Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of healing, or at least trying to heal. I have found that even at my age and so many years after transition that I still have lingering trauma from when I was a child, trauma around my gender not being recognized or accepted.

If you’d asked me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up I would have said that I wanted to be a soldier (an “Army man”) or a doctor, but if you’d pressed further you would have also learned that I wanted to be in a sorority like my big sister and to be a cheerleader, and maybe even be the girlfriend of a football player. My taste in toys ran the same way. I had Army men and Tonka trucks, and I built models of WWII ships and airplanes, and I played with a GI Joe doll, but at the same time I kept that GI Joe in an old Barbie doll case, and wanted to play with dollhouses, and I asked to play a girl role if my friends wanted to play house. On the surface everything about me said “boy” but if you scratched the surface with your fingernail you’d find the girl underneath.

For this reason I have recently started referring to my “girlhood” instead of just being wishy washy and saying “childhood” as a way of avoiding the word boy. I am now thinking of myself as having once been a “little girl”, and my inner child has become my “inner little girl”. These are simply the correct terms and I need to get over the hesitancy to use them that was beaten into me by society. This is one part of the process of healing my inner little girl from the accumulated trauma of being raised as the wrong gender and having my true gender rejected when it was finally revealed.

To understand the healing I need, it’s important to understand the injury to be healed. First, of course, is simply that being raised as the wrong gender is stressful in and of itself, no matter how well intentioned my family may have been. The unfullfilled desires for things like having pretty dresses like my sister, and not having the toys I really wanted, left holes in my life that only filled up with sorrow as time went by. That’s a big part of what I need healing from, but looming even larger is the explicit rejection by my family when they finally discovered the truth about me.

When my step-sister L. walked in on me dressed as a cheerleader and pretending to be my best friend’s girlfriend she reacted with shock and revulsion. She treated me as if I were the worst scum in the world and made it very clear that what I was doing was wrong in her eyes and in the eyes of all adults. When my mother found my hidden stash of women’s clothing that I would dress up in, and I told her that I wished I was a girl, she reacted by sending me to a psychiatrist to “cure” me of this and make me want to be a boy instead. Just writing that sentence made my chest tighten up because that is such a powerfully traumatic memory.

So how do I heal from this? How can I possibly get over this trauma and move on from it? I haven’t spoken to L. in decades. As far as I can tell she hates me or probably just doesn’t even think about me at all. My parents are dead, so there’s no possibility of talking to them and getting them to understand the pain they caused me. Is healing even possible under these circumstances? I don’t actually know, but I am trying.

After talking with a therapist last week I have started trying to recover. A few days ago I noted in passing that I was having an internal dialog with a non-existent person about some sort of potential disagreement that might come up in my life at some point. These ultra hypothetical conversations and arguments are a regular feature of my thought process, even though I find them to be unhelpful, and even to perpetuate negativity in my outlook on things. They are simply ingrained in me in a way that I can’t seem to extricate. But this time it occurred to me that I might be able to make positive use of this habit in dealing with my trauma. I can’t really talk to my parents, but I can still imagine what a conversation with them might be like. I can write down all the things I want to tell them, how I think they’d respond, and how I think I would respond to their responses.

So I did. I got out my diary and wrote the dialog. It was hard! It was so hard that I couldn’t keep it up and had to stop eventually. But I did it. I told them how they rejected me, how they hurt me, how they tried to change who I was, to make me stop being me. I screamed at them. I made them apologize. I’ll never get that apology in real life, but maybe this hypothetical one will help? Certainly I can say that writing this, and also reading over it again, made me cry and feel all of the raw pain of rejection all over again, and that is a positive thing, I think. Being able to accept and experience my emotions has always been difficult for me, so doing it now seems like breaking open a dam. There will be a flood that will destroy everything in it’s path, but eventually the waters will subside and the river run freely again as it is supposed to.

