I’ve come to realize that when I transitioned in the 90’s I never really dealt with my own issues around actualy being transgender. In my therapy sessions and with my doctors I was intensely focused on jumping through the HBIGDA (the predecessor of WPATH) hoops so that I could get letters of recommendation, HRT, and eventually surgery. Accordingly I intentionally avoided talking about a lot of things because they either would not help or I thought they might actually hurt. Then, after my surgery, I stopped having any regular therapy sessions at all and just tried to get on with “normal” life as a woman.

So I really never did deal with any of the trauma I had from growing up. But getting active in the trans community again a few years ago started exposing me to all the people still going through transition, and still experiencing the kinds of things I once had to deal with. Over the past year or so, thanks to politics, things have only gotten more intense in our community and I found myself trying to help people more and more as they dealt with trauma, and that in turn made me think of my own trauma. Now I find myself writing every week, sometimes multiple times a week, about my past and all of the issues that I never truly dealt with.

In other words, now I’m actually starting to deal with the old, lingering trauma and talk about it with people, and it’s really affecting me. Positively, to be sure, but I still find myself crying a lot these days, for example. It’s weird to reopen these old wounds after so many years, wounds that I had ignored and assumed were gone. But they really are still there, aren’t they?