Skip to main content

My Story: Transgender Day of Visibility

CW: suicide, dysphoria, ptsd, memory loss
My relationship with my transition journey is complicated by the fact that PTSD has erased most of my memories of a decade of my life, including all of puberty. However, I want to try, as best I can, to tell you about my transition.

When I was a child, my family did not emphasize gender roles. I was allowed to wear wear and play with whatever I liked and be whoever I liked, and therefore, I didn't feel a great need to push back against my assigned gender.

Early in puberty, I was still allowed to date who I liked and be who I liked, and my body was late to develop, so I still didn't feel much dysphoria. Even though I didn't know what trans was, I was already presenting as my real self.  Autism helped me be oblivious to the opinions of anyone who might have disagreed with my gender presentation. I also remember being exposed to the concept of intersex people around this time and thinking "I was supposed to be born that way." It was the closest thing to nonbinary that I had been exposed to, and it resonated with me.

From ages 10-20 my memories are fuzzy, but I know that my family converted to Christianity when I was 15, and that's the first time in my life I felt any pressure to conform to gender roles. That pressure came not from my family, but from my own study of the Bible and from the Church.

By the time I was 18, I was trying obsessively to match the ideal of a perfect "Proverbs 31" woman. I did not believe I was allowed to have an identity, interests, or passions outside of my Christian identity. I worked hard to squash all other parts of me, not just my gender identity, so I could be what I viewed as the ideal Christian, single-mindedly focused on God.

I start to have clear memories again around age 21. By age 21, I was suicidal, actively going to the train tracks and contemplating jumping on several times a week. I reached a point where I decided that, as Christianity was part of what was making me suicidal, I needed to take a step back from it, and if there was a god, he would understand.

When I stopped finding my identity solely in Christianity, I started to have to put the pieces of who I was back together again. It was almost like picking right back up at age 14, before I converted to Christianity and started my personal quest to erase every other part of my life. I had to re-discover what foods I liked, what clothes I liked, what music I liked, what values guided me, what my passions were, what reasons I had to stay alive- all of it- all over again.

As I pieced myself together again, I discovered that I had developed a lot physically since I was 14, and I had a lot of body dysphoria. I also had a lot of social dysphoria with the dutiful woman role that I had been trying to fill. I was also coming to terms with my lack of attraction to men at this time and talking to a gay coworker about it. He referred me to a local LGBT+ center.

After getting information about programs from the center, I didn't go to any for a while. I wasn't quite sure where I fit, and I was still afraid that being transgender was a sin. Then, one evening, I was standing at the train tracks, contemplating jumping in front of the train, and I decided to get on and take the train to the genderqueer group at the LGBT+ center, instead. That started my "official transition."

That was about 3 years ago. I attended support group at the center for about a year-and-a-half before my health made it to difficult to go. I also joined online gender support groups. After a while, I scheduled an appointment with the local LGBT medical clinic as well. Now, I'm a little over 2 years on low-dose testosterone, and I've been out to my family around that long, too. I've got a great community of people, both online and in real life. And I haven't returned to Christianity. I'd consider myself a soft agnostic now, meaning that I don't know if it's possible to know if there's a higher power or not; the only thing I know is that I don't know.


I am an Amazon Affiliate and am rewarded if you click on or purchase from the ads on my blog.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dear Unnamed Friend

Dear unnamed friend, I carefully hoarded enough spoons to do the activity you suggested at the time you suggested. I went to bed super early and planned NOTHING for tomorrow to be able to do it. I just got discharged from psych this week, and the meds still aren’t all the way in my system, so I’m foggy-minded and emotional. I also woke up every 90 minutes last night for 30-45 minutes due to nightmares about the hospital that joined my normal nightmares. I told you I’d let you know around 9am today, when my alarm was set to sound, whether I could come to the 1pm event today, and I texted you that yes, I could come, but I needed to sleep until 10 to regain spoons. You texted me 4-5 times between 9:15 and 10, effectively cancelling any change I had to sleep, since it takes me at least 2 hours to wake all the way up. You tried to change the plans to pick me up around 10:15am, and I understand why. You were already in the area for something and didn’t want to drive all the w...

Distress Tolerance Skills Part 1: Crisis Survival Skills

All posts in this series reference working through DBT® Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition , and all quotes come from that book unless otherwise specified. Goals of Distress Tolerance: Distress tolerance skills are important because distress is always going to be a part of life, and fighting against that fact causes more suffering. Distress is also part of making any change in ourselves, and if we shy away from that pain, we will be unable to progress. The Distress Tolerance Skills section of the book will be divided into two main types of handouts: Crisis Survival and Reality Acceptance. There will also be some material for "When the Crisis is Addiction". This blog will cover crisis survival skills. The distress tolerance section has 3 main goals: "Survive crisis situations without making them worse Accept reality Replace suffering and being "stuck" with ordinary pain and the possibility of moving forward Become free of having t...

Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills Part 1

All posts in this series reflect working through  DBT® Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition . All quotes come from this book unless otherwise noted.  Deciding to Study Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills: According to the book, the reason for practicing interpersonal effectiveness skills is to "be skillful in getting what you want and need from others", "build relationships and end destructive ones", and "walk the middle path". There are some factors that can get in the way of interpersonal effectiveness: lacking the skills you need, not knowing what you want, being too emotional to be skillful, forgetting long-term goals because of what you want right now, "other people... getting in the way", and having thoughts and beliefs that get in the way. The thoughts and beliefs that were getting in the way of me practicing interpersonal effectiveness skills were: "If I ask for something or say no, I can't stand if so...