I also decided to do healing on a spiritual level. I am a Wiccan witch and practice magick, so for the recent full moon, I wrote out a magickal working in which I talked to my inner little girl about all the things she was denied as a child: the dolls, the dresses, sisterhood, and just being treated like a girl by my mother. And then I told her that I love her unconditionally, that I accepted her as a girl, and that I would give her all the things that she was never given. I cried incredibly hard during this healing rite, and afterwards I held my Raggedy Ann doll, one of the toys I was denied as a girl, and sat with my inner little girl as we hugged our doll and comforted each other. The next day, I put on a cute little dress and big, floppy sun hat, and went to the park nearby to play in the grass. I picked dandelion flowers and put them in my hair, and made a necklace of them, just like I used to do as a girl when I was out playing with other kids in the neighborhood. I plan on spending more time with little me, too, and I am now waiting on some things for her that I ordered online: a fancy Barbie doll and a pink, princess dress so she – and I – can finally play dress up as a princess! It may seem weird for a 55 year old woman to be doing things like this, but it’s really a neccessary part of the healing process for a 55 year old wound.

I can never undo the pain of the past. I can’t erase it. I can’t get closure by talking to the people who hurt me. But I also can’t ignore it, or let it fester any longer. It’s time to heal, finally, and I’m doing everything I can to make that happen.

I’m here for you, Little Me. You are a beautiful little girl and I’m going to take care of you and finally give you the girlhood you deserved.

Like a fair number of trans women I know, I have stuffed animals. I actually have a whole shelf full that I’ve accumulated over the years while telling myself that I’m not really into stuffed animals. I used to tell myself “oh, this one is just a souvenir from a trip” and “that one was bought on a lark because it’s funny” and “that was just a gift from someone”. I’ve even got one that I found at work abandoned my a co-worker after an office reshuffle, and which I put on my desk “just for fun” and then brought home with me when we went full time remote. But I totally wasn’t into stuffies, you see. That would have been too childish for me.

Recently I decided to just embrace the madness, despite being in my 50’s. Now I sleep with a Raggedy Ann doll and a Blåhaj, and I carry a small stuffed lamb in my purse when I go out sometimes.

They are actually quite fun and can be comforting. In fact, the one I carry with me I actually carry when I think I might find myself experiencing some sort of anxiety or emotional discomfort while I’m out, such as when I know I’m going to be in a loud place that will trigger my sound sensitivity or if I’m going to a therapy appointment where I know I’ll be talking about emotionally difficult issues. Yeah, I’m in my 50’s and use stuffies in exactly the same way a 5 year old, would. I’m not ashamed to do that or admit it, though 6 months ago I would have been.

Life is too short to get hung up on doing things the “right way” or making sure you always seem “grown up”. Do whatever makes you happy, and if that’s having stuffed animals around, then go for it!

Here are 3 toys I wanted as a kid but couldn’t have because of my perceived gender. The Betty Crocker Easy Bake Oven, the Barbie Fashion Face, and a Raggedy Ann doll. These days I do have Raggedy Ann finally. What did you want as a child that you couldn’t have?

Today was the funeral for Pope Francis and something interesting happened. The honor guard who accompanied his casket included transgender people! Also immigrants, sex workers, poor people, prisoners, and other marginalized people. It seems this was Franics’ expressed desire for his funeral. You can read about this in the official announcement by the Vatican.

Pope Francis has been a conflicting figure for many trans and other LGBT people because while he has often spoken openly and welcomingly of us, he has still maintained much of the old official stance of the Catholic Chruch that we are sinners and that our existence somehow offends human dignity. Nonetheless, he has also embraced us as part of the Church and promoted acceptance of us in society as well. He leaves a mixed record, but we should still recognize that what he did do in shifting the attitude of the Church on LGBT issues was quite revolutionary and, it is to be hoped, a sign of greater things to come. He himself appointed 110 of the 138 Cardinals who will choose his successor, so there seems a good chance that the next pope will continue and hopefully expand on the newfound LGBT acceptance in the Church.

If you want to know a little more about Francis’ history with transgender people and sex workers, this thread on Mastodon has a nice summary.

