If you’ve read along so far in this series of posts, you might think that I knew I was trans at this point, and that should be the end of the story, but it’s not, really. While my parents didn’t reject me, they also didn’t accept me as female. They wanted me to be “cured”. So they sent me back to the same therapist I saw when they discovered my stash of clothes in junior high school. Thankfully, that therapist actually knew something about gender variance and he did not try and do conversion therapy on me, something I never bothered letting my parents know, of course.

Nonetheless, I found other uses for the therapy. I was seriously suffering from depression and now I had someone I could talk to about it. I also started a lifelong journey with anti-depressants that has continued until this day.

However, the big thing in my life came in the fall when I started college at a new university in my parents city. Over the summer I had started wearing make-up routinely. I thought I was doing it kind of like a goth guy, but I must have failed that, because the first day of classes one of my professors took me for a girl. It tickled me so much that I decided to roll with it and gave my name as Eve – a play on my old middle name. After that I just started bringing a change of clothes with me each day when I left the house for school in the morning. My social transition had begun!

It did not, go well, though. No one questioned me or gave me any trouble, but my depression was in full bloom at this point and I started skipping classes and not doing homework again. I was in danger of actually flunking out of school. I was also getting pressure from my parents to try and be a man, and that pressure was getting to me. About half way through the semester I decided to officially withdraw, and for some reason I also told my parents that I’d been attending classes as a woman. My mother thereafter referred to this as The Eve Incident, as if it were some scandalous event in history.

But the pressure from my parents worked eventually and they broke me. I gave in and promised that I’d try to be a man. I even convinced myself that I really wanted it, too! After all, I thought, surely it must be easier for me to be a man than to try and be a woman. Over the next 4 years I vacillated back and forth several times. I would try to be a man and the internal pressure from inside me would build up until I couldn’t stand it any more and I let myself be trans again. Then my parents would put the pressure on me and I’d go back once more.

This didn’t change until I graduated. At that point I had a degree and I started looking for a job, because my parents would not help me to afford graduate school and I felt so helpless that I didn’t think I could do it on my own. Four months after graduation, though, I did get a job, and it was a good paying job. Suddenly, I was actually financially independent from my parents. I didn’t need their support any more.

They no longer had any threat to make when pressuring me to be a man.

My trans identity came roaring back in full force, and I started adding more feminine clothing to my wardrobe. Clothing that I could actually buy with my own money, not just sneak out of a forgotten storage closet. One night I went to the see the movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and had a great time! A wonderful movie and a groundbreaker in terms of trans presentation in cinema. When I got home, my mother saw me in a jeans, a blue blouse, and with my eye make-up. She asked where I had been, and I told her. She immediately accused me of “backsliding”. But this time instead of being cowed I just rolled my eyes at her, told her she was being an idiot, and I went to bed.

I also started finally following up on some old contact information for trans support groups in my city that I had but had never used out of fear. I was able to get in touch with someone and find out when the next get together was. I showed up in the most ridiculously overdressed fashion. Someone I met told me I looked like I was going to a funeral! We had a talking support session and then a few of the women there took me over to a lesbian bar with them just to hang out and have some fun.

Well, that hooked me! I went to the meetings regularly after that and started making friends. I even somehow got voted onto the board as the meeting coordinator after like 3 months. I also met a trans girl just finishing up her final year of college, and we got to talking and decided to move in together as roomates.

And that’s when I not only told my parents that I was moving out, but that I had also made up my mind to transition and persue surgery. They were furious! My dad demanded to know what “all those years of therapy” were for and I bluntly told him that they had helped me with my depression and also helped me come to accept myself as a woman! Oof! He did not like that. But they didn’t kick me out immediately, and I was able to move out on my own time schedule.

After that, I never looked back, and never again questioned my womanhood. I knew I was trans, I knew I was a woman, and I wasn’t going to let anyone stop me from being who I was meant to be! A few months after moving out I started HRT. A year and half afterwards I legally changed my name and gender, and 4 years after moving out I had my surgery.

I’ve had no regrets about this, at all. It was the best thing that ever happened to me in my entire life.