Who is She?

Small Steps

My current situation makes it difficult for me to do many things towards transition. Were I to begin any open steps towards transition, it would cost me my job. Since I've done 15 of 20 years required to lock in a lifetime pension, that would be costly. Although still tempting, as the thought of having to wait five more years to transition isn't a happy one. But I have to be practical, as I may well have trouble finding work during and after transition, since it's perfectly legal to discriminate against transgendered persons, so I'd best have at least some income locked in before I set myself up in that way.

But that means that, in many ways, I'm in a holding pattern, trapped in a body that doesn't seem right, being treated in ways wholly incorrect for the way I see myself. It is an annoying weight to carry around, as there are many situations every day during which people treat me as a man, and it's difficult not to speak up.

Fortunately, there is one thing I can do to move me in the right direction: therapy. In order to be approved for Gender Reassignment Therapy, you generally need the approval of two therapists. This is at once logical and maddening. On the one hand, this isn't the kind of thing people should do without thinking about it a lot. After all, you're talking about a pretty significant life change. It's understandable doctors don't want people to undergo it without being pretty darn sure they should. Conversely, for someone like me who has been living with this for close to 40 years, the knowledge I now have to convince two complete strangers that, yes, this is really the right thing for me is a bit frustrating. Nonetheless, that is the road I've got to travel if I don't want to go black market, so I'm better off trying to deal with it than wasting energy worrying about it.

My employer will provide access to therapy, but those therapists would be bound to tell my employer I was transgendered, so using them is right out. I thought that would mean I'd have to wait to try therapy, but it turns out that there are some therapists who offer online therapy. I'm not going to pretend that online therapy is likely to be nearly as effective as face-to-face meetings, but given that my options are not between traditional and online therapy, but online therapy or no therapy, online suddenly seems like a reasonable option.

So, after an appropriate amount of searching the internet for therapists who appeared to have the appropriate experience with transgender issues and whose credentials appeared to be in order, I settled on a therapist and set up a meeting with her for last Friday. Hiccups with my internet service nearly prevented me from making my appointment; internet service in my current location is often intermittent. But things worked out and I was able to get online for my first appointment.

The therapy itself went reasonably well. I don't know if it is necessarily something I need from the standpoint of being in some way unhealthy, but it was certainly nice to talk to someone who has some experience in the field and who, when you mention something that has seemed odd your whole life, says that yes, that's actually not atypical for transgendered people. Not that I want to live my life in the footsteps of others necessarily, but when you've lived your whole life thinking that there was something wrong with you, it's nice to hear that, at a minimum, that 'wrongness' is shared by other people. We are social animals, after all. From that standpoint alone, I think that the therapy will be helpful.

The Paradigm Shift

I find myself frequently envying Jenny Boylan, author of She’s Not There, her autobiographical account of how she went from James to Jenny. Unlike her, I was not certain I was a girl when I was a child. Even today I don’t think I am a woman; I just think that I’m supposed to be one. Or maybe I just want to be one; I’m not sure. Today was supposed to be my first appointment with my therapist, but the internet is out here, so that will have to wait at least another few days. In the interim I’m left to wonder if there is somehow something wrong with me. As I said, I never thought I was a girl. Far from it; it was pretty obvious I was a boy, based on my limited understanding of anatomy and physiology. I just thought I was weird. As far back as I can remember, I have wondered what it would be like to be a woman. When my friends played superhero games, I didn’t want to be Batman or Superman, I wanted to be Batgirl or Supergirl. When I discovered role-playing games in my adolescence, the idea of playing female characters fascinated me, although fear of being considered odd generally kept me playing characters congruent with my biological gender. It wasn’t until I discovered online role-playing that I felt free enough to try out female characters, and I really enjoyed playing them. More recently, the Second Life simulation allowed me to play a woman as never before, and it felt so right I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time playing, enough that it caused a strain in my marriage. Not as much as the one I will cause when I tell my wife about my being transgendered, however.

Not that this should come completely out of the blue for her. I have told her in the past that I wanted to be a woman; I just also told her that I would never do anything about it. Having changed my mind on that point, I can expect some well-deserved recriminations from my wife I’m not looking forward to that, but I don’t think there is any way around it.

So what changed my mind? How did I go from living a life of quiet desperation in which I accepted that I could never have what I wanted to one in which I am increasingly determined to undergo gender reassignment therapy, to the point I am prepared to risk my marriage, my family, and even my job? I am not certain I can answer that satisfactorily. I do know that, for as long as I can remember, I have been unhappy. I didn’t know why. I assumed that I had a milder version of the depression that has plagued my mother throughout my life. It was just something I lived with, day in and day out, until it became the background noise of my life. When I told one of my best friends that I wanted to be a woman, her first reaction was that the desire must be very hard for me to live with, but the truth is that I had been living with pain for so long I didn’t really remember what it was like to not be unhappy. So living with it didn’t seem hard at all. It wasn’t until I realized that I could live that life, albeit imperfectly, that I suddenly realized how much pain I had been in, because I was no longer in pain and I thought I was going to burst from happiness. That initial burst of joy has faded with time, but the feeling of being happier than I have been in the past remains, as the weight of trying to hide from who I am has vanished.

And that, more than anything else, is what has convinced me that I am making the right decision. This is certainly something you don’t want to rush into, although my personal circumstances guarantee that I can’t in any case. But the feeling of relief and just simple rightness involved with this realization strike me as too strong to ignore. I lived 37 years feeling like there was something wrong with me, something I couldn’t see, but that was there nonetheless, every minute of every day, waiting in the background. Now that’s gone. And I cannot describe how good it feels.

Beginnings

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.