Transgender people have been the target of an ongoing witch hunt for several years now, with laws increasingly stripping us of basic rights like the ability to use a public restroom, play sports, or even access health care, but now another group is being targeted. The new Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Untied States, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, has long been known as an anti-vaccination activist who claims (either falsely, or mistakenly) that vaccination causes autism. Now, he has ordered a “study” to be performed to determine what causes autism. That may seem like something acceptable in and of itself, but the person he has chosen to lead the investigation demonstrates that the study is not going to do any serious research and that it’s conclusions are already decided.

Kennedy has appointed David Geier to head up the study. He is not a doctor. He is not a psychologist, either. In fact, he’s just some guy, but he has been convicted of multiple counts of practicing medicine without a license on autistic children, so I guess he’s got a kind of medical experience if you want to argue it like Lionel Hutz.. U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) has called this out and is speaking out about how bad this situation is.

Of course, the reason I am writing about this on a transgender blog is because there is so much overlap between the autistic and transgender communities. I can’t even count the number of transgender people I know or have known who are also autistic. I am in that group, myself. Next they’ll find out that I’m a Wiccan witch, and they will add a literal witch hunt against me.

Autistic people have always been subject to discrimination, and Robert Kennedy, Jr’s comments about autistic children, typify the kind of discriminatory attitude that too many people hold. Now we are going to have the US Federal government “investigating” us? No good will come of this.

I am starting to read the book Sacred Gender by Ariana Serpentine. It is a book about trans and non-binary spirituality. At the end of the first chapter there is an exercise in which one is asked to describe one’s gender without using words like male/female, man/woman, masculine/feminine, etc. Here is my response.

My gender is

• Nurturing
• Delicate
• Fragile
• Weeping
• Comforting
• Weary
• Dark
• Star filled
• It is a spider’s web covered with dew, glistening in the morning light.
• It is bruised and battered and yet still hopeful.
• It is needy, desirous of the company of others.
• Lonely
• Beautiful
• Gentle
• Lyrical
• Flowing
• Lithe
• Deep and vast
• Timeless

So what is your gender?

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?

Dear S-

It’s 1982. You are 12 years old. Tonight you are crying yourself to sleep. You just came in from standing under a tree with a rope. You were ready to hang yourself. You thought you couldn’t live any more if you couldn’t be a girl. But you got afraid. You thought it would hurt. You wondered if it would even work at all. You worried about waking up in a hospital not knowing what happened after you pulled the rope. You thought about your parents waking up in the morning and finding you and not knowing what they did wrong. You just couldn’t go through with it. So you went inside and went to bed with tears of shame and despair.

I want to hold you and hug you tight to me and comfort you because I know the pain you are feeling. It was my pain too, you know. I want to stroke your hair and tell you that you really are a girl and nothing anyone says can ever change that and there’s nothing wrong with you wanting to live your life in the way that makes sense to you.

Everyone thinks you are a boy. They expect you to be a boy. They give you things boys like: an autographed baseball; a pocket knife; a skateboard. They think you are just being a nerd about your love of the Lord of the Rings. They don’t know that you really want to be Arwen, the daughter of Elrond. Or really anyone at all from Middle-earth. It’s just a better place than the real world.

No one knows (yet) about the stash of clothes you have hidden under the carpet in the bathroom closet, with all the unused sheets and blankets piled on top to conceal the bulge. Clothes you stole from the store room where a bunch of Mother’s old stuff still is. A few things taken from the back of her overly stuffed closet. Clothes you took because it was the only way to get anything resembling the styles you really want to be wearing all the time. At home, at school, and anywhere else you go. After all, no one is going to go out and buy you nice clothes of your own. Nope, you get stupid Izod shirts, t-shirts, and Levi’s blue jeans. Because you only ever wear what Mother buys for you. Because you don’t care to put any effort into your appearance if you can’t actually dress like you want to. Because it makes you invisible.

