Being Transgender: A Boy's Journey Into Self-Discovery
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Politics and Activism

Being Transgender: A Boy's Journey Into Self-Discovery

I know who I am, and I don't dread being the man I am meant to be.

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Being Transgender: A Boy's Journey Into Self-Discovery
Wikipedia

It’s hard to imagine being transgender if you are not. This isn’t your fault, it just is a difficult concept to identify with if you are not transgender personally. I write this knowing that the vast majority of people do not understand what it is to be transgender and explaining that to people is even harder. Being uncomfortable in your own body and not exactly knowing why you inherently feel the way you do or not even being able to articulate what you feel is not easily imaginable. I am sure some people will stop and think about it-- they will say that they have had some sort of insecurity about their body before, they totally get it! They don’t like their stomach, they don’t like how their teeth look, their butt isn’t perky enough; you’re right, at some point, everyone is insecure about something or embarrassed about their body, or they are shy about their body... but this is a different level of uncomfortable.

When I was in elementary school, there are many instances I could look back on and pinpoint how they indicated that I am trans. One I am going to focus on is when I was in fifth grade. My gym teacher, principal, and mother all had to have a talk about my breasts developing too quickly for me to not wear a bra at school. I remember being miserable, feeling ashamed, embarrassed, and hating my chest more than ever. Now, one way to try and make sense of that moment is to say that being a developing girl is a difficult process for everyone and if you’re a “tomboy” then it is especially awkward. The problem with that explanation is that my classmates -- who were also developing -- were excited and happy about their bodies: they took pride in their bodies. I felt different. I felt like it was the end of the world. I didn’t exactly understand why, but I knew I didn’t feel normal. I didn’t feel like this was a part of growing older, and I remember crying about it. This isn’t my only memory of being upset about my body, but it is the best example I have. It wasn’t about being shy, it was about my body and what it was developing into, and how that felt entirely wrong.

Realizing I am transgender was the biggest eye opener of my entire life, it changed everything about me, what I think, how I feel, how I look at myself-- and it gave me the words to set to the feelings I had been having for years. I didn’t come to the conclusion on my own, truly. I did it with the help of someone important giving me hints, pointing out little things, and lots of denial. When it came down to figuring myself out, I took a week to myself to think about the entire concept. There was a lot of crying, a lot of confusion, a lot of memories I never wanted to acknowledge or sort through. I spent hours upon hours in an incognito window on Google trying to research these feelings I had been having my entire life. Taking quizzes, reading articles, reading help pages, calling the TransLifeline crying because I didn’t want to accept who I was. But after taking that week to mull over my entire life, I knew who I was, I knew my path. So then it started, my coming out process. I started with those closest to me, and then work, and finally, I talked to my family.

Coming out to my family was the hardest thing I had to do. I planned for weeks. I drafted emails, I cried, I was scared. So I started in the place I figured would be easiest; my dad. My dad and I didn’t live together, we barely spoke, and coming out to him was risk-free because our involvement in each other's lives with minimal. My father is a conservative republican, and I figured that if he would take it poorly, it wouldn’t matter very much. I called him on an afternoon where I had the house alone. The man who once told me I wasn’t a person and had no rights sat and listened to me explain myself, nervous and scared for a reaction. All he said was, “That’s it?” It was the biggest relief I had ever heard in my life. If my dad could understand and support me, then the rest of my liberal Democrat family could surely understand!

I came out to my brother next. I handed him my phone with his letter in the car one day, and he didn’t say anything and changed the subject, seemingly indifferent. He knew I had been questioning my gender, and I figured he just knew I had decided and I knew he loved me anyway. I talked to my aunts next, and with caution and concern, they kindly accepted me and said they wanted me to be happy. I left my mom for last.

My mom was the person I had been most scared to talk to because I was afraid to hurt her. I was afraid that by me coming out, she would feel the loss of a daughter too heavily. So on my way to a work meeting one day, I sent her the long email with the combination explanation/apology, begging for her acceptance and love. Upon arriving home, my nightmare came to life. My mother did not accept or support me, she told me that I was confused and I would thank her later for her lack-of-support because I would see that she was right. She made nasty threats about taking me off the health insurance, about contesting any attempt at a name change, questioning who would ever love me or hire me. She said that this rejection was an act of love that I would thank her for. I didn’t sleep a wink that night.

Since then, our relationship had been strained. Her unquenchable aspiration for biological grandchildren and complete disregard for my happiness has put us at odds. I cringe every time she speaks my deadname, every time she calls me she/her. Every time she tells my dog to go see his “mommy” (while he blankly looks at her, knowing that he has a daddy and not a mommy.) Each moment she ignores my happiness in pursuit of her own wants, and living in her own fears, I find myself trying to understand her and the rejection I face. This adversity was one I had never felt before. My family had always accepted that I was interested in women, my family had always supported my choices in happiness. In analyzing this, I have started to come up with a few conclusions, because there needs to be a reason. My mother is not typically a bigoted person, and accepts everyone as they are. She is a fighter for civil rights, she is an ally, she is a defender of the people.

