The biggest factor holding me back from transitioning for all these years was the act of transitioning itself—the liminal period that can stretch on for years and years where the changes in your body can be… so… tediously… slow. Heh, I’m so impatient.
Are you a man or a woman? How do you deal with/manage people’s perception of you? All the awkward fucking conversations… was all that crap worth it? I could never be a real man, right? I’d always be pretending… but then I’ve always been pretending to be a woman. I wished I could just snap my fingers and voilà! Skip past all the embarrassing shit.
Argh… I knew I would hate it.
And I do hate it… but not as much as I thought I would. I’m definitely not as angry or embarrassed as I thought I would be, and you know why? Because there are so many others going through almost exactly the same thing. I’m not alone—not by a long shot.
When I thought about transitioning, early on, it was always with the assumption that I’d be a freak. That trans folk were few and far between and that it would be a horrible, overwhelming, demeaning, uphill battle.
But… it’s not, actually.
See, when I first spoke about my genderfuckedness with my high school counsellor (whom I was forced to see twice a week for my delinquent, antisocial behaviour hehe) all he knew was the word “transexual”… and not really anything about gender dysphoria. He did do his research after talking to me, but it was all medical and, back then, it was super restrictive and secretive and complicated and holy shit I would have blown my stack. And there was absolutely nothing he could do to alleviate my fears of the social aspect. He just didn’t know.
Thank god for the internet.
I mean, it’s still awkward as hell sometimes, and maybe because this is Canada and we generally try to be polite/understanding about things, but I’m finding that dealing with folks as I transition is… no big deal? I lost a lot of my self confidence over the last 10+ years, so I’m timid about certain things that never bothered me before. Like using the men’s washroom, for instance. It never used to bother me. All throughout high school (and the last two years of elementary school), I used the men’s and women’s washrooms pretty much interchangeably. In high school, I used the men’s changing rooms more often than the women’s and, whenever we went on a field trip somewhere overnight, I always bunked with the guys. Same in CEGEP. I was willing to put up with some annoying comments about my behaviour if it meant I could be more comfortable (weirdly, not a single teacher ever questioned anything I did).
But I was the only one I knew like me.
Not anymore. And it’s not only just groups online and a few IRL friends—it’s also all the people who are incredibly supportive and respectful of trans folks. It’s my postman who, picking up on my name/voice/appearance change told me his daughter is trans and he loves and supports her. It’s the teen guy who came to the door to sell some chocolates and who asked “do I call you sir or ma’am?” in the most genuine and endearing way. It’s all the people who “sir” me without question once they see my name. It’s the people who, when they make a mistake, apologize.
And it’s people I admire who are blazing paths on tv, movies, and social media… like Ian Harvie, Laverne Cox, Aydian Dowling, Jamie Raines, Chase Ross, who have so many followers that are trans themselves.
I’m not alone… never was, as it turns out. 🙂
All right. So maybe I don’t actually hate the transitioning thing. It’s slow, sometimes awkward, and really annoying… but if this is all I have to go through to come out the other side feeling and looking more like I do on the inside, I’m lucky.