at a time.
At eleven-years-old I had my first exposure to the concept of transsexuality, seeing a blonde little transgirl on the television whose mother was -gasp- letting her child dress the way that they felt instead of trying to push them into a little boy-box. This stirred something in me, as my recent foray into pornographic material had left me feeling awkward and empty, given I could only see myself in the male role (not necessarily on top, just with a penis and not breasts or any of those other parts). Hesitantly, I brought the concept up with my parents, simply stating, "I saw a kid on teevee who was a girl trapped in a boy's body."
Without missing a beat, the response I got was: "That's just a line men use to pick up on lesbian chicks."
That was it, my whole conceptualized self dashed on the rocks as nothing but a lie, a pick-up line used to screw over someone else. Naturally there was a part of me that recognized how stupid that was, the fact that obviously a lesbian would look at a completely masculine male and be able to interpret that he was being a jackass, but it was certainly enough to teach me that they weren't interested in there being anything honest or real in that concept.
With the emergence of puberty, everything got worse. I stopped wearing feminine clothes as often as I could as my chest jumped in size between twelve and fourteen, opting for tye-dyes and cargo pants and wearing only training or sports bras -- I didn't want to look at my breasts, let alone measure them and go to the store looking for things to dress them with, which I would have to see and wear everyday. My genitals had caused me minor fuss, but I found that I could push past what I now know as dysphoria with enough sexual pleasure -- my breasts, on the other hand, those were inescapable. I came out as a lesbian at twelve-years-old, but it was only two more years and the push that I was going to go to high school, where there were gendered locker rooms, that finally brought me to coming out.
My school was reasonably accepting, and certainly accommodating, but only to a point. The student body were really the best part, as I attended a tiny charter school, which meant that the grades tended toward developing their own niche groups in a 'family circle' kind of way. While there were never notes for substitutes, by the time I left the school, most of the class would tune in to correct substitutes on my name. But such things seldom last, and this was no exception -- I was kicked out of this school due to behavioural problems (a trend throughout my life that has been determined to be an undiagnosed case of childhood Aspergers). As I was moving to a more mainstream school, I panicked, caved, and gave into the pressures of presenting as a female again. It was utter misery, as I discovered early on. I played a fake persona as long as I could before the depression just weighed me down and I steadily gave up parts and pieces of the disguise, finally laying them down when I discovered that I had gained a reputation at my school as the 'angry lesbian'. I never came out in those two years, but I was very quick to dive back into my proper dress and demeanor as soon as I was somewhere I felt safe -- or at least safe enough that I could defend myself.
Another year later and I was back to living with my girlfriend and her parents, much as I was after getting my GED. I had failed miserably at my attempt at going to college, instead leaving myself homeless for six months before we were able to get back into the state. The one new thing I had at my disposal, more valuable than I had ever realized, was Supplemental Security Income, so I settled into doing what little I could do and started tending to my health. First order of business was severe dismenorrhea, a problem I'd had since I started menses at eleven (literally a week after our 'maturation conference'; that's 'the talk' about puberty, but given by the schools, because Utah). Nothing worked, at all; I have, at this point in my life, been on almost every type of birth control and have had severe and sometimes unheard of reactions to each and every one of them; at this point, the only theory I've been able to find, even with the help of my doctors, is that I'm allergic to either estrogen or progesterone. In the end, between my want to transition and birth control inefficacy, it was decided that working on getting onto testosterone was a better idea than anything else (especially with the other option being chemically-induced menopause).
After moving to Washington, transitioning became a much more streamlined process (though the doctors here are much more sensitive as people, they are much more open to alternative orientations). I was on testosterone for a year, then booted from that practice. I got frustrated trying to find a doctor due to the distinct inability of any given location to call me by my preferred name, instead opting to get my name changed beforehand. This led to me losing my prescription entirely for a good ten months (absolute misery, once again; the pain was brutal) before I managed to get back on, leaving me where I am now. My parents are no longer a marked part of my life; my father was abusive and my mother supported the exact cookie-cutter ideal daughter that she gave birth to and raised for about five years, but once I became a person she supported me less, and once I came out as male, I felt the last of that real support disintegrate. As it stands, she awkwardly pushes gifts at my girlfriend and I, rarely focusing on things that we need and refusing to be any kind of emotional support (she has a new family for that).
That is: exhausted by my body and in desperate need of friends, community, and support. I need to raise money, commit to exercising to get down to my 'ideal weight' pre-surgery, to learn how to get surgery estimates properly and how to find them easily, and I really need other people going through the same to tell me that survival and happiness are both achievable things.
A-again, I'm sorry if this is too long or TMI or any kind of rambly, and I'm happy to cut it down if requested, it's just nice to be able to get it all out there for once, in the kind of forum where people might listen and understand.
Edit: Also, I don't know how clear I made it above, but I'm also a crossdresser (to my chagrin). I have finally accepted as an adult that most people will not be able to wrap their minds around what I consider a fairly basic concept (should have been born male, enjoys wearing dresses sometimes), and I don't usually dress as such outside the house.
