Trigger Warning [discussion of suicide and trauma]
This isn’t an easy read, but it’s a good read.
This essay really resonated with me. Like the author, I had figured out my transness at at fairly early age. I almost always had a messy mop of long curly hair throughout my girlhood; oftentimes I was largely indistinguishable from the other girls. It wasn’t until I was 12 or 13 that I really started having thoughts about how I wished I was born a girl. I saw all the girls starting puberty, and suddenly I was obviously, painfully, visually male. I wanted what they had. It was so intense that I would have fantasies about running away from home and cutting off my junk(in my defense, it was like the year 2000. I didn’t have the internet, and wouldn’t for years. I had to endure it in ignorance.) It was a few months afterward that I found a word for what I was feeling. Weirdly enough, it was my mom listening to the Howard Stern show while we were cleaning that made it come up. I heard the word “transsexual”(it was 2000 or 2001 at that point, after all) and I realized without a shadow of a doubt that that was what I was. What was left of my egg shattered into a thousand pieces.
Knowing my condition did me no good back then, though. Even if I were brave enough to speak up, how would I even broach the subject? All I knew was that trans people were a thing and I was one of them. I was afraid of my father, my mother wouldn’t understand, and I never seriously considered anyone at the school as a resource. Looking back, I have no idea why I never thought to hop on one of the school computers and look up some of this trans stuff on the Internet. I was helpless to do anything but watch and wait as the wrong puberty warped and disfigured my body. There’s little now I can do but try to mitigate the worst of it. HRT is a wonder drug, but it’s not perfect. I will carry reminders of my first puberty for the rest of my life.
What wouldn’t I have given to be able to go on puberty blockers at 13, rather than wait until I was 33 to start HRT and try to salvage what I could with my body? By the time I was independent enough to pursue transition, I had gotten too used to playing the role as a “man” to go through with it. “I’ll wait until my parents pass away, then I’ll do it,” I told myself. It wasn’t until 2021, post-Trump, that I allowed myself to lurk in trans spaces. I saw people who were living as their true selves. They seemed happy, an emotion that had become alien to me by that point. I think that was the final kick in the ass I needed to get over my fear and give transition a go. I’m not going to lie and say it’s gone perfectly for me, but being my true self is a lot less draining than constantly having to act.
I can relate. I lived practically as a girl for much of my prepubescent life. I didn’t care about pronouns until they were forced onto me, and made to mean something about me as a person. My mom let me like whatever things I wanted regardless of societal conditioned gender roles, and she taught me much of what it was like to be a post-pubescent woman. And I wanted everything, that should have been my life too. I was jealous of all the other girls who were experiencing puberty and suddenly I felt left behind. I was an outsider, suddenly none of my female friends wanted to be hang out and there was a rift created because I couldn’t live and relate to their experience.
I was still hopeful for puberty because at least I’d look like how people expected me to look as a “man”. But now I’m through it and I still feel like I was born into the wrong body. My whole life I’ve felt like I’m borrowing and taking care of this body without it ever being mine.
Being so disconnected to this body has made it easy to not worry about damage to it. I had thought about cutting off my dick even when I was younger, but this thought continued throughout puberty. I had a terrible eating disorder that resulted in rapid and uncontrolled weight gain (a lot to do with my disgust with puberty and my want to isolate/hide myself). I won’t talk about self-harm, just that disassociation was easy because it wasn’t my body, just a shell.
Even having the internet easily available for half of my life (since I am younger than you) I never considered looking it up. I just assumed I was jealous for some reason. My identity has never felt like something solid that I could explain (to myself or otherwise), I am way too indecisive for labels of my complex human experience. All I know is I very much wish I was born into a cis female body. I wish I was like my mom. I haven’t looked into medical stuff for myself, but I for sure know that I am not cisgender.
I wish I was living as my true self.
I can very much relate to this comment from the essay writer: “[puberty] taught me that my body did not belong to me. It seemed to belong to everyone but me. What I had wanted for it was the last thing that mattered. It made a tragedy of my body.”
🫂
I think I disassociated heavily as well. I wanted nothing more than to be alone with my thoughts, because at least there I was treated as a woman. Daydreaming got me though a couple decades of the closet. It may not have been the healthiest way to cope, in retrospect. I ended up completely aimless in life, going where others pushed me because I had no real will to run my own life.
I had the bad luck of having the 2008 recession happen a couple years after I graduated high school. I hadn’t gotten my feet underneath me yet, and college wasn’t an option due to my mediocre grades(thanks a fucking lot, adhd), and the fact that my sister lost her full ride scholarship, so my parents had to pick up the bill. They had to straight up tell my brother and I that they wouldn’t be able to afford helping us go to college. I was jobless and living at home when the recession hit, and I could not find a job for the life of me. I applied to a McDonald’s and never even got an interview. I struggled for about a year before my dad abruptly told me “You’re joining the navy.” I didn’t argue. I didn’t fight it. I was terrified, because I knew I’d be a terrible fit for the military, but I accepted my fate.
However, because the military was so backlogged, I had to wait a year to report to boot camp after I enlisted. When you enlist in the military, you are made to report to a processing station. We were given a hotel room for the night and would be woken up a 4:30 AM. I have always been a nightowl, and I had almost never woken up that early. Still groggy, we took job aptitude exam(which I actually did very well on; I was appalled at the fact that there was so much stuff on there I learned in freaking elementary school). Most of the rest of the day was spent standing in line, doing various physical exams, and filling out mountains of paperwork. Finally, at the end of the day, my barely awake ass is dragged to a clerk that asked me what I was interested in doing. I told him that I’d like to be an interpreter. The clerk nods and tells me that requires another test, but before I can take it, I need to sign up for another job in the interim, in case I don’t pass. He asked me if I liked computers, to which I murmured agreement. “How about Submarine Electronics and Computer Field?” I was completely fucking fried at this point, so I go, “yeah, sure, whatever”. What this asshole didn’t tell me is that once you volunteer for submarines, you can’t get out of it. I had been bamboozled into an all male service, and there was nothing I could do.
Of course, I was livid. But I kept my mouth shut, and endured five years of military life on the submarine base. For five years, I was the only woman around. And submarines are hard, annoying work. Every fourth day I’d have to stay behind as everyone else left, and spend the night on the sub and stand watch. When I went on deployment, I spent 60 consecutive days underwater and was glad to see Bahrain, of all things. I think I may have gone crazy had I not had a year and a half spell on med hold. Somehow, I think that maybe people subconsciously knew something was up with me. Nobody questioned that I seemed to hate the boat more than anyone else, even the people who had more bullshit jobs. I never got the same kind of treatment as the guys, like they knew they needed to be a bit more gentler with me. I don’t know. I do know that I was generally well-liked, despite the fact that I wasn’t very good at this navy thing.
I did get into college once my enlistment ended, and I started to get more serious about finally transitioning once I got my feet underneath me. Then Trump happened, and all I could see were the chuds flirting with fascism. That scared me back into the closet. I would later drop out of college(thanks a fucking lot, adhd, again) and move back across the country to my parents’ house. It took a year or so to get my independence back. I get settled down in Seattle, annnnnnd covid. Honestly, the pandemic did a good job of helping convince me to go ahead and transition.
