I’ve started reading my old diaries, which begin the day my egg cracked. Those first entries are from April and May of 1989 and describe the shopping trip I made as a woman where everything just clicked in place for me and I had such a wonderful time that I realized this was what I was meant to be. Then in the immediate days after that I did research on transsexualism at the university libraries and also came out to my roommate, who was very graciously accepting of me.

Then I ended up coming out to my family. I had written a letter to my mother asking her for more information about my childhood and saying that I was feeling desperate. She actually drove across the state to come and see me in person because of that, so I cautiously came out a bit. My father then joined us and I came out completely to them. To my great joy they did not reject me. Since my college grades were really bad, we decided it would be best for me to come back to live at home and transfer to a local university, and they would help me find a therapist.

The next diary entries cover 1989-1993 and the first couple of months of 1994. There were lots of entries celebrating little gender affirming moments, and there were lots of recorded dreams. The dreams mostly centered on gender themes.

The dreams usually involved at least two versions of me, one male and one female. Sadly, “my” part was usually the male one and the female part often did not speak at all. The female me was often represented as emotionally and mentally hurt in some way. In one of the most memorable dreams I called her the Psychotic Woman. Inevitably in these dreams the two of us would start out fighting each other or at least not trusting each other. By the end of the dream, though, I would have convinced female me to be my lover and we run away together trying to escape the crowd of people that now wants to kill us both. This dream pattern repeats itself in many forms through many dreams.

The other thing about my diary is that there are two gaps of almost a year each. for 1992 and 1993 I have only a few entries for each year, and those entries say something along the lines of “I don’t want to be a woman anymore”. The pressure from my family would get to me and I’d repress myself again.

cw: mention of suicide attempt, but not my own in the next paragraph.

In 1993 there is a brief rediscovery of my womanhood that results in a big argument with my family when they find out, and then the very next day after that argument my mother made a half hearted attempt at suicide, with a note and everything. That seems to have driven me back into repression.

There are also several entries in my diary where I question exactly how gender variant I am. In one I talk about how ideally the male and female in me should be balanced, something which today I’d call non-binary. In another entry I speculate that I might be happy are a very feminine man in a way that today would be called a femboy. In another entry I wonder if I could be a gay man, but I reject that because I just could not ever imagine myself wanting to have sex as a man. But every time this comes up I always revert back to “I am a woman”.

So now it’s own to my 1994 diary which is when I had graduated college and I finally committed myself to transition.