The Beginning

This is not going to be an easy thing for me to write. I hope it gets easier with practice. The very act of writing it is running against a screaming inner voice telling me to shut the heck up. I have lived a lifetime listening to that voice. Ignoring it, as I intend to here, is a new experience.

I am a transsexual person. By this, I mean the apparent gender of my physical body does not match that of the mind inside me. It never has. I've done a lot to try to make this work from the side of conforming my life to the physical side of things. That ultimately hasn't gone well. So now I've decided to give a shot at making my life work by trying to get the physical side to conform to the inner gender I've carried with me my whole life. I was born with male body. But my mind is female. I intend to make these reconcile more closely going forward.

This is not an easy decision. It's also not impulsive. I've been in therapy for over a year chewing on this very thing. And this therapy has been building upon a lifetime of thoughts on the same matter.

There will be a lot to talk about as this journey goes on... and I do see it as a journey. I'm determined to see it to the end, but I fear some of the hazards I expect to encounter along the way. I'll be talking about those more in future posts.

A few initial thoughts:

1. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have a very negative reaction to anyone who suggests this is a selfish move on my part. I'm choosing a path of personal pain, insult, loss of friends, income, and even family. But that's not really the part of my situation in question. What I had to consider was whether those truly dependent upon me would be able to bear this. That still is the most crucial and harshest thing that weighs upon me. But I had to weigh that against the likelihood I would be able to go on living without this change. It's been a wrenching, and very personal journey just to get this far. People who flippantly suggest they have some keen insight about how this might affect those closest to me which I missed ought to be prepared to dazzle me with their originality. Hitting the same things I've been wrestling with, and which are still sore spots, is likely to set me off.

2. There's a lifetime of being raised and conditioned as a male that will never go away. These are real experiences that form a very real part of the person I have grown to be. The fact that inside I was feeling awkward and alien to the whole "male" part of these things doesn't erase the fact that I experienced them. This will always set me apart from those raised within an entirely female sphere... and I will always feel a sense of loss for not having their equivalent growing-up experiences. I will always be set apart by having lived so much of my life under the influence of one gender, rather than the one I believe I belong to. I get this. And it makes me neither one or the other, really. I never got as much out of the one I had as those it was meant for, and never got at all those I was denied. But I do appreciate that this gives me a rather unique perspective.

3. I've never, ever wanted to be the gender I was born into for a single moment. I have always been coping with it as some kind of "make the best of what you have to work with" situation. This may be hard for some others to grasp. But it's true. Every moment of "male-pride" for me was an action of trying to fit in to my peers. It never felt right. I never believed it. Not one time. Every memory I have of any event where those of one gender were split from another, I only remember feeling like I wanted to be on the other side... like I had to pretend I belonged on the side I was on for the sake of other people's feelings.

4. This experience is kind of like a death to me. I expect most all of those I know to go away and act as if I died. And emotionally, in preparation, I've been treating them the same way... for quite some time now really. Call it an emotional pre-emptive strike. It hasn't been intentional. But now I'm to the point where all my former friends likely think I'm dead anyway. So what's the harm in telling them the cause of death? It would be nice if a couple of them decide to summon the poltergeist I've become to stay in touch, but I'm not counting on it. "You will lose all your friends" is a fait accompli to me by now. Anything in the other direction is a pleasant surprise.

So anyway, this will be the spot I talk about thoughts, feelings, and experiences of my gender transition... my jender journey ( yes, of course it was intentionally misspelled. That kind of alliterative intentional misspelling gives me giggles. And as I have no audience but me to speak to at the moment... it rules).

I hope others going through similar experiences, having similar thoughts, or having salient thoughts on the topics to discuss, will chime in.