If you're reading this, I am quite frankly surprised, if pleased. I hope that my experiences can provide some value both to other transgendered persons who are trying to adjust to their condition and to those who simply hope to understand a bit more about what it means to be transgendered.
I will begin with some basic discussion of who I am, without getting specific enough to reveal things I would prefer to remain private. I am in my late-30s and only recently came to the belief that I am transgendered. My entire life I have felt that I was somehow 'wrong,' but it took me a very long time to understand just why, or what that meant for me as a person. Part of the reason I am writing this blog is to try and capture that.
Needless to say my experiences are unique, and I don't pretend to offer anything approaching the 'definitive' transgendered experience. Indeed, I doubt such a thing even exists in a community as unusual as transgenders. (Transgendereds? I'm so new to this, I don't even know the vocabulary.) But I know how significant it was for me to read just a few excerpts of Jenny Boylan's She's Not There, her autobiographical look at her life and transition from male to female. I don't expect that my writing will have a similar effect, but it might just help a confused person to understand that they're not alone. Because when you have these feelings, you feel really alone most of the time.
Writing about my experiences also helps me to try and understand them, because while there are a lot more people going through this than I believe the general population realizes, this isn't an easy subject to talk about with most people. Right now, I can only discuss this with four people, three of whom I have never met in person and the other I have met only once. My wife doesn't know, nor do my parents nor the rest of my family. Better yet, my job is in a line of work where being transgendered is strictly forbidden, so I have to keep this a secret until I can secure a pension or another job to support myself and pay for the numerous procedures required to transition.
I am not concealing who I am from my wife because I have any sense of malice towards her. Far from it. I love her deeply, and I hope that she will be willing to accept me for who I am. However, our current circumstances have us living apart, and this just doesn't seem to be the kind of thing you tell someone over the phone. So, until we can be together again, I have to resist the urge to tell her. And that urge is very strong, for several reasons. I dislike misleading her in any way. I don't know how she will react to the news, and I'm nervous that it won't go well, but she deserves to know the truth. But it seems very wrong for me to break it to her without being face to face with her.
This, of course, means that I can't really tell anyone else, either. The four people who know, as I noted, are all friends, but they are all friends who didn't really know me well as a male. Indeed, two have known me only as Kaija, thanks to the magic of the internet. So it's a lot easier for them to deal with the idea I want to bring Kaija to life completely. When it comes to explaining that to the woman I've been married to for ten years, or to parents who have known me only as a man for close to 40 years, well, it's a different proposition.
What makes it really hard is not knowing how anyone will react. If my wife says she is going to leave me if I transition, for example, what will I do? I don't know, and I don't particularly like to think about it. But it is certainly a possibility. I suspect I wouldn't take it well if she came to me and told me she was planning to become a man, after all. And a conversation with my father earlier today in which I happened to mention the upcoming civil rights legislation that is foundering on the question of whether or not to provide legal protection to transgendered persons in the workplace was not encouraging.
But it is late and I am tired and these problems will remain tomorrow, so I will tackle them anew at that time.
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