I want to tell you about all of the misery and suffering that lies ahead, but also the joy and euphoria that comes after it. I want to warn you about the future suicide attempts. I want to tell you about the euphoria that fills you up when you finally admit to yourself that you are trans. I want to tell you about the incredible relief and overwhelming sense of joy that comes from the first time someone simply calls you by your real name. I want to tell you about the sense of normalcy that you experience for the first time in your life when you finally see yourself naked in a mirror after getting surgery.

I want to tell you not to be afraid of letting others know how you feel in high school. They won’t do anything bad to you. The beatings you already get at the hands of boys in junior high is so much worse than anything that would happen in high school, and you are strong enough to handle coming out to your friends.

Do you remember when L- caught you dressed as a cheerleader and getting ready to kiss K-? You should have kissed him! You should have laughed at L- and told her to go away because y’all were just playing and there was nothing wrong with what you were doing.

Do you remember when T- told you that you weren’t allowed to be a girl when playing house? You should have played a girl anyway and just laughed at her.

The future holds both pain and joy for you but the joy wins out in the end and you really do become the girl – the woman – you were always meant to be. But this night you are in pain. This night you cry because you feel completely helpless and useless, not even strong enough to end your own suffering. So sleep now. You will wake up feeling exhausted and beaten down. You will go through life numbly, always trying to avoid feeling anything at all. But in the end, you will find peace and joy and all the suffering will fade away.

Sleep, and dream of the future.

I don’t want this blog to turn into a stream of reposts of other people’s work, but I saw this video this morning and it left me in tears and with a feeling of joy. Then I watched it a second time just so I could experience it once more.

@ami_fox_amelia

I challenge you not to shed a tear. This is beautiful. She is beautiful. You can find her on other platforms as laser.breems #transition #trans #heartwarming #story #transjoy

♬ original sound – Ami Foxx

You can find the original of this on Bree’s Instagram site at https://www.instagram.com/laser.breems/

While watching this I felt such joy for Bree. The difference between her old self and current self is so incredibly obvious for anyone to see. She’s come alive whereas previously she seemed like, well, the way I was before I transitioned.

But I also began thinking that this joy is precisely what transphobes want to deny to us. They want to force us all to be those depressed, barely living creatures we were before we discovered ourselves. Worse, they want us to know that we could be happy but that happiness is being deliberately withheld from us. They want to torture us.

They want us to die.

Please spread this video far and wide so that every cis person who doesn’t know how joyful transition is can get to see it! Maybe it will help to convince them to stand up for us instead of passively letting us being eradicated.

[Edit – When I first wrote this post I misgendered the person in question. They identify as non-binary and I used binary pronouns for them. I assure you this was not intentional. When I first met them they were using the binary pronouns in question (not the ones assigned at birth, btw) and unfortunately those pronouns got stuck in my head even after their understanding of their gender evolved. I apologize for this horrible error and I have edited the post to correct it.]

Well, I just quit the trans Discord server I was a mod for. Quit the whole server. Once again, the server owner decided they had to insult someone for disagreeing with them, and once again it was me. This time because I stated that the c-word (“cunt”) was objectionable to me and that I considered it as vile a term as the n-word. That’s how I was raised! So they say I just need to let it go and also calls me racist for some unfathomable reason.

This was hardly the first time we’ve butted heads, but this was the last time. I just am so sick their holier than thou attitude. I wasn’t even asking for anything specific, just for other people in the server to understand that for some people, especially older people like myself, that is a horribly vile, and disgusting insult that reduces a woman to nothing more than a walking set of genitalia. That was apparently too much of an ask, though.

So I gave up.

Do note where I say we butted heads before. This was not a knee-jerk reaction to a single incident, it was the culmination of a year’s worth of conflicts that just never seemed to end. This had been coming for a long time. I had previously stepped down as a moderator even, but the server owner gave me back my mod powers without asking me and apologized, so I took up the role again.

I do not like the way this has worked out. I think that being an active part of the trans community is very important for older trans people like me so that we can share our own experience with the younger generation. I am still in a couple of other trans servers and will continue to be active in them, but the one I left simply had become too unpleasant for me because of the server owner’s dismissive attitude towards anyone who disagreed with her.