There are many things that we experience in life that are very difficult to describe to someone who hasn't experienced them.  Being transsexual is one of those.  I'll be seeing relatives over the winter holidays and have tried to come up with a simple way to explain what it is like to be transsexual. 

The best thing I've come up with so far involves printing color pictures.  One technique is to pass the paper under three different print heads – cyan, magenta, and yellow – to get all the colors.  If the paper gets just a tiny bit misaligned, the picture comes out off-register.  You can tell what it is, and it may look pretty good, but it's off somehow – not quite right.  That's the way my life has been until I started transition – off-register.  Now it has snapped into perfect alignment.  The difference is subtle but remarkable.

So, how do you finish the statement "Being transsexual is like ... "

- Kate

Quote from: K8 on December 19, 2009, 12:03:39 PM
There are many things that we experience in life that are very difficult to describe to someone who hasn't experienced them.  Being transsexual is one of those.  I'll be seeing relatives over the winter holidays and have tried to come up with a simple way to explain what it is like to be transsexual. 

The best thing I've come up with so far involves printing color pictures.  One technique is to pass the paper under three different print heads – cyan, magenta, and yellow – to get all the colors.  If the paper gets just a tiny bit misaligned, the picture comes out off-register.  You can tell what it is, and it may look pretty good, but it's off somehow – not quite right.  That's the way my life has been until I started transition – off-register.  Now it has snapped into perfect alignment.  The difference is subtle but remarkable.

So, how do you finish the statement "Being transsexual is like ... "

- Kate

I don't feel transsexual and don't going around thinking about being transsexual.....and I'm not percieved that way or would want to be. I don't discuss it with other people and they don't dicuss it with me.  I see myself as a female....so do my friends....and that's it...

Are you asking for a metaphor of what it feels like to have been born with transsexualism?

I agree with Natural Blonde but for me now since I am pre-transition I would say being transexual is like being stuck inside a disgusting ugly shell of a body and wanting to break free. I feel like I am trapped and I need to make my grand escape.

As had said.  Being Transsexual is like being trapped in a prison.  The prison is a gender that is not who you are. 

I was born a girl, but the body was deformed into that of a boy.  I am now on the journey to correct that deformity.  Telling others that you are transsexual is just a fast way to correct their thinking about you.



Hugs and Love
Janet

...being a ghost.

Whilst others could not see me as I saw myself it was as though I did not exist corporeally.

I'll probably stir up a hornets nest with this but...

Being transsexual is like ... having a label I'm not too fond of. What I want to be is a person first, who just happened to be transsexual.

The whole mess of "x to y" isn't me, I only played a guy to lie to myself and others. That I'm a trans androgyne (playing the binary for social integration) doesn't leave out that it (transition) is just a phase for me.

edit: this post looks soo hacky :|

Quote from: FlanKitty on December 19, 2009, 02:04:39 PM
I'll probably stir up a hornets nest with this but...

Being transsexual is like ... having a label I'm not too fond of. What I want to be is a person first, who just happened to be transsexual.

The whole mess of "x to y" isn't me, I only played a guy to lie to myself and others. That I'm a trans androgyne (playing the binary for social integration) doesn't leave out that it (transition) is just a phase for me.

edit: this post looks soo hacky :|

Well at the risk of stirring things along with you I would agree and add to that that I believe that when we have arrived at a place where we are comfortable on the gender spectrum we cease to be strictly Trans and instead just become part of the complex spectrum of human gender expression.

Although I acknowledge that historically I was Trans I no longer generally think of myself in that way, rather I say that I am a woman with a Trans past. (And one that took place a very long time ago at that!)

OOPS.  Sorry I wasn't clear. 

I am seeing people who knew me for many years pretending to be a man and who assumed I was a man.  I want to be able to describe to them what it is to be transsexual - to be born a girl with a boy's body (or vice versa).  I don't want to get into an argument about how much of a girl I am.  I want to help people who knew me before know what it has been like for me.

OK.  Assuming you are talking to people who knew you when you presented in the opposite gender and who assumed you were that gender, how can you help them understand what your experience was like?

My life, being born in the body of the wrong gender, has been like ...

- Kate

Quote from: rejennyrated on December 19, 2009, 02:13:13 PM
I no longer generally think of myself in that way, rather I say that I am a woman with a Trans past.

I will acknowledge that I may have been seen as trans at some point in later childhood but that was cured a LONG time ago. If I had once had cancer, I would not say I am cancer just that it is old news, medically speaking. Whatever the medical state of my body so long ago has long been irrelevant.

being invisible behind the imprisoning walls of this body that people see while screaming so loud "Why can't you see me?" and realizing that they can only hear what matches what they see.

like looking in the mirror and wondering "Who the heck is that?, Where did I go?"

like getting put on the fence. go the male side and get told you can't be here, you don't belong. go the female side and get told you don't belong here as well as feel it. male side you hide in the corner to fit in and then your are heard or seen and put back on the fence. female side you hide in the corner cause you don't know how to fit in, then you speak and are put back on the fence. I been put on that fence so long I thought I had to live there. I never learned how to get through to anyone.


like being alone in a crowd.

being an alien left behind on this planet and no way home.


