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| Image from Micheal Held on UnSplash. |
What a mistake it is when a “civilian” says transgender women and transgender men have a choice when they decide to live a life they were destined for.
By destined, I mean ultimately, we had no choice but to
transition and any attempts to stop it were going to be futile. Those of us who
were forced into the male box at birth unfortunately learned the male way to
deal with emotions and difficult circumstances, we just internalized them. Hoping
they would just go away. I know with me, in my family, internalization was taught
from a very young age. It was impossible to relay any sort of gender S.O.S. to
anyone who had a remote idea of how to help me. Back in those days, gender dysphoria
was treated as a mental disorder and at the least, I knew enough to know I was
not mentally ill. I just wanted to be a girl.
What I did then was try to run and hide and attempt to be
hyper masculine in everything I did which worked for years. But the damage from
doing it was extensive, and my mental health suffered from the pressure of
trying to be both binary genders. It became a balancing act which was
impossible to put down.
Along the way, with urging from my second wife, I sought
therapy to save our marriage. To do so, I found a therapist who advertised as a
gender specialist in Columbus, Ohio. She was one of the first and I found her
ad in a LGBTQ publication I was reading and decided to give her a try. After
several sessions, she told me the truth which I only listened to part of. She
said I was Bi-Polar which explained all the severe depression and ups and downs
I had been experiencing. It turned out that it was the easy diagnosis she gave
me because the second part involved my gender dysphoria. One session, she flat
out told me there was nothing she or even me could ever do anything about
wanting to be a woman. Somehow, I would have to learn to live with it or act on
my desires. Her words shocked me and at that time of my life, I was still
searching for my gender truth and was not ready to give up on maintaining all
the comfortable male privileges I had worked so hard for.
My answer at the time was to go back to internalizing what
she told me because there was no way I was going to tell my wife. Who then
would have considered the entire use of therapy to be a waste. Since in many
ways, I was just refusing to look at my true self in the mirror, I discontinued
therapy and went on with my life. Even though my mirror was telling me I was a
man, my mind had other ideas, and I still had no one to send a S.O.S to because
on occasion, I felt as if I was sinking fast. I was fortunate that my new anti-depression
meds worked well enough to keep my everyday moods stable which left me the
gender problems to deal with on their own.
It took me years to finally figure out the gender problems
were not going away no matter how much I tried to internalize them. In
desperation I tried to start going out in public and attempt to interact with
the world as a woman, transgender or not. My S.O.S. to the public was I was not
trying to fool anyone into thinking I was a ciswoman, I meant no harm, and I was
just trying to be me for once in my life with no internalizing. I can’t say it
was always easy and I survived a suicide attempt when I felt I was cheating on
my wife (with myself) but I made it through alive.
The best part was when I began to build a new transfeminine
life completely away from the man I used to be. Ironically though, my internalization
was still there but just reversed. No longer was I trying to hide the reality
of my femininity, now I was trying to hide any of my old male self-slipping
through and re-ruining my life I was trying to build.
The entire path I was on took me head on to the realization
that no matter what the mirror was telling me in the morning, I could work past
him and for once face the world as my true, authentic self. I did not have to
send out any more S.O.S. pleas that went unanswered or internalized anything. I
faced myself and was free to live.
To hell with never having a choice of which gender was right
for me, and to hell is where I almost went thinking I was not man enough to be
a woman. I had the choice all along no matter what society told me. I was just afraid
to do it.