Understanding my mother's adverse reaction to my gender seems to come from a place of selfish wants, a place of worry, a place of fear, a place of not understanding, and a place of mourning. She wants biological grandchildren, more than anything in the world, and hormones have the possibility of making my sterile, thus taking that dream away from her. She knows that being transgender is -- on its own -- a dangerous and difficult path to be on. She knows that people do not like transgender individuals and are trying to take rights away from them at the current moment, and having a child who is transgender is terrifying when you know that people in this country would like to murder transkids. She doesn’t think that I am transgender, just as she doesn’t think that I am ADHD.

I got diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and despite being tested, she refused to ever accept that I am ADHD, and so I think this is similar. She has this idea of who I am in her mind, then she has this idea of what she wants, and the people she knows, and she wants to put me into a box she has the capability to understand. She doesn’t seem to have the capacity to understand that this has been a consistent and persistent problem in my life for as long as I can remember. She can accept having a tomboy for a child because she was a tomboy as a child, but she grew out of it. But the level of dysphoria I have experienced is incomprehensible to her because she doesn’t understand that when she gave me a women’s blazer to wear to prom my junior year, that it made me feel so wrong and so upset that it nearly ruined my entire night. She found my complete mental breakdown about the jacket -- which was just like a men’s jacket (in her mind) -- to be unreasonable. For someone who has never experienced dysphoria, I understand why she thought I was batshit crazy, and as someone who didn’t understand why I was crying about a jacket not being the right gender of jacket, I didn’t have any explanation. All I knew back then was that I felt ugly and wrong in a woman’s jacket. Now that I am older, have done research, and understand myself better, I know that was a moment of dysphoria.

If you don’t know what dysphoria is or feels like, it is an extremely uneasy feeling that can lead to extreme states of anxiety and depression. My feelings of dysphoria often feel like the action I am being forced into is a knife pressed against my jugular, and I am inconsolable until everything is “right.” “Right” for me, is when someone stops their pursuit of attempting to make me wear/do/think/feel/look like any way that a female would. When I am dysphoric (which has not happened in quite some time now) I am reactive, I am anxious, I was incapable of explaining why doing what I was doing made me feel so violently sick to my stomach, and I would do anything to escape that moment because it feels wrong. My whole life, I would cry and be “irrationally” upset at the things that people made me wear, the way they tried to make me look, the way that being called my deadname always felt wrong (so I gave myself an androgynous nickname to make it better,) the way I would have a total mental breakdown when I felt like my masculinity was being torn from me, when people called me a lady and I felt weird, when people treated me like a girl and I got angry.

My mother wanted so desperately to have the dream life she envisioned, with the family she envisioned. I think that she spent her whole life waiting for me to change, to do as she pleased, but the sad and most unfortunate truth of all is that though she gave me life, I am not her property. I am not a cattle for breeding, with the sole purpose of giving her a family she always wanted, because ultimately, this is my life to live, and not hers. I am a human, I am my own individual, and my life is mine to live. I want to live a happy life, a life where I actually have a future that I can imagine, where I am not miserable. Despite her best efforts, I cannot make my mother happy and give her the life that she wants to have. She gave birth to a human, and humans are of free will. When she asked me to delay, when she asked me to wait ten years and have children, I don’t think she understood that she asked me to put myself and my happiness and my will to live aside for her. I never wanted to birth children. It was never a future I saw myself having. I always knew I wanted to have children, but I never once had the desire to carry them myself. I could never see myself doing it and the idea of it always felt inherently wrong. But before I even came out I had explained that I did not want to, I couldn’t understand why, but it was an unfathomable experience that didn’t make any sense to me. My life is mine to live, and to not even see a future in that life, not being able to see a future self without immense disgust was not something I was going to live with for a moment longer.

The trials and tribulations that my mother and I are going through are not uncommon. Sometimes, they even more extreme. My mother chooses to ignore my gender, with the hopes that she is right. The unfortunate truth is that I cannot make her understand. She has to do that for herself, and see that living my life the way I am intended to is what makes me happy, confident, and that it is my job to do my best to make a change in perceptions and in the world. I cannot let fear run my life, just as I cannot live my life to make my mother happy because in the end, I have to do what is right for me. I cannot make my mother understand or accept me, but I can stand up for myself. I can make the choice to be my authentic self, and I can make the choice to correct her. My life cannot be lived according to her desires because I cannot cast who I am aside to make her happy.

The denial has long passed, and I have started to understand these unexplainable moments from my past. Not having the words to convey what you are feeling and why you are feeling it is by far the most difficult and most frustrating thing you will ever deal with. The extremes of my childhood battle with being transgender and the extreme emotions it made me feel is a story that I am very open and proud to share. I am proud to be transgender. I understand the risks, I understand the difficulties and financial aspects of my transition. I am aware that this isn’t an easy path, and if you asked me last year what I thought I would look like in twenty years, I would have told you that I have no idea, but I hope to die before I get there, because the idea of being a woman and living my entire life as a woman has always been so incomprehensible to me. Finally figuring out the missing piece of the puzzle in understanding myself has given me my future. I am no longer afraid of growing older, because I know who I am, and I don’t dread being the man I am meant to be.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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