Ok I ramble.

Quote from: Blanche on December 19, 2009, 12:11:00 PM
Are you asking for a metaphor of what it feels like to have been born with transsexualism?

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

For me, being trans is like being a refugee (before transition) and like being an immigrant (after).





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

Quote from: K8 on December 19, 2009, 02:20:15 PM
OOPS.  Sorry I wasn't clear. 

I am seeing people who knew me for many years pretending to be a man and who assumed I was a man.  I want to be able to describe to them what it is to be transsexual - to be born a girl with a boy's body (or vice versa).  I don't want to get into an argument about how much of a girl I am.  I want to help people who knew me before know what it has been like for me.

OK.  Assuming you are talking to people who knew you when you presented in the opposite gender and who assumed you were that gender, how can you help them understand what your experience was like?

My life, being born in the body of the wrong gender, has been like ...

- Kate

What it felt like emotionally?

Like a fugitive. In the sense that a person who is, for instance, an escaped prisoner or subject to arrest though they are actually innocent.

You have to maintain the "cover" and the false front you present is always uncomfortable not only because it's not really you, but also because you are never 100% certain that you are "pulling off" the deception.

Technically you are free of imprisonment, but spiritually you are just as bound.

When you finally realize you are innocent of any crime and don't have to hide, it is only then that you are truly free.



Alternately, I have another thought on your "misprint" analogy - in that it's the sort of metaphor in which you describe how you precieve the world more than how the world precieves you...

try this and see if it communicates the same idea in a simpler way:

Tell the person you are talking to to cover one eye. Now tell them to assume that that is the only way they had ever seen the world - without depth perception. YOU see the world around you but in a not-quite-normal and natural way. it's only when you see it unobstructed that see life the way it is meant to be seen.

does that convey the same thought?

"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.

Quote from: Laura Hope on December 19, 2009, 05:55:23 PM
try this and see if it communicates the same idea in a simpler way:

Tell the person you are talking to to cover one eye. Now tell them to assume that that is the only way they had ever seen the world - without depth perception. YOU see the world around you but in a not-quite-normal and natural way. it's only when you see it unobstructed that see life the way it is meant to be seen.

does that convey the same thought?

Yes.  I like this.  This and some of the others are what I was looking for – not allowed off the fence, seeing blue but no one else can, an escapee, a refugee, etc.

(The one with the eyes doesn't work for me very well because I have amblyopia.  I've always seen the world more or less in a monocular way. )

Yes, I was looking for a simile.  We are trying to tell someone what it has been like in a way they can understand even though they have no frame of reference.  They're cis-gendered and so never gave gender identity much thought.  Being a hopeless optimist, I think that if I can describe it well, they will "get it".

- Kate

being trans is like.......

going to a fast food resturaunt and ordering a burger, with everything on it...
but when you get it, you dont have the pickles.... but yet your make a big deal out of it, and take it back and get pickles.......


assuming, that we are the burger that is missing that extra thing, but people make a big deal out of it and want to change it??

Oh well.. if this didn't make sense it's typical normal because being trans is confusing!

Being trans is like:

Getting your ghost stuck in someone else's body.

Being dragged along by some idiot guy to a party you don't want to be at full of people you can't relate to, and realising the house it is held in has no windows and the doors are locked from the outside. And don't even get me started on the music!

Going on holiday to the worst one-star resort on the planet and being forced to send photographs of the green pool water and the stained bed linens and the blowfly in the soup bowl back home to all the people you care about attached to a moth-eaten postcard of the condemned and probably haunted hotel with the words printed underneath, in big, bright, poorly spelled letters: "Whish U wear heer!".

Don't even get me started! 

Being born with a birth defect 

Being Transsexual is Like nothing else.


There are times that I hate it, however most of the time I actually really enjoy it.  Yes, having to get surgery, hormones, and what have you sucks, but I think the overall experience is rewarding.

I like to think that I am getting to experience more of life than almost anyone else.  Who else gets to know what it is like to be a boy and a girl, most people don't.  I think the experience alone is worth it.  Yes, being born in the wrong body thing sucks, but I hate being negative (even though I get perceived as being negative, a lot of times it's straight facts with no feeling attached).  For me, being negative just makes me more sad.  And who wants to be sad.  Being a transsexual is like the best thing that ever happened to me (or at least realizing I was TS).

Life gave me lemons, and I painted that ->-bleeped-<- gold.

Being transsexual is like being a butterfly trapped in her own coon.
Not being able to move for fear of being exposed. Being afraid to come out even-though the coon is very restrictive. Because it is familiar, protective and warm. But dieing inside of it.